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Dan Rohde (Harvard University, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Harvard Law School, Students) & Nicolas Parra-Herrera (Harvard University - Harvard Law School) have posted Law as Architecture: Mapping Contingency and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Legal Historiography (Journal of Law and Political...
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Dan Rohde (Harvard University, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Harvard Law School, Students) & Nicolas Parra-Herrera (Harvard University - Harvard Law School) have posted Law as Architecture: Mapping Contingency and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Legal Historiography (Journal of Law and Political...
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I love writing. The medium is excellent for communicating ideas, or a narrative history. But writing is one-dimensional, and it's much worse at communicating the history of ideas in higher dimensions. My meta-scientific interest in understanding how ideas travel, how their fate waxes and wanes, has frequently pushed me beyond my preferred medium. Traditional historiography is extremely […]
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In Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations between authors, agents and publishers in the US from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi’s focus on how such literary partnerships across racial lines advanced equality and integration is a unique contribution to the historiography of African American … Continued
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In this article, Upasana Dandona discusses the historiography of the gender violence surrounding the Indo-Pak partition in 1947. Dandona shows that existing literature discussed a dual marginalization of all women involved: they faced sexual violence and abductions during the conflict, and a subsequent alienation from their families and governments. While literature exists on the topic, … Continued
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The next issue of "Constellations" (vol. 40, no. 4) features articles on The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) and the Frankfurt School:"The Institute for Social Research at 100: Continuity and Transformation"Eleven articles are now available online:* Axel Honneth - "The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former director's perspective"Excerpt: "There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skeptical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research."* Rainer Forst: "The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition" [open access]Excerpt: "In my view, then, critical theory must be reconfigured as a critique of relations of justification. This calls, on the one hand, for a critical social scientific analysis of social and political relations of domination that includes cultural and, not least, economic structures and relationships. In this regard, two dimensions of domination must be distinguished: subjugation to unjustifiable norms and institutions, and subjugation to conditions that prevent practices of justification. Such critical analysis must be combined with a discourse-theoretical, genealogical critique of the justifications and justification narratives that confer legitimacy on unjustifiable relations. On the other hand, we must pose the constructive question of how a "basic structure of justification" can be conceived as a requirement of fundamental justice and be realized in social practice - not as an ideal or a model to be imposed on societies, but as a normative order to be developed autonomously. Essentially, a theory we call critical ought to be based on the principle of criticism itself. Its medium is reason striving for practices of autonomous justification among equals."* Alessandro Ferrara - "If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent"Excerpt: "It is undeniably among the aims of critical theory to envisage a society in which diversity can exist in the absence of oppression. Now, it's all too easy to merely invoke the ideal of equals living together with their diversity (ethnic, ethical, religious, cultural, or of gender, lifestyle, sexual preference) and without oppression. Deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists, and theorists of recognition often emphatically do so. However, when it comes to specifying concretely which institutions should form the basic structure of such a society, how they should relate to one other, what rights and liberties (and how limited and balanced) citizens should have, and what democratic legitimacy means, it is a whole different story.On the nuts and bolts of an oppression-free society the entire first generation had little to offer, to say nothing of the cauldron of the "verwaltete Welt" (Adorno). Habermas has quite a lot to say, in Between Facts and Norms and in his exchange with Rawls. Among the younger critical theorists who long for reviving the earlier program of the Frankfurt School, few even attempt to say anything. This is the problem, instead, on which [John Rawls's] Political Liberalism, not A Theory of Justice, offers an elaborate theory unmatched by any other to date (....) Critical theory can only gain from enlarging its tent to include also some of Rawls's concepts - reasonability, civility, reciprocity - and from launching empirical research on the conditions of the possibility for them to maintain traction in the challenging decades ahead of us."* Maeve Cooke - "Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today"Excerpt: "Since formalist models of politics abstain from critique of the prevailing deep-seated ethical-existential values and from recommendation of alternatives, they are conducive toward unquestioning acceptance of the ethical-existential values undergirding the established political procedures, facilitating the reproduction of the political status quo. Against this, I take the view that contemporary critical theory must engage with ethical-existential questions, not least if it is to meet the challenges posed by our disastrous ecological situation. This requires it, in turn, to engage with the question of ethical-existential validity. Given the challenge of value pluralism, therefore, a key task for contemporary critical theory is to elaborate a conception of ethical validity that is at once universalist and attentive to the plurality of ethical values and worldviews."* Samuel Moyn - "Critical theory's generational predicament" [Link]Excerpt: "(....) it seems clear that the principal cause of the lack of interest in critical theory for younger generations - the lack of zeal to perpetuate or even study it - is that the votaries of the tradition conformed unreflectively to "the end of history" in the 1990s. They had essentially nothing to say about American unipolarity and the militarism that has so clearly accompanied it. Worse, for one-time Marxists, they never formulated an analysis or critique of economic neoliberalism. Yet these are the causes at the center of the activism and theorizing of many who lived through the past decade and forging a critical perspective on their times."* Martin Saar - "Rethinking Critique and Theory" [open access]Excerpt: "Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation."* Frank I. Michelman - "Totality, morality, and social philosophy"Excerpt: "We thus see the Institute for Social Research, at a signal moment in its early history, posing for itself the dialectic of human individual agency and environing social totality - with neither element placed at the other's disposal - as a main topic for pursuit by social philosophy and its connected program of social research. It is by pursuit of that topic that the Institute's engagements over the decades of my own academic career have figured, importantly for me, in my work (not generally classified as "Frankfurt School") on liberal constitutional theory. Most pointedly it has done so in undertakings by Jürgen Habermas to explicate a moral point of view from which citizens in a political society encounter one another as each a free and equal person commanding full respect as such - but to explicate that morality, as I have sought to explain, not as a view "that philosophy independently discovers," but rather as one that lies embedded in a historically particular social totality."* Cristina Lafont - "The return of the critique of ideologies" [open access]Excerpt: "(....) I shall focus on just one issue: the recent revival in critiques of ideology. In my view, this type of critique is an important task of critical theory and remains one of its most significant legacies. Yet, if one focuses on the work of critical theorists over the past decades, this statement is far from obvious. In fact, the second generation of the Frankfurt school,most notably Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action, explicitly rejects ideology critique as obsolete in the context of contemporary societies. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, he had embraced the classicalMarxist approach to ideology critique, he ultimately rejected it. It was the explicit attempt to rebut objections that had plagued this approach that brought about the so-called "democratic turn" of critical theory characteristic of Habermas's work from the 1980s onward and in which the critique of ideologies no longer plays a role."* Christopher F. Zurn - "We're not special: Congratulations!"Excerpt: "It is fine, then, to get right to work on current social movements - Occupy Wall Street and other Square movements, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise and Third Act movements, MeToo, the Arab Spring, or the Mahsa Amini protests - and on pressing contemporary social problems - climate change and human adaptation, deepening material inequality, the erosion of constitutional democracy, artificial intelligence and human de-skilling, global migration and refugee waves, the transformation of the Westphalian international order, the resilience and resurgence of patriarchy, and so on - without worrying how to fit these movements and problems into the architectonic of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Theory of Communicative Action. To be sure, we need not ignore the conceptual resources and insights of our tradition when they are relevant and enlightening. But we need to take interdisciplinarity seriously by looking to the much broader currents of critical thought on social formations and the changing horizons of human emancipation."* Peter E. Gordon - "The animating impulses of critical theory"Excerpt: "For some readers, this generational shift - between the first and second generations of critical theory - is overdramatized into a stark contrast between totalizing negativism and restorationist optimism, both of which seem to hover at too great an altitude above social reality. Needless to say, this contrast does an injustice to both parties. Adorno and Horkheimer are far more committed to reason's self-reflective possibilities, while Habermas remains far more attentive to reason's systemic distortion. They converge at a point of dialectical mediation, whereas neither pure negativism nor pure idealism would serve as a viable groundwork for critical theory. In what follows I wish to suggest that Horkheimer's original model of social philosophy, as animated by a rational but materialist ideal of emancipation, still has enduring merit."* William E. Scheuerman - "Horkheimer's unrealized vision"Excerpt: "Horkheimer's idea of a mutually constructive exchange between philosophy and critical social science has too often been rare and ephemeral. And this should worry us if you believe, as this author does, that Horkheimer was right to see such an exchange as indispensable to critical theory. (....) Only in 1962 did Habermas, in an appropriately interdisciplinary study that relied heavily on research from legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists, begin to revitalize Frankfurt critical theory. Not only did his landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere take the social sciences seriously, but its young author seems to have implicitly grasped that critical theory could only flourish on the basis of an authentically cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Horkheimer's original interdisciplinary vision clearly inspired the young Habermas. When properly reconstructed, it should inspire us today as well."
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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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Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape? The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk
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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)