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Jordan Branch on Google
Maps, State Formation, and the International Politics of Cartography







The territorial
underpinnings of international politics are as familiar as they are contested
within the discipline of International Relations. While the presumed 'territorial
trap' of the discipline has been attacked from many sides (see, for instance, Theory Talk #4),
Jordan Branch is more interested in turning the question around. 

His work has
carefully addressed the historical constitutive effects of mapping practices
and technologies on the subsequent transformation of practices of, and ideas about,
rule and the international system. In this fascinating Talk, Branch,
amongst others, discusses the significance of cartography for international
politics, explores the effects that contemporary digital mapping might have on political
spaces, and illustrates how innovations in mapping impacted on rule with the historical
example of France.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is according to your view the most
important challenge facing global politics and what is/should be the central
debate in the discipline of International Relations (IR)?



While
there are many different debates going on at the same time within the discipline,
the one that has interested me most is the relationship between ideas and
practical or material factors. There is a very simplistic version of this
dichotomy that has been debated to death in the constructivist versus
rationalists debates, particularly in the American field of IR—an over-drawn
distinction, as many have pointed out. I am more interested in actual
explanations for the process, outcome, or phenomenon we're looking at. Rather
than separating them out, I am interested in how the ideational and material
relate to one another, how they fit together.



This
relationship poses questions for my specific interest in technological change. We
are experiencing fast-paced technological changes—for example, the information
technology revolution—which can yield a natural yet incorrect assumption, namely,
that this change will inevitably have some kind of major effect on, or
interaction with, politics and, specifically, with international relations.
This may be true, but it is too often assumed. Indeed, this raises another
problem. Even if there is such an effect, is it something we'll be able to
observe, let alone predict or explain, as it is happening? From my historical
work on the role of maps in state formation, for example, it is quite evident that
for people at the time, there was no way to see the impact maps had on the
political/spatial/ideational constitution of the state.



The information
technology (IT) revolution is the most obvious current example of dramatic technological
change. Although it has been playing out for the last 20 or 30 years, it only
continues to accelerate. Over the past couple of years, a lot of discussion has
focused on 'big data' and what it implies for business, financial analysis, and
the like. Of course, it also presents possibilities as a new tool for social
science. But there is a danger here. There is a tendency of seeing new
technological phenomena only in their material contexts, specifically focusing
on possibilities for measurement, for example, thereby neglecting to think
about the ideational. How do ideas about collecting and using data actually
play into the collection and analysis itself? So while they are in practice
always entangled, analytically, I find the distinction between the ideational
and the material a very fruitful one, not so much as a debate between opposing
fields, but as way to think about technological change.





How
did you arrive where you currently are in your thinking about these issues?



It is
funny—people often ask this sort of question, and I did not necessarily see a
natural trajectory for my thinking or work until I began to look and think
back. This interest in connecting technological and political change goes as
far back as my undergraduate time at Stanford University, where I initially
majored in mechanical engineering, and later switched to International
Relations. While technology remained an important preoccupation, I became more
interested in politics, history, and theory. So the interest formed into
questions about the political implications of phenomena like technology. But
this didn't happen instantly. Just before beginning my PhD at the University of
California, Berkeley, I was planning to do comparative work on regime change
and democratization. Then my older brother (Adam Branch), who is also a
political scientist, gave me a copy of Hendrik Spruyt's The Sovereign State and its Competitors (1994), and he said: 'Hey
you might like this!' So, I literally read that on a beach the summer before
starting grad school—which may sound funny, but I sat down, read it, and found
it fascinating. Yet I didn't immediately start thinking about these questions
then. It took a year or two, when I started really thinking about what I wanted
to work on. I came back to this work and realised these were the kind of
questions I was interested in: the origins of the territorial state and its
characteristics.



The
interest in the state as a concept had been with me for slightly longer. As an
undergrad my first introductory course to IR was taught by Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk #21).
Krasner has strong views, and the class was very rigorous. A lot of his work
focuses on the state and I think his framings influenced me early on. I don't entirely
agree with some of Krasner's arguments about sovereignty, but these
disagreements are more about the specifics of salient time periods or cases.
Other work which influenced me early on was that of John Ruggie on
territoriality. Indeed his approach became central as I was developing these
questions myself. I also discovered a host of literature in political geography
that turned out to be very interesting and useful. 



So,
one could say that my trajectory was really more focused on understanding the
historical outcome of the territorial state than on what role technology,
specifically maps, played in this process. The focus on technology, while
existent from my engineering days, really began to materialize as a link missing
from existing explanations of state formation. I was thinking about how we might
be able to find some additional traction on these questions by including
technology more prominently. It has certainly been part of some scholarship on
state formation, as in Charles Tilly's work or William McNeill's on
technological change and warfare. Surely, technology has always been in there,
but the discussion has been centered on war fighting technology and maybe on
transport, and only to a lesser degree on communication technology in the
broader sense.



Another
piece of work which triggered my focus on the relationship between the
ideational and the material was Ron Deibert's book Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia (1997, read the 1995 PhD thesis
that became the book here, pdf). He talks about internet
communication technology but also about the printing press and the impact it
has on the global distribution of power. Yet, only when I read this book for
the second or third time just as I was finishing up my dissertation did I realize
how much his framing had shaped how I formulated my thesis. He does touch on
the role of mapping, but it is his elaboration on the way in which media
informs how people think about the world which was spot on for me. For me, maps
as a medium very importantly framed how people thought about and imagined the
world in the past—but of course these questions about technology and its role
in constituting the international political system, states, territorial
boundaries, and so on are still relevant today.





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



I
think it is important to be really excited and interested in your topic and
what you want to do. The key thing is to enter a grad program that fits you in
terms of your interests and to be willing to do whatever methodological training
ends up being needed for your research project.



I
think there's a tendency to look for a 'one size fits all' graduate training
model, which does make sense at the initial level. Everyone should get a
certain amount of background in a variety of methods, whether they'll end up
using those or not. For example, I have not used quantitative methods in my own
research, but I'm glad that I had to take classes on those methods in grad school.
They give you the ability to understand work which may connect to your own but
comes at it from a different angle. And you should always be open to a variety
of methods. The key is to be able to understand a broad array of approaches, otherwise
you won't be able to engage in broad conversations.



I
also feel I gained a lot from exploring, and reading widely, from other
disciplines such as history and sociology. I already mentioned political
geography, which is really not too distant but, nonetheless, in the U.S. it
sits in a different department. You might think that some work is 'on the other
side of the fence' but it is important to be able to bring that work into your
thinking.



The
final thing is to be open and ready to change your mind, whether it is about
the answer you're expecting to get to your question, or even changing the
question itself. Obviously there is a certain point when you're almost done
with a project where that might not be a good idea…. but if it is early on and
it works and you can do it logistically, I think it is important to be willing
to do that. Five years later you're going to be a lot better off.





So far, your work has been mainly
historical. Can you explain the importance of 'looking back' for understanding
contemporary international relations?



I
think it is extraordinarily important and useful. A lot of us in this and other
fields do see strong connections between today's politics and past events,
institutions, and ideas. There is an important notion that we cannot engage
meaningfully with the present if we do not understand its genealogy. That is
certainly a driver for me in thinking about the origins of the state and
territorial boundaries. It may help us to observe patterns we might see
replicated or appear in some kind of altered yet recognizable form today.
Indeed, it can help us think about where were might be headed.



Although
I also hesitate here slightly: always looking to the past for the answers can
be problematic. History can help us to observe patterns, dynamics, and maybe
relationships that might tell us something about other periods or about contemporary
international relations. But we should never do so thinking that the patterns
are definitely going to be the same or are deterministic. I think one can look
for patterns or relationships without automatically assuming that they have to
apply everywhere.



Historical
analysis can be problematic in its own right, because there is no way to
discover or absorb the past 'as it really was.' All history is some kind of
construction, whether it is based on contemporary or historical sources. Additionally,
in the social sciences we often have to rely on secondary sources. That is not
inherently a problem; this fact just introduces more variables to think about.
Pure narrative purporting to capture 'what really happened' can be very
problematic.



Given these disclaimers, it is useful to consider
the past. I think what should be emphasized is that, specifically at the grad
school level, students should be encouraged to dig a little deeper
historically. They shouldn't hesitate to do that excavation work.





IR, it has been argued, rests firmly on
a spatial or territorial understanding of politics. What constitutive role does
territorial space play in IR and is that role based on historical fact or is it
myth?



I
like that question. I think it is actually both—sort of a myth and sort of a
fact.  In one sense, territory informs at
least the state ideal (i.e., states as we think of them): it informs what the
state is, the interests of states, and of course how we distinguish one state
from another. And yet, while this is all inherently territorial, we also know
that this is far from an accurate description of a lot of regions and places in
the world. There are many different spatial ideas, practices, and organizations
with political agency that are non-state or non-territorial.



But
regarding the myth of state territoriality: I think it is important to point
out there is a lot of detail in the 'conventional narrative' of the state, such
as timing of when territoriality came about as pinpointed in Westphalia, that
has been quite effectively debunked by a number of scholars in the last 10 or
20 years (scholars like Andreas Osiander or Benno Teschke, from different
theoretical perspectives). This is a strongly supported finding. But it really
hasn't penetrated the mainstream narrative very well. While we can gradually see
a little more nuanced discussion in IR textbooks in the U.S., they more often
than not will still start with 1648 and Westphalia.



We
can now confidently say that states—states as we think of them now—did not
appear in 1648, let alone earlier. This is especially true if we look at the
specifically territorial or spatial aspects of statehood, which again are so
central to how we think about the state internationally. The focus on defending
cleanly demarcated linear boundaries and the idea of asserting absolute
sovereign authority within those lines; this is really not consolidated until at
least the 19th century. So, part of the myth is the timing and the
how and why we have states.



But
there still is a factual quality to territoriality in this story we tell
ourselves about the foundation of the international system and the supposed
creation of sovereign states. In a certain setting and for a certain period I
think this describes the ideas and practices of international politics quite
well. The most obvious example of this is 19th century Europe. While
there are still ways in which it diverges from the ideals of the typical state system,
in a lot of ways it actually did fit that. This happened at the same time as
the development of modern Western historiography, and it was the setting for some
of the traditional foundation of political science and IR. So we can see how
one shaped the other: history-making and state-making. The singular territorial
ideal of statehood from the 19th century has subsequently been
applied to other issues, actors, and areas. Even if it does not fit exactly, it
is applied today still and it is made to fit retrospectively much earlier
periods, where it applied less well.



Ultimately,
it is a powerful myth which has informed how we think about international
relations to such a degree that we shouldn't just throw it out. Instead, we
should think about exactly how it actually informs the way that international
relations is understood and practiced.
Practitioners and officials don't exactly read IR journals and base their
decision-making on our knowledge production, but the basic ideas of states, boundaries,
and territory which inform the practice of international relations—as well as
the study of it—should be our concern.





You have looked specifically at how
mapping has contributed to imagining and formation of the modern state system. Could
you elaborate more on how something as technical as cartography matters for
international politics?



I've
argued in my recent work that early modern mapping technologies were really
essential to the consolidation of the territorial state, particularly the
specific territorial features of states today. Maps, which have been a popular
medium over the past few centuries, really do shape how people understand the
world and their place in it. This gets us back to the connection between the
material and the ideational.



In early
modern Europe a revolution took place, first in mapmaking technologies and,
slightly later, in the ideas and practices of political rule, especially as it
relates to territory. I argue this was really not a coincidence. How rulers and
subjects conceived of rule and how rulers conceived of their realms was really
altered as they increasingly used maps that depicted the world in this one
particular way. The key characteristics of modern statehood – at least of the
ideal of modern statehood – such as linear boundaries between homogenous territorial
claims, really appeared first in maps and only subsequently in political practices
on the ground. Of course, there were existing authority structures, but these were
not particularly spatial or were not spatial in this linear demarcated way. Subsequently,
however, these authority structures were ignored or sometimes even actively
renounced in favor of the kind of authority which could be literally shown and
drawn on a map.



It is
interesting because initially, maps were not predominantly produced by rulers, states,
or officials. They were certainly involved in sponsoring some mapping projects,
buying maps, and using them, but mapmaking was more of a commercial private
scientific enterprise, if we can apply the label 'scientific' in the 16th
and 17th centuries. These map-makers certainly didn't have any articulated
goal of changing politics, at least not on this broad level. They were really
concerned with making money, maybe creating art, and advancing what they
thought was a growing science of cartography.



We
can however see that the map, as a technological artifact—maps as actual things—had
an impact on the practices of rule both between rulers and between rulers and
their subjects. I argue that this process occurred quite broadly across the
European development of the international system at that time. And you can see
this sequence really clearly in a case like France.



Let
me illustrate that. Here are three maps of 'France' ranging from the 1400s to
the 1700s—the quotation marks are necessary because the notion of there being
one entity called France across this whole period is more a matter of us labeling
it as such rather than it being one recognizable entity.









The
first map is from a 15th century manuscript about royal and noble
genealogy in France. The image is purported to represent 'all the realm of
France' and shows the country as a collection of what I would call places
rather than a single linearly demarcated space. You do have the notion of spatial
boundaries here, in terms of rivers as means for demarcation. Yet, very
clearly, the visual language of this map focuses on towns. And this is how rule
was practiced and operationalized as well: negotiations would be over places, or
maybe collections of people based on identity, jurisdiction, or where they were
allowed to reside, but not in term of linear demarcations between claims.









Now
look at the second map, which is just from about 150 years later, from the
1590s. It is from an atlas by a follower of Mercator, and its label Gallia is
the Roman designation for France. From our modern perspective we can recognize
something that looks a lot like a modern map of France. Maybe even a state, although
the boundaries are not exactly like we would expect them to be. But this is the
visual language of mapping that we are familiar with: longitude, latitude,
spatial expanses colored in, homogenous territorial claims—there is something
about the space depicted that argues that it is all the same, that is all
France.



And
despite this familiarity, it was actually far from an accurate depiction of
French rule. Not just in the actual placement of the boundaries, which are
contestable, but in the discrete nature of the boundaries themselves. Along
these frontiers, so clearly demarcated on this image, the claims of the French
king were often unclear and overlapped with those of other rulers. This was
even true for the interior of France during this period.









The
third map is another 150 years later, from the 1740s. This is from a map
showing the triangulation of the realm, undertaken by a group of geographers, known
as the Cassini survey, as several generations of the Cassini family headed up
this effort. The realm is being mapped explicitly using geometric tools with
the important emphasis that the image is actually meant to represent reality.
It is understood that way: it's supposed to measure reality, in order to enable
the French king to better understand what he rules. Moreover, this mapping took
place at the same time that rule was being implemented in practice on the
ground in terms of spatial expanses as we think of them, in the form of
demarcating boundaries with neighbors which had previously been unclear,
overlapping jurisdictions.



Although
maps of the second generation (i.e., the map from the 1590s) were 'inaccurate,'
they were extremely influential. They were widely distributed and purchased by
the elite, both inside and outside of government. Using these maps provided
rulers with this particularly new territorial meaning to their centralizing and
bureaucratizing efforts. As a consequence, the use of these maps as material
tools of governing and negotiation really changed the language of rule. Rule becomes
cartographic, at least in part. When two opposing sides come to the negotiation
table, for example, they at the very least have already agreed, implicitly, that
the division should be a linear boundary—it is just a question of where.



By
the time the third map is produced, the government is much more directly
involved in map production using accurate geometrical measurement. Yet the very
desire for this mapping was shaped by the earlier use of those commercial maps
that built up the visual grammar of geometric space. The French case is useful
because it is very well documented, but we do see the same sort of process
repeated either simultaneously or later throughout Europe and also elsewhere. In
fact, there is a lot of interesting scholarship on the introduction of mapping
and modern geographic thinking into regions outside the West. Siam Mapped (1994), a book by Thongchai Winichakul,
is a fantastic study that I found really useful for my thinking about Europe,
even though it deals with Siam (Thailand) in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.



This
is my story about mapping and territory, but I think there is a broader frame
to your question: do we want to bring in these sort of technical factors into explanations
in International Relations? And while we don't want to be technologically
determinist, there is some useful thinking around technology and its effects we
should consider. The impact of maps has been so strong, and yet they are such
common artifacts that they are largely conceived of as 'unremarkable' outside
of geographic-oriented disciplines.





So can we juxtapose this insight that mapping practices precede the
practice of rule and state formation to the anthropological present, that is,
what do the contemporary, some say radical, shifts in mapping techniques entail
for international politics?



Absolutely.
When I initially present my work, there is often an assumption that I use GIS
in my study. Instead, my work focuses on analyzing mapping itself—maps as
historical artifacts, their effects and their interaction with political
identities, interests, and organizations. But I think the ways in which methodology
and the subject of study overlap on subjects like technology could potentially
contribute to stretching the boundaries of IR. The big data question is both a
question of studying what big data means for politics but also how we can use
big data to study politics. The way in which new technologies can simultaneously
play into our methods and into our answers or questions is a pressing and
fascinating issue.



For
instance, there has been a lot of back and forth on the question of whether
more open-access mapping techniques entail some sort of democratization. While
I think we have seen that more participatory forms of mapping are possible, we
shouldn't think that this type of mapping is completely open, as no
technological system is completely open to anyone and everyone at all times.
But, indeed, there is a democratization of mapping under way. Authorship in a
whole host of domains, including mapping, is opening up where there used to be
a single authoritative voice or at least a single type of authoritative voice. So
maps are an example of this opening up and collective authorship. At the same
time, accommodating more voices also means that a lot of information is being
shared without authority or attribution or what we think of as a legitimate
source… When you open a map from Rand McNally or National Geographic, you know
that specific cartographers thought this was accurate and you can blame or
praise them. But when you open up a layer of Google Earth that has been
crowd-sourced you don't know who put that pin there, and you don't know why.



It's
really interesting to explore a bit further how this is different from the
recent past. In the 19th and first half of the 20th
century, mapmaking was essentially state-led. The U.S. geological survey, the
Ordnance Survey in Britain, or large mapmaking geographical institutions such
as National Geographic represented the owners and producers. Mapping was so
technical, so obviously technical that the everyday person would not be able to
make a map to Rand McNally's standards. This has changed, and quite importantly
so. Not only do we have the technology to do this, people are aware that they
can use it as easily as opening a smartphone app, thereby incorporating more
points of view. This is not necessarily good or bad. Politically, it does open
up new possibilities. Maps have always been political, both implicitly and
explicitly. It certainly opens up the possibility of some kind of broader shift
in ideas about territory. Let me illustrate with an example. I haven't
necessarily come across specific maps that present some completely novel visual
grammar potentially reshaping the way we think about the world. But, an
interesting example I like to bring to my students: there was a September 2011blog post on Google's Lat-Long blog (which is the company's blog about Google Maps and Google Earth). Its headline
read: 'South Sudan is now official on Google Maps,' and it displayed a
screenshot of the new boundary. 







They changed their base layer by adding a boundary between South Sudan and
Sudan. This of course followed the referendum and the UN's recognition, and all
the traditional precursors to official statehood. South
Sudan became a recognizable entity on that blog. Google Earth, a
non-governmental actor, indeed a huge corporate actor—and thus not necessarily
democratizing—becomes part of the discourse of declaring South Sudan's official
existence.



This
is an example of how things might be going. Interestingly, the whole enterprise
of mapping today actually resembles more closely that of the 16th
and early 17th centuries then that of the 19th or early
20th century, not technologically but organizationally. The
state-centric view of the world was enforced by the state-authored mappings of
the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, by contrast, there is a
kind of shared or unclear authorship, there is crowdsourcing, there are multiple
sources of conflicting and quite openly unreliable or uncertain information.
This environment of rapidly increasing distribution and use also describes the
creation of the early atlases in the late 16th century and early 17th
centuries, which involved the collation of all kinds of information from multiple
sources.



And
of course it was in the 16th and 17th century when this
sort of non-state-controlled mapping presented innovative images of the world—those
images that ended up shaping and consolidating the state form of territory. And
so it was these new tools for understanding and acting on the world which gave
the state its territorial shape. As key information-producing activities are
being opened up, some forms of power are being redistributed. This certainly
means that we need to widen our scope in terms of whom we consider to be a
stakeholder or what sort of actors we want to study. We know that the dichotomy
of state versus non-state is not sufficient. We need to be subtler in our
inquiries. In IR, of course, the stereotypical over-emphasis on states is being
questioned, and this is really just one more sign that a piece of the power of
the state, in this case map-production and distribution, is shifting elsewhere.




I
recently had a conversation with students in my undergrad seminar on technology
and international politics. I went into it saying: 'Hey, all this mobile
mapping and GPS and Google Earth is totally revolutionary. This may change how
we think about the world.' And they were all completely unconvinced, since they
use these technologies all the time—to a bunch of twenty-year-olds these tools seem
unremarkable. And maybe that is actually a more accurate analysis. But it is
interesting how it is such a different analysis from that of my generation and anyone
older, all of us who have spent a lot of time, for example, driving around
without GPS. It is partly this perception and the 'unthinking usage' which make
the relationship between technologies and social and political outcomes so difficult
to observe. Our ideas may be changed, and especially the ideas of younger
generations may be changed, without anyone particularly noticing how dramatic
the changes might be. This also means that the connections, because they are
'unthinking,' can be quite foundational to people's ideas of social identities
or political practices. They are tacit and embodied. That makes it both hard to
observe but also an interesting puzzle. But it is worthwhile mentioning that
the images presented by Google Maps and other digital mapping tools,
particularly satellite imagery, might carry a greater legitimacy in terms of
depicting 'the truth'. It looks like a picture of the world and therefore
whatever is on it, even layered on data (like a new international boundary),
must be true. It represents another apex of the scientific trajectory of
mapping.





If it is just about adding a data layer on a base map that remains the
same, does that then mean that ontologically this kind of mapping technology
actually doesn't challenge territoriality?



That
gets to an interesting point, which entangles with a lot of the more careful
discussions of globalization and the state. One version of that is that the
state is not dying, is not being destroyed. It is just that other things are
being layered on top of it, and the state and its boundaries still remain and
still matter for certain things. In this case, maps are perfectly capable of
showing state boundaries—they look very fixed, very strong—but one can layer on
top other types of information, maybe transactional flows or particular places
that are connected in different ways.



I
think that could be an interesting argument: these new mapping tools can really
show so much, and it is matter of selecting what you want to show and
unselecting things you don't want to show. Thus they don't do anything to
undermine one particular view of the world. Now that is not necessarily a good
or bad thing. If we look at the history of mapping and the origins of state
territoriality, a key part of that was that it was really hard to depict
medieval jurisdictional and personal notions of rule on early modern maps. Printing
technology and mapping tools prescribed depiction in a certain way—drawing
lines and coloring in spaces. Maps made it harder to show and thus think about
the other forms of rule. If digital maps are still perfectly capable of showing
states and their boundaries, they may do very little to undermine that notion
of territory.





Finally, if we are interested in the politics of maps, to what extent do
we need to study not only the maps as political artifacts but the mapmakers as
political actors as well?



I
think it is extremely useful to do both, and obviously if we study mapping
today, we can do both. In terms of
historical work, we can only rely on very limited sources, such as what mapmakers
themselves wrote about what they were doing. We don't know a lot about their
goals or ideas about politics. I would have loved to have been able to read
exhaustive memoirs by mapmakers such as Ortelius and Mercator. Of course, they might
not have said anything about the questions we are interested in. On the other
hand, a lot of map-makers today are involved in mapping for explicit political
reasons: for example, Ushahidi-type collaborative mapping (www.ushahidi.com), or humanitarian and
relief mapping. Here we can dig into the question of how the maps produced relate
to specific objectives. That is a great way to get more analytical leverage on
a lot of these questions.



Jordan Branch joined the Political Science
department at Brown as an Assistant Professor in summer 2012. He received his
PhD in Political Science at UC-Berkeley in 2011, and spent 2011-2012 as the
Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Studies at
the University of Southern California. His interests include international
relations theory, the history of the sovereign state system, contemporary
challenges to statehood, and the intersection of technological and political
change. In 2014, Cambridge University Press published his book, The
Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty. His
research has also appeared in International Organization and
the European Journal of International Relations.







Related links





Faculty profile at Brown University
Read
Branch's Mapping the Sovereign State:
Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change (International Organization 2011) here (pdf) 
Read
Branch's Colonial Reflection' and
Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood (European Journal of International Relations,
2012) here (pdf) 








Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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Siba Grovogui on IR as Theology, Reading Kant Badly, and the
Incapacity of Western Political Theory to Travel very far in Non-Western
Contexts




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The study of International Relations is founded on a
series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West.
For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to
broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law
and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and
lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he
discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian
logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and
the trajectory of the discipline of IR.




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?



I don't want to be evasive, but I
actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object
today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of
those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an
American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in
multiple ways: if you think of à
la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this
empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the
predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International
Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here
a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain
capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension
and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that
placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European
empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration
of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.



Now you can believe all the stories
about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon
different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know
Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function,
etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the
extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to
say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be
foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater
impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or
should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be
seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies.
International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of
material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the
relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings
and capacities.



If one sees it that way then we must
reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an
important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily
in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are
bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different
ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a
justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries,
from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and
that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same
manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications,
explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are
important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions
and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still
belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by
the concept of IR.



I am therefore curious about the
so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable
science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly
those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in
International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself
and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the
West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the
tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative,
redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about
that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are,
so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the
'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its
constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces
within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far
eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.



Consider the question of China today, as
it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular
foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some
people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for
instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in
the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and
China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you
are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that
China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed.
And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility
to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.



In
some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states
than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states
consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this
regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in
1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India
intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of
understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold
War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and
were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and
interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were
actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility,
of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated
since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics",
"international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full
of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for
understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is
why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of
hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have
been incorporated.





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



I came to where I am now essentially
because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself
"international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or
unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the
way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.




I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and
when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught
at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some
places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science
there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be
in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the
end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and
in political science. When I came to America and went the University of
Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or
something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically
articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to
have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of
which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which
countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction,
etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if
something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass
here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still
the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less
science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of
these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones
they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really
what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.



This way of seeing IR is related to the
fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the
discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style,
unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be
less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to
try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the
world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be
structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of
the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus,
God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand
that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that
revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some
are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so
there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into
different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods.
Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our
lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on
Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to
the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you
are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance
think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it
doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party
says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you
liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks
and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves
into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another,
instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..



For me, as a non-monotheist myself,
everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or
has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we
have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it
absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a
context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we
must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible,
the Quran, and the Torah. And I am
comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human
truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so
individually. 



If I had the truth, then I might be one
of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the
way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the
Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple
revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount,
the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that
to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation
I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through
deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a
revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the
New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is
interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the
way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the
world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm
not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was
raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is
that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we
were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to
have it.





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



I am not sure I want to make a canonical
recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I
have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I
do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology,
and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by
implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want
is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways:
people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem
for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies
and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am
talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about
diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was
talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here
where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from
1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have
recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took
place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it
allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you
know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization,
hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened
also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.



What that allows me to do is to cut
through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the
image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to
us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If
you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those
historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with
how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism,
liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that
history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that
people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but
the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do
with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the
violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking
refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had.
But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the
manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are
today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide
analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of
the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective
inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has
nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.



All of the stuff projected today as
canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the
classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read
them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led
there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in
which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New
World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere
was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities
in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history,
literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in
fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would
become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the
pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned
some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and
enslavement.



For the same reason I recommend students
to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might
think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students
that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and
Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries
before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to
dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a
different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional
networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable
communications among populations and individual groups.



This approach causes many people to ask
whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something
else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to
particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer
but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and
policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African
sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the
way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners.
I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that
way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem
in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This
questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the
question.



Rather, I invite my students to
reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the
problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem
is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of
the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either
conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost
me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns
understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how
sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial
moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is
wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting
point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!





In
your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the
2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery,
margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even
global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging
from Africa and its spokespeople?



The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization'
come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with
the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the
colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary
on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a
direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book
was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African
Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June
1960, Africans went to defend France, because
France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that
Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood
that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so
the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would
have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control,
or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France
actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad
and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be
restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France,
because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And
Pétain, to his credit, is the only French
official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his
minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a
different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were
victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our
aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency
to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the
French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.



Our inability to understand that Africa
actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so
escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were
debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided
this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had
surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the
International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness',
after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it
was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The
implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan
and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good
citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that
is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck
Africa out of the World.  Nobody says,
America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying
is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can
be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal
consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be
universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to
think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial
populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them
of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go
fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask
that question today!



And it could be argued that this
thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all
are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and
worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I
went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I
can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the
people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because
there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual
in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you
cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the
university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no
longer ignorance, that is hubris.





Your work presents an original take on the role of
language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?



The language problem has many, many
layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for
instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power
Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what
white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power
should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to
translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of
authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific
categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era
enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations
in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of
translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what
kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with
how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference
between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest
in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th
century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that
is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate
with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.



The difference that I am trying to make
here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is
distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language
is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a
proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have
cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of
it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for
linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand,
is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one
uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to
Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the
African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to
smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult.
Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to
me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.



Moreover, there is a danger for instance
when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not
speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to
bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my
father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not
available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else.
Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant
but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were
actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the
categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient
with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of
people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant
is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about
politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of
resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the
interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant
is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am
making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not
a bad reader.



At an ISA conference I once was attacked
by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to
explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a
result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment
he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was
reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand
things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool
available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology
or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I
retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of
vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts
and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or
Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I
can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the
realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own
traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today
is less with Kant than with Kantians.



Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the
body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties
in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes
today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last
time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he
was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are
still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the
body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what
organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors
and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my
problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the
distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my
problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My
problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty
or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book
on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies
may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the
time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on
how we read Hobbes today.



The absence of contextualization and
historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to
receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless
simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for
instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak
about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very
tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those
guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even
capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal
that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me
to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody
needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one
faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally,
could be said of China nowadays.



One of the things I would like
to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a
dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues,
some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were
reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West
today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the
West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This
act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of
Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much
engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of
colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I
have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I
have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European.
Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter
into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was
often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the
relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the
relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person
talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western
philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern
period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I
encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being
Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today
that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or
exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this
expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such
dialogues was Western or British?





So in sum you are not trying to counter Western
thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own
perspective can bring something new to IR studies?



I am going to try and express
something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa
brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not
saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans,
that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more
of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to
nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came
with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by
certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in
Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and
it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.



One of the presidents of postcolonial
Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one
of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed
everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know
I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become
Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are
rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have
quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may
no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though
we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council
of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of
elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament
and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than
all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders,
and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And
the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what
he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head
of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to
understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our
modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our
circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with
him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group,
fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and
if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children
away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university
is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in
France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking
for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of
elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being
the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that
language. It was a very clever move.



The second one was my mother who was
completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one
of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish
you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So
I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we
have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to
the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are
talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past
eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional
heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic
connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they
collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about
that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional
classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk
about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the
necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of
the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give
the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in
Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they
have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as
it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then
nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And
journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and
redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition,
we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we
don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are
vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of
journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more
relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how
they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the
message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms
that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That
is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters
have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.



The third story is about how we had a
constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about
the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of
people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American
Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a
wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not
lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and
19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation
of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who
interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in
Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can
imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually
have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not
allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make
sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a
different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.



In sum, the West is a wonderful
political experiment, and it has worked for them.
We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here
that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without
undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining
the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be
tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of
powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same
way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third
story.





Siba N. Grovogui has
been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela
postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and
teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently
professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins
University. He is the author of Sovereigns,
Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International
Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions
and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long
study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in
Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.





Related links




Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University
Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond
North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)