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Dirk Messner on the dynamics
of global change and the significance of international science and technology
cooperation in the post-Western world



This is the fifth in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 





In recent years, the analysis of new emerging powers and shifting global order has become central to the study of international relations. While International Relations, aiming to evolve into a truly global discipline, is only just about to start opening up towards Non-Western perspectives, global power shifts have already led to a restructuring of global governance architecture in large fields of political reality and practice. Dirk Messner illustrates how far global power shifts have to lead to new patterns of international cooperation using international science and technology cooperation as a case in point. He argues that investment in joint knowledge creation and knowledge exchange is vital for managing the earth system. Messner also points to the multitude of tasks related to socio-technical systems which the political sphere is currently facing, particularly with regard to the challenge of managing the climate system. 




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is the most important challenge facing global politics that should be the central debate in the discipline of International Relations?



The biggest challenge of the next decades which we have to come to terms with is governing the big global commons. When I say global commons I do have in mind the atmosphere, the climate system, and other parts of the earth system, but also international financial markets and global infrastructures, such as the Internet – stability of these and other global commons is a public good much required. We need to stabilize the global commons and then manage them in a cooperative manner.



Three dynamics of global change make it specifically challenging to manage these global commons. The first wave of global change is the globalization wave; the economic globalization, cross-border dynamics, global value chains. It becomes evident that in many areas and especially when it comes to the global commons, regulation exceeds the capacity of individual nation states. The international community is required to institutionalize multilateralism and efficient global governance mechanisms in order to properly address issues arising from global dynamics. The second big global change is the shift from a Western to a post-Western world order. Global power shifts remaking the international system impede governing global commons. The third wave of global change is related to climate change, which adds a new dimension of global dynamics; human beings now have to learn how to steer, to stabilize, and how to govern the earth system as such. We are not only a species living on this planet, depending from resources and ecosystems of the earth systems. With the acceleration of economic globalization during the 1990s and the emergence of new, non-Western economic drivers of change, like China, humankind now significantly impacts the physical structures of the earth system. This trend is new. For the first 4,6 billion years of the existence of the earth system it was driven by the laws of physics, the dynamics of biology and bio-chemical processes. Homo sapiens appeared 220.000 years ago, and the impact of our species on the earth system has been marginal until the industrial revolution started 250 years ago. During the last decades human mankind became a major driver of change at a planetary scale.





How did you arrive in your current thinking about these issues?



I have always been interested in international relations, international policy dimensions, and the global economy. I started at the Free University of Berlin at the beginning of the 80's towards the mid-80's, studying Political Science and Economics. One among those professors who have been particularly important to me is Elmar Altvater. He was the supervisor of my diploma as well as of my Ph.D., and he sent me abroad. This resulted being a pivotal experience to me. I studied the last year of my first degree in Seoul, in South Korea. It was the period, the 80's, when the four Asian Tiger states emerged following Japan's example: South Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapur. I had the chance to visit these countries, study there and learn a lot about Asia. I was fascinated by the dynamics of emerging economies and what this implied for the international arena. Somewhat later, the Latin American continent became the center of my interest. I did research in Nicaragua, Uruguay, Chile and some other Latin American countries, trying to understand liberalization-movements, how weaker actors come under pressure in Western-dominated global settings, but also how some countries managed it to become dynamic parts of the global economy (like the "Asian tigers" or Chile) and why others failed. I learnt that it is crucial to understand dynamics of global change in order to being able to build solid and inclusive economic structures and legitimate political systems at national levels. There has always been a political impulse that pulled me into certain fields I decided to work in.





What is your advice for students who would like to get into the field of global change research or international cooperation?



My first advice is: visit and work in different countries and different cultural and political settings. It is one thing to learn from scholars or books, but having studied and having lived in different contexts and countries is absolutely a key experience. This is the way to understand global dynamics, to get a feeling for differences and similarities. My second advice stems from my experience and conviction that we need much more interdisciplinary research than we currently have. We talk a lot about interdisciplinarity, however, we do not have career paths that systematically build interdisciplinary teams.



Looking particularly at global environmental changes and the future of the earth system, at the end of the day, social scientists and natural scientists need to learn how to work together and to understand each other. The future of the oceans, for example, is not a question that can be understood by ocean biologists only. They are the people studying how these elements of the earth system are actually working, the dynamics and drivers - focusing on physical, chemical, and biochemical processes. But when we look at the oceans towards 2100 from the perspective of global change, the most important drivers are now us human beings, our economies, our consumption patterns, our greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts on the oceans. And this implies that to understand dynamics of global change, we need to analyze the interactions, interdependences and feedback loops between three systems: the ecological system(s); social systems (our economies and societies) driven by humans; the technical systems and infrastructures. Therefore natural scientists, social scientists, and engineers need to interact very closely.  In the German Advisory Council on Global Change we call this approach: Transformation Research. Currently, we do not possess the appropriate university structures to adequately address this sort of problems. This is an immense institutional challenge. If I were a young scholar I would move into this direction, crossing disciplinary boundaries as much as possible.





What is the role of science and technologies in the dynamics of global change?



There are multiple important dimensions, but I would like to focus on some of them by moving through the aforementioned waves of global change. Technology is driving economic globalization, the first wave of global change. So we need to understand the dynamics of new technologies, especially the impact of ICTs, in order to understand the dynamics of economic globalization. The World Wide Web and social communication media are restructuring industrialization processes and global value chains. ICT infrastructure is also displaying a big potential for less developed regions. In Africa, for example, we saw many African countries jumping from the old telephone technologies to smartphones within less than a decade, because the old, maintenance and capital intensive communications infrastructure was no longer needed. Many African people now have access to smartphones, thus to communication- and information networks, and begin to reshape prize constellations and the global economy. Because of its restructuring effects, the impact of ICTs is relevant in all areas of the global economy. The global trend towards urbanization is similarly related to ICTs. Currently, we approach the global economy via data on national economies. But this might be about to change, as global mega-cities develop into global knowledge and financial hubs, building their own networks. In 2040, 80 percent of the global production, global GDP, global consumption, global exchange might be concentrated in 70 to 80 global cities or city regions.



Technology is also linked to the second wave of global change – the tectonic global power shift – in the way that investment in technology and knowledge in emerging economies are growing rapidly. We are not only facing economic and political power shifts, but also a remaking of the global science and research system itself. From my perspective, international cooperation in the field of science and technology research between "old powers" and "new powers", between Western countries and non-Western countries is extremely important for two reasons: First, we need to pool know-how in order to solve core global challenges and to develop patterns for managing the global commons. Interaction and cooperation in the field of science and technology is especially important for the creation of knowledge that is "better" in any way. For instance, in the field of adaptation policies to the impacts of climate change, most of the knowledge on how societies and local communities actually work or respond under these conditions exists in non-Western societies. The generation of knowledge is context dependent. We need to interact with colleagues from the respective countries for mutual learning and common knowledge improvement. My second argument is that, as an effect of the global power shift, traditional development cooperation is losing legitimacy. Many of these societies, from China to Peru, from Kenya to Vietnam, are no longer interested in our usual business, in our "aid-packages", our money, our experts or our concepts. What they are more interested in is true and reciprocal knowledge exchange and joint knowledge creation. Therefore, investments in respective forms and institutions of knowledge exchange and creation will be a central pillar of/for future oriented development cooperation or international cooperation and beneficial for all partners involved. Joint knowledge creation is a precondition for joint action and legitimate global governance initiatives.



The role of technologies with regard to the implications of climate change is crucial and multifaceted. In the German Advisory Council on Global Change we put forth suggestions concerning the transformation towards a low-carbon global economy. We are relatively optimistic in a technological sense. This statement is partly based on the Global Energy Assessment (GEA) research, which has been driven by Nebojsa Nakicenovic, one of our colleagues, who is working on energy modeling. The perspective there is that we know which kind of technologies we need for the transformation into a low-carbon or even zero-carbon economy. We can even calculate the investment costs and structures of different countries and regions. But we do know relatively little about the transformation processes of entire societies, economies and, eventually, the international system towards low-carbon systems. The transformation towards a low-carbon society is a "great transformation". In the entire history of mankind there might be only two examples for such a profound change: the industrial revolution 250 years ago and the Neolithic revolution 10.000 years ago, which induced the practices of agriculture. Today, we thus witness the third great transformation: the decoupling from fossil resources, from high-carbon to zero-carbon. To achieve the 2° Celsius goal, a complete decarbonization of the basic infrastructures of the global economy (the energy systems, the urban infrastructures and systems, the land use systems) is required – within a very limited period of time, until 2070. Comprehensive knowledge is key to achieve this. Let me emphasize once more the significance of international cooperation in the field of science and technology research, particularly in the IPCC context. I am sure that politicians from China, India, or Brazil only accept what the IPCC is presenting as objective knowledge, as the stand of the art knowledge, because their national scientists are deeply involved. If this were a classical western-based knowledge project it would have resulted in a lack of legitimacy. In the case of global climate policy, it is obvious that investment in joint knowledge creation is also about creating legitimacy for joint action.





What are the main obstacles of the low-carbon transformation?



The first two great transformations have been evolutionary processes. No one "planned" the industrial revolution, not to mention the Neolithic revolution.  These have been evolutionary dynamics. The sustainability transformation instead needs to be a governed process right from the beginning. In our institute, we looked at different transformation dynamics, not only the really big ones, the Neolithic, industrial, and the current sustainability transformation. We also examined structural adjustment programs in Latin America and Africa, the collapse of communism at the end of the 80s, the abolition of slavery, and similar other key transformations of human societies. Based on this historical perspective, we have identified four main drivers of transformation: The first one is crisis, this is the most important one. Confronted with strong crises, society and probably also individuals react and change direction. The second important driver is very often technology and scientific (r)evolution. The third driver is vision: If you are confronted with a problem but you do not know where to go to, transformation becomes very difficult. The European Union is the product of a fresh vision among elites after World War II; the United Nations is a result of the disasters of the first half of the 20th century. Advancing a vision is an essential means to move or to transform in a goal-oriented manner. Sustainability, of course, is also a vision. The fourth and last driver of transformation is "knowledge": you know that you have a certain problem constellation, and though the crisis is still not there, you react based on your knowledge in a preventive way.



For the low-carbon transformation, the fourth driver currently is absolutely key. We are able to address problems which would otherwise become much worse in the future, although the climate crisis is latent still – in contrast to, for example, the financial crisis, which is more visible in its effects. The impacts of a global warming of 4 or 5 degrees are still not visible. This makes for a huge difference. In fact, humans are not very good at acting and transforming significantly based on knowledge only. In combination with visible, tangible crises, knowledge is a strong driver of change, but without crisis, it is merely sufficient. Transformations based on knowledge and preventive action only are rare. The ozone hole is one positive example; solving the problem was possible because it required less complex technological change, affecting few industries only. Human beings are risk-averse in a sense, we are conservative, we do not like to change rapidly; we are path-dependent. John Maynard Keynes once said: "It is easy to develop new concepts and ideas. The difficult thing is to forget the old ones". Therefore, scientific tools are needed in order to sketch out future scenarios. Based on scientific knowledge, we need to convince our societies, our political decision-makers that it is necessary and possible to transform societies and economies towards sustainability – in order to avoid disruptive change in the earth system. Pushing towards sustainability at a point where the crisis has not yet materialized implies a specific and new role for science in managing global dynamics. Organizing a deep transformation towards sustainability avoiding significant crises driven by Earth system changes would be a cultural learning process – a civilizational shift.





What are the effects of growing multipolarity for global governance processes?



To start optimistically, I would argue that in contrast to historical situations in which this kind of tectonic power shifts led to conflicts or even wars, the current situation is different. The world is highly interconnected and economic interdependencies are stronger than ever. Charles Kupchan is differentiating between "war", "cold peace" and "warm peace". I think that a big "war" is not very probable, and "cold peace" is what we are in actually. "Warm peace" would be cooperative global governance: we identify our problems, have a joint problem analysis, and subsequently start acting cooperatively on them. But this does not describe the contemporary situation. While there are no severe global conflicts, we do not solve many of the global interdependency problems.



There are many barriers to global cooperation and I would like to mention two or three of those. The first one consists of power conflicts and power struggles. Hopefully realists such as John Mearsheimer are not right in claiming that "a peaceful rise of China is not possible". But the fundamental point remains that the re-organization and shuffling of power resources is rendering cooperation extremely difficult. The second point is that all the important global actors currently have severe domestic challenges to manage. The European countries are coping with the European dept crisis. Similarly, the United States is concerned with financial turbulences and rising social inequalities. China has to keep its annual growth rate of about 8 to 12 per cent and meanwhile stabilize its rapid modernization process. In India, there is still a large group of people suffering from poverty. So, managing that and trying to be a responsible global actor at the same time is not easy at all. In brief, all actors that we would like to see taking on a more responsible role on the global level are overcommitted domestically.



There is consensus among different disciplines on what cooperation is actually about. At the Centre for Global Cooperation Research we did a study on The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation (2013) based on insights of very different disciplines – evolutionary biology, social anthropology, cognitive sciences, psychology, political sciences, behavioral economics – to find out what the basic mechanisms are which help human beings to cooperate at any scale towards global corporation in a world of nine billion people. Finally, we identified seven factors promoting cooperation: trust, communication, joint we-identities, reputation, fairness, enforcement – and reciprocity, which is the most fundamental prerequisite. These factors form an enable environment for cooperation and they are manmade. In contexts, actor constellations, systems, in which these basic mechanisms of cooperation are strong, they help to embed power dynamics, to solve social dilemma problems and to manage interdependencies. In contrast, contexts, actor constellations, and systems in which theses basic mechanisms of cooperation are weak, will be driven mainly by power dynamics and struggles. By looking at these factors one immediately understands why the G20 context is so difficult. We have been able to create and to well establish these factors in our old settings; in the European Union, the Western world, the transatlantic community. But now we are sitting together with new actors rather unknown. The G7/G8 world – the OECD driven and the western driven global economy and global politics – has moved towards G20 since it was acknowledged that one cannot manage any global turbulence without emerging economies. The G20 was created or rather called to meet in 2008, a few days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers when many feared the collapse of the world's financial markets. Most western economies were highly indebted, whereas the emerging economies, especially China, were holding large currency reserves. From a behavioral perspective we have to invest in these basic factors of cooperation in the G 20 context in order to create the essential preconditions of joint action to solve the big global problems. This represents a long-term project, and unfortunately many of these global problems are highly challenging from the time perspective: a tension derives from the gap between time pressure in many of these areas and the time it probably needs to build up these basic mechanisms of cooperation. In fact, the major feeling is that international cooperation is even weaker now than a decade ago. I usually visualize the current situation of the G20 as a round table with 20 seats but no one is sitting there. Charles Kupchan's "No one's world" or Ian Bremmer's "The G0 world" deal with the same problem: international cooperation, global governance is currently so difficult, although all these interdependency problems rendered the problem of managing the global commons fully obvious. If you talk to our Foreign Ministers or Finance Ministers or Chancellors and Presidents, they of course all know exactly what is out there in terms of globalization impacts. But organizing the necessary global consensus and the governance and cooperation structures is tremendously difficult.





How far is the discipline of development research affected by global change?



This is a complex question, to which I do not have a definite answer. The whole field of development research is currently about to get redefined. In the past, the concept of development was clear: On the one side, there was the developed world, the OECD-world, consisting of 35-40 countries and on the other side, the "underdeveloped" part of the world, all other countries. Understanding the differences between developed and developing, along with thinking about the basic drivers of modernization and wealth creation in less developed countries was at the core of development research for a long period. How can poor countries become rich and as developed as OECD countries already are?



Today, it is highly questionable if even the broader categories of "development research" still serve to analyze the new realities. Do we currently still need "development economists", and how would they differ from classical "economists" doing research in those European countries suffering most from the debt crisis, high unemployment and weak institutions? Situations in many OECD countries nowadays look like what one would expect from a still developing or emerging economy, and the other way around. So, what distinguishes development research? This is an important question. Studying non-OECD countries, do we still need development research based governance theories or democratization theories – thus, theories that are systematically different from those we apply in our research on OECD countries? The discipline of development research is under immense pressure. This debate is linked to the second wave of global change we talked about: the post-western world order, emerging economies catching up, convergence trends in the global economy.



If you look at the role of international technology transfer, the same scenario arises: the North-South, donor-recipient categories have dissolved. Technology transfer has lost its distinct direction, and it is much more reciprocal and diffuse than it used to be. There are several studies currently pointing to the fact that investment rates in R&D and in technology creation are growing fast in several regions around the globe, whereas in many OECD-countries, investment is stagnating, or even decreasing. The whole map of knowledge, if you like to say so, is about to undergo deep changes. This implies that the common assumption that knowledge is based in OECD countries and transferred to the South via development cooperation is just not working any longer. We need new patterns of cooperation between different countries in this area. And we need research on global development dynamics which will be different from classical development research which has been based on the assumption of a systemic North-South divide for a long time.







How do institutions such as the World Bank react to the emerging and redefined agenda of development?



The current reorientation of the World Bank as a Knowledge Bank originates from the assumption that knowledge is just as important as money for global development. The second point is that more and more of their partners in non-OECD countries, classical developing and emerging economies, are more and more interested in the knowledge pools of the World Bank and less in their experts. And: dynamic developing countries and emerging economies are even more interested in investments in their own knowledge systems and joint knowledge creation with the World Bank. The old North-South knowledge transfer model is eroding. You might say that there currently are two contradictory global trends: on the one hand via social media and the Internet, knowledge is being widely distributed – broader than ever before and actually, theoretically accessible at any point in the world –, on the other hand the proliferation of knowledge is accompanied with access restriction and control, and the growing privatization of knowledge. Aiming to play a constructive role in collaborative knowledge generation, the World Bank invests a lot in building up freely accessible data bases and open research tools, including the provision of governance or development indicators of any kind. However, this is a difficult process that is developing slowly.



The World Bank is currently undergoing several basic re-orientations. The structures inside of the World Bank are about to become less hierarchical and more horizontal. Originally, the World Bank has been a much more western dominated organization as the Bretton Woods institutions were formed by the United States and its allies. If you look into the governance structures of the World Bank today, it is still largely dominated by OECD countries, but you can notice that this is changing. It is a global organization but 90 % of people working there have been studying at Anglo-Saxon universities. Actors especially from emerging economies have been criticizing that for long, claiming that the World Bank as a global organization should have to be represented by a global citizenship. Although this had slowly started to change already, all the knowledge and all the qualification procedures still remained very western dominated. So they asked the World Bank to diversify its partner structures, to reach out and cooperate with research institutions from around the world. This is what the World Bank is trying to do at the moment, which is really a break with its culture. Because even though the World Bank is a global organization, it has always been a very inward-looking organization. The World Bank was strong, with fantastic professionals and researchers inside, but without cooperating tools. Now they are trying to broaden their cooperation structures and to learn from and together with other institutions.





What are the opportunities and difficulties of big data analysis for global development?



Access to any kind of data is important for any kind of knowledge creation. It has been very limited for many developing countries over a very long time. So, thinking about how to assure access to serious data is significant. This would be my first point. My second point is that, when it comes to big data and the question of managing large amounts of indicators on, for example, cross-country or cross-sector modeling, I think the new technologies are opening up new research possibilities and opportunities. Big data provides the opportunity to identify patterns. Looking for similar dynamics in very different systems is a very interesting exercise, because you get deeper insights into the basic dynamics of systems. This is what I have learned from my colleague Nakicenovic, whom I have mentioned before, and who is working on the Global Energy Assessment, or from Juergen Kurths, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who is studying basic structures and dynamics of very different complex systems like air traffic networks, global infrastructures and social media networks. Managing big data allows you to see patterns which cannot be seen if you only work with case studies. However, to understand the dynamics of countries and sectors, new actor constellations or communities, you need to go into detail and in this specific moment, big data is only the starting point, the background: you also need qualified, serious, very often qualitative data on the ground. Big data and qualified, specific data: they complement each other.



For sure, an important aspect of big data is that for the most part, it is gathered and stored by private businesses. We started this interview talking about global commons and we actually just defined a global commons: data on development should be a global commons, and we need standards and rules of managing those. Private actors could play a role, but within a set of rules defined by societies and policies, and not the private business sector.









Dirk Messner is the Director of the "German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)" since 2003 and teaches at the Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen. He is Co-Director of the "Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR)", University Duisburg-Essen, which was established in 2012. He furthermore is Co-Chair of the "German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU)", member of the "China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development", member of the "Global Knowledge Advisory Commission" of the World Bank and member of the "European Commission's Scientific Advisory Board for EU development policy". Dirk Messner's research interests and work areas include globalisation and global governance, climate change, transformation towards low carbon economies, and development policy. He directed many international research programs and thus created a close international research network.



related links:


Profile at German Development Institute
Messner, Dirk / Guarín, Alejandro / Haun, Daniel (eds.) (2013): The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation, Global Cooperation Research Papers 1, Centre for Global Cooperation Research (pdf)


Read Jing Gu, John Humphrey, and Dirk Messner's (2007) Global Governance and Developing Countries: The Implications of the Rise of China here (pdf)


Messner, Dirk (2007): The European Union: Protagonist in a
Multilateral World Order or Peripheral Power
in the »Asia-Pacific« Century? (pdf)


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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Raufu Alaka, chief in the fishing village of Orimedu (Lagos State). © Photo: Arne Hoel, World Bank






















Digital technologies offer new avenues for economic growth in Africa by accelerating job creation, supporting access to public services and increasing productivity and innovation. However, major challenges remain. The lack of connectivity in remote and rural regions and the low use of digital technologies in connected areas is further disadvantaging the poor, women, and small businesses. Increased cyber risks and lack of data protection have brought new risks and vulnerabilities to businesses, governments, and people.

Government policies and regulations are key to enable greater use of digital services while mitigating risks. But how to intervene in a timely manner in a changing technological environment? Agile enabling regulations are needed to quickly respond to market developments, facilitating entry of new competitors for the benefit of consumers. In Kenya, collaboration between the competition authority, the central bank and the telecom regulator allowed digital financial service providers to access telecom services to offer mobile money services along mobile network operators. Consumers benefitted with greater availability of options for mobile payments. Later, the collaboration also facilitated interoperability between mobile money providers and banks, allowing consumers to seamlessly transfer funds between providers, top up saving accounts or use digital credit.

Such new approach is required to support the development of agile and collaborative regulations. A shift from planning and controlling to piloting and implementing policies in a multi-stakeholder setting for rapid feedback and iteration is necessary. Feedback loops allow policies to be evaluated against the backdrop of the broader ecosystem to determine if they are still meeting citizens' values and needs and considering the impact on the industry and private participation. To implement this approach, a change of mindset is first needed. This approach is particularly appropriate for dealing with digital transformation, which by its nature is changing and evolving, and would otherwise be hampered by rigid policies and regulations.

Some African countries are already implementing agile regulation principles to address various issues. Ghana and South Africa responded swiftly to COVID pandemic demand for higher bandwidth by quickly adjusting current regulations and made it easy for companies to offer higher bandwidth to citizens. Kenya and Zimbabwe were quick to remove roadblocks and supported the roll-out of applications that allowed citizens to quickly access mobile money transfers and other financial apps. The African Union has consulted perspectives from businesses, civil society and academia to develop policy frameworks on data and on digital identities. This inclusive multi-stakeholder approach resulted in workable frameworks that encourage innovation through data sharing and cross-border data flows for African eCommerce while protecting rights of individuals. These African Union frameworks on data and on digital identities are important cornerstones to build an African Digital Single Market – the vision of the Smart Africa Alliance that is endorsed by all members of the African Union.

The African Union's Agenda 2063 envisions a people-driven development for Africa, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth. That's why digital skills are prioritized in the African Union Digital Transformation Strategy 2020-2030, where the goal is to "build inclusive digital skills and human capacity across the digital sciences […] and technology policy & regulation". African leaders recognize the pivotal role of policies and regulations in shaping societal and business practices and - if done correctly – how policies can support and encourage digital transformation.

German Development Cooperation and the Digital Development Partnership of the World Bank, in partnership with Smart Africa, have started piloting this agile approach under the Agile Regulation for Digital Transformation program (AReg4DT), a program linked to the Smart Africa Digital Academy, the digital skills vehicle for Smart Africa, and atingi - an online learning platform developed by GIZ, the implementing organization of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation. The pilot is equipping policymakers and regulators in Africa with the knowledge and tools to regulate digital markets in Africa to support digital transformation. The results so far have been promising with a combination of online and face-to-face training events to allow for learning and knowledge exchange within and for Africa. This partnership is testing the development of capacity building activities in an agile and iterative way and tailoring the content to the local context, as well as gaining a practical understanding about implementation challenges and the training ecosystem in Africa. Prof. Dr. Yeboah-Boateng from Ghana's National Communications Authority also appreciated the chance for peer-to-peer exchange during the event in Abidjan. In particular, he noted the "value of better harmonization of policies and regulations across Africa that would benefit the continent as a whole."








Regulators across the world are developing and testing new policies and regulatory tools, while also adapting existing ones for new purposes, particularly in face of the COVID pandemic. In many cases, the same technologies that challenge traditional regulation also offer many opportunities to reinvent rule making, oversight, inspections, and enforcement.

The AReg4DT program supports the implementation of the Digital Economy for Africa (DE4A) initiative and aims at facilitating regional integration through a common understanding of challenges, opportunities and solutions that can be implemented at the national and regional level, thereby ushering Africa, into the dawn of the single digital market.









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https://www.linkedin.com/in/boutheina-guermazi-8699a35a

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Boutheina Guermazi
Director for Regional Integration for Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, World Bank
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Birgit Pickel
Director-General for Africa in the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
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Lacina Kone
Director General and Chief Executive Officer, Smart Africa
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Join the Conversation

Timothy Mitchell on
Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil










This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 







The unrest in the Arab
world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus
on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic,
political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international
relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has
insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political
dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has
largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt
and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the
Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences
between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced
and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's
analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social
sciences.  In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the
economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the
state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking
technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.







Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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



I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates,
the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The
reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended
to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three
positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the
days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International
Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole
discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in
any field: it is laid out as a
serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not
find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the
way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a
certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations
of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I
have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a
particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something
curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.



However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource
curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had
been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the
problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued
back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to
understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics.
Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with
those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you
would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up.
In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.



But I think, moving from International Relations as a
field to 'globally oriented studies', to
use your phrase, one of the biggest
challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as
a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like
the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local.
Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term
'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define
their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even
national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors
or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense
global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation
states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global
system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of
universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close
inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry
tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small
agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put
themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and
sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in
taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what
it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act
in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.



Now this relates back to the second part of your
question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I
was writing Carbon Democracy there
was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle
East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when
debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it
as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many
countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about
the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call
carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the
increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences
of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as
democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in
particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the
perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the
relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this
inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining
and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a
whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption
that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just
worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns
in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the
world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than
another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here. 





How did
you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?



Well,
I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I
actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was
still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided
that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in
political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of
the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a
student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of
the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important
thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines,
which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of
intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if
there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant
moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next
one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone
who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to
the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in
my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is
probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving
across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the
same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in
another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a
sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.



I
think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I
explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the
specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of
large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern
politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which
I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and
later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt
and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field
site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where
I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships,
that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I
am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I
do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that
are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in
relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped
me as a scholar. 



So
traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set
of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not
necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more
mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving
across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another
sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility
provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more
traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing
about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing
constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with
specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided
both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with
local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like
the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking
of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the
twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and
transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more
recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way
different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention
beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a
discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I
was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to
understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a
form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.



In
sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the
politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter
and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can
muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether
it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And
entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but
arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of
its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of
oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the
anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes
and things and materials.





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



A
couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer
to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical
processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an
investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's
area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a
student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a
willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of
an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but
also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I
think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously
important.



The
other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is
that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to
move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of
improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international
security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other
experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of
field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place
to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile
knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize
from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about
whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the
carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around
the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East,
around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy
elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again
following the Arab Spring.



Against
that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there
is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo,
one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and
classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the
world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the
possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me
those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually
exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I
have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so
I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing
this sort of work.





In which discipline or field would you situate
yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?



I
like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of
them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political
theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology
studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental
studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and
have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I
also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt
for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary
fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I
have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a
deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of
post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to
have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take
advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad
disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of
creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an
archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline,
while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual
disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a
community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic
literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I
also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of
Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of
trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.



Yet
doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually
absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly
possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one
field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the
disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this
and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every
imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In
the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up
to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar
areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early
history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is
something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that
the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of
literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and
that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other
everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the
evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is
something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know
it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working
on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been
interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or
the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a
completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are
actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the
accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on
the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the
enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything
else!





What role does expertise, which is kind of a central
term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the
historical unfolding of modern government?



That
is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is
that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself
as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of
expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which
government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of
public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of
economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy,
climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself
operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields
of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important
ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes
through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others,
that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed,
even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.



But
I think there is another relationship between modes of government and
expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I
wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American
Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that
it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of
power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not
the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated
and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency
called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed
object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a
series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a
sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power
works.



More
recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history
of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as
something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its
existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political
economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th
century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the
history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object
called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the
history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an
apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.



If
you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you
find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately
after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous
political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there
were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a
share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms
of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of
democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western
Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the
way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the
economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this
American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was
radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European
governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation
between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages;
instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole
state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in
the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of
prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European
path after the war, this object outside of
government with its own experts was
created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and
regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is
interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the
state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that
precisely represent what is not the
state, or the sphere of government.





Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures
afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates
how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend.
Can you give an example of how that works?



Let
me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a
simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to
be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th
century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very
strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of
oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set
of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil.
I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic
politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy
determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not
fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin
with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the
emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th
century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a
brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and
possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of
political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for
much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between
the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is
known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy
itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made
possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization;
therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have
changed and made them democratic or something.



That
story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and
drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the
history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of
people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability
to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of
energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the
20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a
supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between
different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of
vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be
routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical
properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to
say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political
struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one
way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku,
which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in
California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical
dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with
this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an
exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented
concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it
flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that
moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent
history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example
of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different
understanding of the politics of oil.





This leads to my next question, which is how do you
speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either
radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do
you get these accusations sometimes?



Yes,
I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear
some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the
literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or
even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a
kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the
technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that
coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged
social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because
such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast:
talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only
interested in the oil once it had already
become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy
people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how
oil becomes money and how you put
together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or
turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to
me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in
them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the
technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so
many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in
different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of
the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences.
It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of
politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be
in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one
finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism
that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance,
there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort
of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept
external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the
model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical
determinism.



The
other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to
some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his
approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself,
there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether
in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th
century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political
economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so
that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has
produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of
labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The
factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences.
The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing
that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories
that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century
capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and
some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and
profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography
continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my
work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in
understanding expertise and modes of power.





How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick
so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be
constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically
reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about. 



I
think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have
approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was
much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on
the colonial era, including my first
book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where
I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come
to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind
on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it,
representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked
in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world
exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern
legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated
world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the
two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature,
material on the other.



Second,
what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind
of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early
work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this
as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary
that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a
term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian
road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to
machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we
would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the
dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost
every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure
versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I
have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science
and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines,
studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as
something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they
realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have
done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So
there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and
Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people
have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only
just discovered.





Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly
decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political
science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a
complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is
an important theme in your work?



I
have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently
looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World
War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam,
constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change
decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that
sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and
sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility
and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for
the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were
all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue
to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has
always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some
German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind
of this large-scale work in Europe at
the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt
had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with
the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam
so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez
Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of
the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the
fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved,
because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of
development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development.
And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the
whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the
excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to
overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of
decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working
with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of
destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly
things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this
desperate attempt by a series of
European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a
certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period
and now they suddenly were being deprived of. 






Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of
what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light
on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which
are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant. 



May
be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and
disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam.
It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the
political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the
Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a
very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with
exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance
with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that
relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from
the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but
it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the
politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not
seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time
operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can
work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term
perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they
function.



The
other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy
in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about
equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels
of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view
in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require
very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more
as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage
of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to
describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the
effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian
democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the
particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the
possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the
Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor
movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was
important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in
industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually
successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And
there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the
state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there
was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around
income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to
raise tax revenues—but around property taxes.
And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just
some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough
that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement.
This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be
useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in
Egypt. 



Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research
include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and
technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other
forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his
current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow
material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional
political theory.  Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he
received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D.
in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined
Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York
University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern
Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the
Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.





Related links:





Faculty Profile at Colombia University
Read
Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum
2008) here (pdf)
Read
Mitchell's The Limits of the State:
Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science
Review 1991) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S.
Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter
from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's The World as Exhibition
(Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf) 



Print version of this Talk (pdf)



  

John Cochrane's blog has always been a favorite of mine. It's provocative. It's entertaining. And it invariably leads me to reflect on a variety of notions I have floating around in my head. In his latest piece,  he asks an interesting question: How does the Fed come up with its inflation forecast? What sort of model might be embedded in the minds of FOMC members? I like the question and the thought experiment. My comments below should not be construed as criticism. Think of them more as thoughts that come to mind in a conversation. (It's more fun to do this in public than in private.)John begins with the observation that while the Fed evidently expects inflation to decline as the Fed's policy rate is increased, at no point in the transition dynamic back to 2% inflation is the real rate of interest very high. To quote John (italics in original): the Fed believes inflation will almost entirely disappear all on its own, without the need for any period of high real interest rates. Of course, this is in sharp contrast with the Volcker disinflation, an episode that demonstrated, in the minds of many, how a persistently high real rate of interest was needed to make inflation go down (some push back in this paper here).John believes that the current inflation was generated in large part by a big fiscal shock in the form of a money transfer (an increased in USTs unsupported by the prospect of higher future taxes). I'm inclined to agree with this view, though surely there other factors playing a role (see here). John asks how this type of shock can be expected to generate a transitory inflation with the real interest rate kept (say) negative throughout the entire transition dynamic. Below, I offer a simple model that rationalizes this expectation. Whether it's the model FOMC members have in their heads, I'm not sure. (Well, I happen to know in the case of two FOMC members, but I won't share this here.)Formally, I have in mind a simple OLG model (see, here). The model is Non-Ricardian (the supply of government debt is viewed as private wealth). The model's properties are more Old Keynesian than New Keynesian. The model is also consistent with Monetarism, except with the supply of base money replaced with the supply of outside assets (i.e., all government securities--cash, reserves, bills, notes and bonds). So, I'm thinking about my model beginning in an hypothetical stationary state. The real economy is growing at some constant rate (say, zero). The supply of outside assets consists of zero interest securities (monetary policy is pegging the nominal interest rate to zero all along the yield curve). This supply of "debt" is also growing at some constant rate. Debt is never repaid--it is rolled over forever. Indeed, the nominal supply of debt is growing forever. New debt is used to finance government spending. The real primary budget deficit is held constant. The government is running a perpetual budget deficit via bond seigniorage; see here. The steady-state inflation rate in this economy is given by the rate of growth of the supply of nominal outside assets. (It is also possible that the inflation rate is determined by shifts in the demand for USTs; see here, for example). The real interest rate (on money) is negative. OK, now let's consider a large fiscal shock in the form of a one-time increase in the supply of outside assets (i.e., a helicopter drop of money that is never reversed).  The effect of this shock is to induce a transitory inflation (a permanent increase in the price-level). An increase in the nominal supply of money at a given interest rate at full employment makes the cost of living go up -- it makes the real debt go down. And oh, by the way, the debt-to-GDP ratio is declining thanks in part to inflation:This is despite the persistent negative real interest rate prevailing in the economy. I mean, what else might one imagine from a one-time injection of money? Is this is what the Fed is thinking? (This is what I'm thinking!) Note: an increase in the interest rate in this model would unleash a disinflationary force, but this would only serve to speed up the transition dynamic. As it turns out, this simple story seems consistent with what I take to be John's preferred theory of inflation. The large fiscal shock here is unaccompanied by the prospect of future primary budget surpluses. The effect is to increase the price level (i.e., a temporary inflation). Maybe the Fed has John's FTPL model in mind? Neither of these stories line up particularly well with the New Keynesian model, which emphasizes interest rate policy as *the* way inflation is controlled. There are, however, many strange things going on in this model. First, while no explicit attention is paid to fiscal policy, the fiscal regime plays a critical role in determining model dynamics (basic assumption is lump-sum taxes and Ricardian fiscal regime). Second, the Taylor principle that is needed to determine a locally unique rational expectations equilibrium is an off-equilibrium credible threat to basically blow the economy up if individuals do not coordinate on the proposed equilibrium (I learned this from John here.)  By the way, Peter Howitt provides a different (and in my view, a more compelling) explanation for the "Taylor principle" here--published a year before Taylor 1993. Given these shortcomings, why are we even using this model as a benchmark? This is another good question. John presumably picks this model because he sees no better alternative for modeling monetary policy via an interest rate rule. If he wants an alternative, he can read my paper above. Or, he can appeal to his own class of models extended to permit a liquidity function for USTs. These models easily accommodate stable inflation at negative real rates of interest. But whether this is how FOMC members organize their thinking, I'm not sure.In any case, John picks an off-the-shelf NK model and assumes that it adequately captures what is in the mind of many FOMC members. Let's see what he does next (Modeling the Fed). He writes: "The Fed clearly believes that once a shock is over, inflation stops, even if the Fed does not do much to nominal interest rates. This is the "Fisherian" property. It is not the property of traditional models. In those models, once inflation starts, it will spiral out of control unless the Fed promptly raises interest rates." [I think he meant "threatens to raise interest rates.]Comment 1: I'm not sure what he means by a "Fisherian" property. (Note: the Fisher equation holds in the OLG model I cited above--though the real rate of interest is not generally fixed in those settings.) Comment 2: Conventional models? I presume he means Woodford's basic NK model. It seems likely to me, however, that FOMC members may have other "conventional" models in their heads -- like the Old Keynesian model or the Old Monetarist model--both of which continue to be taught as standard fare in undergraduate curricula.  OK, so John considers a very basic IS-PC model and considers two alternative hypotheses for how inflation expectations are determined. The first hypothesis is a simple adaptive rule (see also Howitt's work above). The second hypothesis is perfect foresight (rational expectations) -- which, by the way, implicitly embeds knowledge of the Ricardian fiscal regime. Under the adaptive expectations model, inflation explodes. Under the rational expectations hypothesis, inflation largely follows the Fed's actual forecast. Maybe this is what the Fed is thinking? The Fed has rational expectations? Except that I'm not really sure what this means. John does give us a further hint though. He goes on to say "Not only is the Fed rational expectations, neo-Fisherian, it seems to believe that prices are surprisingly flexible!" Right. So the Neo-Fisherian hypothesis is that to get a permanently lower rate of inflation, the Fed must (at least eventually) lower its policy rate (and vice versa to raise the rate of inflation). I've questioned this hypothesis in the past (see here). But what's going on here now? Is John suggesting that the FOMC is made up of closet Neo-Fisherians? Steve Williamson would no doubt be pleasantly surprised. John writes: "The proposition that once the shock is over inflation will go away on its own may not seem so radical. Put that way, I think it does capture what's on the Fed's mind. But it comes inextricably with the very uncomfortable Fisherian implication. If inflation converges to interest rates on its own, then higher interest rates eventually raise inflation, and vice-versa." No, I'm afraid the conclusion that inflation is transitory (even with negative real rates) is NOT inextricably linked to the Neo-Fisherian proposition. It is only inextricably linked this way in a class of economic models that: [1] are pretty bad; and [2] highly unlikely to be in the heads of most FOMC members. 

Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace



This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 






World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)







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



The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.



A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')



My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.



In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.



Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.



The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.



Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.





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



Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.



My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.



Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.



Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.



My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.



Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.



In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.



As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.



Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.



I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.



When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.



I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.



One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.



I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.



This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.

                                    



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



I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.



Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.



The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.





Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?



Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.



The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.



This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.



The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.





Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?



Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).



This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.



But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.

                                                                                                                

Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).



For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.



What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.





You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?

                                                                                                          

The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.



While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.



By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort.  There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.



Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.





You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?



When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.



Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.



Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.



When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.



Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.



An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.



Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.





Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?



Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.



In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.



Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.



A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics. 



My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.



But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.

                                  

Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.





Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?



The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.



Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.



Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.





My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?



American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.



The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.



Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.



The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.



It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.



Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'





Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.





Related links



Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) 
Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf) 









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World
Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution







The global
economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International
Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does
that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems
to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who
denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an
anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he
bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to
advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth
accounts of insiders. In this Talk,
Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic
regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic
crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



If we'd reframe
your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of
the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism
have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have
penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.



This has
happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World
bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of
graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to
American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is
'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they
come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back
home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In
Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing
a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in
key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this
direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in
Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.



I live in the
UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the
government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting
that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are
tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is
only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if
the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being
irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it
is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted
against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to
power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.



The persistence
of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial
crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these
neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In
previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary
case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social
democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the
whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured
on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments
to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not
rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60
percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments
that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by
the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound
budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that
government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of
Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster,
and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse
for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union,
namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as
exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they
call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but
about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very
basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way
down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it
goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run,
and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very
little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about
Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one
small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these
zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically
bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the
overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some
help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.



Yet, one knows
that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One
knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the
question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in
norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this
take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a
real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and
polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement
to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is
now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely
around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if
there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality
at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income
distribution.



Let me explain. The
share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor
income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of
the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider
section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the
profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders
are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If
equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the
population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute
something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the
customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital
markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and
then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the
company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that
dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of
the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in
national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like
this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is
only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility
of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by
using the market against itself, so to speak.





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



I suppose the starting point was really this; my
father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was
twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After
having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very
formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by
the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the
many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular
remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead
and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how
unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also
visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that
great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across
Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or
to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development
Studies in Sussex and  got enrolled for a
PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that
time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied
under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry
textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function
and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this
time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the
middle of the Pacific.



When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced
that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology
thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding
why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did:
a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake,
because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam
Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to
change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state
bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other
related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation
agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was
kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms
of state agencies and then the state as a whole.



Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and
my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted
me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If
in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not,
because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very
different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to
Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk
to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the
published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based
on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the
case. They had never actually talked to
people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would
have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was
quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the
reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing
trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not
want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really
regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the
introduction here) is not well
received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing
the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade
country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.



So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was
that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the
anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I
love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of
anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on
gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier
reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix,
and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see
how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and
that is really not my interest.





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



Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate
training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really
difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say
the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will
likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know
how to think, how to make arguments,
they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing
thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other
disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality,
but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or
Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much
idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of
cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of
left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a
lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that
the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.



Point number two is that I think that there is a huge
premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries,
but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out
to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies:
to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are
working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From
the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE
library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a
student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the
experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it
back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I
think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for
studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in,
experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge
almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to
buy into it.





The relations between states are settled
either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to
understand IR?



Because economics—such as
for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and
incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great
deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other
countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if
you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather
different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help
you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my
constituency.



So, in a way, the way you
framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of
IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather
separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very
powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of
the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like
Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people
were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad
regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men,
concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for
the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the
making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a
living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International
Relations.





Pikkety recently published Capital in the
21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality
between people matter for IR?



Let me comment by invoking
a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade
ago I looked at the figures and if you took the
average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the
average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a
percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels
relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market
exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara
Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates
and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there
is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised
land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies
can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move
pretty quickly across these planes.



So all one has to do—and this
might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this
poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of
getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which
you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are
just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International
Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.





You've done anthropological fieldwork inside
the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in
IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank
is?



First of all, let me say
that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know
inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work.
But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the
IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of
US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are
defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them),
they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to
look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but
Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles
of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it
very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their
shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less
recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have
a very strong influence.



Just to illustrate what the
Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the
Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were
in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of
Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of
where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk
out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as
Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said
something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted
with David Lipton.



Just to take another
example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a
person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the
State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or
a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who
appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration,
or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in
a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin
America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the
Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a
protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is
very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he
is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat
about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about
what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about
what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these
personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US
Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing
a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be
doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just
a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years
or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does
not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it
says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take
care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.



So the US wants to keep the
presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on
the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but
provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In
the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans
have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous
sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short
of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round
of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund
depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months
terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's
ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what
was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the
IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is,
resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they
actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with
one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons,
who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look,
the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you
want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects
in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people,
whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way,
way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House
is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond
this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or
producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is
hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a
loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto
in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.



One response of the big
developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the
Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing
number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good
thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking
after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change.
In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World
we have today.



You engage thoroughly with economics and
economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to
economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys
into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it
wrong. Where do you stand in this?



If you take the example of
how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of
rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to
right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large,
and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must
apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic
proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from
propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing
way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro
foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics.
So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?



This leads us to one
fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be
traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th
century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics
on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and
Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with
terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in
economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of
economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical
economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith
thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working,
revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never
separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point
about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was
that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So
economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not
production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with
each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange
rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law
in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the
movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the
gas. So why did they make that analogy?



The point of likening of
individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the
following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of
ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should
we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of
individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations
of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the
question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the
street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?'
And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and
questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a
way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea
of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those
moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of
Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to
capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics,
professional economists work.





Haven't specific fields, like development
economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these
weaknesses in economic theory?



Let me root my answer again
in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in
practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes
visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for
roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all
orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and
read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am
thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look
at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that
much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in
terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is
really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF
loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it
is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington
Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production,
upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export
diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for
experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these
regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to
open the rest of the world to their markets.



In the 80s there were a lot
of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work,
promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But
then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of
people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth
people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as
experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good
governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad
experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten
into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as
roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which
then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole
conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this
direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind
of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to
reroute the global system of economic governance.



So after the 1980s, the
Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic
development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our
dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in
terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory,
but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality,
because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can
feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which
involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.



But then the most recent
turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank
and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent
infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the
West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing
bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building
financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of
the growth of developing countries.





Last question. Adam Smith seems to be
constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?



I kind of engage in a
critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe
his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word
summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually
wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth
of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will
tell you the significance of them. He said:



'Little else is
requisite to carry a state to the highest degree
of opulence from the lowest
barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable
administration of justice; all the rest being
brought about by the natural course of things.'



So I am struck by how today
many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some
qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have
to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more
modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory
Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council
of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very
popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to
say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy
Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also
begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of
elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my
point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front
of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these
centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea
of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word
statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have
to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.







Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of
Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow
Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000.
Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage
Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in
Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank
1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village
Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988,
1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government
in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American
Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.



Related links





Faculty profile at LSE
Read Wade's The Piketty
phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Capitalism
and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Rethinking
Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here
(pdf) 
Read Wade's Bringing the
State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Is
Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Creating
Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)