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

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

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

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

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Blogbeitrag#1129. August 2013

Theory Talk #57: Siba Grovogui

Blog: Theory Talks

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

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

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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