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Ann Tickner on Feminist
Philosophy of Science, Engaging the Mainstream, and (still) Remaining Critical
in/of IR







Feminist IR is still often
side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearing as one
of the last chapters of introductory volumes to the field, despite the
limitless efforts of people such as Cynthia Enloe (Theory Talk #48)
and J. Ann Tickner. She has laboured to point out and provincialize the
parochialism that haunts mainstream IR, without, however, herself retreating
and disengaging from some of its core concerns. In this Talk, Tickner elaborates—amongst others—on the specifics of a
feminist approach to the philosophical underpinnings of IR; discusses how
feminism relates to the distinction between mainstream and critical theory; and
addresses the challenges of navigating such divides.







Print version of this Talk (pdf)



What is, according to
you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And
what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?



I think the biggest challenge for IR is
that it is relevant and helps us understand important issues in our globalized world.
I realize this is not a conventional answer, but too often we academics get
caught up in substantive and methodological debates where we end up talking only
to each other or to a very small audience. We tend to get too concerned with
the issue of scientific respectability rather than thinking about how to try to
understand and remedy the massive problems that exist in the world today. Steve
Smith's presidential address to the ISA in 2002 (read it here),
shortly after 9/11, reminded us of this. Smith chastised the profession for
having nothing to say about such a catastrophic event.





How
did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?



I've gone through quite a few transformations
in my academic career. My original identity was as an International Political
Economy (IPE) scholar; my first academic position was at a small liberal arts
college (College of the Holy Cross) where I taught a variety of IPE courses. In
graduate school I was interested in what, in the 1970s, we called 'North-South'
issues, specifically issues of global justice, which were not the most popular
subjects in the field. So I always felt a little out of place in my choice of
subject matter. In the 1980s when I started teaching, IR was mostly populated
by men. As a woman, one felt somewhat uncomfortable at professional meetings;
and there were very few texts by women that I could assign to my students. I
also found that many of the female students in my introductory IR classes were
somewhat uncomfortable and unmotivated by the emphasis placed on strategic
issues and nuclear weapons.



It was at about the time when I first
started thinking about these issues, I happened to read Evelyn Fox Keller's book Gender and Science,
a book that offers a gendered critique of the natural sciences (read an
'update' of the argument by Keller here, pdf).
It struck me that her feminist critique of science could equally be applied to
IR theory. My first feminist publication, a feminist critique of Hans Morgenthau's
principles of political realism, expanded on this theme (read full text here,
pdf).




Teaching at a small liberal arts college
where one was judged by the quality of one's work rather than the type of
research one was doing was very helpful—because I could follow my own, rather
non-conventional, inclinations. So I think my turn to feminism, after ten years
in the field, was a combination of my own consciousness-raising and feeling
that there was something about IR that didn't speak to me. Later, I was fortunate
to be hired by the University of Southern California, a large research
institution, with an interdisciplinary School of International Relations,
separate from the political science department. When I arrived in 1995, the
School had a reputation for teaching a broad array of IR theoretical approaches.
The support of these institutional settings and of a network of feminist
scholars and students, some of whom I discovered were thinking along similar
lines in the late 1980s, were important for getting me to where I am today.





What
would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or
understand the world in a global way?



It depends on the level of the student:
at the undergraduate level, a broad array of courses in global politics including
some economics and history. Language training is very important too, and ideally,
an overseas experience. We need to encourage our students to be curious and
have an open mind about our world.



At the graduate level, this is a more complicated
question. The way you phrased the question 'to understand the world in a global
way,' can be very different from training to become an IR scholar, especially in
the United States. I would emphasize the importance of a broad theoretical and
methodological training, including some exposure to the philosophy of science,
and to non-Western IR if possible, or at least at a minimum, to try to get
beyond the dominance of American IR, which still exists even in places outside
the US.





Why should IR scholars incorporate
gender in the study of world politics? What are the epistemological and
ontological implications of adopting a feminist perspective in IR?



Feminists would argue that incorporating
feminist perspectives into IR would fundamentally transform the discipline.
Feminists claim that IR is already gendered, and gendered masculine, in the
types of questions it asks and the ways it goes about answering them. The
questions we ask in our research are never neutral - they are a choice,
depending on the researcher's identity and location. Over history, the
knowledge that we have accumulated has generally been knowledge about men's
lives. It's usually been men who do the asking and consequently, it is often
the case that women's lives and women's knowledge are absent from what is
deemed 'reliable' knowledge. This historical legacy has had, and continues to
have, an effect on the way we build knowledge. Sandra Harding,
a feminist philosopher of science, has suggested that if were to build
knowledge from women's lives as well, we would broaden the base from which we
construct knowledge, and would therefore get a richer and more complex picture
of reality.



One IR example of how we limit our research
questions and concerns is how we calculate national income, or wealth—the kind
of data states choose to collect and on which they base their public policy. We
have no way of measuring the vast of amount of non-remunerated reproductive and
caring labour, much of which is done by women. Without this labour we would not
have a functioning global capitalist economy. To me this is one example as to
why putting on our gender lenses helps us gain a more complete picture of
global politics and the workings of the global economy.



Feminists have also argued that the
epistemological foundations of Western knowledge are gendered. When we use
terms such as rationality, objectivity and public, they are paired with terms
such as emotional, subjective and private, terms that are seen as carrying less
weight. By privileging the first of these terms when we construct knowledge we
are valuing knowledge that we typically associate with masculinity and the
public sphere, historically associated with men. Rationality and objectivity
are not terms that are overtly gendered, but, when asked, women and men alike
associate them with masculinity. They are terms we value when we do our
research.





In one of the foundational texts of
Feminist IR, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists
and IR Theorists' (1997, full text here, pdf),
you highlighted three particular (gendered) misunderstandings that continue to
divide Feminists and mainstream IR theorists. To what extent do these
misunderstandings continue to inform mainstream perceptions of Feminist
approaches to the study of international politics?




I think probably they still do, although
it's always hard to tell, because the mainstream has not engaged much with
feminist approaches. I've been one who's always calling for conversations with
the mainstream but, apart from the forum responding to the article you mention,
there have been very few. In a 2010 article, published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, I looked
back to see if I could find responses to my 1997 article to which you refer. I
found that most of the responses had come from other feminists. The lack of
engagement, which other feminists have experienced also, makes it hard to know about
the misunderstandings that still exist but my guess would be that they remain. However
I do think there has been progress in accepting feminism's legitimacy in the
field. It is now included in many introductory texts.



The first misunderstanding that I
identified is the meaning of gender. I would hope that the introduction of
constructivist approaches would help with understanding that gender is social
construction - a very important point for feminists. But I think that gender is
still largely equated with women. Feminists have tried to stress that gender is
also about men and about masculinity, something that seems to be rather hard to
accept for those unfamiliar with feminist work. I think it's also hard for the
discipline to accept that both international politics as practice and IR as a
discipline are not gender neutral. Feminists claim that IR as a discipline is
gendered in its concepts, its subject matter, the questions it asks and the way
it goes about answering them. This is a radical assertion for those unfamiliar
with feminist approaches and it is not very well understood.



Now to answer the second misunderstanding
as to whether feminists are doing IR. I think there has been some progress here,
because IR has broadened its subject matter. And there has been quite a bit of
attention lately to gender issues in the 'real world' - issues such as sexual violence,
trafficking, and human rights. Of course these issues relate not only to women
but they are issues with which feminists have been concerned. Something I
continue to find curious is that the policy and activist communities are
generally ahead of the academy in taking up gender issues. Most international
organizations, and some national governments are under mandates for gender
mainstreaming. Yet, the academy has been slow to catch up and give students the
necessary training and skills to go out in the world and deal with such issues.




The third misunderstanding to which I
referred in the 1997 article is the question of epistemology. While, as I
indicated, there has been some acceptance of the subject matter, with which
feminists are concerned, it is a more fundamental and contentious question as
to whether feminists are recognized as 'doing IR' in the methodological sense. As
the field broadens its concerns, IR may see issues that feminists raise as
legitimate, but how we study them still evokes the same responses that I
brought up fifteen years ago. Many of the questions that feminists ask are not
amenable to being answered using the social scientific methodologies popular in
the field, particularly in the US. (I should add that there is a branch of IR
feminism that does use quantitative methods and it has gained much wider
acceptance by the mainstream.) The feminist assumption that Western knowledge
is gendered and based on men's lives is a challenging claim. And feminists
often prefer to start knowledge from the lives of people who are on the margins
– those who are subordinated or oppressed, and of course, this is very
different from IR which tends toward a top-down look at the international
system. One of the big problems that have become more evident to me over time
is that feminism is fundamentally sociological – it's about people and social
relations, whereas much of IR is about structures and states operating in an
anarchic, rather than a social, environment. I find that historians and
sociologists are more comfortable with gender analysis, perhaps for this reason.
I'm not sure that these misunderstanding are ever going to be solved or that
they need to be solved.





Although Feminist methodology is
often conflated with ethnographic approaches, 
in 'What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers
to International Relations Methodological Questions' (2005, pdf here),
you argued that there is no unique Feminist research methodology. Nonetheless,
Feminist IR is well known for using an autoethnographic approach. What does this approach add to
the study of gender in IR? What might account for the relative dearth of
autoethnography in other IR paradigms?



I think it is important to remember that
feminists use many different approaches coming out of very different
theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, socialism, constructivism, postpositivism,
postcolonialism and empiricism. So there are many different kinds of feminisms.
If you look specifically at what has been called 'second-generation feminist IR,'
the empirical work that followed the so-called 'first generation' that
challenged and critiqued the concepts and theoretical foundations of the field,
much of it, but not all, (discourse analysis is quite prevalent too), uses
ethnographic methods which seem well suited to researching some of the issues I
described earlier. Questions about violence against women, domestic servants,
women in the military, violent women, women in peace movements– these are the
sorts of research questions that demand fieldwork and an ethnographic approach.
Because as I stated earlier, IR asks rather different kinds of questions, it
does not generally adopt ethnographic methods. Feminists who do this type of
ethnographic research tell me that their work is often more readily received
and understood by those who do comparative politics, because they are more comfortable
with field research. And since women are not usually found in the halls of
power – as decision-makers. IR feminists are particularly concerned with issues
having to do with marginalized and disempowered peoples' lives. Ethnography is
useful for this type of research.



I see autoethnography as a different issue.
While the reflexive tradition is not unique to feminists, feminism tends to be
reflectivist. As I said earlier, feminists are sensitive to issues about who the
creators of knowledge have been and whose knowledge is claimed to be universal.
Most feminists believe that there is no such thing as universal knowledge. Consequently,
feminists believe that being explicit about one's positionality as a researcher
is very important because none of us can achieve objectivity, often called 'the
view from nowhere'. So while striving to get as accurate and as useful
knowledge as we can, we should be willing to state our own positionality. One's
privilege as a researcher must be acknowledged too; one must always be
sensitive to the unequal power relations between a researcher and their
research subject – something that anthropology recognized some time ago. Feminists
who do fieldwork often try to make their research useful to their subjects or do
participatory research so that they can give something back to the community. All
these concerns lead to autoethnographic disclosures. They demand a reflexive
attitude and a willingness to describe and reassess your research journey as
you go along. This autoethnographic style is hard for researchers in the positivist
tradition to understand. While we all strive to produce accurate and useful
knowledge, positivists' striving for objectivity requires keeping subjectivity
out of their research.





Robert W. Cox (Theory Talk #37)
famously distinguished two approaches to the study of international politics:
problem-solving theory and critical theory. How does the emancipatory project
of the latter inform your perspective of IR and its normative goals? And is
this distinction as valid today as it was when Cox first formulated it, over 3
decades ago?



Yes
I think it's still an important distinction. It's still cited very often which
suggests it's still valid, although postmodern scholars (and certain feminists)
have problems with Western liberal notions of emancipation. I see my own work
as being largely compatible with Cox's definition of critical theory. Like many
feminists, I view my work as explicitly normative; I say explicitly because I
believe all knowledge is normative although not all scholars would admit it. What
Cox calls problem-solving theory is also normative in the conservative sense of
not aiming to changing the world. A normative goal to which feminists are
generally committed is understanding the reasons for women's subordination and
seeking ways to end it. It's also important to note that the IR discipline was borne
with the intention of serving the interests of the state whereas academic feminism
was borne out of social movements for women's emancipation. The normative goals
of my work are to demonstrate how the theory and practice of IR is gendered and
what might be the implications of this, both for how we construct knowledge and
how we go about solving global problems.





Much of your work addresses the
parochial scope and neopositivist inclination of International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially in the United
States. What distinguishes other
'Western' institutional and political contexts (in the UK, Europe, Canada and Oceania) from the American
study of IR?  How and why is
critical/reflectivist IR marginalized in the American context? What is the
status of these 'debates' in non-Western
institutional contexts?



With respect to the parochial scope of US
IR, I refer you to a recent book, edited by Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver,
International
Relations Scholarship Around the World. It contains chapters by authors from around the world, some of whom
suggest IR in their country imitates the US and some who see very different IRs.
The chapter by Thomas J. Biersteker, ('The Parochialism of Hegemony:
Challenges for 'American' International Relations', read it here in pdf)
reports on his examination of the required reading lists for IR Ph.D.
candidates in the top ten US academic institutions. His findings suggest that
constructivism accounts for only about 10% of readings and anything more
radical even less. Over 90% of assigned works are written by US scholars. The dominance
of quantitative and rational choice approaches in the US may have something to
do with IR generally being a subfield of political science. Critical approaches
often have different epistemological roots. And I stress 'science' because
while IR is also subsumed in certain politics departments in other countries,
the commitment to science, in the neopositivist sense, is something that seems
to be peculiarly American. Stanley Hoffman's famous observation, made over
thirty years ago, that Americans see problems as solvable by the scientific
method is still largely correct I believe (read article here, pdf).
I find it striking that so many formerly US based and/or educated critical
scholars have left the US and are now based elsewhere – in Canada, Australasia,
or Europe.



Biersteker
sees the hegemony of American IR extending well beyond the US. But there is
generally less commitment to quantification elsewhere. This may be due to IR's historical
legacy emerging out of different knowledge traditions or being housed in
separate departments. In France, IR emerged from sociological and legal traditions
and, in the UK, history and political theory, including the Marxist tradition,
have been influential in IR. And European IR scholars do not move as freely
between the academy and the policy world as in the US. All these factors might encourage
more openness to critical approaches. I am afraid I don't know enough about
non-Western traditions to make an informed comment. But we must recognize the
enormous power differentials that exist with respect to engaging IR's debates. Language
barriers are one problem; having access to research funds is an enormous
privilege. Scholars in many parts of the world do not have the resources or the
time to engage in esoteric academic debates, nor do they have the resources to
attend professional meetings or access certain materials. The production of
knowledge is a very unequal process, dominated by those with power and resources;
hence the hegemonic position of the US that Biersteker and others still see.





As methodological pluralism now
retains the status of a norm in the field, John M. Hobson (Theory Talk #71) recently argued that the question
facing IR scholars no longer revolves around the debate between positivist
and postpositivist approaches. Rather, the primary meta-theoretical question
relates to Eurocentrism, that is, 'To be or not to be a Eurocentric, that is the
question.' To what extent do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?



Given
my answer to the last question, I am not sure that methodological pluralism has
reached an accepted status in the US yet. However, John M. Hobson has produced
a very thoughtful and engaging book that asks very provocative questions. Unfortunately,
I doubt many IR scholars in the US have read it and would be rather puzzled by
Hobson's claim. But certainly the Eurocentrism of the discipline is something
to which we should be paying attention. I find it curious how little IR has
recognized its imperial roots or engaged in any discussion of imperialism. As
Brian Schmidt and other historical revisionists have told us, when IR was borne
at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism was a central preoccupation
in the discipline. Race also has been ignored almost entirely by IR scholars.  



To
Hobson's specific claim that the important question for IR now is about being
or not being Eurocentric rather than about being positivist or postpositivist, I
do have some problems with this. I am concerned with Hobson's painting
positivism and postpostivism with the same Eurocentric brush. Yes, they are
both Eurocentric; but postpositivists or critical theorists – to use Cox's term
– are at least open to being reflective about how they produce knowledge and
where it comes from. If one can be reflective about one's knowledge it does
allow space to be aware of one's own biases. Those of us on the critical side
of Cox's divide can at least be reflective about the problems of Eurocentrism,
whereas positivists don't consider reflexivity to be part of producing good
research. Nevertheless, Hobson has made an important statement. He has written
a masterful and insightful book and I recommend it all IR scholars.





Last question. Your recent work is
part of an emergent collective dialogue that aims to 'provincialize' the
Western European heritage of IR. In a recent article
entitled 'Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities
for Dialogue in International Relations' you highlight the need for
non-Eurocentric approach to the study of IR. In IR,
what are the prospects for genuine dialogue across methodological and geographical borders?
Where do you see this dialogue taking place?



This is a very tough issue. There are
scholars like Hobson who talk about a non-Eurocentric approach, but given what
I said about resources, about language barriers, and about inequalities in the
ability to produce knowledge, this is difficult. As I've said at many times and
in many places, the power difference is an inhibitor to any genuine dialogue.
So, where is dialogue taking place? Among those, such as Hobson, who advocate a
hybrid approach that takes other knowledge traditions seriously and sees them
as equally valid as one's own. And mostly on the margins of what we call 'IR', where
some very exciting work is being produced. Feminism is one such site. Feminist
approaches are dedicated to dialogic knowledge production, or what they call
knowledge that emerges through conversation. Feminists believe that theory can
emerge from practice, listening to ordinary people and how they make sense of
their lives. I also think that projects like the one undertaken by Wæver and
Tickner (which is still ongoing) that is publishing contributions from scholars
from very different parts of the world is crucial.





J. Ann Tickner is
Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University. She is also a
Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California where she taught for
fifteen years before coming to American University. Her principle areas of
teaching and research include international theory, peace and security, and
feminist approaches to international relations. She served as President of the
International Studies Association from 2006-2007. Her books include Gendering
World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (Columbia
University Press, 2001), Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia University
Press, 1992), and Self-Reliance Versus
Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States
(Columbia University Press, 1987).







Related links





Faculty Profile at American University
Read
Tickner's Hans Morgenthau's Principles of
Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation (Millennium, 1988) here (pdf)
Read Tickner's You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and
IR Theorists (1997 International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) 
Read Tickner's What Is Your
Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations
Methodological Questions (2005, International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Kimberly Hutchings on Quiet as a Research
Strategy, the Essence of Critique, and the Narcissism of Minor Differences










As a job, International Relations requires carving out one's position by being vocal. Being vocal entails making
oneself heard, forwarding identifiable 'contributions'. But what if the biggest
contribution one might make would actually consist of quieting down? 

In a
provocative and wide-ranging Talk,
Kimberly Hutchings—amongst others—challenges us to take postcolonialism seriously
as an invitation to hush, and provides compelling suggestions as to what
critique means in a time of proliferating criticality.






Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest
challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your
position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



In my view, the
main challenge for IR right now is to deal with postcolonialism and
decoloniality, which would entail a kind of decentering of the standpoint of
judgment within the study of international politics. Essentially, we should move
away from the kind of common-sense starting points of Western theory, Western
history and all the rest of it. To be sure, this does not necessarily mean
disregarding them. Instead, we should avoid always seeing them as the
authoritative, and find a way to keep them at a distance in order to make space
for the inclusion of other voices. Practicing this inclusion, answering 'what
would you do about it', or 'where do you stand' I find more difficult; I have
discussed questions of decoloniality and postcolonialism with my colleagues and
we all find it very tough to do something different or to suggest alternatives.
Especially since we are—or at least I am—educated and structured within a
particular (eg. Western) realm of understanding. Because it is so difficult for
'us' to do so, our starting point should therefore exactly be to start from the
empirical and theoretical engagement of the political actors on the periphery.
By doing so we can begin to decenter our work and the debates. There is an enormous
amount of really brilliant decolonial and postcolonial work our there. Here, I
think the work of people like Arlene Tickner has been great in attempting to do
carve out this space. This goes to prove that scholars are suggesting alternative ways and that it can be done differently.



So perhaps
paradoxically, I would summarize my central contribution as a hush—scholars
like I have to dampen down our voices in order to allow other voices to be
heard. Keeping this is mind can prove to be a really important lesson for
theorists. At least I attempt to do so within my particular subfields of
theory.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in your
thinking about International Relations?



During my route through
academia I have been inspired by a number of theorists, books and historical
events and I continue to be. However, there are two or three specific points of
inspiration that I can draw out; some more philosophical or theoretical ones and
others almost accidental to how my thinking has progressed.



Largely, I have
arrived at where I am today because I started my PhD on the philosophies of
Kant and Hegel. This has set up certain parameters for my way of thinking; for
thinking about ethics and about critique, and this has influenced my way of
thinking and ultimately my work ever since. Another factor was my time as a
young scholar working at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic where I met Steve Gill. He suggested I attended the BISA conference to
present a paper on war in relation to Kant and Hegel. He knew this was my field
of interest and in the end I accepted. The first panel I attended was okay,
though only two people participated. The second panel was far more interesting
and featured amongst others Rob Walker. Walker talked about bringing Foucault's insights and
ideas about critique to bear on thinking about international politics. This
made me realize that my purely philosophical way of thinking in relation to
Kantian critique and the problems of Kantian critique were already being worked
through within the domain of International Relations as a field of study. It
spurred my initial interest as I came to think of IR as a kind of case study of
applied political philosophy more generally. In some ways, you could say that
the questions I was asking from a political philosophy perspective were being
addressed more progressively in IR. Certainly, I caught on to IR when they were
being very consciously addressed. The timing and shift in IR spoke directly to
me and, in my view, pushed me to think about questions of judgment and argument
shifts. Here, one should attempt to genuinely relate to an international or
global frame of reference rather that simply taking for granted a kind of
methodological nationalism, which, I suspect, up till then had been. In this
sense IR pushed my thinking.



It is
interesting how it often is the texts you read early on that shape you as a
scholar. To me it was the texts I read in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when
critical IR was really getting off the ground, which were formative for me. Initially,
it has been Kant's political thought and Hegel's philosophy of rights. Additionally,
there has been a range of theorists within critical writing; retrospectively
the work of Hannah Arendt and The Origins
of Totalitarianism in particular. Moreover, Foucault has also been
essential to my work; particularly Discipline
and Punish and The History of
Sexuality have been really crucial in terms of me looking at a kind of 'fate
of critique', if you like, in Western thought in the 20th century. Within
IR Andrew Linklater's work is really important, especially his book on Men and Citizens, and afterwards his
postcolonial community book from the late 1990s. They are important as a sort
of interlocutors, which I in fact reacting against, because I saw them as carrying
through this very Habermasian line of thought, with which I did not agree. Obviously
also the work of feminists scholars amongst others Cynthia Enloe (TheoryTalk #48) and Christine Sylvester, whose books were very
important to me. Again, they enabled me to widen my scope and see how broader
themes of feminist philosophy were being addressed in IR.





What would a student need to become a specialist in International
Relations or understand the world in a global way?



In order to
become a specialist in IR a student's main qualities should be intellectual curiosity,
openness, and willingness to engage with ideas. However, it is importing not to
insist on 'you must know your Foucault backwards' or 'you must know your Hegel
backwards'. To me this is not essential; instead, the focus should be on one's
interests and curiosity, and to locate yourself in terms of where you are 'thinking
from'. In this way, you are able to relate your ideas and arguments to a
specific problematique—perhaps one concerning the political contexts you
derived from yourself, and maybe because of the particular intellectual
trajectory that you have taken.



Then again,
knowing your classic theorists as Foucault and Hegel is definitely beneficial
when engaging with IR. When I entered the field of IR, it meant I was already
loaded with a set of intellectual parameters, interests and political
commitments. Ultimately, this enabled my participation and outcome of conversations
with different trajectories within IR. Therefore, what are most important to me
are intellectual curiosity, openness, willingness to listen, and a sense of
where you are coming from to the conversation. Yet, the great thing about IR is
that you do not have to be trained in IR, in any straightforward way. In my
view IR is a cross-disciplinary field, where many disciplines and arguments
merge; students from law, political science, sociology, who all can have lots
to say to IR, and IR can in return have lots to say to you.



The key to
combining academia with your own starting point lies to me in education; if you
get a good education, there should be space for the individual engagement. Particularly
if you are interested in antiracism or in feminism, I would assume, an IR
scholar speaking to those areas would encourage you to make space for independent
thought. However, all academic work is at the same time a discipline, which at times can be painful to adjust to and actually
take on board. Academia is not for everyone; to some it ends up being a waste
of time and they long for something different, which is completely fine as
well. But in my view it is sign of a poor university education if it closes
things down to an extent where you cannot find the space to articulate your
views or relate them to the things that you are learning. And that is a fault
of the education, not of the student.





You fall squarely among
'critical' IR scholarship. What does it mean, for you, to be critical?



First of all, the term 'critical' is highly contested and in a way it
can become a useless label. In my view one of the problems with critical IR is
you tend to get into the sort of narcissism of minor differences, which also
involves getting into a kind of competition for philosophical antecedence, in
which scholars argue either through Marx, through Heidegger or through
Foucault. The second problem of critical IR, which I have discussed in my work
at various points, is the suspension of judgment forever. Since you can never
find the ground, the sort of desire to find the authority in some sense ends up
paralyzing judgments. I would argue that when there is a kind of risk that
comes with people's willingness to make claims that it can ultimately suspend
judgment. Yet, there is still dynamism, and the fact that your claim-making can
be precisely deconstructed as in fact a reinforcement of what you are trying to
undermine is part of the excitement and the interest of doing critique. The neverendingness
of it is challenging in itself. In a sense we would like to be sort of God and
in a sense we say 'well, I know that this is right and it just is'. Critique
stops you doing it. That is why it is healthy, even though it at the same time
can be quite frustrating.



My own personal understanding of what 'critique' and 'critical' means,
comes out of my engagement with ideas of Kantian critique. The Kantian critique
represent a foundational moment in the sense that both Marxist critique and
post-Marxist critique refer back to Kant. In this way, the Kantian critique
becomes a very rich starting point, as it has been able to branch out in all
kinds of directions, from the sort of Hegelian/Marxist direction to other very
different ones. The sort of typical critique is about questioning the
assumptions or the authoritative basis of any kinds of claims. In doing so,
critique is largely about disturbing the conditions or possibility of a claim
that is made, and this is basically what Kant's transcendental move is about.
This means that critique can go in lots of directions, some of them more
helpful than others. Critique can also end up as a claim to a new authority and
in my view, certain forms of post-Kantian critique have done that. I would also
argue that there are aspects of Kant's work, where he did the same; in
particular in how he moves from one possible ground to another to attempt to
underpin some kind of authority for his claims. This might be contentious, but
this is my reading of Kant, whereas others probably would argue he construes
the space of critique very openly. Put simply, my reading of Kant is in line
with Foucault's: critique is the admission that you are always in a tentative
position in which any claim to authority is going to be questionable. Within any
argument, you are always going to be holding something steady in order to
question other parts, which mean you cannot ever escape from having to claim
some sort of authority in the arguments you make. However, this does not mean
that arguments become an overweening or foundational kind of ground. In a sense
it is about keeping things moving, and I quite like the Foucauldian expression
of it being an ethos, an attitude, a way of being, rather than a set of
techniques or a claim to a moral high ground, which then enables you to show
how everybody else is wrong. That is how I think of the concept of 'critical'.





Classical theory plays a
big part in your work. If bygone thinkers spoke to the issues they saw in their
times, then what do the minds of bygone eras have to say to contemporary
issues?



I am never quite sure what the answer to that is. There is a tradition
of thinking about canonic thought in the UK, Quentin Skinner is one of them,
that is really dubious about talking about Kant or Heidegger in relation to
contemporary problems or trying to suggest you can have a philosophical
conversation across time and space. I have spent some time on this argument and
in my view they are to a great extent right, at least if you think of a conversation
with the 'real Hobbes' or someone else. However, there is a sense in which I
start from a position in which there is no 'real' whoever. Instead, it should
be viewed as a text with arguments and ideas, which you read and interpret in
the light both of your time and place, but also the course of a whole set of
secondary engagements with that. When reading such texts you are dealing with
two hundred years of interpretation of Kant and Hegel. In this sense one must
note that the voices of those philosophers as highly mediated in many different
ways. If you can still engage with them and find useful insights, then sort of
'why not' seems reasonable. A second argument in terms of philosophers as Kant
and Hegel is, the time they wrote in was obviously radically different.
Meanwhile, it also had features in terms of the shape the state were taking, the
beginnings of what we would now recognize as the modern capitalist market
state. They were there, they were before that, and they were looking at the
beginnings. They were around during the Napoleonic wars, mostly Hegel but also
Kant was at point when the European colonialism or imperialism took off in
particular ways. Here, a lot of the categories of race, culture etc. took shape
under their noses. In this sense we are still within a frame that they were a
part of, rather than excluded from. If you look at Machiavelli, he was speaking
in a radically different time and space. There is an argument there about
occupying a world that in some sense we still recognize or perhaps of Kant and
Hegel trying to construct ways of understanding and judging a world that still
has links to the world we inhabit today. That is another reason why they are
still useful today. We all get our ideas from somewhere; as long as we do no
argue that referring to Kant, Hegel, Foucault or Arendt makes it right. Instead,
use ideas as they come and mix and match them, it is reasonable to be eclectic,
depending on what kinds of claims you are making. If you attempt to do a solid
reading of Kant, then you must know both the texts and the context, but if you
wish to discuss critique in IR you can, in my view, take some elements of Kant
or the post-Kantian legacy and use them to illuminate a contemporary debate.





The encounter between the
West and the non-West is an important theme running through your work, and you
liberally engage with post-colonial theory. So how does that work in practice?



The problem to someone who is trying to critique Eurocentrism or get
away from it is that you cannot do it in an isolated way. One of the ways in which
people try to think about the inclusion of other voices was in terms of the
notion of dialogue. This was actually why I ended up writing about dialogue. My
problem here was that some of the ways of thinking about dialogue seemed to me
to simply confirm the centrality of the West and the position of the non-West
as other. The big question is then how do you articulate the non-West? In my
view the thing is that you simply do not; instead one must think constructively
about how you quiet down, how you moderate dominant voices and create spaces
for others. Sometimes it may just be a question of just being quiet, it may be
about encouraging other work, it may be about encouraging theoretical investment
in other places.



I am talking to you now, but in some sense what I am doing is enforcing
the position of the privileged white, Western, middle-class woman. In my
position talking about Eurocentrism and critique is merely by the fact of doing
it, I am reinforcing a certain privilege and a certain sense of it. And this is
not to say that you therefore you do not do it. Sometimes it is not useful to
have someone like me on a panel; it is a much better thing to have somebody
else, somebody younger or somebody from a different part of the world. To me
this is what you have to think about, and as a scholar you have think about how
you can contribute to creating spaces within which other voices can be included.
To be honest, I do not think I have done a very good job of doing that. To
quiet yourself down is really difficult; especially since there is so many
institutional and other incentives for you to try and occupy the center stage. In
my view it is something that maybe feminist scholarship has been better at.



In this sense it relates to a much bigger set of issues that social
science is about; social sciences were and are kind of an imperialist project
in their foundation. Whether or not you can ever make them to anything else, I
doubt. It might be that you cannot, in which case the move to aesthetics, for
example, which you see in some bits of IR, is understandable. It is difficult
in the sense that we cannot do what we want to do by staying within the vocabularies
of social science. We have to move to another kind of discourse in order to do
what we think we need to do.





So here we navigate the
space between scholarship and activism. I remember this picture of you
delivering a lecture on a road blocking an arms convoy.



Yes, my very minor piece of activism, except it was the people that
were being handcuffed on the road who were the real activists, not me. I think
it is really important to be clear that doing critical theory as an IR scholar
does not make you a political activist, and I think it is important, because it
can sometimes feel really good to make a gesture of whatever, you know, 'being
critical'. And that's all great, but actually it's all within an incredibly
privileged forum and you're not really making any difference to anything. So,
I'm a bit I think Hegelian in the sense that I think that philosophy or
academic work is about understanding more, trying to understand and to think,
and it may well generate frameworks and ideas that make it useful in various
ways, and it may well not, but if you want to have revolution, go out and start
organizing. You know, don't think that you can somehow do it by being on ISA
panels. Marx was a political activist, he didn't just sit around writing, he
was part of the movement, part of an organization, and that's the only way you
really can help bring fundamental change, and quite often it'll go wrong. Being
a political activist is much more scary and difficult than being a critical IR
thinker.



Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is a leading scholar in international relations theory. She has extensively researched and published on international political theory in respect to Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, international and global ethics, Feminist theory and philosophy, and politics and violence. Her work is influenced by the scholarly tradition that produced the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. She is the author of Kant, Critique and Politics, International Political Theory: rethinking ethics in a global era, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy and Time and World Politics: thinking the present. Her current focus is on the areas of global ethics, assumptions about time and history in theories of international relations, and the conceptual relationship between politics and violence in Western political thought.







Related links





Faculty Profile at Queen Mary's




Read Hutchings' Ethics, Feminism and International Affairs (2013) here (pdf)
Read Hutching's What is Orientation in Thinking? On the Question of Time and Timeliness
in Cosmopolitical Thought (2011) here (pdf)
Read Hutching's World Politics and the Question of Progress (2004) here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns
in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making






Can we really go on speaking about International Relations
as a 'discipline'? Even if social constructivism is often presented as a robust
theoretical cornerstone of the discipline, one of the thinkers that established
this theoretical position challenges the existence of IR. Surely, Nicholas Onuf
argues, we have a disciplinary machinery—institutions, journals, conferences
and so forth—but these form an apparatus built around a substantive void—in his
words, 'a discipline without an 'about''. In this Talk, Nicholas Onuf—among others—weaves an appraisal of
disciplinary boundaries through a discussion of social constructivism's birth
and growth, tells the material turn to get serious and provides a bleak
assessment of IR's subservient relation to political order.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge /
principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or
answer to this challenge / in this debate?



In my view, the
biggest challenge for IR is making good on claims (I'd say pretensions) that IR
is a discipline in its own right.  Such
claims presume that IR has a reasonably well-bounded subject matter and a body
of theory uniquely suited to that subject matter.  For 25 years I have been saying that IR fails
miserably in meeting this challenge. 
Much less do we acknowledge the challenge—there is no debate.  As it is, we have institutionalized a
so-called discipline (journals, conferences, workshops, PhD programs) that
reaches far beyond (lower case) international relations.  In short:  a discipline without an 'about.'  Were we to acknowledge the challenge, we
might be content to say:  Forget disciplines,
it's all about 'the social' and social theory belongs to us—too.  Or we might say, it's all about 'the
political,' and legal, political and
social theory also belong to us.  I'm not
sure there's much difference.  I am sure
that it's not enough to say our 'about' is 'the international.'  And I have said as much publicly, though
intemperate terms that I instantly regretted.



Given such a
negative assessment of IR, you might wonder why I stuck with it all these
years.  Why didn't I just call myself a
social theorist and (try to) publish in the few journals in which theorists
gets a hearing?  Actually, I did try a
few times, to no avail (just as I put 'social theory' in the subtitle of World of Our Making (1989) to no
discernible effect).  I think there's a
status issue lurking here.  Once
identified with IR, it's hard to get acknowledged outside IR.  Nobody reads
or cites us; we 'don't get no respect'; status ordering condemns us to be
consumers rather than producers of big ideas.  If (just perhaps) the era
of big ideas is over, then the next generation in IR may feel a little
braver than I was about jumping ship.  Not that I'm betting on it,
especially since publishing in a host relatively new, expressly interdisciplinary
journals, such as Global
Constitutionalism, International
Political Sociology and International
Political Theory, offer a safer alternative.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International
Relations?



I have to say
that events have never inspired me.  In
my callow youth, Hans Morgenthau's Politics
among Nations (1948) inspired me to think about spending a lifetime doing
IR, as did my teachers Robert Tucker and George Liska—both realists with a taste respectively for
international law and international institutions.  Working as Tucker's assistant in revising Hans Kelsen's Principles of International Law (1952) prompted
a longstanding interest in legal theory. 
As a doctoral student, I got hooked on systems theory à la Hoffmann, Kaplan, Rosecrance; the
special issue of World Politics (vol.
14, no. 1) on the international system left an indelible mark, as did Waltz's Man, the State and War (1959).  Working with Richard Falk a few
years later affected me a great deal—he remains one of my very few heroes.  So did Fritz Kratochwil,
briefly a student of mine and friend ever since.



In the 1980s
I got to know a number of mavericks: 
Hayward Alker, Rick Ashley, Dick Mansbach, John Ruggie and Rob Walker
are by no means the only ones on this list. 
More important, I think, were my feminist doctoral students, who changed
my life in a great many ways and were largely responsible for my turn to social
theory.  It was in that context that I
took the so-called linguistic turn to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin et al. 
World of Our Making is pretty
clear about its many sources of inspiration. 
The big trick was fitting everything together.  Since then (and to keep the story manageable),
working with my brother Peter is responsible for my interest in Aristotle and in the making of the modern world; republican
theory links these two concerns.  I
cannot blame Peter for my ongoing fascination with Foucault.  





What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?



For me at least, this is a tricky question.  As I said earlier, I am not very much
interested in events—either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what's
happening in the world at any given moment. 
Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events—how
often I find them glued to one news source or another.  Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious
they should be.  Most people in the field
engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in 'cases' or as
statistically manipulated patterns. 
Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and
training.  At the same time, students
also need an exposure to theory—big picture thinking—and, in my view, the
philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.



Theory is a seductive.  I was seduced at the age of 19 and never
gotten over it.  Shifting metaphors, I always
told my doctoral students not to succumb to the theory bug, at least to the
exclusion of what I just called 'the skillful assembly of events.'  In other words, don't do it my way—I was lucky
to get away with it.  Disposition is a different
matter.  Students must love to work hard
for extended intervals with little immediate gratification.  Machiavelli said that warriors must be
disciplined and ardent.  I used to tell
my doctoral students, you have to be 'warrior nerds.'  If you don't fit this profile, find another
vocation.





You were immensely influential in
constructing the theoretical pillar of social constructivism in IR, starting
over 25 years ago. Looking back, has social constructivism delivered on the
promise you etched out in World of Our
Making?



No way, and for all kinds of
reasons.  This was all too clear within a
decade, as I intimated in a review of Peter Katzenstein's
The Culture of National Security (1996,
read introduction here)
and spelled out in Don Puchala's Visions of International Relations (2003).
To simplify unduly and perhaps unjustly, the constructivists who came to
prominence in the 1990s made three mistakes. First, they took for granted that a
norm (as in 'the norm') is normative without asking whether, to what degree, or
how this might be so.  I'm pretty sure this
mistake came from a mindless appropriation of functional sociology and utter
indifference to legal and political theory. Second, they substituted identity
('who am I?' questions) for agency ('who acts for what or whom?' questions) in
guessing at the implications of the end of the Cold War.  In doing so, they compounded the felony by
leaping from personal identity to collective identity and unreflectively
imputing agency to imagined collectivities. Third, they treated culture as an
aggregate residual and then assigned it enormous causal significance. Had any
of them taken the linguistic turn seriously, they might have extricated those
elements of 'culture' that (one might guess) are most consequential for social
construction.



More generally, I
came to see the constructivist surge of the 90s as a liberal-institutionalist
renaissance.  Standing in for legal
rules, formal institutions and corporate personality, norms and identity look
like a conceptual breakthrough to a generation of scholars who had been taught
to dismiss old-time liberal IR.  In the
2000s, a shifting panorama of events (genocide etc.) prompted a straight-on
liberal institutionalist revival with lots of help from lawyers.  Meanwhile, a much more diverse range of
scholarship has come to be styled constructivist for lack a better label.  Finally, there has emerged a gang of 'third
generation' constructivists who now actively repudiate their predecessors from
the 90s.  They speak my language, but
I'll let them speak for themselves.





How, do you think, do 'turns' in IR
relate to the broader context of real-world historical events? If the origins
of social constructivism have been located in the end of the Cold War, is there
some kind of dialectic whereby social constructivism then impacts on the course
of history? For instance, social constructivism is by now so established that a
big part of newer generations of practitioners in IR are probably social
constructivists. How does that influence international politics? In other
words, does social constructivism as an illocutionary theoretical approach hold
perlocutionary effect on its object of study?



I have some reservations
about the metaphor 'turn.'  Do we imagine
IR as a colossal ship that turns, however slowly, all of a piece?  I've already used the ship metaphor, but in
this context it's not appropriate—we're not that put together, and, besides, no
one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers).  Or a herd of wildebeests, in which all the members
of the herd turn together by keying off each other once one senses danger and
turns?  I don't think so, even if we do
sometimes see signs of a herd mentality. 




Back in the late 60s, Karl
Deutsch suggested that the field had even then experienced a succession of
waves.  I like this metaphor better
because it captures both the messiness of what's going on and a sense that
perhaps not much is changing in deeper water. 
You yourself switch metaphors on me when you mention a new generation of
constructivists.  As it happens, I like
this metaphor a lot (and have a piece entitled 'Five Generations of International
Relations Theory' forthcoming in a new edition of International Relations Theory Today, which Ken Booth and Toni
Erskine are editing).  It suggests a
dynamic internal to any field of study rather than one prompted by external
events.  Inasmuch as constructivism got
its start before the Cold War ended but afterwards changed its profile
significantly tells us the story is actually rather complicated.



The more interesting question
is whether constructivism will, as you say, impact the course of history.  The quick and dirty answer is, yes, but in
ways too subtle to document.  We already
know how difficult it is to establish any impact from IR as a scholarly pursuit
on world affairs.  That is, any impact
beyond realism and raison d'état.  As we become more specialized in what we do
and so does everyone else, it seems ever less likely that we'll be able to pin down
extended causal chains.  But I suspect
that you have something more like 'mood' in mind.  Once liberal institutionalists adopted a
slick kind of constructivism, they were pretty much in sync with the Zeitgeist, at least for a decade or
so.  So, yes, as a not very helpful
generalization, we can surmise that some degree of co-constitution was then at
work.  Always is.



One last point.  I don't have even the slightest sense that my
own scholarly work has had anything have much to do with large-scale world-making,
or that it will in any near-term.  I
don't have to be told that my work is too austere and forbidding to reach very
many people—though I am told this often enough. 
Years from now, who knows?  Yet my
teaching career convinces me that there's more co-constitution going on in the
classroom than anywhere else we're likely to find ourselves.  Interacting with hundreds of MA and PhD
students in Washington DC over 28 years—during which I noodled through what
would become World of Our Making—affected
me and them in ways beyond measure.  Some
of those students became scholars, but many more have spent their lives in
public service.





What has been, to you, the biggest
surprise or exciting move in IR since social constructivism saw the light?



The biggest and most
surprising 'move' has been the move offshore. 
I speak of course as someone raised, trained and employed in the US when
IR was 'AnAmerican Social Science.'  For the
last twenty years, IR has not so much left the US as gained strength everywhere
else.  Better to say, its center of
gravity has moved.  In the process, IR
has transformed, both as a claimant discipline and as a theory-driven
enterprise.  As a participant-observer, I
see IR as an institutional beneficiary of globalization and, to a lesser
degree, those of us in IR as agents in this hugely complicated process. 



Globalization has meant,
among much else, the extraordinary growth of higher education and its
institutional apparatus.  The
proliferation of universities is an acknowledgment of cosmopolitan imperatives and an accommodation of national needs, exemplified
in programs for the grooming of managerial elites.  For IR, this large process has been colored
by an ostensible rejection of American hegemony.  One expression of this anti-hegemonial
sentiment is the fashion for post-positivist scholarship and the sort of constructivism
that is now conventionally ascribed to Fritz Kratochwil and me.  For me personally, it's just wonderful to be
taken seriously everywhere but my own country.





You recently have turned attention
towards cognitive and evolutionary psychology. This is a pretty
underrepresented field, in terms of its being mined in IR. What challenge has
this literature to pose, in your view, to dominant IR?



Long ago, I ventured into cognitive
studies as a consequence of casting a broad net in social theory.  Since then, several disciplines have
converged in making cognitive studies just about the most exciting game in
town.  I cannot imagine anyone not being
fascinated (but then I am also fascinated by advances in cosmology, however
little I understand the technical stuff).  In recent years, I have developed a more
specific interest in what cognitive and evolutionary psychology might tell
about my mind, any mind, in relation to a world that my mind cannot access
directly, the world of appearances.  As
you can see, I'm a philosophical idealist—with many qualifications, a Kantian
idealist.  Most people in IR are
philosophical realists, for whom such issues are less compelling.  



Let me comment briefly on any
challenge the cognitive revolution might pose for IR in the philosophical
realist mode.  IR's substantive concerns
are so far removed from the stuff of cognitive science (neurons and such) that I doubt scholars in IR will ever feel
obliged take the latter into account. 
Nor should they.  Positivist
science is reductive—it always pushes down levels of analysis to explain what's
going on at higher levels.  But anyone
pushing down risks losing touch with what seems to be substantively distinctive
about one's starting point, and IR and its event-manifold are a long way up
from the synchronized firing of neurons. 
I would qualify this bald statement somewhat to account for the recent interest
of emotions in IR.  At least some of the
psychological literature on emotions taps into a deep pool of research where
the age-old cognition-emotion binary has finally been put to rest.





You have a broad experience in IR.
How do you see the evolution of the field? Is it a tragedy of unfolding
rationalization and increasing division of labor, or is something else going
on?



As I intimated earlier, IR has
failed as a disciplinary project.  I'm
almost inclined to say, there's no hope for IR 'as we know it.'  Better to say, IR has lost its self-told coherence.  A hundred flowers bloom, but just barely, and
there are a lot of weeds.  I don't see
this as a bad thing (your weeds may well be my flowers), although other
disciplines, such as sociology and a resuscitated geography, cast shadows on
our scraggly garden.  I do think larger
societal processes—modern rationalization and modernist functional
differentiation—have conjoined to impose a coherence we don't see.  Crudely, we are servants to other servants,
all of us ultimately minions to run-away capital and victims of its
techno-material seductions.  I guess you
could call this phenomenon a tragedy, though its very impersonality undercuts
the sense of the term.  I have no doubt,
however, that it will eventuate in a catastrophe from we moderns will never
recover.  I have been saying this ever
since the 1970s, when the debate over The Limits to Growth
persuaded me that we would never turn the ship around.





A new 'turn' seems to be developing
in the social sciences, possibly a swing of the ontological pendulum back to
materialism—this time with a more postpositivist undertone. How do you relate
to such a turn?



I am skeptical.  It looks like a fad to me—people casting
about for something new and interesting to say. 
Moreover, the vitalist, Bergsonian tenor of so
much of the new materialism turns me off—I cannot see the case for ascribing
agency (and thus purpose) to things when the language of cause suffices.  (And I am not among those constructivists who
will not speak of cause for fear of positivist contamination.)  But there's another issue that troubles
me:  the continued power of the
materialist-idealist binary.  In IR, we
call realists materialists and liberal institutionalists/soft constructivists
idealists when it should be obvious that whatever separates them (in my view,
not as much as they think) has nothing to do with idealism and materialism as
philosophical stances.  Security dilemmas,
arms races and terrorist plots are not ideationally informed?  Norm diffusion, identity crises and human
rights are not materially expressed?  Get
serious.



 I argued in World of Our Making that the material and the social are bound
inextricably bound together.  Rules do
the job.  They turn the stuff of the
world into resources that we, as social beings, put to use.  I think I got it right then.  Needless to say, I also think students afflicted
with mindlessly linked binaries can only benefit from reading that book.





Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned
as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also
known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory,
International History, and Social Theory. Onuf's most famous
work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social
Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which
should be on every IR student's must-read list. His recent publications
include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American
Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International
Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is
currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida
International University and is on the editorial boards of International
Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto
Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at
John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American
University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.





Related
links


FacultyProfile at the Florida International University 
Read Onuf's Rule and Rules in International Relations
(2014 conference paper) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Fitting Metaphors: the Case of the European
Union (New Perspectives, 2010) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Institutions, intentions and international
relations (Review of International Studies, 2002) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Levels (European Journal of
International Relations 1995) here (pdf) 












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Karen Litfin on Gaia Theory, Global Ecovillages, and Embedding IR in the Earth System




This is the third 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 






Many debates in International Relations concern struggles regarding what should be the autonomous limits and focus of the discipline itself. However, increasing environmental and climate concerns challenge the self-contained nature of IR on discrete political phenomena, because what IR considers it's exogenous context is threatening to destabilize the premises of the content of international political practice itself. While such concerns often lead to a securitization and politicization of the environment and climate in IR, some scholars argue we should work towards the exact opposite. In this Talk, Karen Litfin—among others—elaborates on the kind of theory in which IR is embedded in, rather than applied to, natural systems; discusses examples of social arrangements that try to translate that theoretical insight into practice; and engages with questions of secularism and mysticism that irrevocably accompany those efforts.






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?



The fact that we can today truly speak of something of a global economy, the central problem now is to formulate the political institutions that are commensurate to these globalized economic institutions. We have far to go on that project. It also means doing so within the carrying capacity of the earth—that is, politically configuring that global economy in such a way that it doesn't exhaust ecological resources. So I would say that the challenge, in terms of actual politics, is to find those institutions.



The challenge for the discipline of International Relations is to do the necessary thinking to facilitate that institutional transition, but few IR scholars even acknowledge that political institutions must attend to the carrying capacity of the earth. In general, the discipline of International Relations, Political Science and even most of social sciences more generally behave as if there are no natural constraints to our behavior. Yet our freedom to even be able to theorize about the international system is completely dependent upon a vast web of life, other people growing our food, and a whole technological infrastructure that we had nothing to do with creating. International Relations talks a lot about interdependence, but do we really take it seriously?





How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?



I've always been interested in science and technology. As an undergraduate, I studied physics and astronomy, but I didn't finish those majors because I realized, that if I graduated with those degrees I would most likely be working indirectly or directly for the military. I got politicized and I began to see that the political agenda drives the scientific agenda. This was in the 1970s and it was possible at that time that we were going to have an all-out nuclear war. I did not want to be a part of that.



I began to see that there is a dialectical relationship between science and politics. Because science facilitates the technological changes, which make the basic backdrop for politics, it's very important. For instance, the defense department was funding DARPA, which led—without them fathoming that at the time—to the development of the Internet—now a key site where global politics plays out.



Science also provides metaphors through which we understand politics. I did my Masters thesis on the mechanistic worldview and the devitalization of nature in the 17th century—that is, taking living nature out of our systematic theorizing. While others had written on this, I traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophy. A reductionist and mechanistic worldview underpins a lot of IR theory, as well most of our political institutions. We need to really start questioning that. Another way this plays out is that the notion of the global really had a huge jump when we got the image of Earth fromspace. The idea of Earth Day was really closely aligned to the fact that the image of the earth from space just had come out. Gaia Theory came about because James Lovelock was looking for signs of life on Mars. We were interested in extra-planetary life, but weren't looking at our own system or planet. So basically it turned all that science back on the Earth and said 'Oh my Gosh, we do have this kind of atmosphere that has the telltale science of life in it', which tells us that life is hoping to create the atmosphere. Then to have the human mind to conceptualize that is really huge. The idea that we are the Earth becoming conscious of itself is basically what science is telling us. These monitoring systems are one means by which we have the possibility of becoming conscious of that fact.



In terms of personal trajectory, when I started teaching International Relations back in the early 1990s, I started realizing that petroleum holds the whole thing together, the whole global system was held together by petroleum. (You could also say fossil fuels, but coal and natural gas don't power that much transnationally; it's really the petroleum.) Yet hardly anybody in IR talks seriously about petroleum—or energy or biodiversity or soil or the atmosphere. That's what I mean about getting to the material basis. But having said that, I think how we interact with the material basis is a reflection of our consciousness. So I'm not a material reductionist. Rather, I'm looking for a wholeness that understands our approach to material reality as being a reflection of our consciousness.



So this was why I have become interested in biological metaphors. I still think the leaning edge of human thought is understanding human systems as living systems. From this vantage point, we can begin to reshape our institutions in ways that mimic, sustain, and regenerate living systems. There's a long history of natural law and I don't exactly put myself in that camp, but I think there are ways that we need to understand ourselves as thoroughly embedded in natural systems and then move consciously from that place.





What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



To my mind, these are very different questions because, at least at many universities, becoming an IR specialist often entails ignoring some fundamental global realities. For one, even though most of humanity lives in so-called developing countries, most IR theory pays attention only to the Global North. Likewise, IR is fairly blind to the fact that the lifestyles of the Global North, if globalized, would require between three and six Earths, depending upon whether you are looking at Europeans or North Americans. Again, there is only one Earth! Fortunately, an important subfield has emerged with IR—global environmental politics—that is helping to rectify the situation.



The question I would prefer to answer is: what would a student need to know in order to understand the most pressing challenges facing the world system? To this, I would advise three things. The first would be to dive deeply into a broad and critical reading of the history of modernity, including the interpenetrating scientific, political, commercial, theological and industrial revolutions that characterize the modern era. The second would be to learn about the primary international institutions (the WTO, World Bank, IMF, EU, UN Security Council, etc.), and ask what is working, what isn't, and why? The third would be to do all of this learning while simultaneously learning to think systemically. Take at least one good course on systems theory; one that specifically offers a strong grounding in living systems, and start making connections. Why, for instance, do 'ecology' and 'economics' share the same root (oikos, Greek for household)? What would it mean to consider the international system as a living system and a subset of the Earth system? If we think this world system that we've created of a globalized economy and rudimentary international law is not a part of a living system, we are living in a big delusion. So to actually understand how living systems function, we need the literature on system theory that of course has been used in biology and ecology, but has also been applied a lot in the business world and organizational development. I think it's making its way into IR.





The world is full of technologies and technological systems (and getting more so each day). Could you elaborate on how this is relevant for IR?



I think that's a huge gap: IR doesn't pay nearly enough attention to technological systems—and when they do, it's generally from an uncritical and mechanical perspective. Even though much of the constructivist critique of liberal institutionalism is that the latter is overly materialistic, it actually isn't as if institutionalists talk about economics as if that were a material reality. Economics is a secondary human system overlaid on, but abstracted from, material systems. I think that IR needs to get really serious about understanding the actual material basis for politics. Climate change will probably be the issue that drives that.



So what kinds of technologies and institutions are we going to have to facilitate a global civilization? Now that's a worthwhile question! As I indicated, we now have a more or less globalized economy, but we don't have a global polis; we don't have the institutions that are commensurate to the economy that we have got. So the question is: can we sustain current civilization on the energy budget that is available to us and not wreck the climate?



Technological systems are driven by energy; energy is the master resource. Some energy analysts say that in order to have a global civilization, we need to have an energy return on energy investments of something like 5 to 1—meaning, for instance, that for each barrel of oil we put into getting more oil, we need to get five back. Right now petroleum is getting—depending on where you find it and how it's getting to you—somewhere between 15 and 25 to 1. That's the Middle East. It used to be 100 to 1 at the beginning of the 19th century. And now we are getting, say, 20:1. I've seen analyses of tar sands that put that energy source at somewhere between 3 and 5 to 1. Solar panels, if they work well, they are maybe getting 5:1. So the trend is worsening and we are starting to push that envelope of 5:1 energy return on investment. And if we exploit some of the new unconventional hydrocarbons—like fracking and, worse, methane hydrates—to their maximum potential, we'll fry the planet.



My question is how we can leverage existing technological, economic, financial and political resources to sustain a global civilization. I dearly wish more people were putting their attention on that question. The underlying assumption for most people is that business as usual can continue. Maybe, but not for long.



I'd like to throw in one little term coined by Stephen Quilley, an environmental sociologist: 'low energy cosmopolitanism' (read the paper here). I think this is a huge challenge for us. If it's possible to have a global civilization on the energy budget that we have available, it's going to be some form of a low energy cosmopolitanism, where we make some very conscious choices about what we are going to globalize. For instance, Germany probably wouldn't be importing grapes from Africa and none of us would be going on luxury vacations. We would be making a lot of conscious choices, but if we want to have a global civilization we have to be globalizing something, so what is it that we are globalizing?





How do you see the question of technological determinism when studying technologies?



This is really important to note, because if you just look at human systems as living systems there can be a kind of materialistic reductionism there. People who think like William Connolly, the new materialism understands that we should not be materialistic reductionists and that there is this wildcard of human consciousness. The fact of the matter is, we can assemble all the data we want but we don't know where we are going. But what we do know is that we've created a tremendously complex and complicated world that nobody can actually understand!



I think we need to address that question in a very specific way with respect of specific technologies, but if we stick to one example—satellites—I think the technologies do have certain properties embedded in them. I have written a feminist theoretical critique of earth observing satellites, where I argued that this kind of gaze from space actually does downplay or preclude certain perspectives. But as I thought about it more deeply, I saw very concretely that a lot of people are using those technologies to do what they want—not what the centralized political and scientific institutions that gave rise to the satellites wanted. So I would say the wildcard here is consciousness and human inventiveness, because that's what will shape how people deploy the technologies once there are on the ground.



For example, satellites were devised for spying and are certainly still being used for spying, but they are being used for so much else, such as Google Maps. I think some people might have been able to foresee that kind of development, but most of us didn't have a clue that this sort of thing could come about. Or that you could have indigenous people mapping their traditional lands in order to make land rights claims. So the wildcard really is human consciousness and that's why nothing really is deterministic. The greater the complexity in a living system, the more surprising its emergent properties. Seven billion human brains linked together in global technological and ecological systems are bound to yield surprises!





You indicated that you use biology and living systems as a reservoir for metaphors. Could you elaborate on that?



If I speak about living systems I usually do so through work called Gaia Theory. Looking through the lens of Gaia Theory, we would first understand that we exist within certain spheres such as biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. We have taken geological time and inserted it into human time by digging up fossil fuels. As a consequence, we have kind of checkmated ourselves and are now forced into having to think in geological terms. We have to start thinking in geological time scales, which was never the case before. If we are going to find a way of inhabiting this planet sustainably, particularly if we are going to have anything approaching a global civilization, we have to understand that we live within a living system and then go about the rather daunting but exciting project of developing international law and institutions that reflect that reality.



There is a whole subfield of earth system governance in which Earth system scientists, IR theorists and international legal experts are coming together to think through these questions. The literature on earth system governance starts from the premise that the Earth is a living system and draws heavily on earth system science, which draws heavily from Gaia theory. You cannot separate atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, and biosphere: they are all intertwined as one big living system—and now humanity is functioning as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. That's the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it will require an entirely new way of going about politics and economics.



So how can we bring the concept of Gaia Theory into practical reality? Besides the emerging field of Earth system governance, we can also do this in a very personal way by beginning to really internalize what it means being a human being at this time. A few years back, I came to the point where I decided that I did not want to theorize about anything I could not live. That turned out to be a huge challenge. After I wrote the 'integral politics' piece (see links below)—and I really do love that piece!—I saw that I couldn't fully live it. It was so big. For me, one of the most important implications of Gaia Theory is that we are the Earth becoming aware of itself. That's a huge implication. If you merely think of it conceptually, it is wonderful mind candy; but if you actually take it to the heart and try to live it, it changes your life. I challenged myself to do this and, at some point, it occurred to me that there must be other people who have traveled farther down that road than I had—in other words, people who had radically changed their lives to reflect their growing awareness that human beings are the Earth becoming conscious of itself. So I found myself traveling around the world to ecovillages which, for me, helped to tie it all together. Why is somebody who's teaching international environmental law and politics wandering around the world visiting these little tiny micro-communities? Because these people are taking the radical implications of Gaia Theory to heart (even if they've never read about it) and collectively changing their material, economic and social lives. That's why I spent a year on the road living in ecovillages. It's a strange thing to be an IR theorist who doesn't want to theorize about anything that she can't live!





Bringing up the issue of how to live your research, could you elaborate on what kind of outlook is necessary to live in accordance to Gaia Theory?



So this leads to the importance of humility for me. The value of humility is that it comes naturally as a consequence of understanding. You do not have to value it in advance; it comes automatically from understanding ourselves as part of this larger living system. In my experience at least, as soon as you grasp that, you automatically have an enormous sense of humility and gratitude. Those two qualities just spontaneously arise from truly grasping that reality. Going back to ecovillages, I asked myself who is living in ways that can actually work for the long run. The result became the eponymous book. I wanted to see collective efforts and particularly larger communities that were generally at least a hundred people, because you can do a lot more collectively, than you can on your own. Some of these communities are reducing their ecological footprint radically. In some cases, we are talking about per capita reductions in material consumption and waste production of 80-90% as compared to their home country averages.



This is very big news—especially given that these communities are still tied to the larger system. They are not tiny isolated enclaves. For instance, they're still using the mass transit of the larger society; most of them have Wi-Fi and high-speed Internet. They're not living in caves and many of them are very much globally engaged. On a material level, they're much closer to living within the Earth's carrying capacity. So in that way, I was very interested in just seeing what are their physical systems. But I began to see that their physical systems were only made possible because of the degree of trust and reciprocity that they have created.



That entails doing a lot of personal work. Diana Leafe-Christian, who has written a number of books on communities, says that 'community life is the longest and most expensive personal growth workshop you'll ever take'. It's true! If you're willing to do the personal work and hang in there through the difficult times and conflicts, you can develop the kind of self that's willing to do some very deep sharing. I would add, though, that this level of sharing is done best when it is respectful of the individualism that we have developed. I don't think that communities should be running roughshod over individualism. There needs to be some balance of privacy and communal life. The communities that work well have figured out a way to do this. To my mind, the communities that work really well are the ones who are working on developing collective forms of consciousness. Which means actually I think going beyond the separative rational mind: it doesn't mean demeaning those qualities, it means using them, but using them in the service of something larger. As I said earlier, progressive change entails transcending and including. Individualism, for all its negative consequences, is a genuine historical achievement.



And I would say on a very practical level, one of the ways that they reduce their footprint is by withdrawing to some extent from the global economy. Having very low consumption and being fairly energy efficient and self-reliant, reliance on food self-sufficiency, but withdrawing from global society. To me, they are answering the question I raised earlier: What would a low-energy cosmopolitanism look like? And they are doing this not just because they consume less and live more simply but because by and large ecovillagers actually have a cosmopolitan identity. They might be growing their own food and composting their shit, but they're also tied into the global system. They're actively engaged in the Internet, sometimes attending global conferences and many of them are politically active on issues such as genetically modified organisms and nuclear waste disposal and human rights.



They are little nodes of positive examples, but they're very small. In fact, hardly anybody lives in an ecovillage, which is why the last chapter of my book is called 'Scaling it up'. I basically look at the underlying principles of ecovillages and talk about how these principles could be scaled up to the level of cities, regions, national government and international norms. I realize this is a big stretch, but I felt that as an International Relations scholar, I at least need to try it. The important misconception you run into that moment is the idea that sustainability needs to be expensive—the idea that somehow we can consume our way into sustainability. Actually, the most sustainable form of consumption is no consumption! Yet this is not what all ecovillages do. There is one community that I visited in up-state New York, in Ithaca, this is the same city that Cornell University is in, where two thirds of the residents have masters degrees or PhDs and their homes are worth more than the average in the area. They have a pretty middle class lifestyle, yet their average ecological footprint is about half the American norm. So they're not sustainable, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. They hired architects and have nice homes, which is a very different approach than that of most rural ecovillages.



In the Global North, the smallest footprints that I saw tended to be in the rural off-grid ecovillages that were more or less self-sufficient in food, energy, and water. In some of these communities, residents were living on as little as 25% of their average national incomes. This is impressive because it tells us that people in affluent countries can live well on far less money and with far less environmental damage than is considered normal in those countries.



Yet the fact of the matter is that most people today live in cities, so it was important for me to also look at urban ecovillages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, has a very small footprint because it is high-density and automobile use is discouraged. If you lower your transportation footprint by not driving or sharing vehicles, and if you grow your own food or rely upon locally produced food and have and passive solar construction and renewable energy for your buildings, you can dramatically reduce your energy consumption. You can have a much smaller footprint and still have a very comfortable life. People think that you need money in order to live. It seems that we need money in order to live, but actually what we need is food and shelter and transportation and relationships. So if you figure out ways of getting those things without money, you've made a huge step to getting out of the global economy. In a nutshell, that's what ecovillages are doing.





So are ecovillages all the same across the globe? Is it a new 'social form' emerging?



It is different in the developing countries and in the affluent countries, and I think it's important to clarify that at the outset. I visited a number of ecovillages and ecovillage networks in both developing countries and affluent countries. In the latter, there is a greater possibility for what I consider 'post-individualist' that both transcends and includes individualism. A very simple 'post-individualistic' approach to property rights, for instance, would be co-housing, where the land is owned in common and people own their own homes. But their private homes would be a lot smaller because so many amenities are shared. The common house would have a community kitchen, so that, depending upon how much people are willing to share, private kitchens can be very small. If there's a collectively owned guest space, then you don't need a guest room in your house. And if you do a lot of your socializing together, then you can do that in the common house. So your own house could be quite small but you would still have access to all the comforts of a private existence and more. The more people are willing to share, the more will be collectively owned. And that really does require trust, because it's a big problem if the relationships blow up and you have your finances entangled with those people! This is just one example of how property rights can coexist with the softening of boundaries between individuals.



The flipside of this is occurring in developing countries, where the post-individualistic arrangement that I've been making doesn't really apply. And this is important because that's where most people in the world live. There you have cultures where people already have much more of a collective orientation. So we really need to pay attention to what's happening there. Actually, in many cases, their developmental task is to become more individuals. And the question is: how do they become more highly-individualized rather than being subsumed by traditional moral codes—how do they that without over-consuming. In the west, we had a fossil fuel subsidy that enabled us to become highly individualized, as I said before, the only reason we can be having this interview is because somebody else is growing our food.



In developing countries, the real task is to find a way for people to become more individualistic without over consuming. And so this is why I was impressed by the model I saw in Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan participatory development network that belongs to the Global Ecovillage Network. There, fifteen thousand villages are trying to apply ecovillage principles to create what they call a "no-poverty/no-affluence society." Their programs in micro-finance and women's literacy, for instance, give villagers—especially women—an incentive to stay in the village because they have a livelihood. And when people stay in their villages, they tend to live a lot more sustainably. As the women becoming literate, they begin making choices for themselves and therefore becoming more individualized. So it's a way of hopefully leap-frogging urbanization in order to sustain rural village life.



I should say that you can apply these principles anywhere you live, in cities as well as rural areas. I visited quite a few ecovillages in cities. One of the most important things that the Global Ecovillage Network is doing is training people, wherever they live, to apply ecovillage principles in their urban neighborhoods or wherever they find themselves. There have been some amazing projects coming up in the Brazilian favelas and in China. GEN has developed a course called 'Gaia Education' that's being offered all over the world and especially in developing countries. There's now a Global Ecovillage Network for Africa. There are basic principles of sustainability that, if you live in an ecovillage, you can apply more intentionally, but they are applicable everywhere.





In a way, 'Gaia theory' sounds very spiritual—and for that reason the Gaia concept was initially very much opposed by many physicists and climate scientists. In a way, Gaia theory entails a critique of modernist secularism and faith in technology; how do you see that in your work?



I have mentioned the critique of mechanization in the early modern era, but in fact the early modern scientists, such as Newton, were all looking for God. Now many of the hard sciences are moving in the direction of mysticism—I would speak of mysticism rather than spirituality—but it's not a mysticism that is simply a projection of the human psyche onto the cosmos; rather, it is empirically derived. I think that's a kind of postmodern development that would have been impossible in the pre-modern era. That's what I was saying about transcending and including, that the ideas that we have of who we are in the cosmos are so different as a consequence of modern science. We can transcend those ideas but also include them. From the Big Bang and the evolution of species, we came out of all of that! And implicit within this fact, if you take it deeper, is that there is a secret oneness to it all. I think that the lessons we have to learn politically and economically now are about interdependence. But if you take interdependence to its depths, it too implies a secret oneness. Most importantly for the current evolutionary crisis: that oneness is embedded in our consciousness and we can access that. That is the reason why I don't want to theorize about anything that I can't live; I'm working at that level as well.



It's interesting, because that also has implications for my teaching. I teach in a fairly direct way when I have living bodies and inquiring minds right in front of me and can engage them at a personal level. I give them my big picture view of politics as a subset of living systems and also being a kind of living system. I get them to inhabit that in themselves through doing contemplative and reflective exercises in the classroom. For instance, I'm teaching a class called political ecology of the world food system and we talked about the globalization of different food commodities and where chocolate comes from for instance, where it originally came from, who processes it, how much do the farmers get from all of that. I brought in raw cacao nibs, which most of the students had never tasted before. We talked about where these came from and how expensive they were even though cacao is not processed, because raw cacao is a something of a delicacy. Then I gave them this very highly processed chocolate without sugar and with alternative sweeteners in it. I invited them to really be present to tasting each of these things as I talked about them and I left some significant gaps of silence, they could actually be present to experience of themselves inhabiting the living system and now being the beneficiary of a world food system. How did we come to have cacao from West Africa and stevia from Paraguay in our mouths? What are sociopolitical and biotic networks that have made this possible? And can we allow ourselves to truly experience what it means to be the beneficiary of these living systems? And what of our own as living system? When I am in the classroom it is actually quite easy to teach what I call person/planet politics. I never teach anything as if it is just 'out there'. Whenever I teach anything, I want the students to inhabit it in their bodies, in their experience. And I try to do that as best as I can by living what I teach as best I can.



It is a little embarrassing, but I don't know how all of this applies to IR; I am just trying to do it as best I can in my own life, as it is presented to me. And I write about it and I publish things—I have a piece coming out on localism that basically makes the case for what I call organic globalism, which is a globalization that is premised upon the earth as a living system and international institutions being designed very consciously on that basis. I don't quite know what it looks like but I have a sense of its rightness. To be honest with you, I am better with that in the classroom that I am at the level of large-scale institutions. Because I am beginning to inhabit this in my own being and I can communicate it to students. Maybe the next challenge is to be able to communicate it at a larger level.





So isn't there a tension between living sustainably and participating in a globalized world that is hard-wired in terms of technology?



Consciousness does not at all preclude technology. For example, I think us having this dialogue is on some level contributing to a certain kind of consciousness and it's completely facilitated by technology. Without Skype we wouldn't be having this conversation. What's helpful to me, about what I call E2C2 (ecology, economics, community and consciousness) is that these are four lenses through which to view any phenomenon—and that includes technology. For instance, we can view our Skype conversation through the lens of ecology in terms of the amount of energy that's used. Economically, we might consider what is being produced and what its value is. It's probably a pretty good economic deal since you and I are virtually paying nothing for it! So economically it's a good deal. In terms of the communitarian lens, we are developing a dialogue that will hopefully be in a relational field with many other people, perhaps thereby also contributing to a certain growth of consciousness.



E2C2 offers four lenses through which we can look at technology; they are not mutually exclusive. For me, the question is: to what extent are our technologies beneficial in terms of each of the lenses. Denis Hayes, the guy who started Earth Day, said the basic principle of sustainability is that you leave your molecules at home and export your photons. This brings us back to the concept of low energy cosmopolitanism. It's a huge question: what are we going to globalize? If we are going to have a global civilization we need to have global communication. The Internet is a tremendous achievement in that regard, and could to function as a kind of global brain, though its roots are in its military applications and today it is primarily dominated by commerce. (And I understand that pornography is a big part of it as well.) Despite its limitations, the Internet provides an infrastructure that could enable us to be in communication globally, which is very important if you want to develop a global consciousness and a global civilization. But we need to understand that our technologies must operate within the limits of the Earth system. In other words, technologies—like all human systems—are also living systems.





Last question. So how can we relate this back to IR?



I think one of the ways this is happening is that some pockets of IR are actually returning to foundational concepts. For instance, Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3) has started this Journal International Theory. People are seriously looking at the bigger and deeper questions, so uniting more with political theorists for instance. This idea that we are coming up against real limits is a very frightening idea from the perspective of a certain idea of freedom rooted in liberal politics. We really need to rethink the meaning of freedom in an era of limits. My own feeling is that human beings are kind of hard-wired towards unlimitedness—but the world is now pressing us to interrogate this impulse. We don't do well with limits. But the fact of the matter is, we are not evolutionarily adapted to abundance, we don't even know what to do with abundance. We are squandering resources in the most absurd ways. So we really need to rethink what freedom is in a world of limits.



It's not all together a bad thing that we are facing these limits. Those of us who have at least the privilege of being well fed and reasonably comfortable, can actually turn our attention to this question of consciousness. Because this question of 'what is freedom' is a problem of human consciousness. Rather than turning our desire towards mastery—I think as human beings we have an innate desire towards mastery – rather than turning that desire onto the external world, we've pretty well mastered it; except turns out that we live in it so it's coming back to bite us and we are facing huge climate change most likely. When we shift the focus of this desire for mastery to our own psyches, then lots of things open up. And I don't think only people who live in industrialized countries need to do this or are doing this. One of the things I saw in my ecovillage book is that people living in developing countries are also quite aware of it and are doing it at the places they live as well. There is a global awakening, at least in small pockets, to the fact that we live within a limited Earth system and a serious inquiry into what it means to be a human being at this juncture between modernity and the Anthropocene.





Karen Litfin (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls "person/planet politics." Her first book, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in International Environmental Cooperation (Columbia University Press, 1994), looks at the discursive framing of science in the ozone treaties. Her second book, The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (MIT Press, 1998), explores how state sovereignty is being reconfigured as a consequence of global environmental politics. Some of the topics of her recently publications include: the politics of earth remote sensing; the political implications of Gaia Theory; the relationship between scientific and political authority in the climate change negotiations; the politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world; and holistic thinking in the global ecovillage movement. 





Related links





Faculty profile at the University of Washington
Read Litfin's Thinking like a planet: Gaian politics and the transformation of the world food system (2011 book chapter) here (pdf)  
Read Litfin's Towards an Integral Perspective on World Politics: Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecoloy (Millennium, 2003) here (pdf) 
Read Litfin's The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty (Global Society, 1999) here (pdf) 
Read Litfin's The Gendered Eye in the Sky: Feminist Perspectives on Earth Observation Satellites (Frontiers 1997) here (pdf) 








Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

John M. Hobson
on Eurocentrism, Historical Sociology and the Curious Case of Postcolonialism







International
Relations, it is widely recognized, is a Western discipline, albeit one that
claims to speak for global conditions. What does that mean are these regional
origins in and by themselves a stake in power politics? This Eurocentrism is
often taken as a point of departure for denouncing mainstream approaches by self-proclaimed
critical and postcolonialist approaches to IR. John Hobson stages a more
radical attack on Eurocentrism, in which western critical theories, too, are
complicit in the perpetuation of a dominantly western outlook. In this extensive
Talk, Hobson, among others, expounds
his understanding of Eurocentrism, discusses the imperative to historicize IR,
and sketches the outline of possible venues of emancipation from our provincial
predicament.



Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is,
according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current
International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in
this debate?



In my view, there
are two principal inter-related challenges that face IR. The first is the need
to deal with the critique that the discipline is constructed on Eurocentric
foundations. This matters both for critical and conventional IR. The latter
insists that it works according to value-free positivistic/scientifistic
principles. But if it is skewed by an underlying Western-centric bias, as I
have contended in my work, then the positivist mantra turns out to constitute a
smokescreen or veil behind which lies the dark Eurocentric face of conventional
IR. And of course, if Eurocentrism in various forms infects much of critical
IR, then it jeopardizes its critical credentials and risks falling back into
problem-solving theory. For these reasons, then, I feel that the critique of
Eurocentric IR and international political economy (IPE) poses nothing short of
an intellectually existential challenge to these disciplines.



The second inter-related
challenge is that if we accept that the discipline is essentially Eurocentric
then we need to reconstruct IR's foundations on a non-Eurocentric basis and
then advance an alternative non-Eurocentric research agenda and empirical
analysis of the international system and the global political economy. This is
a straightforward challenge vis-à-vis conventional IR/IPE theory but it is more
problematic so far as critical IR/IPE is concerned (which is why my answer is
somewhat extended). The more postmodern wing of the discipline would view with
inherent skepticism any attempt to reconstruct some kind of (albeit
alternative) grand narrative. And the postmodern postcolonialists would likely
concur. It is at this point that the thorniest issue emerges in the context of postcolonial
IR theory. For however hard this is to say, I feel that simply proclaiming the
Eurocentric foundations of the discipline does not hole its constituent
theories deep beneath the waterline; a claim that abrades with the view of most
postcolonialists who view Eurocentrism as inherently illegitimate either
because it renders it imperialist (which I view as problematic since there are
significant strands of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism and scientific racism) or
because they conflate Eurocentrism with the unacceptable politics of (scientific)
racism (which I also find problematic notwithstanding the point that there are
all manner of overlaps and synergies between these two generic Western-centric
discourses, all of which is explained in my 2012 book, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics). The key point—one
which will undoubtedly get me into a lot of trouble with postcolonialists—is
that I feel we need to recognize that in the end Eurocentric IR (and IPE)
theory constitutes a stand-point approach, just like any other, and its merits
or de-merits can ultimately only be evaluated against the empirical record,
past and present (notwithstanding the points that I find Eurocentrism to be
deeply biased and that what I find so deeply galling about it is its dismissive
'put-down' modus operandi of all
things non-Western, wherein all non-Western achievements are dismissed outright,
alongside the simultaneous (re)presentation of everything that the West does as
progressive and/or pioneering).



So the second
principal challenge facing the discipline—one which will no less get me into
trouble with many postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers—is the need to
reconstruct an alternative non-Eurocentric set of disciplinary foundations,
which can then generate fresh empirical narratives of the international system
and the global political economy. For my view is that only by offering an
alternative research agenda and empirical analysis of the world economy can IR
and IPE be set free from their extant Eurocentric straitjackets and the
Sisyphean prison within which they remain confined, wherein IR and IPE scholars
simply re-present or recycle tired old Eurocentric mantras and tropes in new
clothing ad infinitum. For if nothing
else, the absence of an alternative reconstruction and empirical analysis means
that IR and IPE scholars are most likely simply to default to, or retreat back
into, their Eurocentric comfort zone. Accordingly, then, the battle between
Eurocentrism and non-Eurocentrism needs to be taken to the empirical field and
away from the high and rarified intellectually mountainous terrain of
metanarratival sparring contests.





How did you
arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International
Relations?



Another way of
asking this question would be: what influenced you to become a non-Eurocentric
thinker? I get asked this question a lot, especially by non-white people. A
good deal of this is related to my life-experience, much of which is
sub-conscious of course and both too personal and too detailed to openly reflect
upon here (sorry!) More objectively, the initial impetus came around 1999 when
I came across a book on Max Weber by the well-respected Weberian scholar, Bryan Turner, in
which he argued inter alia that Weber's
sociology had Orientalist properties; none of which had occurred to me before.
Following this up further I became convinced that Weber was indeed Eurocentric,
as was Marx. More importantly, I came to see this as a huge problem that
infected not just Marx and Weber but pretty much all of historical sociology
(which was reinforced in my mind when I came to read James Blaut's books, The Colonizer's Model of the World (find
it here), and Eight Eurocentric Historians). So I set
out to develop an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history and
historical sociology as a counter (which resulted in my 2004 book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation).




Two further key IR
texts that I became aware of were L.H.M. Ling's seminal 2002 book, Postcolonial International Relations and
Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's equally brilliant 2004 book International Relations and the Problem of
Difference, both of which led me to explore further the Eurocentric nature
of IR and later IPE. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the influence
of Albert Paolini; a wonderful colleague whom I had the pleasure to know at La
Trobe University in Melbourne back in the early 1990s before his exceedingly
unfortunate and premature death (and who, I must say, was way ahead of the game
compared to me in terms of developing the critique of Eurocentrism in IR (see
his book, Navigating Modernity (1997)).
However, it would be unfair to the many others who have influenced me in
countless ways to single out only these books and writers, though I hope you'll
forgive me for not mentioning them so as to avoid providing yet another overly
extended answer!



What
would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a
global way?



This is an excellent but very challenging question and I want to try and make
a succinct answer (though I shall build on it in some of the answers I will
provide later on). The essential argument I make about 'thinking
inter-culturally' is that while the more liberal side of the discipline thinks
that its cosmopolitanism does just this, its Eurocentrism actually prevents it
from fulfilling this. Because ultimately, cosmopolitanism wants to impose a
Western standard of civilization upon the world, thereby advancing cultural
monism rather than cultural pluralism. And this is merely the loudest
expression of a spectre that haunts much of the discipline. But I guess that in
the end, to achieve genuine cultural pluralism and to think inter-culturally
requires us to take seriously how other non-Western peoples think of what their
cultures comprise and what it means to them, and how their societies and states
work along such lines. Dismissing them, as Eurocentrism always does, as
inferior, backward and regressive denies this requirement outright.
Interestingly, my great grandfather, J.A. Hobson flirted
with this idea in his book, Imperialism: A Study
(though this has largely escaped the notice of most people since few have read
the more important second part of that book where all this is considered). But
this is merely a first step, for as I will explain later on in the interview,
ultimately thinking inter-culturally requires an analysis of the dialogical
inter-connections and mutual co-constitutive relations between West and
non-West which, in turn, presupposes not merely the presence of Western agency
but also that of non-Western agency in the making of world politics and the
global political economy. 



All of which is clearly a massive challenge and I am certainly not
advocating that the discipline of IR engage in deep ethnographical study and
that it should morph into anthropology. And in any case I think that there are
things we can do more generally to transcend Eurocentrism while learning more
about the other side of the Eurocentric frontier without going to this extreme.
I shall talk about such conceptual moves later on in this interview. One such theoretical
move that I talk about later is the need to engage historical sociology (albeit
from a non-Eurocentric perspective) or, more precisely global historical sociology. Again, though, I'm not advocating that
the discipline should morph into historical sociology. And I'm aware that one
of the biggest obstacles to IR making inroads into historical sociology is the
sheer size of the task that this requires. It has always come naturally to me
because that is where I came from before I joined the IR academic community.
But there is quite a bit of historical sociology of IR out there now so I do
think it possible for new PhD students to enter this fold. All of this said,
though, I'm unsure if I have answered your question adequately.





The west is often seen as the source of
globalization and innovation, which have historically radiated outwards in a
process without seeming endpoint. What is wrong with this picture, and, perhaps
more interestingly, why does it remain so pervasive?



In essence I
believe this familiar picture—one which is embraced by conventional and many
critical IR/IPE and globalization theorists—is wrong because this linear
Western narrative brackets out all the many inputs that the non-West has made
(which returns me to the point made a moment ago concerning the dialogical
relations that have long existed between West and non-West). In my
aforementioned 2004 book I argued that the West did not rise to modernity as a
result of its own exceptional rational institutions and culture but was
significantly enabled by many non-Western achievements and inventions which
were borrowed and sometimes appropriated by the West. In short, without the
Rest there might be no modern West. Moreover, while the West has been the
principal actor in globalization since 1945, the globalization that preceded it
(i.e., between 1492 and c.1830) was non-Western-led (as was the process of
Afro-Eurasian regionalization that occurred between c.600 and 1492 out of which
post-1492 globalization emerged). And even after 1945 I believe that
non-Western actors have played various roles in shaping both globalization and
the West, all of which are elided in the standard Eurocentric linear Western
narrative of globalization.



But why has this
image remained so persistent? This is potentially a massive question though it
is a very important one for sure. Conventional theorists are most likely to
disagree outright with my alternative picture in part because they are entirely
comfortable with the notion that the 'West is best' and that the West single-handedly
created capitalism, the sovereign inter-state system and the global economy.
Critical theorists are rather more problematic to summarize here. But one that
springs to mind is the type of argument that Immanuel Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) made in a1997 article, in which he insisted that it be an imperative to hold the
West accountable for everything that goes on in the world economy so that we
can prosecute its crimes against the world. Arguments that bring non-Western
agency in, as I seek to do, he dismisses as deflecting focus away from the West
and thereby diluting the nature of the crimes that the West has imparted and
therefore serves merely to weaken the case for the critical prosecution. I
fundamentally disagree with him for reasons that I shan't go into here (but
will touch upon below). But in my view it is (or should be) a key
debate-in-the-making not least because I suspect that many other critical
theorists might agree with him and, more importantly, because it brings
fundamentally into question of what Eurocentrism is and of what the antidote to
it comprises. Either way, though, critical theorists, at least in my view, often
buy into the Western linear narrative, albeit not by celebrating the West but by
critiquing it. All of which means that both conventional and many critical IR scholars
effectively maintain the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the discipline though for
diametrically opposed reasons; and which, at the risk of sounding paranoid,
suggests a deeply subliminal conspiracy against the introduction of non-Eurocentrism.



Nevertheless one
final but rather obvious point remains. For the biggest reason why Eurocentrism
persists is because it makes Westerners feel good about themselves. And at the
risk of sounding like sour grapes (notwithstanding very decent sales for my non-Eurocentric
books), I have been struck by the fact that there seems to be an insatiable
appetite—particularly among the Western public readership—for high profile
Eurocentric books that celebrate and glorify Western civilization; though, to
be brutally frank, many of these rarely add anything new to that which has been
said countless times in the last 50 years, if not 200—notwithstanding Ricardo
Duchesne's recent avowedly Eurocentric book The
Uniqueness of Western Civilization as constituting a rare exception in this
regard. All of which means that writing non-Eurocentric books is unlikely to
get your name onto the bestseller list (though granted, the same is true for many
of the Eurocentric books that have been written!)





International theory and political theory
originates mainly from Europe, but makes universal claims about the nature of
politics. How does international theory betray its situated roots and how do
these roots matter for how we should think about theory?



I'm not sure
that I can answer this question in the space allowed but I'll try and get to the
broad-brush take-home point. I guess that when thinking about modern IR theory
we can find those theorists who in effect advocate a normative Western
imperialist posture even if they claim to be doing otherwise. Robert Gilpin's
work on hegemonic stability theory is perhaps the clearest example in this
respect. Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he claims, is non-imperialist because it always seeks to help the rest of the
world, not exploit it. But the exercise of hegemony, it turns out, returns us
to the old 19th century trope of the civilizing mission where
Western practices and principles are transferred and imposed on non-Western
societies in order to culturally convert them along Western lines. And this in
turn issues from the assumption that the British and American interests are not
selfish but are universal. This mantra is there too in Robert Keohane's (Theory Talk #9) book, After Hegemony, where cultural conversion of non-Western societies to
a neoliberal standard of civilization by the international financial
institutions through structural adjustment is approved of; an argument that is
developed much more expansively in his later work on humanitarian intervention.
And this trope forms the basis of cosmopolitan humanitarian interventionist
theory more generally, where state reconstruction, which is imposed once
military intervention has finished, is all about re-creating Western political
and economic institutions across the world. I don't doubt for a moment the
sincerity of the arguments that these authors make. But they can make them only
because they believe that the Western interest is truly the universal. In such
ways, then, IR betrays its roots.



Ultimately,
Western IR theory constructs a hierarchical conception of the world with the
West standing atop and from there we receive an image of a procession or
sliding scale of gradated sovereignties in the non-Western world. For much of
IR theory that has neo-imperialist normative underpinnings, it is this
construction which legitimizes Western intervention in the non-Western world,
thereby reproducing the legal conception of the (imperialist) standard of
civilization that underpinned late 19th century positive law.
Nevertheless, there has been a significant strand of anti-imperialist
Eurocentrism within international theory (and before it a strand of anti-imperialist
scientific racism, as in the likes of Charles HenryPearson and LothropStoddard). But once again, as we find in Samuel Huntington's famous 1996
book, The Clash of Civilizations—which
comprises a modern equivalent of Lothrop Stoddard's Eugenicist texts, The Rising Tideof Color (1920) and Clashing Tides of Color
(1935)—the West is held up as the highest expression of civilization, with
non-Western societies viewed as socially inferior such that the West's mandate
is not to imperially intervene across the world but to renew its uniquely
Western civilized culture in the face of regressive and rampant non-Western
regions and countries (particularly Middle Eastern Islam and Confucian China). Hedley Bull's
anti-imperialist English School argument provides a complementary variant here
because, he argues, it is the refusal of non-Western states to become Western
wherein the source of the (unacceptable) instability of the global
international society ultimately stems. All of which, as you allude to in your
question, rests on the conflation of the Western interest with the universal. It
is for this reason, then, that the cardinal principle of critical
non-Eurocentrism comprises the need to undertake deep (self) reflexivity and to
remain constantly vigilant to Eurocentric slippages.



In turn, this returns
me to the point I made before: that IR theory does not think inter-culturally
because it denies the validity of non-Western cultures. Because it does so,
then it ultimately denies the full sovereignty of non-Western states. For one
of the trappings of sovereignty is what Gerry Simpson usefully refers to as
'existential equality', or 'cultural self-determination'. It seems clear to me
that the majority of IR theory effectively denies the sovereignty of
non-Western states because it rejects cultural pluralism and hence cultural
self-determination as a function of its intolerant Eurocentric monism. The
biggest ironies that emerge here, however, are two-fold; or what I call the
twin self-delusions of IR. First, while conventional IR theory proclaims its
positivist, value free credentials that sit comfortably with cultural pluralist
tolerance, nevertheless as I argued in my answer to your first question, this
positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which
lies the face of intolerant Eurocentric cultural monism. And second, it means
that while IR proclaims that its subject matter comprises the objective
analysis of the international system which focuses on anarchy and the sovereign
state, nevertheless it turns out that what it is really all about is narrating
an analysis of Western hierarchy and the 'hyper-sovereignty' of Western states versus
the 'conditional sovereignty/gradated sovereignty' of non-Western states.





Linking your work to Lizée's as
a critique of extrapolating 'universals' on the basis of narrow (Western)
experiences, Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44) wrote as follows: 'Perhaps the
cure for the disease that Hobson and Lizée diagnose is a rethinking of what
"theory" means beyond empirical generalizations, so that future
international theorists can avoid the sins of the past.' What is your
conception of what theory is or should be?



As noted
already, I am all in favor of developing non-Eurocentric theory. To sketch this
out in the most generic terms I begin with the proposition that Eurocentric IR/IPE
theory is monological, producing a reductive narrative in which only the West talks
and acts. It is essentially a 'winner/loser' paradigm that proclaims the non-West
as the loser or is always on the receiving end of that which the West does, thereby
ensuring that central analytical focus is accorded to the hyper-agency of the
Western winner. And its conception of agency is based on having predominant
power. We find this problem particularly within much of critical IR theory,
where because the West is dominant so it qualifies as having (hyper) agency
while the subordinate position of the non-West means that it has little or no
agency. In turn, particularly within conventional IR and IPE we encounter a
substantialist ontology, where the West is thought to occupy a distinct and
autonomous domain. From there everything else follows. And even in parts of
critical IR and IPE where relationalism holds greater sway we often find that
the West still occupies the center of intellectual gravity in the world.



My preference is
for a fully relationalist approach which replaces the monologism of Eurocentrism
and its reification of the West with the aforementioned conception of dialogism
that brings the non-West into the discussion while simultaneously focusing on
the mutually constitutive relations between Western and non-Western actors. It
also allows for the agency of the non-West alongside the West's agency (even
though clearly after c.1830 the West has been the dominant actor). This in
effect replaces Eurocentrism's either/or problematique with a both/and logic,
enabling us to reveal a space in which non-Western agency plays important roles
without losing focus of Western agency, even when it takes a dominant form as
it did after c.1830. In this way then, to reply to Wallerstein's argument discussed
earlier, one does not have to dilute the critique of the West when bringing
non-Western agency in for both can be situated alongside each other. While I
could of course say much more here, these conceptual moves are paramount to me and
inform the basis of my empirical work on the international system and the
global political economy.



All in all, IR theory
needs to take a fully global
conception of agency much more seriously; structuralist theory in its many
guises is necessary but is ultimately insufficient since it diminishes or
dismisses outright the prospect or existence of non-Western agency. Moreover, I
seek to blend materialism and non-materialism, which means that neither constructivism
nor poststructuralism can quite get us over the line. Even so, blending
materialism and non-materialism is not an especially hard task to achieve
though IR's preferred ontologically reductionist stance certainly makes this a
counter-intuitive proposition.





You combine historical sociology with
international relations. What promises does this interdisciplinary approach
hold? Why do we need historical sociologies of IR?



Following on
from my previous answer I argue that a relationalist non-Eurocentric historical
sociology of IR is able to problematize the entities that IR takes for granted—states,
anarchy (as well as societies and civilizations)—in order to reveal them, to
quote from the marvelous introduction that Julian Go and George Lawson have
written for their forthcoming edited volume Global
Historical Sociology, as 'entities in motion'. Indeed such entities are
never quite complete but change through time. Here it is worth quoting Go and
Lawson further, where they argue that



'social
forms are "entities-in-motion": they are produced, reproduced, and breakdown
through the agency of historically situated actors. Such entities-in-motion,
whether they are states, empires, or civilizations often appear to be static
entities with certain pre-determined identities and interests. But the
relational premise, and perhaps promise, of GHS is its attempt to denaturalize
such entities by holding them up to historical scrutiny'.



It is precisely
this global historical sociological problematique that underpins the approach
that I develop in a forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Reorient International Political Economy
where inter alia, I show how many of
the major processes of the global economy are never complete but are constantly
mutating as they are shaped by the multiple interactions of Western and
non-Western actors. To take the origins of capitalism or globalization as an
example, I show how these have taken not a Western linear trajectory but a
highly discontinuous path as West and non-West have interacted in complex ways.




A good number of
IR historical sociologists have focused specifically on particular historical
issues—especially that of the rise of the sovereign state in Europe. Such
analyses have in my view proven to be extremely valuable because they allow us
to puncture some of the myths that surround 'Westphalia' that populate standard
or conventional IR reportage (particularly that found in undergraduate text-books).
But ultimately I feel that the greatest worth of the historical sociology of IR
project lies in using history (understood in historical-sociological terms
rather than according to traditional historians' precepts) as a means of
problematizing our understanding of the present international system and global
political economy. Thus, for me, historical sociology is ultimately important
because it can disrupt our understanding and explanations of the present. And I believe that this kind of
inter-disciplinarity can bear considerable fruit (notwithstanding the
difficulty that this task poses for IR scholars).





You famously criticized IR's Eurocentrism
and argued for the need for inter-cultural thinking. What is inter-cultural
thinking and how can it benefit IR?



As I already
discussed what inter-cultural thinking is a bit before, I shall consider how it
might benefit IR and indeed the world in various ways. First, if the rise of
the West into modernity owes much of this achievement to the help provided by
non-Western ideas, institutions and technologies, then acknowledging this debt
could go a long way to healing the wounds that the West has inflicted upon the
non-West's sense of self-esteem. Moreover, the hubristic claim ushered in by
Eurocentrism, that the West made it to the top all by itself and that the very
societies which helped it get there are then immediately denounced as inferior
and uncivilized, significantly furnishes the West with the imperialist mandate
to intervene and remake non-Western societies in the image of the West. So in
essence, the help that the once-more advanced non-Western societies that the
West benefited from is rewarded by 150 years of imperial punishment! Of course,
IR scholars do not really study the rise of the West, but it is implicit in so
much of what they write about. So acknowledging this debt could challenge the
West's self-appointed mandate to remake the world in its own image as well as
problematize many of the historical assumptions that lie either explicitly or
implicitly within IR.



Second, and
flowing on from the previous point, thinking inter-culturally means recognizing
the manifold roles that the non-West has played in shaping the rise of Western
capitalism and the sovereign state system as well as the global economy, as I
have just argued, but also appreciating their societies and cultures on their
own terms rather than simply dismissing them as unfit for purpose in the modern
world. Less Western Messianism and Western hubris, more global understanding
and empathy, is ultimately what I'm calling for. But none of this is possible
while Eurocentrism remains the go-to modus
operandi of IR and IPE. And this is important for IR not least because
significant parts of it have informed Western policy, most especially US
foreign policy.



Third, a key
benefit that inter-cultural thinking could bring to IR is that while the
discipline presumes that it furnishes objective analyses of the international
system, the upshot of my claim that the discipline is founded on Eurocentrism
is that all the discipline is really doing is finding ways to reaffirm the
importance of Western civilization in world politics, defending it and often
celebrating it, rather than learning or discovering new things about the world
and world politics. I believe that only a non-Eurocentric approach can deliver
that which IR thinks it's doing already but isn't.





You've said that 'what makes an argument
[institutionally] Eurocentric…lies with the nature of the categories that are
deployed to understand development. And these ultimately comprise the perceived
degree of 'rationality' that is embodied within the political, economic,
ideological, and social institutions of a given society.' In order to think
inter-culturally, does IR needs new conceptions of rationality, or standards
other than rationality altogether?



What an
extremely interesting and perceptive question which has really got me thinking!
Again, it's something that I've been aware of in the recesses of my mind but
have never really thought through. Certainly the essence of Eurocentrism lies
in the reification of Western rationality (or what Max Weber called Zweckrationalität)
and its simultaneous denial to non-Western societies. But what with all the
revelations that have happened in Britain in the last decade, where a seemingly
never ending series of fraudulent practices have been uncovered within British
public life—whether it be MPs' expenses scandals, banking scandals, newspaper
scandals and the like—then one really wonders about the extent to which the
West operates according to the properties of Zweck-rationality that Weber
proclaimed it to have. Corruption and fraud happen in the West but clearly they
are much more hidden than in those instances where it occurs in non-Western
countries (notwithstanding the revelations mentioned a moment ago). But if one
were to open the lid of many large Western companies, for example, and delve
inside one might well find all sorts of 'rationality-compromising' or
'rationality-denial' practices going on. To mention just two obvious examples:
first, promotions are often tainted by personal linkages rather than always
founded on merit; and second, managers often mark out and protect their own
personal position/territory even when it (frequently) goes against the
'rational' interests of the said organization.



To return to
your question, then, one could conclude that many Western institutions are far
less rational than Eurocentrism proclaims, which in turn would challenge the
foundations of Eurocentrism. Of course, corruption and fraud are not unique to
the West, but it is the West that proclaims its unique 'rational standard of
civilization'. Whether, therefore, we need to abandon the term (Zweck)
rationality on the grounds that it is an impossibly conceived ideal type
remains the question. Right now I don't have an answer though I'll be happy to
mull over this in the coming years.





You've written that engaging with the
East 'creates a genuinely global
history' and articulate a 'dream wherein the peoples of the Earth can finally
sit down at the table of global humanity and communicate as equal partners'. Do
you consciously operate with an 'ontology' of 'peoples' and 'civilizations' as
opposed to 'individuals'? How do you conceive of the relationship between
global humanity and plural peoplehood? Is there an underlying philosophical or
anthropological view that you are drawing on in these and similar passages?



Certainly I
prefer to think of peoples and even of civilizations rather than individuals
and states, though I'll confess right now that dealing theoretically with
civilizations and articulating them as units of analysis is extraordinarily
challenging. At the moment I leave this side of things to better people than
me, such as Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15) and his recentpioneering work on civilizations. The term 'global humanity' concerns me
insofar as it is often a politically-loaded term, particularly within
cosmopolitanism, where its underbelly comprises the desire to define a single
civilizational identity (i.e., a Western one) for 'global humanity'. In essence,
cosmopolitanism effectively advances the conception of a 'provincial (i.e.,
Western) humanity' that masquerades as the global. So I prefer the notion of
plural peoplehood, so as to allow for difference. I wouldn't say that I am
operating according to a particular philosophical view although it strikes me
that such a notion is embodied in Johann Gottfried Herder's
work which, on that dimension at least, I am attracted to. But to be honest,
this is generally something that I have not explored though it is something
that I've thought that I'd like to research for a future book (notwithstanding
the point that I'll need to finish the book that I have started first!).





In your reply toErik Ringmar, you draw on psychoanalytic metaphors to discuss the benefits
of overcoming Eurocentrism, writing that, 'Eurocentrism leads to the repression
and sublimation of the Other in the Self. Thus, doing away with Eurocentrism
can end the socio-psychological angst and alienation that necessarily occurs
through such sublimation.' How do you envision what we now call the West (or
Europe) after its socio-psychological transformation? What does a world after
angst and alienation look like? Is it possible, and is that the goal you think
IR theory should aim at?  



Another massively challenging and fascinating
question, let me have a go. Since you raised the issue of socio-psychological/psycho-analytical
theory (though it is something that I am no expert on), it has always struck me
that Eurocentrism itself is not simply a construct designed to advance Western
power and Western capitalist interests in the world. This seems too
mechanistic. For recall that it was a series of largely independent sojourners,
travel-writers, novelists, journalists and others rather than capitalists who
played such an important role in constructing Eurocentrism. Something more
seems to be at play. One can think of the battles between 'Mods and Rockers' or
Skinheads and heavy metal fans in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, who detested
each other simply because they held different identities and prized different
cultural values. Most importantly, I feel, the constant need to denounce, put
down and dismiss the Other as inferior seems reminiscent of those kinds of
people we sometimes meet who, in constantly putting down others to falsely elevate
themselves to a position of superiority, ultimately reveals merely their own
insecurities. The same issues, of course, underpin racism and Eurocentrism. The
West rose to prominence in my view as a late-developer and having got to the
top it very quickly came to view its duty as one of punishing all others for
being different – all done, of course, in the name of helping or civilizing the
very 'global humanity' that had done so much to help the West rise to the top
in the first place! And to want to culturally convert everyone in the world
according to the Western standard of civilization seems to be symptomatic of a
deeply insecure mindset. A secure person or society for that matter does not
feel threatened by, but openly embraces, difference.



Can we move beyond this stand-off given that
such a mentality has been hard-wired within Western culture for at least three
centuries? And ten if you count the sometimes terse relations between Europe
and Middle Eastern Islam that emerged after 1095! We need to move beyond an
identity that is based only on putting others down. It's 'bad karma' and, like
all bad karma, damages the Western self, not just the non-Western other. But to
transcend this identity-formation process requires us to do away with
logocentrism; clearly a very big task. Nevertheless, that is exactly what my
writings are all about. And it is something that I think IR theory needs to
strive to achieve. Because IR theory is to an extent performative then I live
in the hope, at least, that such a mentality might, just might somehow seep
into international public life, though if it were to happen I strongly suspect
that I would not be around to see it. Still, your question—what would a world
beyond Eurocentrism look like?—though very important is nevertheless perhaps
too difficult to answer without seeming like a hopeless idealist… other than to
say that it could be rather better than the current one.





You write
that 'IPE should aim to be an über-discipline, drawing on a wide range
of disciplines in order to craft a knowledge base that refuses to become lost
in disciplinary over-specialization and the depressing academic narcissism of
disciplinary methodological differentiation and exclusion.' Why do you prefer
that IPE should be the überdiscipline,
instead of IR (or something else altogether), with IPE as a subset?



My degree was in Political Economy, my Masters
in Political Sociology and my PhD in Historical Sociology and (International)
Political Economy. Despite the fact that the majority of my academic career to
date has been in IR research, I have always returned at various points to my
old haunting ground, IPE (as I have most recently). I have always found IR a
little alienating for its reification of politics, divorced from political
economy. I'm not a Marxist, but I share in the view that political economy, if
not always directly underpinning developments and events in the international
system is, however, never far away.



The quote that you took for this question came
from the end of my 2-part article that came out in the 20th
anniversary edition of Review of
International Political Economy. This was partly responding to Benjamin
Cohen's (Theory Talk #17) 2008 seminal book, International Political Economy: A
Intellectual History. One of the challenges that I issued to my IPE readership,
echoing Cohen, is the need for IPE to return to 'thinking big' (in large part
as a reaction to the massive contraction of the discipline's boundaries that
has been effected by third wave American IPE, which labors under the intellectual
hegemony of Open Economy Politics). In that context, then, I argued that IPE
needs to expand its boundaries outwards not only to allow big or macro-scale issues
to return to the discipline's research agenda but also to incorporate insight
from other disciplines. For in my view IPE has the potential to blend the
insights of many other disciplines that can in turn transcend the sometimes
myopic or tunnel-vision-based nature of their particular constituent specialisms.



One of the implications of 'thinking big' is
that IPE should be able to cover much of that which IR does… and more. Like
Susan Strange, who expressed her exasperation with IR for its exclusion of
politico-economic matters, so I feel that the solution lies not with IR
colonizing IPE (which is not likely for the foreseeable future!) but with IPE
expanding its currently narrow remit. If it could achieve this it could become
the 'über-discipline', or the
'master discipline', of the Social Sciences, notwithstanding the point that my
postcolonial and feminist friends will no doubt upbraid me for using such terrible
terms!





Final question. Beyond the East outside
the West, Greece is now being remade as the 'East' within the West, with a
range of measures applied to it that had hitherto been the preserve for the
'East' or Global South. How can your work help to make sense of the stakes?



Your question
reminds me of a similar one that I was asked in an interview for Cumhurieyet Strateji Magazine concerning
Turkey's ongoing efforts to join the EU, the essence of my answer comprising: 'be
careful what you wish for'. One of the things that I have felt uneasy about is
the way, as I see it (and I might not be quite right in saying this), that European
Studies (as a sub-discipline) sometimes appears as rather self-affirming,
thereby reflecting the core self-congratulatory modus operandi of the EU. I am not anti-European or in any way ashamed
to be Western (as some of my critics might think). But I'm deeply uneasy about
the EU project, specifically in terms of its desire to expand outwards, not to
mention inwards as we are seeing in the case of Greece today. For this has the
whiff of the old civilizing mission that had supposedly been put to rest back
at the time of the origins of the European Economic Community. Although Greece
is a member of the EU (notwithstanding its non-European roots), it seems clear
that what is going on today is a process of intensified internal colonization
under the hegemony of Germany, wherein Greece is subjected to the German
standard of civilization. All of which brings into question the
self-glorification of the self-proclaimed 'socially progressive' EU project.
And to return to my discussion of Turkey I recognize that candidate countries
have their reasons for wanting to
join the EU. But I guess that what my work is ultimately about is restoring a
sense of dignity to non-Western peoples, in the absence of which they will
continue to self-deprecate and live in angst in the long cold shadow of the
West. All of which brings me back to the answers I made to quite a few of the
earlier questions. So I would like to close by saying how much I have enjoyed answering
your extremely well-informed questions and to thank you most sincerely for
inviting me to address them.



Professor Hobson gained his
PhD from the LSE (1991), joined the University of Sheffield as Reader and is
currently Professor of Politics and International Relations. Previously he
taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne (1991–97) and the University of Sydney
(1997–2004). His main research interest concerns the area of
inter-civilizational relations and everyday political economy in the context of globalization, past and present. His work is principally involved in carrying
forward the critique of Eurocentrism in World History/Historical Sociology, and
International Relations.





Related
links





Faculty Profile at the University of Sheffield
Read Hobson's The Postcolonial Paradox of Eastern
Agency (Perceptions 2014) here
(pdf) 
Read Hobson's Is critical theory always for the white West
and for Western imperialism? (Review of International Studies 2007) here
(pdf)





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Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Daniel Levine on Hidden Hands, Vocation and Sustainable Critique in International Relations











Daniel Levine is part of a new generation
of IR scholars that takes a more pluralist approach to addressing the hard and
important questions generated by international politics. While many of those
interviewed here display a fairly consistent commitment to a certain position
within what is often referred to as 'the debate' in IR, Levine straddles the boundaries
of a diverse range of positions and understandings. Time to ask for
elaboration.














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?






The
question I'd like us to be asking more clearly than we are is, 'are we a
vocation and, if so, what kind of vocation are we'? This points to a varied set
of questions that we, as scholars, gesture to but spend relatively little
theoretical time developing or unpacking. There's an assumption that the
knowledge we produce is supposed to be put good for something, practical in
light of some praiseworthy purpose. Even theorists who perceive themselves to
be epistemologically value-free hope, I think, at least on an intuitive level, that
some practical good will emerge from what they do. They hope that they are doing
'good work' in the sense that some Christians use this term. But, there is not
really a sustained project of thinking through how those works work: how our notions of vocation might
be different or even mutually exclusive, and how the differences in our notions
of vocation might be bound up in non-obvious ways to our epistemological,
methodological, and theoretical choices.







Moreover,
except for a few very important and quite heroic (and minoritarian) efforts, we
don't really have a way to think systematically about the structure of the
profession: how it influences or intervenes or otherwise acts on particular
ideas as they percolate through it, and how those ideas get 'taken up' into
policy. Brian Schmidt has
done work like that, so has Inanna Hamati-Ataya,
Ole Waever, Ido Oren,
Oded Löwenheim, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah,
and Piki Ish-Shalom; and it's good work, but
they are doing what they are doing with limited resources, and I think without due
appreciation from a big chunk of the field as to why that work is important and
what it means.







When
I started writing Recovering
International Relations, I had wanted to recover the 'view from nowhere'
that many social scientists idealize. You know, that methodological conceit
where we imagine we are standing on Mars, watching the earth through a
telescope, or we're Archimedes standing outside of the world, leveraging it
with distance and dispassion. I had worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
for a long time, was living in Tel Aviv, working for a think tank, and was—am—an
Israeli citizen and an American citizen. I had this somewhat shocking discovery
right after the Second Intifada broke
out. Most of my senior colleagues were deploying their expertise in what seemed
to me to be a very tendentious way: to show why the second Intifada was Yassar
Arafat's fault or the Palestinian Authority's fault—or, in a few cases, the
Israelis' fault. There were some very simplistic political agendas that were
driving this research. People were watching the evening news, coming into work
the next morning, and then running Ehud Yaari's commentary through their respective fact-values-methods mill. Or if they were
well-connected, they were talking to their friends on the 'inside', and doing
the same thing.







It
was hard to admit this for a long time, but I was very naïve. I found that very
unsettling and quite disillusioning. That's why the view from nowhere was so
appealing. I wanted to be able to talk about
Israel and Palestine without taking a position on Israel and Palestine—but without eschewing the expertise I had
acquired along the way, in part because I was
a party to this conflict, and cared about its outcome. I was young,
inexperienced, and slightly arrogant to boot—neither yet a scholar, nor an 'expert,'
nor really aware of the game I was playing. So my objections were not well
received, nor did I pose them especially coherently. To their credit, my senior
colleagues did recognize something worthwhile in my diatribes, and they did
their best to help me get into graduate school.







As the
project developed, and as I started engaging with my mentors in grad school, it
appeared that the view from nowhere was essentially impossible to recover. With
Hegel and with the poststructuralists, we can't really think from nowhere; the
idea of it is this kind of intellectual optical illusion, as though thinking
simply happens, without a mind that is conditioned by being in the world. Therefore,
there needs to be a process by which we give account of ourselves.







There
are a variety of different ways to consider how one might do that. There's what
we might call the agentic approach, in which we think through the structure of
thought itself: its limitations, our dependence on a certain image of thinking
notwithstanding those limits—thought's work on us, on our minds. This is closest
to what I do, drawing on Adorno and Kant, and Adorno's account of how concepts
work in the mind; how they pull us away from the things we mean to understand
even as they give us the words to understand them. And drawing on Jane Bennett, William Connolly,
Hannah Arendt, Cornel West, JoanTronto, and JudithButler to think through how one
conditions oneself to accept those limitations from a space of love, humility
and service. Patrick Jackson's (TheoryTalk #44) Conduct of Research in IR is quite
similar to this approach; and so is Colin Wight's Agents, Structures and International
Relations; though they use more philosophy of science than I do.







One
could also do this more 'structurally.' One could say 'this is how the academy
works and this is how the academy interconnects with the larger political
community' and then try to trace out those links: I mentioned Hamati-Ataya,
Oren, and Ish-Shalom, or you could think of Isaac Kamola,
Helen Kinsella, or
Srdjan Vucetic.








Any of
those approaches—or really, some admixture of them—would be pieces of that
project. I would like us to be doing more of that—alongside, not instead of,
all the other things we are already doing, from historical institutionalism to formal
modeling, to large-N and quantitative approaches, and normative, feminist and
critical ones. I would like such self-accounting to be one of the things
scholars do, that they take it as seriously as they take methods, epistemology,
data, etc. Driving that claim home in our field, as it's presently constituted,
is our biggest challenge.






How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?






I'm 42,
so the Cold War was a big deal. I'm American-born, and I was raised in a pretty
typical suburb. John Stewart from the Daily
Show is probably the most famous product of my hometown, though I didn't
know him. My view of history was a liberal and progressive in the Michael
Waltzer/Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens, vein, but I was definitely influenced by
the global circumstances of the time, and by the 'End of History' discourse
that was in the air. I thought that the US was a force of good in the world. I
was a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. I really wanted to live in Israel for
personal reasons, and the moral challenge of living in Israel after the
Intifada seemed to go away with the peace process. So, it seemed to me that it
was a kind of golden moment: you could 'render unto Caesar what was due to Caesar',
and do the same for the Lord. I could actually be a Jewish-Israeli national and
also a political progressive. (That phrase is, of course, drawn from the Gospels,
and that may give you some sense of how my stated religious affiliations might
have differed from the conceptual and theological structures upon which they actually
rested—score one for the necessity of reflexivity. But in any case, those
events were important.)







I moved
to Israel when I was 22 and was drafted into the military after I took
citizenship there. In the IDF, I was a low-level functionary/general laborer—a
'jobnik', someone who probably produces less in utility than they consume in
rations. Our job was to provide support for the combatants that patrolled a
certain chunk of the West Bank near Nablus—Shechem, as we called it, after the
biblical name. I was not a particularly distinguished soldier. But we were cogs
in a very large military occupation, and being inside a machine like that, you
can see how the gears and pieces of it meshed together, and I started taking
notice of this. Sometimes I'd help keep the diary in the operations room. You
saw how it all worked, or didn't work; or rather, for whom it worked and for
whom it didn't. All that was very sobering and quite fascinating.







I once
attended a lecture given by the African politics scholar Scott Straus, and he
said the thing about being present right after genocide is that you come across
these pits full of dead bodies. It's really shocking and horrific—there they
are, just as plain as day. Nothing I saw in the sheer level of violence compares
to that in any way—I should stress this. But that sense of it all just being out there, as plain as day, and being
shocked by this—that resonated with me. Everyone who cared to look could
understand how the occupation worked, or at least how chunks of it worked. So I
would say in terms of events, those things were the big pieces that structured
my thinking.







Here's two
anecdotal examples. Since I was a grade of soldier with very limited skills, I
was on guard duty a lot. We had a radio. I could hear the Prime Minister on the
radio saying we are going to strike so-and-so in response to an attack on such-and-such,
and then I could see helicopters pass overhead to Nablus, and then I could see
smoke. Then I could see soldiers come back from going out to do whatever it was
the helicopter had provided air support for. I'd see ambulances with red
crescents or red Stars of David rush down the main road. It began to occur to
me that there was a certain economy of violence in speech and performance. I
didn't think about it in specifically theoretical terms before I went back to
graduate school, but Israelis had been killed, political outrage had been
generated. There was a kind of affective deficit in Israeli politics that
demanded a response, and some amount of suffering had to be returned—so the
government could say it was doing its job. I found this very depressing. My odd
way of experiencing this—neither fully inside nor outside—is certainly not the
most important or authentic, and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert
on this basis. I'm only trying to account for how it made me think at the time
and how that shows up in what and how I write now.







Later,
when I was in the reserves, I was in the same unit with the same guys every
year. One year, we were lacing our boots and getting our equipment for our
three weeks of duty in a sector of the West Bank near Hebron, I think it was. I
remember one guy, one of the more hawkish guys, said 'we'll show 'em this time,
we'll show them what's what'. Three weeks later, that same guy said 'Jeez, it's
like we're like a thorn in their backside; no wonder they hate us so much.' (He
actually used some colorful imagery that I can't share with you.) I remember
thinking, 'well, ok, he'll go home and he'll tell his family and his friends;
some good will come of this.' The next year, I saw the same guy saying the same
thing at the start, 'we'll show those SOBs.' And then three weeks later, 'oh my
God, this is so pointless, no wonder they hate us…' So after a few years of
this I finally said to him, 'tagid, ma
yihiyeh itcha?'—Like, dude, what's your deal? 'We've had this conversation every year! What happens to you in
the 48 weeks that you're not here that you forget this?' And I think he looked
at me like, 'what are you talking about?'







I
thought about that afterwards: we have these moments of experience when we're
out of our everyday environment and discourse, the diet of news and fear, PR
and political nonsense—that's when these insights become possible. So, when
this guy comes in and says 'ok, we'll get those SOBs,' he's carrying with him this
discourse that he has from home, from the news and TV, from his 'parliament'
with his friends where they get together and talk about politics and war and
economics and whatever else—and then a few weeks of occupation duty disrupts
all that, makes him see it in a different light, and he has these kinds of
fugitive experiences which give him a weirdly acute critical insight. Suddenly,
he's this mini-Foucault.







In a
few weeks, though, he goes back to his life, there's no space or niche into
which that uncomfortable, fugitive insight can really grow, so it just sort of
disappears or withers on the vine, its power is dissipated. This is a very
real, direct experience of violence and it's covered over by all of this
jibber-jabber. So there's a moment where you start to wonder: what exactly
happens there? What happens in those 48 weeks? What happens to me during those weeks? You can see how a
kind of ongoing critical self-interrogation would evolve out of that. Again,
none of those things are exactly what my book's about, but it gives you a sense
of how you might find Adorno's kind of critical relentlessness and negativity vital
and important and really useful and necessary. You can see how that might
inform my thinking.







In
terms of books, as an undergraduate, I had read, not very attentively, Said and
Foucault, and all of the stuff at the University of Chicago we had to take in
what they called the 'Scosh Sequence,' from sociologists like Elijah Anderson
and William Julius Wilson to Charles Lindblom and Mancur Olsen: texts from the
positive and the interpretive to the post-structural. I had courses with some
very smart Israeli and Palestinian profs—Ephraim Yaar, Salim Tamari, Ariela
Finkelstein. And of course Rashid Khalidi was there at that time. Once I was in
the military, the Foucault and Said suddenly started popping around in my head.
Suddenly, this sort of lived experience of being on guard duty made the
Panopticon and the notion of discipline go from being a rather complicated,
obscure concept to something concrete. 'Oh! That's
what discipline is!'







When I
went back to graduate school, I was given a pretty steady diet of Waltz,
rational deterrence theory, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt (Theory Talk #33), and Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12). Shai
Feldman was a remarkable teacher, so were Ilai Alon in philosophy, Shlomo
Shoham in sociology and Aharon Shai in History. Additionally I had colleagues
at work who were PhD students at the Hebrew University working with Emanuel Adler;
they gave me Wendt (Theory Talk #3), Katzenstein's (TheoryTalk # 15) Culture of National Security, Adler and
Barnett, and Jutta Weldes' early article on 'Constructing National Interests'
in the EJIR (PDF here).
My job was to help them publish their monographs, so I got really into the guts
of their arguments, which were fascinating. I am not really an agency-centered
theory guy anymore and I am not really a constructivist anymore, but that stuff
was fantastic. I saw that one could write from a wholly different viewpoint,
perspective, and voice. This is all very mainstream in IR now, but at the time,
it felt quite edgy, very novel. Part of the reason why the middle chapters of Recovering IR has these long discussions
about different kinds of constructivism is that I wouldn't have had two
thoughts to rub together if it was not for those books. I do disagree with them
now and strongly, but they were very important to me all the same.






What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?






I'd be
more comfortable answering that question as someone who was, until relatively
recently, a grad student. I've not been productive long enough to say 'Well,
here's how to succeed in this business and be a theorist of enduring substance
or importance' with any authority. But I can say, 'here's how I'm trying to be
one.' There's a famous article by Albert O. Hirschman called 'The Principle of
the Hiding Hand,' (PDF here)
and in it he says that frequently, the only way one can get through really
large or complicated projects is to delude oneself as to how hard the project
is actually going to be. He takes as an example these ambitious, massively
complicated post-colonial economic projects of the Aswan High Dam variety. The
only way such enormous projects ever get off the ground, he says, is if one
either denies their true complexity or deludes oneself. Otherwise you despair
and you never get it done. From the first day of seminar to dissertation
proposal to job—thank God I had no idea what I was in for, or I might have
quit.







Also,
the job market being what it was, we had to be very, very passionate scholars who
wrote and argued for the sheer intellectual rush and love of writing. And yet,
we also had to be very practical and almost cynical about the way in which the
academic market builds on the prestige of publications and the way in which
prestige becomes shorthand for your commodity value. At least in the US, the
decline of tenure and the emergence of a kind of new class of academics whose
realm of responsibility is specifically to engage in uncomfortable kinds of
political and moral critique—but without tenure, and at the mercy of a sometimes
feckless dean, an overburdened department chair or fickle colleagues—that's very scary. If you're doing 'normal
science', it's a different game and the challenges are different. But if your
job is to do critique, in the last ten years, it's a very big deal. Very
difficult. I'm very fortunate in that regard; at Alabama I've had great support
from my department, my chair, and my college.







I was a
Johns Hopkins PhD, and my department was fantastic in terms of giving me
support, encouragement, getting out of my way while throwing interesting books
at me, reading drafts that were bad and helping me make them good—or at least
telling me why they were bad. We did
not get particularly good professional training, because I think they did not
want us to get professionalized before we found our own voice. I'm really
grateful for that, truly. But then there's this period in which you have to
figure out how to make your voice into a commodity. That's really tough, it's a
little bit disheartening—even to discover that you must be a commodity is dismaying; didn't we go into the academy to avoid
this sort of logic? But just like Marx says, commodities have a double life, and
so do you. The use-value of your scholarship and its exchange-value do not
interlock automatically and without friction. So you spend all this time on the
use-value of it—writing a cool, smart, interesting dissertation—thinking that
will translate into exchange-value, and it turns out that it sort of does, but
a lot of other things translate into exchange-value too that aren't really about
how good your work is necessarily. And many of your colleagues, if what you're
doing is original, won't really understand what you're doing; the value or the
creativity of it won't be apparent to them unless they spend a lot of time sifting
through your bad drafts of it, which only a few—but God bless those—will do. So
how you create exchange-value for yourself is important. So is finding people
who will care about you, your project, your future—and learning when to take
their advice, when to ignore it, and how to do so tactfully.







If all that's
hard, you're probably doing it right. It's unfortunate that that's how it is,
but at all events, that's how it was for me.











Would you elaborate on the concept of
vocation and why this is so important to the view from nowhere? It is important
to say that the view from nowhere is perhaps difficult. So is vocation, or a
kind of Weberian approach, a way to articulate that for you?







There's
a quote in a book from a Brazilian novelist named Machado de Assis. His
protagonist is this fellow Bras Cubas, who's writing a posthumous memoir of his
own life. He's writing from beyond the grave. From there, he can view his whole
life and his entire society from outside; he's finally achieved positivism's
view from nowhere. But the thing about this view—and the book means to be a
sendup of the Comtean positivism that was fashionable in Brazil in those
days—is that it gives him no comfort. He now knows why he lived his life the
way he did; how he failed and what was—and what was not—his fault. The
absurdity of it all makes sense. But it changes nothing: he has died
unfulfilled, unloved, and essentially alone: a minor poet and back-bench politician
who was ultimately of little use to anyone nor of much to himself. All he knows
is how that happened.







In the
end, if we're all playing a role in how a world comes into being and it's in
some sense our job simply to accept this, and our job as scholars merely to
explain it, this gives us no comfort in the face of suffering, in the face of
violence and evil. To some extent as scholars, and to some extent as a
discipline, we exist as a response to evil, to suffering, to foolishness, to
folly; it's not a coincidence that the first professorship of IR is created in
Britain in the wake of WWI, and that it's given to someone like E. H. Carr.







If we
don't have a view from nowhere because we've given up anything like a moral
sense that can't be reduced to fractional, material, or ideological
sensibilities, and if we know that sometimes those 'views from somewhere' can
provide cover for terrible kinds of evil or justify awful kinds of suffering,
then the notion of vocation seems to come in at that point and say well,
'here's what I hope I'm doing', or 'here's what I wish to be doing', or 'here's
what I'd like to think I'm doing', and then allowing others to weigh in and
give their two cents. Vocation, in the sense of Weber's lectures, comes out of
that. It's Kant for social scientists: What can I know? What should I do? For
what may I hope? In other words, what the necessity and obligation of thinking
is on the one hand, and on the other what its limitations are.







This is
a way to save International Relations from two things: one, from relativism and
perspectivism, and the other, from a descent into the technocratic or the
managerial. I am trying to stand between the two. My own intellectual
background was in security studies at Tel Aviv University in the 1990s: the
period immediately after Maastricht, in the period of the Oslo Process, the end
of Apartheid. My hope back in the days when the peace process seemed to me to
be going well was that I'd be able to have a kind of technocratic job in
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Defense. Counting tanks, or something
similar. I thought that would be a pretty good job. I would be doing my part to
maintain a society that had constructed a stable, long-term deterrent by which
to meaningfully address the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability,
but without the disenfranchisement of another people. I could sit down and
count my tanks with a clear conscience, because the specter of evil was being
removed from that work. The problem of the occupation was being be solved.
Again, it's somewhat embarrassing to admit this now.







I would
say in the US academy, there is definitely a balance in favor of the
technocrats. We have enormous machines for the production and consumption of
PhDs in this country. The defense establishment is an enormous player. Groups
like the Institute for Defense Analysis need a lot of PhDs, the NSF funds a lot
of PhDs (for now, at least), and that tips the balance of the profession in a
certain way. My ability to use ideas compellingly at ISA won't change that fact
all by itself, there's a base-superstructure issue in play there.







In
Europe, it's a different story, for a bunch of reasons. The defense
establishments of the EU member states aren't as onerous a presence. And, there
are more of them; so there's a kind of diversity there and a need to think
culturally about how these various institutions interlock and how people learn
to talk to each other: the Martha Finnemore-to-Vincent Pouliot-to-Iver Neumann (Theory Talk #52) study of ideas and institutions and
officials. Plus, you have universities like the EUI and the CEU, which are not
reducible to any particular national interest or education system; creating
knowledge, but for a political/state form that's still emergent. No one knows
exactly what it is, what its institutions and interests will ultimately be.
Because of that, it's hard to imagine the EUI producing scholars with obviously
nationally-inflected research programs, like Halford Mackinder,
Mahan, Ratzel from a century
ago. There will still be reifications and ideologies, but there's more 'give'
since the institutions are still in play. And there's fantastically interesting
stuff happening in Australia, and in Singapore—think of people like Janice
Bialley-Mattern, Tony Burke and Roland Bleiker.











Critique has a long and controversial
history in our discipline. Could you perhaps elaborate, as a kind of background
or setting, how critique can be used in IR and why you've placed it at the
center of your approach to IR theory?







Critique
as term of art comes into the profession through Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37) and through the folks that were writing
after him in the '90s, including Neufeld, Booth, Wyn-Jones, Rengger, Linklater and
Ashley—though pieces of the reflexive practice of critique are present in the
field well before. For Cox, the famous line is that theory is always 'for
something and for someone.' The question is, if that's true how far down does
that problem go? Is it a problem of epistemology and method, or is it a problem
of being as such, a problem of ontology? Is it fundamental to the nature of
politics?







If the
set of processes to which we refer when we speak of 'thinking' is inherently
for someone and for something, and that problem harkens back to the idea that
all thinking is grounded in one's interests and perspectives, i.e., that all
practical or systematic attempts to understand politics are 'virtuous' in the
Machiavellian sense (they serve princely interests) but not necessarily in the Christian
sense (deriving from transcendent values), then we have a real problem in keeping
those two things separate in our minds. Think of Linklater's book Men and Citizens in International Relations
as a key node in that argument, though Linklater ultimately believes (at least
in that book) that a reconciliation between the two is possible. I'm less
convinced.







Now
recall the vocation point we discussed before. IR as a discipline has a deep
sense of moral calling which goes beyond princely interest. And the traditions
on which it draws are as much transcendently normative as anything else. So
encoded in our ostensibly practical-Machiavellian analyses is going to be
something like a sense of Christian virtue; we'll believe we're not merely
correct in our analyses, but really and
truly right in some otherworldly, transcendent way. True or not, that sense
of conviction will attach itself to our thinking, to the political forces and
agendas that we're serving. We'll come to believe that we are citing
Machiavelli in the service of something greater: whether that's 'scientific
truth' or the national interest, or what have you. Nothing could be more
dangerous than that. Critique, as an intervention, comes here: to dispel or
chasten those beliefs. Harry Gould, Brent Steele, and especially Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53) write about prudence and a sense of
finitude: these are the close cousins of this kind of critique.







If we
take seriously the notion that people sometimes fight and kill in the service
of really awful causes while believing they are doing right, and that scholars
sometimes help them sustain those convictions rather than disabuse them of them—even
if they do not intend this—then critique becomes an awfully big problem and it
really threatens to undermine the profession as such. It opens up a whole new
level of obligation and responsibility, and it magnifies what might otherwise
be staid 'inside baseball'—Intramural scholarly or methodological debates. Part
of the reason why the 'great debates' were so great—so hotly fought—had to do
with this: our scholarly debates were, in fact, ideological ones.







It
undermines the field in another way as well. If we take critique seriously,
there's got to be a lot of moral reflection by scholars. That will make it hard
to produce scholarship quickly, to be an all-purpose intellectual that can
quickly produce thought-product in a policy-appropriate way, because I will
want to be thinking from another space, and of course precisely what
policy-makers want is that you don't
think from some other space; that you present them with 'shovel ready' policy
that solves problems without creating new ones.







So you
now have not just a kind of theoretical or methodological interruption in the
discussion of, say, absolute or relative gains. You now have to give an account
of yourself. And for me, that's what critique in IR means. To unpack the
definition I gave above, it's the attempt to give an account of what the duties
and limits of one's thinking are in the context of politics, given the nature
of politics as we understand it. Because IR comes out of the Second World War,
we're bound to take the most capacious notions of what political evil and
contingency can be; if we are not always in the midst of genocide and ruin,
then we are at least potentially so. And so contingency and complexity and all
the stuff that we're talking about must face that. I want to hold out that Carl
Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau might be
right—in ways which neither they, nor I, can completely fathom. Then I have
to give accounts of thinking that take a level of responsibility commensurate
with that possibility.







In that
vein, when I look at accounts of thinking in the context of the political, when
I look at what concepts are and how they work and how they do work on the world
so that it can be rendered tractable to thought, I realize that what we come up
with when we're done doesn't look very much like politics anymore. We have
tools which, when applied to politics, change it quite dramatically; they reify
or denature it. To be critical in the face of that, you're going to be obliged
to an extensive degree of self-interrogation and self-checking, which I call chastening.







That process
of chastening reason, is, in effect, what remains of the enlightenment obligation
to use practical reason to improve what Bacon called the human estate. What's
left of that obligation is to think in terms of the betterment of other human beings
as best as you can, knowing you can't do that very well, but that you may still
be obliged to try.







That's
really hard to do and it's an odd form of silence and non-silence. After all,
if I were to look at the Shoah while it was happening, or look at what happened
in Rwanda, and say 'well, I don't really have a foundational position on which
to stand so I can't analyze or condemn that'—that would not be a morally
acceptable position. Price and Reus-Smit (TheoryTalk #27) say this
in their 1998 article and they are absolutely right. But then there's the fact
that I don't quite know what to say beyond 'stop murdering people!' The world
is so easy to break with words, and so hard to put back together with them—assuming
anyone cares at all about anything we say. So I am obliged to respond to those
kinds of events when I see them, and I am also obliged to acknowledge that I
can't respond to them well, because my authority comes from the conceptual tools
I have, and they aren't really very good. Essentially, what I'm doing as
scholar of IR is the equivalent is using the heel of my shoe to hammer in a nail.
(That's a nice line, no? I wish it was mine, but it's Hannah Arendt.) It will
probably work, but it will take a while, and the nail won't go in so straight. To
chasten one's thinking is to remind oneself that the heel of one's shoe is not
yet a hammer; that all we're doing is muddling through—even when we do our work
with absolute seriousness and strict attention to detail, context and method—as
of course we should.











You discuss IR theory in terms of different
reifications. In which was does that also lead you to take a stand against a Weberian
understanding of IR?







I think
where I depart from Weber is that he has more faith than I do that, at some
point, disenchantment produces something better. There is faith or hope on
their part that the iron cage that we experience as a result of disenchantment
and as a result of the transformation from earlier forms of charismatic and
traditional authority to contemporary rational ones won't always be oppressive,
not forever. New forms and ways of being will emerge, in which those
disenchanted modes actually will fulfill their promise for a kind of
improvement in the human estate. If it's a long, complicated process—hence the
image of slow boring into hard wood—but faith is still justified, good things
can still happen.







For me,
the question is how would you manage a society that is liable to go insane or
to descend into moments of madness because of the side-effects or intervening
effects of disenchantment and modernization, while holding fast to the notion
that at some point, this is going to get better for most people? I'm a bit less
certain about that than I read Patrick and Weber being. I think that even if
they're right, it makes sense morally as scholars, not necessarily as citizens
or individuals or people, to dwell in the loss of those who fall along the way.








I find
myself thinking about the people who are gone a lot. My ex-wife teaches on
slavery, and I think a lot about this terrible thing she once told me. On slave
ships, when there was not enough food they would throw the people overboard
because ship masters got insurance money if their property went overboard, but
not if human beings succumbed on-ship. There's a scene depicting this in
Spielberg's film Amistad and it
haunts me. I find myself thinking about those people, dragged under with their
chains. I wonder what they looked like, what they had to say. I wonder what
they might have created or how their great-great grandchildren children would
have played with my child. I wonder if my best friend or true love was never
born because her or his ancestor died in this way. An enormous number of people
perished. I can't quite believe this, even if I know it's true.







Yoram
Kaniuk, the recently deceased Israeli novelist, wrote that the Israeli state was
built on the ground-up bones of the Jews who couldn't get there because it was
founded too late. I wonder about them too. And when I taught course modules on
Cambodia, I would find myself looking at the photographs made of the people in
Tuol Sleng before they were killed, the photo archives which the prison kept
for itself. There is a mother, daughter, father, brother, son, and I find
myself drawn into their eyes and faces. I don't want those people to disappear
into zeros or statistics. I want somehow to give them some of their dignity
back, and I want to dwell in the tragic nature my own feeling because it bears
remembering that I cannot ever really do that. If I remember that, I will have
some sense of what life's worth is, and I won't speak crassly about
interventions or bombings or wars—wherever I might come down on them. I would
say that it's almost a religious obligation to attend to the memory of those
people. My desire to abide with them makes me very, very suspicious of hope or
progress. I want this practice of a kind of mourning or grief to chasten such
hope.







There's
a problem with that position. Some will point out to me that this will turn
into its own kind of Manichean counter-movement, a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Or else that dwelling in
mourning has a self-congratulatory quality to it. And there are certainly
problems with this position at the level of popular or mass politics. We do see
a lot of ressentiment in our
politics. On the left, there's a lot of angry, self-aggrandizing moral
superiority. And you can think about someone like Sarah Palin in the US as a
kind of populist rejection of guilt and responsibility from the right.







But as social
scientists, we might have space to be the voice for that kind of grief, to take
it on and disseminate the ethics that follow from it; to give that grief a
voice. That kind of relentless self-chastening is what I'm all about. I think
it opens you up to new agendas and possibilities. I think it's a much deeper
way to be 'policy relevant' than most of my colleagues understand this term. If
we are relentlessly self-critical as scholars, and if we relentlessly resist
the appropriation of scholarly narratives to simplistic moral or political ends
and if we, as a society, help to build an intolerance of that and a sense of
the mourning that comes out of that, we also open our society up to say things
like, 'ok, well what's left?'







And
then, well, maybe a lot of things are left, and some of them are not so bad. Maybe
we start to imagine something better. That's where I'd rejoin Jackson and
Weber; after that set of ethical/emotional/spiritual moves. I think, by the
way, that Patrick mostly agrees with me; it's only a question of what his work
emphasizes and what mine has emphasized. On this point, consider Ned Lebow's
notion of tragedy. He and I disagree on some of the details of that notion. But
on top of his remarkable erudition, he's a survivor of the Shoah. I suspect he has thought very deeply about grief and
mourning, and in ways that might not be open to me.











The final question I want to pose to you is
a substantive one: Your understanding of critique somehow does relate to
sustaining progress, in a way. Perhaps on the one hand, you are not so
optimistic as Weber was, but on the other hand, your work conveys the sense
that it is possible to bridge the gap between concepts and things. I'm not sure
if it's possible, but perhaps you can relate it to the substantive example of
how your work relates to concrete political situations. I think the example of
Israel-Palestine comes to mind best.







Again,
I don't think I am as optimistic as that. In my heart of hearts, I desperately
wish this to be the case. To think of the people who were most influential on
my intellectual development—my cohort of fellow grad students at Johns Hopkins
and our teachers, to whom as a group I owe, really, everything in intellectual
terms—I was certainly in the minority view. Most of them were, I think, working
in the Deleuzian vein of making 'theory worthy of the event.' I just don't
believe that's possible; or anyway I think it's really, really, really hard, the work of a generation to tell that
story well and have it percolate out into our discipline and our culture. In
the meantime, we must muddle through. I hope I'm wrong and I hope they're
right. I'm rooting for them, even as I try to give them a hard time—just as I
give Keohane (Theory Talk #9)
and Waltz and Wendt and everyone else I write about a hard time. But I'd be happy, very happy, to
be wrong.







What I
do think can be done is that you can sustain an awareness of the space between
things-in-themselves and concepts, and by extension some sense of the fragility
and the tenuousness of the things that you think and their links to the things
that you do. Out of this emerges a kind of chastened political praxis.







You mentioned
Israel and Palestine, which I care a great deal about and am trying to address
more squarely in the work I'm doing now, partly on my own and partly in pieces I've
worked on with my colleague Daniel Monk. What we observe is that though the diplomatic
negotiations failed pretty badly twelve and a half years ago, we're still
looking at the same people running the show: the same principal advisers and
discussants and interlocutors: in the US and Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.
The same concepts and assumptions too. Just a few days ago, Dennis Ross
published a long op-ed about how we get the peace process back on track, and
you might think that you're reading something from another time—as though the
conflict were a technical challenge rather than a political one. You know that
Prince song about 'partying like it's 1999'?







I don't
know what a peaceful, enriching, meaningful Israeli-Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Muslim-Christian
collective co-existence or sharing of space or world looks like, but I know
that this pseudo-politics ain't that. When I see something that's just a
re-hashing, I can say, 'come on guys, that is not thinking, that's recycling
the old stuff and swapping out dates, proper nouns and a few of the verbs.' Nor
is it listening to other voices who might inspire us in different ways, or
might help us rethink our interests, categories and beliefs. Lately, I've been
listening to a band called System Ali, hip-hop guys from Jaffa's Ajami quarter,
who sing in four languages. What they say matters less to me than the fact that
they really seem to like another, they trust each other, they let each voice
sing its song and use its words. They have something to teach me about
listening, thinking, acting and feeling—because it's music after all—and that
can produce its own political openings.







Of course,
there are pressure groups, from industry and AIPAC to
whatever else in the US, and those groups merit discussion and debate, but I'm
also wary of the counter-assumption which follows from folks who talk about
this too reductively: that there actually is an American interest, or a
European or Arab or Israeli one, which somehow transcends partisan interest—one
that can be recovered once the diaspora Jews, the oil moguls, the arms dealers
or the Christian 'Left Behind' people are taken out of the picture. That feels
like the same heady brew that Treitschke and Meinecke and the German realpolitik scholars poured and drank:
that the national state has some transcendent purpose to which we gain access
by rising above or tuning out the voices of the polity or its chattering
classes. Only with a light liberal-internationalist gloss: Meinecke meets David
Lake (Theory Talk # 46),
Anne-Marie Slaughter or John Ikenberry.







I can
also go meet starry-eyed idealists who want to hold hands and sing John Lennon,
I can say to them yes, I want to hold your hand and sing John Lennon, but I am
also enough of a social scientist to know that if a policy does not respond to
real and pressing problems—water, land, borders etc.—that any approach that
does not respond to those things will be hopelessly idealist. It will be what
my granny called luftmentsch-nachess—the
silly imaginings of men with their heads in the clouds, like the parable about Thales
and the Thracian maiden. I am not interested in being either a luftmentsch nor a technocrat. So what
does that leave with you with? You need to balance.







You can
look at groups at the margins of political culture to see what they can tell
you. In Israel and Palestine, it's groups like Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence and Zochrot, and this settler
leader who recently died, Rabbi Frohman, who was going out and meeting every
Palestinian leader he could because for him, being a Jew in the land was not,
in the first instance about his Israeli passport. There were and are
possibilities for discussion that feel really pregnant and feel very different
from the conversation we are sustaining now; which reveal its shallowness and
its limitations and its pretentiousness. These other voices are of course not
ideal either, they are going to have their own problems and limitations, their
own descent into power and exclusion and so on, but they reveal some of the lie
of what we're doing now.







I guess
in the end, social scientists make a living imagining the future on the basis
of the past. I also spend a lot of time reading novels and watching books and
films. Partly because I am lazy and I like them. Partly because I'm looking for
those novels and films to help me imagine other possibilities of being that
aren't drawn from the past. Art, Dewey tells us in The Public and its Problems,
is the real bearer of newness. Maybe then, I get to grab onto those things and
say ok, what if we made those them responsive to an expansive materialist
analysis of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to survive? What if we
held the luftmentsch's feet to the
materialist/pragmatic fire, even as we held the wonk's feet to the luftmentsch's fire? Let them both squeal
for a while. There's possibility there.







Daniel J. Levine is assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Among his recent publications (see below) stands out his book Recovering International Relations.



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Related links








Faculty Profile at U-Alabama
Read the first chapter of Levine's Recovering IR (2012) here (pdf)
Read Barder and Levine's The World is Too Much (Millennium, 2012) here (pdf)
Read Levine's Why Morgenthau was not a Critical Theorist (International Relations, 2013) here (pdf)
Read Monk and Levine's The Resounding Silence here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)