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






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





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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




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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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





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



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



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





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





Related
links


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












Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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Siddharth Mallavarapu on International
Asymmetries, Ethnocentrism, and a View on IR from India












How is the rise of the BRICs in the international
political and economic system reflected in our understanding of that system?
One key insight is that the discipline of International Relations that has
emanated from the northern hemisphere is far less 'international' than is
widely thought. Scholars from the 'Global South' increasingly raise important
challenges to the provincialism of IR theory with a universal pretense.
Siddharth Mallavarapu's work has consistently engaged with such questions. In
this Talk, Mallavarapu, amongst
others, elaborates on IR's ethnocentrism, the multitude of voices in the Global
South, and why he rather speaks of a 'voice from India' rather than an 'Indian
IR theory'.




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?



One of the things I constantly contend with in my work
is to think of ways of how we can widen our notion of the international. IR has been too closely linked to the fortunes of
the major powers, and this has been to our detriment, because it has
impoverished our sense of international. I think the spirit of what I contend
with is best captured by what Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his book Globalectics:
Theory and Politics of Knowing concerns himself with, namely '…the
organization of literary space and the politics of knowing'. My interest is to
grapple with the manner in which the discipline of International Relations in
its dominant mainstream idiom orchestrates and administers intellectual space
and the implications this carries for the broader politics of knowledge. Simply
put, the principal challenge is to confront various species of ethnocentrism –
particularly Anglo-American accents of parochialism in the mainstream account
of International Relations.



I am also keenly sensitive to some disciplinary biases
and prejudices, which I think sometimes take on tacit forms and sometimes more
explicit forms, and in which provincial experiences are passed off as universal
experiences. The whole question of 'benchmarking' is problematic, in that a
benchmark is set by one, and others are expected to measure up to that
benchmark. Then there is the question of certain theories, for example the idea
that hegemony is desirable from the perspective of international stability –
think of the Hegemonic Stability Theory in the 1970s, or the Democratic Peace Theory that assumes that liberal democracy is an unsurpassed
political form from the perspective of peace. Then there is human rights
advocacy of a particular kind, and the whole idea of the 'Long Peace' applied
to the Cold War years. In reality, this was far from a 'long peace' for many
countries in the Third World during the same era.



I am also interested right now in the issue of the
evolution of IR theory, and was really intrigued by the September 2013 issue of
the EuropeanJournal of International Relations, with its focus on 'the End of International Relations Theory': I find
this fascinating, because just at a time when there are new players or re-emerging and re-surfacing
players in the international system, there is a move to delegitimize IR Theory
itself. So I am curious about the conjuncture and the set of sociologies of
knowledge that inform particular terms and turns in the discipline.



My response to this challenge
is to consciously work towards inserting other voices, traditions and
sensibilities in the discipline to problematize its straightforward and
simplistic understanding of large chunks of the world. My work is informed by
what international relations praxis looks
like in other places and how it is locally interpreted in those contexts. There
are gaps in mainstream narratives and I am interested in finding ways to create
space for a more substantive engagement with other perspectives by broadening
the disciplinary context. This is not merely a matter of inclusive elegance but
a matter of life and death because poor knowledge as evident from the
historical record generates disastrous political judgments that have already
resulted in considerable loss of human life, often worst impacting the former
colonies.



The global south holds a particular attraction for me
in this context, especially given its often problematic representations in
mainstream IR discourse. The underlying premise here is that the discipline of
IR will stand to be enriched by drawing on a much wider repertoire of human
experiences than it currently does. The normative imperative is to nudge us all
in the direction of being more circumspect before we pronounce or pass quick
and often harsh political assessments about sights, sounds, smells and
political ecologies we are unfamiliar with. IR as a discipline needs to reflect
the considerable diversity.  



My doctoral research on the role of the International Court
of Justice advisory opinion rendered in July 1996 on the legality of the threat
or use of nuclear weapons provided an opportunity to probe this diversity
further. While advancing a case for categorical illegality of nuclear use under
all circumstances, Judge Christopher Gregory Weeramantry discusses at length the multicultural bases of
international humanitarian law. In doing so, he combines knowledge of world
religions, postcolonial histories and canonical international law to frame his
erudite opinion, which displays a thoughtful engagement with often neglected or
obscured sensibilities.



These examples can be exponentially multiplied. Such a
sentiment is most succinctly captured by Chinua Achebe in Home and
Exile where he argues that '…my hope for the twenty-first [century] is that
it will see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world's
peoples'. It most critically calls for '…the process of 're-storying' peoples
who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession'. I would treat this as an important charter or
intellectual map for anybody embarking on the study of International Relations
today. I would also like to add that this storytelling would inevitably
encounter the categories and many avatars
of race, class, gender and nationality crisscrossing and intersecting in all
sorts of possible combinations generating a whole host of political outcomes as
well.  



The skewed politics of knowledge is most evident when
it comes to theory with a big 'T' in particular. Most theories of International
Relations emanate from the Anglo-American metropole and little from elsewhere.
This is not because of an absence of theoretical reflection in other milieus but
due rather to a not so accidental privileging of some parts of experiential
reality over others. IR has been too caught up with the major powers. I could
think of conscious efforts to theorize both in the past and in the present
elements of reality hidden from conventional vantage points. One recent illustration
of social and political theorizing from the context I am more familiar with is an
account by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai titled The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. There
are on-going theoretical engagements in Africa, the Arab world, Asia and South
America reflecting an intellectual ferment both within and outside of these
societies. International Relations as a discipline has to find ways of
explicitly engaging these texts and relating it to prevailing currents in world
politics rather than carry on an elaborate pretence of their non-existence. I
am more troubled by claims of an 'end of International Relations theory' just
at a moment when the world is opening up to new political possibilities
stemming from the projected growth in international influence of parts of Asia,
Africa, the Arab world and South America. IR has to move beyond its obsession
of focusing on the major powers and seriously democratize its content. The
terms 'global' or 'international' cannot be a monopoly or even an oligopoly.
Such a view has severely impoverished our understanding of the contemporary world.





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



I cannot really claim that this was a neatly planned
trajectory. I stumbled upon the discipline by chance not design. My initial
curiosity about the world of social cognition emerged from a slice of my medical
history. When I was at school in my early teens, I developed a condition referred
to as Leucoderma or Vitiligo which involved skin depigmentation. I enjoyed
writing from an early stage and recall recording my observations of the world
around me in a piece titled Etiology
Unknown borrowing language from the doctor's diagnosis. I recall an urgency
to comprehend and make sense of what I perceived then as a fast changing world
where old certitudes were dissolving on a daily basis. I felt an outsider at
some remove from my earlier self and it gave me on retrospect a distinct
vantage point to witness the world around me. It was impacting who I thought I
was and thereby compelled me to confront issues of identity – individual and
social. An extremely supportive family made all the difference during these
years.



The turmoil and confusion in those years led me to
develop a deeper interest in understanding more loosely why people reacted in
particular sorts of ways to what was in medical terms merely a cosmetic change.
It also led me to informally forge community whenever I saw anybody else experiencing
similar states of being. I also internalized one of the first ingredients of
good social science – the capacity to be empathetic and put ourselves in others
shoes. I learnt that the discipline of Sociology among the available choices in
my milieu came closest to allowing me to pursue these concerns more
systematically further. I applied to a Sociology master's programme after my
undergraduate years at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, but I had also
applied simultaneously to the International Relations programme since in my
understanding it after all concerned the wider world – an extension of scale
but similar I imagined in terms of the canvas of concerns. The numbers in India
are large, the competition is stiff: I made it to the IR programme but did not
make it to the Sociology programme.



Having got there, I had some outstanding influences,
and I soon realized that one could also think about issues of identity (then
cast by me in terms of simple binaries – home and the external world, the
relationship of inside and outside, victors and the vanquished) in the
discipline of IR. I decided to stick the course and delve into these questions
more deeply while keeping up with a broader interest in the social sciences.



I could list a few influences that were critical at
various stages of my academic biography: at high school, an economics teacher S.
Venkata Lakshmi was very encouraging and positive and confirmed my intuitive
sense that I would enjoy the social sciences. Subsequently at college I had in
Father Ambrose Pinto a fine teacher of Political Science. He would take us on
small field excursions to observe first hand issues such as caste conflicts in
a neighbouring village, and all that helped me develop a sharper sense of the
political which moved away from the textbook and was strongly anchored in the local
context.



At the graduate level of study, Kanti Bajpai who later also became my mentor and advisor in the doctoral programme
exercised an enormous influence as a role model. I was convinced that a life of
the mind is worth aspiring and working towards once I came into contact with
him in the classroom. He also exposed me to all the basic building blocks of an
academic life – reading, writing, researching, teaching and publishing,
demonstrating at all times both patience and unparalleled generosity. We have
collaborated on two edited volumes on International
Relations in India and I continue to greatly value an enduring friendship.



For over a decade, I have also had the good fortune of
coming into contact with B.S. Chimni who is an exemplary scholar in the Third World Approaches to
International Law (TWAIL) tradition. It has been a great joy bouncing off ideas and discussing
at length various facets of International Relations, International Law and
Political Theory together over the years. I have learnt much from this rich and
continued association. In 2012 we worked jointly on an edited book titled International Relations: Perspectives for
the Global South.



I have also learnt (and continue to do so) from my
students both at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and at the South Asian
University (SAU). At JNU, I made my beginnings and continue to take some pride
in being intellectually home spun at one of the foundational and premier
crucibles of International Relations scholarship in India. I have also
thoroughly enjoyed my interactions over the years with the students drawn from
diverse backgrounds. At SAU, I have in the space of a short period been exposed
to some fine students from across the South Asian region. I have often been
impressed by their understanding of politics and on occasion have marvelled at
their demonstration of a maturity beyond their years. There is much I learn
from them particularly from their insider narratives of the unique political
experiences and trajectories of their specific countries.



Himadeep Muppidi has also been a remarkable influence
in terms of clarifying my thinking about the workings of the global IR episteme.
His receptivity to hitherto neglected intellectual inheritances from outside
the mainstream and most evidently his capacity to write with soul, passion and
character while retaining a deep suspicion of the 'objectivity' fetish in the
social sciences has alerted me to a whole new metaphysics and aesthetic of
interpreting IR. The thread that runs through all these interests and
influences is firstly the issue of context, and secondly the question of agency
–what it meant to be marginal in some sense, how could one think about
theorizing questions relating to dispossession, relating to a certain degree of
marginality– and also the broader issue of the politics of knowledge itself: of
how certain attitudes and concepts seem to obscure or deface certain
conditions, which seem to be quite prevalent.



I have also found excellent academic conversationalists
with sometimes differing perspectives who help sharpen my arguments
considerably. I would like to make special mention of Thomas Fues and the fascinating
global governance school that he offers intellectual stewardship to in Bonn. In
the years to come, I look forward to further intellectual collaborations with
scholars from Brazil and South Africa and other parts of South America and
Africa as well as the Arab world.





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



The key without a doubt is curiosity. I do my best to
feed that curiosity as a teacher. I also think Gerardo Munck and Richard
Snyder's counsel and interviews in their book, Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics are a useful
resource for students wanting to study International Relations. I also feel
strongly that classics need to be read and engaged with, by bringing them into
play in our contemporary dilemmas. I find that many of the questions we ask
today are not necessarily entirely new questions: there is a history to them
and there has been some careful thought given to them in the past, so it is
important to partake of this inheritance.



Then there is language: it is vital for students to
break out of one particular region or one particular set of concerns which flow
from a limited context, and in this way to become willing to engage with other
contexts. In this sense, language learning potentially opens up other worlds. I also believe that some exposure to quantitative methods is important:
you need to be able
to both contextualize and interpret data with some degree of confidence and not
overlook them when approaching texts. Not
everybody may choose it but we need to make the distinction between The Signal and the Noise as Nate Silverreminds us. I have found Marc Trachtenberg's The Craft of International History (chapter 1 in PDF here) a very useful text in providing
some very practical advice in fine tuning our research designs to weave the
past into our present. D.D. Kosambi's essay on 'combining methods' (PDF here) still
provides important clues to thinking creatively about method.



I also think it is important for students to avoid the
temptations of insularity and also pose questions in a fashion that allows them
to explore the workings of these questions in diverse settings. They should be open to a
diversity of methods from different disciplines such as ethnography, and
develop a deeper historical sensitivity, all these are crucial to shaping up as
a good scholar.



In sum, the importance of classics, fieldwork and
language acquisition cannot be emphasized sufficiently. Classics bring us back
to refined thought concerning enduring questions, language opens up other
worlds, and field work compels one to at least temporarily inhabit the trenches,
dirty your hands and acquire an earthy sense of the issues at hand.





Given the
importance you attach to the learning of language, among other things, and the
linguistic diversity that characterises India, do you often perceive language
to be a barrier to understanding?



I think language works in two ways. On the one hand,
each language has a specific manner of framing issues and a specific set of
sensibilities associated with it which in some respects is quite unique.
However, languages also lend themselves to different cross-cultural
interpretations and adaptations. Kristina S. Ten in an evocative piece titled 'Vehicles for Story: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on Defining African Literature,Preserving Culture and Self' maps some key lines of an enduring debate. Thiong'o
has a particularly strong position on this question of language: he says he no
longer wants to write in the English language, but instead in his native Gikuyu,
as well as Swahili. He argues that language has to do with memory, has to do
with what he calls a soul, and he maintains that language hierarchies are very
real and that we must contribute to enriching our own pools of language to
begin with, if we are to contribute to a much wider, global repertoire of
languages. In contrast, Chinua Achebe whom I mentioned earlier, very often wrote
in English and held the position that it was important to be accessible to more
people and to reach diverse audiences who would not necessarily be from his
home country. He said it was possible to use a language like English and permeate
it with local texture, wisdom and pulse – something he has exemplified in his
own work. I consider his writings a testimony to how well that can be done.



So there is a bit of a divide in terms of how one can
look at this question of language, but teaching in India I know that there are
students who may be very bright but who are constrained by the fact that they
have not had the same access to English schools, and therefore are restricted
to the vernacular. These students may have some very good ideas, but they feel disadvantaged
by the fact that their command of the English language is not sufficient to
guarantee close attention to what they wish to say. Some work hard to overcome
these challenges and meet with considerable success. While I think it is
wonderful to learn another language, it does not need to entail a diffidence or
neglect of one's own native language or any other vernacular language. My
impression is that if unimaginatively pursued something is lost in the process
and students end up feeling diffident and apologetic about their native language
which is entirely undesirable. I believe therefore that while one should enthusiastically
embrace new languages, the challenge is to accomplish this without unconsciously
obscuring one's native tongue. Having said that, all of us in India are keen to
go to English language schools. Vernacular languages have often lost out in the
process. So there is something to be said about this concern about language. We
have to tread carefully and remain attentive to how language hierarchies are
positioned and deployed for advancing particular species of knowledge claims.





From the
language issues flow conceptual questions: Asia is a Western construct, and
South Asia an extension of that. You reluctantly use this term, South Asia, in
what you call shorthand, and similarly terms "nation" and "state". How can we
break away from these concepts if we don't have a new vocabulary?



This really flows from the fact that IR is still very
much an ethnocentric construct. We are also suggesting in the same breath that
there is a particular form in which most concepts and categories tend to be
employed. I think IR language is imbued at least partly with the vocabulary of
the hegemon or of the dominant powers, so that it shares with the area studies' legacy the political connotations that are still very much with us. One
way that I try to break away from this when I introduce students to these
concepts and categories is by focusing on the lineage and the broader
intellectual history and etymology of concepts which come into play in IR.
Students are in any case acutely aware of the fact that there is a strong area
studies tradition which has mapped the world in a particular way which was not an
innocent discursive formation by any stretch of imagination. They also
recognize that this is not the only framing possible. The challenge for us is
of course to introduce new concepts and categories. I noticed for instance that
South Asia has become 'Southern Asia' for some strategic commentators (StevenA. Hoffmann among others) because 'Southern Asia' also includes China. However,
when it is done from the perspective of strategy there are other interests intertwined
such as specific geopolitical assessments.



What I try to do, rather, is to draw on the deeper
histories within the region itself, in order to arrive at concepts and
conceptions which are more germane to our context. I don't think I've succeeded
in this project as yet, but one of the reasons why I think it's important to
historicise these elements and even categories is to open up the possibility of
thinking about different imaginaries and along with that different categories.
I don't want to call it an alternative vocabulary, because I think that some
sensibilities have been given short shrift in history, and some provincial
experiences have more successfully masqueraded as universal experiences. Therefore,
part of the challenge is to call that bluff, while another part of the
challenge is to reconstruct and offer fresh perspectives. These may even be
questions about traditional issues such as order or justice, questions of
political authority, political rule or legitimacy. These are questions which
are of concern to all societies though individual responses may not echo the
language and slants of conventional IR theory. However, they may throw up some
sophisticated formulations on these very issues. A part of the challenge for
the IR scholar, then, is to recover and bring these ideas into the sinews of the
mainstream IR academia.



It is equally important to avoid any sort of nativism,
or to suggest that this is necessarily 'the best' approach, but to widen the
inventory before moving on to stimulating a real conversation between divergent
conceptions. We must avoid falling into the trap of what Ulrich Beck among
others has referred to as 'methodological nationalism'. I am by no means
suggesting that there is 'an Indian theory' of IR, but what I am curious about
is how the world is viewed from this particular location. That is quite
different from suggesting that there is a national project or a national school
of IR. I think that distinction needs to be made more subtly and needs to come
through more clearly, but one of the projects I am currently involved in is the
chronicling of a disciplinary history of IR in India and what that tells us
about Indians and their readings of the world outside their home. In that
process, I ask what the key issues that animated particularly an earlier
generation of scholars - how did they present these ideas and why did they
avoid using certain forms of presentation and framing? What were some of the
conspicuous presences and nonappearances in their work? Exploring these sorts
of issues will lead us forward by, firstly, bringing to bear all these pieces
of work which I feel have been ignored or have not received their due, and secondly,
by showing that there is a fair amount of diversity of thinking even in the
earlier generations of IR scholarship. The intent is to avoid a monolithic
conception of IR that emerges from India. I will have to make this point much
more clearly and emphatically in the future, and hope that my focus on
disciplinary history will contribute to some critical ground clearing. Similar
inventories of IR scholarship need to be assembled in different locations from
Africa, South America, other parts of Asia and the Arab world.



Many of these projects then also link up to very
practical questions. One of the issues that is of interest to me in this
context is that of South-South cooperation, such as for instance the IBSA Dialogue Forum, or the grouping known as BRICS, or the broader forum of
the G-20. There is evidence that the traditional structures and ways of doing
things are increasingly suspect and being viewed with suspicion by some actors
within the international system. It is therefore more important now to reopen
some of these questions and to think afresh about such things as institutional
design: what does it mean to be talking about "democratising international
relations"? How can we think of more inclusive and legitimate institutions? How
can we think about ways in which we can cooperate for the provision of global
public goods, but in a manner which is historically more legitimate and fair?
How can we address previous asymmetries that are not necessarily going to just
disappear? How do we deal with old power structures and their residual
influences in terms of the Westphalian state system? What legacy has been
enshrined for instance in the Bretton Woods institutions and what has that
legacy meant? What happened to non-alignment? Vijay Prashad chronicles
vividly the promise and unfulfilled promise of the non-aligned movement in
his fascinating account titled The Darker
Nations: A People's History of the Third World. How the past plays out in
terms of contemporary global governance questions and arrangements is fundamental
to my research interests. I have recently intervened on the Responsibility to
Protect (R2P) doctrine and its practice. I have been rather critical arguing that it
cannot be disassociated from a longer history of interventionism by the major
powers in the global south however benign its dressing. A thread that runs
through my work is to demonstrate how historical asymmetry continues to manifest
in terms of how the contemporary international system is structured. And I ask if
we are to arrive at a more legitimate, inclusive and effective international
system, then what are the mechanisms and steps which we need to work towards?





What do you
imagine that process might look like? Do we need to return to a 'world of
villages' (the 1300s) before we can reinvent IR, the national and the global?
Do we need micro histories before we can reassemble a bigger history or is a
subtle shift possible?



There are two levels on which this can happen: on one
level the changes that seem to work are incremental changes and not
lock-stock-and-barrel fundamental changes. In terms of scale, different
scholars do different things. Some scholars are interested in micro histories,
others are interested in macro histories and asking the big questions.



I imagine both these projects are important and there
should be more scholars from the global south as well who ask the big macro questions.
What has happened for too long is that we have relegated this responsibility to
the traditional post Second World War major powers and they have treated it as
natural to offer us macro-historical narratives and pictures. I think scholars
from the global south need now to attend to both tasks: to write good micro
histories as well as reframe the larger questions of macro history. I would add
that normative concerns such as the content and feasibility of global justice needs
also to be an integral part of contemporary international relations
scholarship. For instance, it would be fair to ask that in a world of plenty,
why do so many people go hungry?



So if you were to ask me about my dreams and my hopes,
I still think that the 1955 Bandung Conference and subsequent nonalignment visions
remain unfinished business. I hope that within the span of the current
generation there is greater egalitarianism accomplished in the international
system and ultimately a balance not just in terms of what Achebe called the stories
of the world, but also in terms of actual institutional designs and political outcomes.
This should translate into much better provision of various public goods to global
citizenry with special attention to those who have been historically
disadvantaged. For assorted reasons there have been deep asymmetries within the
international system which have persisted and resulted in diminishing the life
chances and collective self-esteem of various peoples in the global south. There
is an urgent need to both acknowledge and remedy the situation in the world we
live in.





In your
experience, what is the role of the IR scholar in India in relation to the
foreign policy establishment and the policy makers?



It is quite hard to find traction of one's ideas in
terms of any influence of scholars or groups of scholars on the social or
political establishment. Overall I would say that academia has for  a long time not been taken seriously by the
foreign policy establishment, and that has more to do with the institutional
structure where there is a pecking order and the bureaucracy sees itself as
being better informed. Even in academic conference settings, one could periodically
expect a practitioner of foreign policy to argue that they know best having
been present at a particular negotiation or at the outbreak, duration and
conclusion of any recent episode in diplomatic history. This does not in reality
translate into the best knowledge because there is the possibility that besides
the immediate detail, the absence of a larger historical context or even
unaccounted variables in terms of the contemporary political forces at work
during that moment could be blind spots in the narrative. It is fair to say
therefore that the influence of academia on the Indian foreign policy
establishment by and large has tended to be minimal. However, one could make
the argument today that there are some early stirrings of changes in the offing.




Quite evidently, the Indian Foreign Service is far too
miniscule for a country of India's size and desired influence in the
international system. There is a perceived need from within the foreign policy
establishment to draw on expertise from elsewhere and on occasion they do turn
to the academia to invite counsel on specific issues. From the perspective of
the IR academic, it is perhaps equally important to be not too close to the
corridors of power as it could alter the incentive structure to the detriment
of independent opinion making for securing short or long term political
patronage.





Siddharth Mallavarapu is currently Associate
Professor and Chairperson at the Department of International Relations at the South
Asian University in New Delhi. He is on deputation from the School of
International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He completed his doctoral
thesis on the politics of norm creation in the context of an Advisory Opinion
rendered by the International Court of Justice in 1996 on nuclear weapon threat
or use. This culminated in his first book, Banning
the Bomb: The Politics of Norm Creation. His principal areas of academic
focus include international relations theory, intellectual histories of the
global south, disciplinary histories of IR, global governance debates and more
recently the implications of recent developments in the field of cognition on
the social sciences. Mallavarapu retains a special interest in issues related
to the politics of knowledge and examines the claims advanced in the discipline
of International Relations through this perspective. His immediate teaching
commitments include a graduate course on 'Cognition and World Politics' and a
doctoral level course on 'Advanced Research Methods'. He has co-edited (with
Kanti Bajpai) two books on recent Indian contributions to International
Relations theory. In 2012 along with B.S. Chimni, he co-edited International Relations: Perspectives for
the Global South.





Related links

Faculty Profile



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Read
Mallavarapu's Dissent of Judge
Weeramantry (2006 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read
Mallavarapu's Indian
Thinking in International Relations here (pdf)
Read
Mallavarapu's Because
of America here (pdf)
Read
Mallavarapu's Nuclear
Detonations: Contemplating Catastrophe here (pdf)


Print version of this Talk (pdf)