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Sam Levey reminded me of Kalecki's 1943 article on the political aspects of full employment. This a very interesting and thought-provoking paper. I enjoyed it enough to offer my critique of it.
The paper starts by taking as given what Kalecki calls the doctrine of full employment. The basic idea is that the private sector, left to its own devices, is prone to Keynesian aggregate demand failures (see here for game-theoretic interpretation). The remedy for these spontaneously-occurring "coordination failures," is a government spending program that acts, or stands ready to act, as private demand begins to falter.
Kalecki starts his paper off by asserting that by 1943, the doctrine was widely accepted by most economists. It seems clear that Kalecki views the doctrine to be self-evidently true.
But if this is the case, then this poses a problem. If the doctrine is so obviously true, why then are there still economists who oppose it? And if the idea is so self-evident, why are so many "captains of industry" reluctant to accept it? As Kalecki admits (pg. 324), this attitude is not easy to explain. After all, depressions are bad for business and businesses collectively should welcome any intervention that restores the economy to full employment.
The problem, as he sees it, is a political one. While the "economic experts" that disavow the doctrine may believe in their own theories, however poor they may be, he notes that "obstinate ignorance is usually a manifestation of underlying political motives." He doesn't say exactly what these political motives are, but he notes that these "economic experts" are, or have been, closely connected with banking and industry. But if this is the case, then the question turns to what motivates industry leaders to block interventions that they know will be good for industry?
He lists the following three reasons.
[1] Absent full employment policy the "state of confidence" will produce business cycles. Under laisser-faire then, industry leaders can credibly use this fact to exert a powerful indirect control over government policy.
[2] Supporting obviously beneficial public sector investments leads to a slippery slope. The government may wish to encroach in other areas in competition with private enterprise.
[3] In a perpetually full employment economy, the threat of unemployment vanishes as a discipline device for employers (see also here). As well, the social position of the boss would be undermined and the self assurance and class consciousness of the working class would grow, leading to political instability.
What to make of this? Well, I'm not sure. The first reason asserts that "business leaders" are willing to plumb the depths of economic depression every once in a while in exchange for political power. He doesn't actually say what this political power buys them. But whatever it buys them, I wonder whether it might not be purchased more cheaply through more conventional means?
The second reason doesn't seem plausible to me. Why wouldn't the private sector be willing to support infrastructure projects that benefit their interests directly? Was there any serious industry opposition, say, to the Federal Highway Act of 1956? And if there was, was it because of a fear that the project might succeed too well, an outcome that would encourage the government to become more adventurous in other arenas?
The third reason also seems weak to me. It is true, Kalecki writes, that profits would be higher under full employment, "but 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated by the business leaders than profits." First, the idea of unemployment as a discipline device only needs a constant low level of unemployment to work (Shapiro and Stiglitz, AER 1984 "Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device;" see their reply here to a critique.) A decade-long Great Depression seems like an awfully high price to pay for "worker discipline." And as for promoting political stability, I think it is understood that events like the Great Depression, or even the Great Recession for that matter, promote political instability (which even Kalecki mentions in the article).
To sum up, Kalecki asks a great question. Collectively, we are all better off materially in the absence of economic depressions. We know--in principle, at least--how to prevent major economic depressions (I'm not talking about regular "small time" business cycles here.) But if so, why are interventions like the Obama stimulus program met with such bitter opposition in some quarters? For that matter, the TARP intervention--a "bailout" program aimed at stabilizing the financial sector--was also met with vocal opposition, especially from Main Street. Is this really all just a concern over "moral hazard?"
Maybe there's just a suspicion that these interventions, however good they may sound on paper, work out in practice simply as ways to redistribute income to undeserving, but squeaky wheels. I overheard a political commentator on NPR the other day remark that in economic and political negotiations, "if you're not at the table, then you're likely on the menu." I suppose it's easy to say what we need in this case is better representation at the table. How to do this? I'm all ears.
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by Adrian Schlegel The year 2020 might fill our descendants' history books with the rampant phenomena that emerged around the COVID-19 pandemic. The global health crisis, aggravating social inequalities, political authoritarianism, gender-based discrimination and economic fragility might be few aspects that would serve as representational bullet points of currently lived...
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Unless you've been hiding under a rock these past few months, headlines about how the PRC is cracking down on its most lucrative companies--Internet-based services, video games, online education, and the rest--have dominated business news. This crackdown is ostensibly in the name of maintaining social order--not letting inequality get out of hand, not getting young people hooked on mindless games, and so forth. This social engineering is most evident in new rules aiming to restrict hours spent by those under 18 on video games to no more than three. So far, the largest victims of this erstwhile Xi Jinping-organized socialist putsch have been local firms. However, those feared to be next in the firing line are foreign purveyors of luxury goods. Are they next in line in being styled as "enemies of the people"?Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped up his call for "common prosperity," sending shudders through luxury goods vendors, which worry that China's rich will not be able to splurge on $3,000 bags. The fear was palpable on the stock market last week. Shares of Paris-listed Kering, owner of the Gucci brand, slumped 17%. Switzerland's Richemont, the company behind such names as Cartier and Piaget, sank 14%. LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Hermes slid 13% and 8%. Makers of high-end cars were hit as well, with Porsche down 10% and Ferrari 6%.The catalyst was Xi's call for "common prosperity" as part of "high-quality economic development" last week at a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs. The committee called for adjusting "excessive incomes" and redistributing wealth that has become overly concentrated in the hands of a small number of people.Veteran China commentator George Magnus (ex-UBS) I believe has it right when he says the current crackdown has more to do with the Communist Party maintaining control than any sort of re-commitment to socialist principles. Insofar as the likes of Alibaba and Tencent were gaining more and more of the "mindshare" of the Chinese people, they posed a threat to Communist Party fealty. Hence, they had to be knocked down to size to ensure that no other gods would be placed before the Party.My belief is that Western luxury brands are not as vulnerable for this reason: while they may symbolize the wrong things like conspicuous consumption, they do not really pose a threat to the control that the Party has on various aspects of Chinese life--political, economic, social or technological. Ironically, it's the domestic tech giants who pose more of those kinds of threats, hence the recent actions.
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Hello, Fully Automated friends! For your coronavirus lockdown listening pleasure, we are today releasing a really special episode. Our guest is Dr. Magnus Paulsen Hansen, who is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, at Roskilde University. Magnus researches the role of ideas and evaluation in the legitimation of welfare state transformations. But he is also a bit of a Foucault ninja. And he is joining us today to discuss a question that has vexed me for a long time: was Foucault a neoliberal?
Veteran listeners may recall the last time we discussed this issue, when we had Mark GE Kelly on the show, all the way back in Episode 2! But I wanted to get Magnus on the show to go a little deeper into some of these arguments, as its a debate that doesn't seem to be going away. In 2015, Magnus published an article in the journal Foucault Studies, entitled Foucault's Flirt? Neoliberalism, the Left and the Welfare State; a Commentary on La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault and Critiquer Foucault. For me, it stands as one of the most exhaustively researched and argued rebuttals of the contention, by Daniel Zamora, and other fellow travelers (see also here), that Foucault bears some kind of intellectual responsibility for the rise of neoliberal thought.
Honestly, I've always been a little alarmed by the argument that Foucault was a neoliberal. Its not so much the idea itself that offends me, as the slipshod nature of the way the argument is made. With a strong tendency towards ad hominem argumentation, and little consideration for Foucault's core teachings on power, the argument appears to be quite ideologically driven. Often, it seems to boil down simply to the argument that Foucault was some sort of intellectual magpie, and all too easily distracted by shiny objects. Zamora and his fellow travelers claim that Foucault was "seduced" by the basic model of freedom offered by neoliberal thought, and that he was thus blinded to its more disciplinary tendencies. Given Foucault's prestige and influence among the left, this was an abdication from his intellectual duty, weakening the left just at the moment of Reagan and Thatcher's arrival.
In this interview, we discuss the danger of looking for "hidden" or "unconscious" intentions in an author, and the idea that such intentions might relate to any conclusion about an author's politics. We discuss the "best case" defense of the claim that Foucault was somehow seduced by neoliberal thought, and the way this argument often gets linked in an under-nuanced way to Foucault's critique of the post-war welfare state. We also explore the various ways in which Foucault, while often categorized as a libertarian, with anti-state proclivities, was equally opposed to anarchist theoretics of the state, going even so far as to refer to them as a form of "state phobia" — something that is especially interesting think about today, in light of Agamben's recent interventions on Coronavirus measures as amplifying permanent state of exception (I discussed this at length in the intro to our last episode, with Garnet Kindervater).
In the face of such weak evidence, we should note that Foucault in no way accepted or endorsed the idea that he was himself a neoliberal. To the contrary, as Magnus notes, there is a strong cautionary voice in Foucault's writings on neoliberalism. Indeed, he appears to argue that it foreshadows the dawn of a new and sinister mode of political power; at the moment of neoliberalism's birth, Foucault was warning that neoliberal theory imagines itself installing a "permanent economic tribunal" and becoming a hegemonic "model of social relations and of existence itself." Certainly, this is not to say Foucault's work has no blind spots when it comes to the question of what neoliberal theory would later become. One common objection to Foucault in this sense is his failure to anticipate the disciplinary aspects of contemporary neolibera...
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Addled horses may be the least of horse racing's worries if the sport's subsidies take a hit.As a casual follower of horse racing, I was intrigued by the legendary horse trainer Bob Baffert being barred from participating in the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, due to doping. Baffert has already been cited for doping a number of times, but this time is the most noteworthy, just coming off a Kentucky Derby victory in the sport's most prestigious event. As it turns out, horse racing--in the United States at least--is a dying sport. if the pot of money being contested over keeps shrinking, well, that would help explain why even the most prominent trainers are tempted to turn the odds in their favor through underhanded means. Unbeknownst to me, and I suspect most everybody else outside the industry, American horse racing circa 2021 cannot stand on its own... four legs. Probably by invoking nostalgia and tradition, the industry has managed to wangle massive state government subsidies: It's a story rarely told outside the racing industry, and understandably so: Horse racing is propped up by tax dollars from casinos that have nothing to do with what happens on the track or at the betting windows. Although the sport loses public interest with each passing year, at least 24 states, almost three-quarters of those with racing, directly subsidize it with public funds. Based on publicly available information and statistical analysis, the total is likely close to $1 billion annually.New York and Pennsylvania alone account for half of that amount; over the last 15 years, they've distributed around $6 billion. Both states also forgo countless millions each year in sales taxes they don't charge on racehorse purchases, an exemption that doesn't apply to other kinds of horses.Throughout the country, horse racing has become so heavily subsidized that it resembles a public enterprise. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Race Horse Development Fund is the state's single largest economic development program, and it funds nearly every aspect of horse racing, from purses to support for breeders, health and pension benefits for horsemen, drug testing of the horses, and even racetracks' advertising costs.Is horse racing too big to fail, in financial parlance? The emerging backlash is that these taxpayer dollars are going to an increasingly marginal pastime whose patrons are mostly the rich who can spare cash to gamble with when there are so many urgent social concerns:But the issue isn't going away, especially not as the pandemic has dynamited state finances, leaving lawmakers with tough decisions. This February, [Pennsylvania governor] Wolf again included a cut to racing's subsidy in his proposed 2021 budget. And last week, the editorial board of The Philadelphia Inquirer called for the industry to be "put out of its misery.""It's like a giant party on the Titanic," Ward said, "except the guests know what is coming." For racing's dependence on public money, Pennsylvania might be just the tip of the iceberg.The doping scandal will probably only raise more questions the industry would rather the general public be unaware of. Make no mistake: American horse racing, a pastime for the wealthy, is on the dole in a big way.
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Welcome to another episode of Fully Automated! Our guest for this episode is Keir Milburn, Lecturer in Political Economy and Organization at the University of Leicester. Keir has a new book out, called Generation Left. I had a chance to discuss the text recently, with my Columbus, OH-based friends, Chairman Moe's Magic Contradiction (AKA Charlie Umland and Jim Calder). We liked it so much, we thought we'd reach out to Keir and see if he'd come on the show, to discuss.
American audiences may have heard Keir interviewed by Chuck Mertz a couple of weeks ago, on This Is Hell! We're kind of hoping this could be a good companion episode to that interview, as we go deep into some aspects of the book that Chuck didn't have time to address. And there is a LOT going on in this book! It starts by questioning the popular notion that Millennials and Zoomers are a bunch of entitled snowflakes, and suggesting that this myth is actually doing quite a lot of work, politically, in dividing young and old members of the working class, giving them over to the idea that they have fundamentally different interests.
But of course, as with many myths, an investigation of the facts produces a rather different persecutive. It turns out, says Keir, that the generations are stuck in rather different material trajectories. One statement Keir makes early in the book really caught our attention: "the older generation are still tied to the neoliberal hegemony of finance while the young seek to escape it." But these trajectories are not a given. To the contrary, the logic of neoliberalism forces the Boomer generation to hold onto its material advantages, as a retirement strategy. And, as it does this, it condemns Millennials and Zoomers to a life of debt and forces them into a culture of cynical entrepreneurialism.
In the show, we talk with Keir about the role of events in composing generations. Events, he says, can disrupt our accepted ways of making sense of the world, and lead to the emergence of radically new social energies. But not every disruptive event will necessarily lead to some kind of new configuration, nor will every new configuration necessarily be a progressive one.
One particular event, the 2008 financial crisis, of course looms large in Keir's story. Unleashing austerity on the developed world, it represents in a sense the apogee of neoliberal governmentality. Milburn cites academic theorists like Wendy Brown, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Jennifer Silva to try to explain how neoliberal capitalism tries to get us to think and act as if there is no alternative to neoliberalism, even tho we all know its not working — we know we can't all be entrepreneurs. (This reminded us a bit of Adam Curtis, and his hyper-normalization documentary). A key figure for Milburn here is Mark Fisher, and his argument about consciousness deflation.
Whatever we want to call this system (authoritarian neoliberalism? zombie capitalism?), clearly it is making us sick. Throughout the text, Milburn make repeated reference to how we are living in the midst of an epidemic of "depression, insomnia and mental distress." Yet there's kind of a mystery to unpack here. He cites Jennifer Silva, for example, to explain how capitalism prefers us to internalize these issues, making them questions more to to do with our emotional and psychic resilience, than anything to do with the structure of the economy.
And, as he argues, this way of thinking about our mental wellbeing even showed up in the "assemblyism" of the occupy Wall Street movement. Nevertheless, he insists, Occupy's approach to the collective discussion of experiences and struggles did offer therapeutic and even political potentials to the young people who participated. And, as we discuss in the show (admittedly not in nearly enough detail) there are things we can learn here, very much in the spirit of the late Mark Fisher, that might be applied to a new model of treating mental and ...
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John Dewey on the Horror of Making his Poetry Public
This April's Fools interview is a preview for 'The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations' (ed. Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten & Hidemi Suganami), now available at Palgrave.
After various rounds of experimentation, two youthful IR scholars (the editor-in chief of this venture and Christian Bueger) bend space-time and access an alternate reality with the ambition to conduct an interview for Theory Talks with John Dewey. Dewey (1859-1952) was an American thinker often associated with a school of thought that has become known as American pragmatism. He is today largely known for his contributions to education studies, philosophy of science, and the theory of democracy. In this Talk, the young scholars sound out Dewey on what thinking tools his original worldview would provide for IR—after resolving a small embarrassment.
TT Dear Mr. Dewey. Thank you so much for your willingness to participate in this Talk. Theory Talks is an open-access journal that contributes to International Relations debates by publishing interviews with cutting-edge theorists. It is not often that Theory Talks is able to overcome space-time limitations and conduct a Talk with a departed theorist.
I am sorry—I think I have to interrupt you there…
TT Well, all right?
Yes, yes, the fact of the matter is that I am not a theorist and refuse to be associated with that label! To purify theory out of experience as some distinct realm, sirs, is to contribute to a fallacy that I have dedicated my life to combat! I am afraid that this venture of yours, of involving me in this Theory Talks, is stillborn.
TT Dear Professor Dewey—with all due respect, we are running ahead of matters here a little. The reason why we invited you is exactly for you to expound your ideas—and reservations—regarding theory, practice, and international relations. Would you be willing to bracket your concern for a minute? We promise to get back to it.
Well my dear sirs—it is that you insist on a dialogue—that restless, participative and dramatic form of inquiry that leads to so much more insight than books—and that you have travelled from far by means that utterly fascinate me, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
TT Thank you. And let us from the outset emphasize that by interviewing you for Theory Talks, we don't necessarily want to reduce your contribution to thought to the practice of theorizing. Isn't it also correct you have written poetry?
Now I am baffled a second time! I have never publicly attempted my hand at the noble art of the poetic!
TT It has to be said, Mr. Dewey, that the problem of what is and isn't public has perhaps shifted a bit since your passing away. That's something we'd like to discuss, too, but the fact of the matter is that what you have consistently consigned to the trashcan of your office at Columbia University has been just as meticulously recovered by 'a janitor with a long view'.
Oh heavens! You tell me I have been uncovered as a versifier? What of my terrible scribbling has been uncovered you say?
TT Well, perhaps you recognize the one that starts like:
I hardly think I heard you call
Since betwixt us was the wall
Of sounds within, buzzings i' the ear
Roarings i' the vein so closely near…
… 'That I was captured in illusion/Of outward things said clear…' I well remember—a piece particularly deserving of oblivion. I wrote that in the privacy of lonely office hours, thinking the world would have the mercy not to allow a soul to lay its eyes on it!
TT We are sorry to say that besides this one, a total of 101 poems has been recovered, and published in print—and you know, given some advances in technology, circulation of text is highly accelerated, meaning that one could very well say your poetry is part of the public domain.
So there I am, well half a decade after my death, subject to the indirect effects of advances in technology interacting with the associations I myself carelessly established between roses, summer days, and all too promiscuous waste bins! Sirs, in the little time we have conversed, I see the afterlife hasn't brought me any good. Hades takes on a bleaker shade…
TT Well, in reality, the future has been good to you: you are firmly canonised as one an authentic American intellectual, and stand firmly on a pedestal in the galleries occupied by the notables of modern international social thought. So why don't we explore a little bit why that is, within the specific domain of political theory? Theory Talks actually poses the same first three questions to every interviewee, followed by a number of questions specific to your thought. The first question we always pose is: What, according to you, is the biggest challenge or central debate in International Relations and what is your position vis-à-vis that challenge/debate?
I think that while it must have been noted by other interviewees that in fact this question is two separate questions—one about real-world challenges and another about theoretical debates—I would be the last to do so, and I am happy you mix concerns of theory and practice. I have always fought against establishing such a fictional separation between seemingly distinct domains of thought and practice. It is a dangerous fiction on top of it. The same goes for International Relations—while I have not dedicated myself to the study of the international as a discrete field of action, I do think that this domain does not escape some of the general observations I have made regarding society and its politics.
I hold that "modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected" by all kinds of associations. As I explain in The Public and its Problems, a fundamental challenge of modern times is that the largely technically mediated associations that constitute societies have outstretched the social mechanisms that we had historically developed on the human scale of the village to mitigate their indirect effects on others. During my life, I witnessed the proliferation of railway, telegraph, radio, steam-driven shipping, and car and weapon industries—thoroughly extending the web of association and affectedness within and across borders. This means action constantly reaches further. People close by and in far-off places are suddenly confronted with situations that they have to relate to but which are out of their control. This automatically makes them part of interested publics, with a stake in the way these mechanisations work. Now this perhaps seems abstract but consider: the spread of a new technology—I see you both looking on some small device with a black mirrored screen nervously every 5 minutes—automatically involves users as a 'stakeholder'. Your actions are mediated by them. You become affected by their design and configuration—over which you have little control. In that regard, you are part of a concerned public, but you have no way to influence the politics constitutive of these technologies.
I would say the largest challenge is to amplify participation and to institutionalize these fleeting publics. The proliferation of technologies and institutions as conduits for international associations has rendered publics around the globe more inchoate, while seemingly making it easier than ever before to influence—for good or ill—large groups through the manipulation of these global infrastructures of the public. We sowed infrastructures, we reap fragilities and more diffusely affected publics: each new technological expansion of the possibility to form associations leads to concomitant insecurities.
TT How did you arrive where you currently are in your thinking?
I have had the sheer luck or fortune to be engaged in the occupation of thinking; and while I am quite regular at my meals, I think that I may say that I would rather work, and perhaps even more, play, with ideas and with thinking than eat. I was born in the wake of the Civil War, and in times of a profound acceleration of technology as a vehicle of social, economic, and political development. Perhaps, as in your own times, upheaval and change was the status quo, stability a rare exception. My studies at Johns Hopkins with people such as Peirce had tickled an intellectual curiosity as of yet unsatisfied. I subsequently went to the University of Chicago for a decade in which my commitment to pragmatist philosophy consolidated. Afterwards at Columbia, and at the New School which I founded with people such as Charles A. Beard and Thorsten Veblen, this approach translated into a number of books. In these I applied my pragmatist convictions to such disparate issues as education, art, faith, logic and indeed politics, the topic of your question. For me, these are all interdependent aspects of society. This interdependence and inseparability of the social fabric means that skewed economic or political interests will reverberate throughout. But I am an optimist in that I also believe in the fundamental possibility and promise of science and democracy to curb radical change and reroute it into desirable directions for those affected. Good things are also woven through the social and we should amplify those to lessen the effects of negative associations.
TT What would a student require to become a specialist in International Relations or to see the world in a global way?
A question dear to my heart. You might know that throughout my entire life I have striven for transforming our understanding and practice of education. Human progress is dependent on education, and as I have learned during my travels to Russia, reform is not to be had by revolution but by gradual education. Education is training in reflective thinking. The quality of democracy depends on education.
Towards the end of my life I witnessed the creation of the United Nations. This was a clear signal to me that "the relations between nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call for some measure of political organization". Having this forum implied that we saw the end of the complete denial of political responsibility of how the policies in one national unit affect another as we find in the doctrine of sovereignty. That the end of this doctrine is within reach means that we require global education which will ensure the rise of informed global publics which can develop the tools required to respond to global challenges.
In a more substantive fashion, I would insist that students hold on to the essential impossibility to separate out experience as it unfolds over time. The divisions and preferences that have come to dominate academic knowledge in its 20th century 'maturing' are for me a loss of rooting of knowledge in experience.
TT We're sorry, but isn't the task of social sciences to offer universal or at least objective analytical categories to make sense of the muddle of real-world experience? What you seem to be proposing is the opposite!
I align with Weber in lamenting the acceleration of the differentiation of understanding in society. This has made it difficult for your generations to address social, political and economic challenges head on while avoiding getting lost in one of its details or facets. Isn't the economic and the political, constantly encroaching on everyday life? In the end, this perhaps explains my insistence on democracy and schooling as the pivots of good society: democracy to reconstruct and defend publics, and schooling to defend individuals against (mis)understanding the world in ways that cannot be reduced to their own lived experience. If students could only hold on to this holistic perspective and eschew isolating subject matters from their social contexts.
TT Throughout your 70 years of active scholarship you have written over a thousand articles and books. One commentator of your work suggested that your body of writing is an "elaborate spider's web, the junctions and lineaments of which its engineer knows well and in and on which he is able to move about with great facility. But for the outsider who seeks to traverse or map that territory there is the constant danger of getting stuck." Many find your work difficult to navigate—what advice would you give the reader?
Sirs why would anyone want to engage in a quest of mapping all of my writings? You have to understand that thought always proceeds in relations. A web, perhaps, yes. A spider's web certainly not. A spider that spins a web out of himself, produces a web that is orderly and elaborate, but it is only a trap. That is the goal of pure reasoning, not mine. The scientific method of inquiry is rather comparable to the operations of the bee who collects material within and from the world, but attacks and modifies the collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure. "Drop the conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is a disclosure and definition of the properties of fixed and antecedent reality; interpret the aim and test of knowing by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific inquiry". The occasion of thinking and writing is the experience of problems and the need to clarify and resolve them. Everything depends on the problem, the situations and the tools available. Inquiry does not rely on a priori elements or fixed rules. I always attempted to start my work by understanding in which problematic situations I aimed at intervening. Philosophy and academic, but also public life, in my time was heading in wrong directions that called upon me to initiate inquiry to resolve issues—in media res, as it were. When I wrote Logic, I tried to rebut dogmatic understandings. Now it appears that I am on the verge of becoming a dogma myself. In a sense, the most tragic scenario would be if people develop a "Deweyan" perspective or theory. Now I am curious, what problem brought you actually to converse with me?
TT Well, we are here today because we have been asked to contribute to an effort to collect the views of a number of different theorists, who, like you, live in different space-time. Now that we are here, could we ask you to tell us how you use the term 'inquiry'? It is one of your core concepts and in our conversation you already frequently referred to it. It is often difficult to understand what you mean by this term and how it provides direction and purpose for science…
It's a simple one, provided you have not been indoctrinated by logical positivists. You, me, all of us, frequently engage in inquiry. There is little distinction between solving problems of everyday life and the reasoning of the scientist or philosopher. Most often habit and routine will give you satisfaction. Yet when these fail or give you unpleasant experience, then reasoning begins. Without inquiry, sirs, most likely you wouldn't have been able to speak to me today! You will have to explain later how you bended time and space and which technology allowed you to travel through a black hole. But Albert was right, time travel is possible! Could we converse today without Einstein's fabulous inquiry that led him to the realization of space-time? Until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of ultimate fixed and independent substances. Einstein questioned this on the basis of experimentation and an investigation of the problem of simultaneity, that is, that from different reference frames there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events.
Reflection implies that something is believed in (or disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced without any intermediary fact; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain because of the condition of the air or the state of the barometer. The fact that inquiry intervenes in ever-shifting contexts demands us to restrain from eternal truths or absolutistic logic. Someone believing in a truth such as "individualism", has his program determined for him in advance. It is then not a matter of finding out the particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, and the circumstances, of doing it. He knows in advance the sort of thing which must be done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what must happen, so that all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of definitions and classifications.
When I say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not absolutistic, I have in mind a certain logic of method. Such a logic firstly implies that the concepts, general principles, theories and dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge are shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, policies and proposals for social action have to be treated as working hypotheses. They have to be subject to constant and well-equipped observations of the consequences they entail when acted upon and subject to flexible revision. The social sciences are primarily an apparatus for conducting such investigations.
TT Doesn't such a form of reasoning mean we'll just muddle through without ever reaching certainty?
Absolutely correct! Arriving at one point is the starting point of another. Life flowers and should be understood as such; experimental reasoning is never complete. I can imagine the surprise you must feel at sudden unforeseen events in international political relationships when you hold on to fixed frames of how these relationships do and ought to look. That we will never reach certainty does not imply to give up the quest of certainty, however. We have to continuously improve on our tools of scientific inquiry…
TT Sorry to interrupt you here. Now it sounds as if you have a sort of methods fetish. Do you imply that everything can be solved by the right method and all that we have to do is to refine our methods? That's something that our colleagues running statistics and thinking that the problems of international can be solved by algorithms argue as well.
It might be that mathematical reasoning has well advanced since my departure, and that the importance granted to the economy and economic thinking as the sole conditioning factor of political organisation has only increased, but you haven't fully grasped what I mean by 'tools'. Tell your stubbornly calculating colleagues that inquiry is embedded in a situation, hence there cannot be a single method which would fix all kinds of problems. Second, while I admire the skill of mathematicians, what I mean by tools goes well beyond that. A tool can be a concept, a term, a theory, a proposal, a course of action, anything that might matter to settle a particular situation. A tool is however not a solution per se. It is a proposal. It must be tested against the problematic material. It matters only in so far as it is part of a practical activity aimed at resolving a problematic situation.
TT You emphasize that language is instrumental and reject the idea of a private language. You also spent quite some energy to demolish the "picture theory" of language. These arguments form the basis of what we call today "constructivism", yet they are mainly subscribed to the Philosophical Investigations of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Earhh, I am aware of this fellow. He is an analytical philosopher, so develops his argument from a different background. I started to work on the social and cultural aspects of language use from around 1916. I don't know whether Wittgenstein actually read my work when he set out to write Philosophical Investigations, but you are quite right, there are obvious parallels. I think my own term of "conjoint activity" expresses pretty much the same, perhaps less eloquently, what Wittgenstein termed language games. I am pleased to hear, however, that the instrumental view on language, that objects get their meanings within a language in and by conjoint community of functional use, has become firmly established in academia. I'd have reservations about the term, 'constructivism'. It might be useful since it reminds us of all the construction work that the organization of politics and society entails. Indeed I have frequently stressed that instrumentalist theory implies construction. If constructivism doesn't mean post-mortem studies of how something has been constructed, but is directed towards production of better futures, I might be fine with the term. But perhaps I would prefer 'productivism'.
TT That is a plausible term, but we are afraid, the history of science has settled on constructivism. And you are right, the tendencies you warn us of are significantly present in our discipline.
Sirs, if you permit. I have to attend to other obligations. I wish you safe travels back. Make sure you pick up something from the gift shop before you leave.
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Timothy Mitchell on Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil
This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
The unrest in the Arab world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic, political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social sciences. In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates, the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in any field: it is laid out as a serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.
However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics. Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up. In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.
But I think, moving from International Relations as a field to 'globally oriented studies', to use your phrase, one of the biggest challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local. Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term 'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.
Now this relates back to the second part of your question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I was writing Carbon Democracy there was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?
Well, I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines, which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.
I think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships, that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped me as a scholar.
So traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.
In sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes and things and materials.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
A couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously important.
The other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East, around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again following the Arab Spring.
Against that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo, one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing this sort of work.
In which discipline or field would you situate yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?
I like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline, while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.
Yet doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything else!
What role does expertise, which is kind of a central term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the historical unfolding of modern government?
That is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy, climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others, that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed, even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.
But I think there is another relationship between modes of government and expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power works.
More recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.
If you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages; instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European path after the war, this object outside of government with its own experts was created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that precisely represent what is not the state, or the sphere of government.
Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend. Can you give an example of how that works?
Let me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil. I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization; therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have changed and made them democratic or something.
That story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the 20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku, which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different understanding of the politics of oil.
This leads to my next question, which is how do you speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do you get these accusations sometimes?
Yes, I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast: talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only interested in the oil once it had already become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how oil becomes money and how you put together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences. It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance, there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical determinism.
The other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself, there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences. The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in understanding expertise and modes of power.
How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about.
I think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on the colonial era, including my first book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it, representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature, material on the other.
Second, what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines, studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only just discovered.
Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is an important theme in your work?
I have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam, constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind of this large-scale work in Europe at the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved, because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development. And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this desperate attempt by a series of European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period and now they suddenly were being deprived of.
Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant.
May be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam. It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they function.
The other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to raise tax revenues—but around property taxes. And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement. This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in Egypt.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory. Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.
Related links:
Faculty Profile at Colombia University Read Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum 2008) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science Review 1991) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S. Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The World as Exhibition (Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf)
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Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape? The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk
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To celebrate International Youth Day 2020 Rachel Mims, Senior Program Officer for Youth Political Participation at NDI, is joined by three young leaders from Zambia, Lebanon, and Moldova. They discuss competitive youth debate as an opportunity to build political skills, actively contribute to solving social problems, and create greater space for youth inclusion in public life. For more information please go to https://www.ndi.org/youth-leading-debate Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play Given Kapolyo: I don't believe in the saying young people are the future leaders. Because the truth is they tell us this for years and years and years, when I was 15 they told me you're a future leader, then I turned 20 and they said I'm a future leader, then they turned 25, and they said I'm a future leader, so then I'm now just waiting, I'm saying okay, when does the future come? Now I think just this is time that we turn it around, and say young people should be the leaders of today, as well. Rachel Mims: Today's young people deserve real opportunities to participate in political processes, and contribute to practical solutions that advance development. When given an opportunity to organize, voice their opinions, and play a meaningful role in political decision making, they consistently demonstrate their willingness and ability to foster positive lasting change. They also become more likely to demand and defend democracy, and gain a greater sense of belonging. Recent global movements such as movements for climate justice and racial justice demonstrate that young people are demanding a shift in who has power, and in how that power is used, yet young people still find themselves marginalized from mainstream politics, and are limited in their ability to exercise the same influence over decision making processes. This is particularly true for young people who have experienced intersecting forms of marginalization and exclusion. At a time when global inequality is increasing, young people remain disproportionately impacted, and are expressing frustration with leaders and institutions that they perceive to be inaccessible, incapable, unresponsive, corrupt, and often repressive. NDI works globally to support the political participation of young people through a variety of approaches that increase young people's agency, and create a more supportive environment. One approach involves helping young people develop competitive debating skills, including an issue analysis and framing, reasoning, public speaking, and active listening. NDI has supported [inaudible 00:02:05] programs in several countries, including longstanding programs in Jordan and Moldova, and more recent programs in Guatemala and Libya. We've seen the debate skills not only enhance political participation, but also contribute to holistic youth development. Debate builds practical skills that pave the way for young people to successfully engage in civil discourse and peaceful problem solving, both with their peers and with adult power holders. I'm Rachel Mims, Senior Program Officer for Youth Political Participation at the National Democratic Institute, and today we are joined by three young leaders from Lebanon, Moldova, and Zambia, each working in different ways to apply their debate skills and actively contribute to solving social problems. As a result, they're creating greater space for youth inclusion in public life. First we'll hear from [Gibbon Carpolio 00:02:58]. Next up, Rachbenda Fou, and then Selena Decuzar. Welcome to Dem Works. In Zambia, NDI partner with a chapter of the Center for Young Leaders of Africa, and Youth for Parliament, to gather young people from across political parties, media, and civil society organizations to debate solutions for increasing the number of young people in parliament. This debate program created an opportunity for youth from parties and civil society to change ideas, develop their public speaking and research skills, and to generate discussion around critical issues facing youth in Zambia. We spoke with Given Kapolyo to learn more. Given, thank you for joining us today. GK: Thank you so much for having me. It's a great pleasure to feature. First of all, I'm a young African female, my name is Given Kapolyo, I'm a young politician, I'm a student, I'm an activist, I'm an advocate, and a public speaker now. I can proudly call myself a public speaker, after I took part in the NDI public speaking that was called the Youth Debate Zambia. I live in the northern part of Zambia. That's Kasama, northern province, Kasama, rural part of Zambia, so it was great that I was moved from the northern part of Zambia to the capital city, just to participate in the Youth Debate Zambia. RM: Thank you, and thank you for telling us about all the different hats you wear. I hope to hear more about your activism, and other things that you're doing in politics. Can you tell me more about your experience in the debate program? What was it like? What were some of the topics that you all discussed? GK: We began with a training session. We covered the history of public speaking, we covered the tricks that we need for public speaking, how you draw the attention of a crowd, how you keep them engaged, and ordered. It was different young people from different parts of the country, and we were all brought together and were taught together, and then were given a topic. We were discussing how we can increase the number of young people in parliament, the number of youths in parliament, and it was a very profound experience, in the sense that we didn't just learn, then they'd give us a chance to actually show what we had learned from the training, and it was that interesting. By the time we were leaving the training, there were people that were so confident to go back to their communities, and just speak change into their communities, into the crowds, and that was just how interesting, and just how meaningful it was to me and other participants that were there. RM: I really love the point about public speaking, and this immediate sense of agency that young people feel, that they can go back and use their voice, and they have skills that they can start to put into use right away. Can you talk about the connection between some of the skills that you learned and your future political aspirations? I know that you're interested in running for public office. GK: One of the things that we learned at the Youth Debate Zambia was that communication, public speaking and communication have a lot to do with politics, and with the youth standing out as a public figure, because it's they also mentioned how many great orators were [inaudible 00:06:34] were to get into public office because of how they spoke, how good they were at it, and the impacts that it just had in changing society. For me as a young politician, first of all I must mention that the country that I'm from it's very difficult for a young female. First of all, it's very difficult for a female to make it into public office. It's even worse for a young female to make it. That, it also prepared me for how I could use my words to show people that not only will I be a voice for them, I could actually speak my heart out to them, tell them what my plans are, but then do it skillfully in a way that they buy into it, and are able to elect me, and even how because we dealt with topics on how you could make your speech relatable such that as you're telling your story somebody that is listening instantly feels like you're telling their story, and when they're able to relate with you it will be very easy for them to actually elect you as their leader, because they feel like you're a mirror of them, and then you can represent them better. The training for me was actually a point that I think began a lot of things for me, because I knew I could speak, but then I didn't know I could use it to further my political ambition. When I went back home, in Kasana, I was able to speak to various groups. Just by me sharing my story with them, they were able to buy into the vision that I have for my ward, because I have aspirations of standing as a ward counselor next year, in our general elections, and it's been very helpful. I've been able to know another important thing we learned is how you should be able to read your audience, so depending on who I'm talking to, I'm able to know which skills I should employ. RM: Thank you. I know you can't see me, but I'm nodding vigorously over here, because you just shared, I think, so many important lessons with our listeners, just about how you can use these skills to further your political ambition, how things are different for young women, and how they face different barriers and challenges into getting into elected office, and how these skills help create an opening. I want to talk about NDI's work in changing the face of politics, and it relates directly to what you mentioned about being a young woman in politics. NDI is launching a decade-long campaign to accelerate the pace of change on all aspects of women's empowerment, and that includes their participation in leadership and politics, and I wanted to hear from you what you think young people's role is in not only changing the face of politics, but ensuring that young women have a role to play, and can participate in politics. GK: We need to become alive to the reality that our parents will not be here 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, it is us that will be here. Every time I'm speaking to young people about young people involvement in politics and leadership and decision making and getting involved in civic spaces, I'm always telling them if we don't get involved now, then we are simply selling our future off ... Not even selling it off, we're simply giving it off for free. Because whatever our ... Those that we leave leadership to today, whatever decisions they make, or whatever they choose to do with the resources that we have, whatever they choose to do with our nation, they will not be here to face the repercussions, we will be here. Most of our parliament, the Zambian parliament has over 158 seats, and only 2 people are below the age of 35, only two people are youth, but if we do get young people involved, then we do get young people into parliament, we will know to say this decision that I'm making today, I'm only 27, so the decision that I'm making today, 30 years from now the chances that I still will be here to answer for it and to face the repercussions of if I make a bad decision will linger in my mind, for even as I make a decision I'm thinking I'm not thinking five years from now, I'm thinking 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years from now, because I'm assured I will still obviously be here. I feel the time is now that young people actually take over and provide solutions to many of these challenges, and many of the problems that our country, our continent, and even the world is facing today. RM: So many of the points that you just talked about really point to the need for this culture shift, and a culture change within politics. I think a lot of what you are advocating for, particularly about greater youth inclusion, can help contribute to that shift, and politics being more inclusive and representative of young people. I just really want to thank you for taking time to talk with us today, and to share your thoughts, and I really want to wish you all the best in your run for office. I think you would make an amazing political leader, and I'm really excited to see what your future holds, and where you'll go after your participation as a young person in politics. GK: Thank you so much. I look forward to where I go to, so I keep working towards it. And this I'm guaranteed that I will get there. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure having this conversation with you. I look forward to further interactions. RM: Us as well. Thank you again. For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with thousands of courageous and committed democratic activists around the world, to help countries develop the institutions, practices, and skills necessary for democracy's success. For more information, please visit our website, at www.NDI.org. In Lebanon, NDI is collaborating with the television station MTV Lebanon, for its weekly program, It's About Time, which features political leaders responding to questions from the host and from young people who have been trained in policy analysis and debate skills by NDI. MTV Lebanon hopes that by expanding debate culture in the country and by proving that young people can debate, they will pave the way for hosting Lebanon's first debates between national political leaders before the next elections in 2022. The show has achieved broad viewership, and resulted in viral moments on social media, with some political leaders saying that they tune in specifically to watch the youth debate segment. I would like to introduce everyone to Rafka Noufal, a junior Lebanese lawyer, and active participant on the debate show. Rafka, thank you for joining us for the podcast today. Rafka Noufal: Thank you for having me with you today. RM: I'd like to start with you giving us a brief introduction about your work, and your background, and what brought you to the debate show. RN: I'm a 24-years-old Lebanese junior lawyer. I studied law in the Holy Spirit University, a Catholic University in Lebanon, and I just graduated from my masters to a degree. I also have a certificate of completion of the [inaudible 00:14:06] university program on international criminal law and procedures, and am a very social person who's interested in politics and in all the topics that are rising inside our country. When I knew about the TV political show It's About Time, through my university, I was very excited and more willing to join this show because I saw it as a platform to raise our voice as the young people in Lebanon, and to give our opinion and our thoughts on all the political and social and economic topics that are arising inside our society. I work as a lawyer now, [inaudible 00:14:42] bar association, and I work in an office that takes private law cases and more specifically criminal law cases. Throughout my work, I got familiar with the gaps and insecurities inside the Lebanese legal system. RM: I see so much connection between your ability to do this work as a lawyer and having the opportunity to dig into these pressing political issues on the debate show. Can you tell me a little bit more about your experience on the show, and talk about some of what you gained, whether it's skills that you gained, or kind of how the show maybe changed your perspective about politics? RN: In fact, the different trainings we did with NDI were very useful on many levels. First of all, it developed our skills in public speaking, which is very important in the life of politics, and to my work also of the lawyer. Also, these trainings triggered the reason and the logic inside every mind of the young people who participate in the show, and it let us discuss and have conversations people from all over the country, so this debate program let us know how to discuss, how to debate topics without hurting other people's feelings, or other people's opinions. RM: Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the topics that you debated on the TV show, and maybe topics that came up that were a bit more controversial, or there was more, there were maybe more emotions, or opinions that people really wanted to share? RN: First off, my last debate at the show was about the early elections in Lebanon. I was supporting that we should have an early election in Lebanon, to change the members of the parliament, because the government in Lebanon now, even the parliament, they are not doing enough work in order to take us, or to help Lebanon go through this economic situation, this economic crisis we're going through right now in Lebanon. I was supporting the fact that we should be doing an early election, to change the leaders, to change the member of the parliament. We need young people to get inside the parliament. We need new, free minds, that are not attached to the past, they are not divided by sectarianism. We need a civil country, not a country that is divided by sectarianism. RM: Can you talk a little bit more about your thoughts on the protest, and what you see as a way forward not only for young people in Lebanon, but the entire so many people across the country have been engaged in the protests, kind of what do you see as a vision, or a way forward? RN: I would like to start by giving, talking about the problem between this disconnection, between young people nowadays in Lebanon, and the political parties, before talking about the protests. In fact, political parties in Lebanon are still attached to the past, and they divide young people by sectarianism. You should follow this party because you are from the sect that this party supports, or also I think that political parties inside Lebanon lack any vision for the future beyond their personal interests, and the most important point is that they deny the youth right to participate in decision making process, because they are political parties that are doomed with ... How to say it? Political inheritance, and the cultural hierarchy that says that elders know better than young people, but in fact when that's not the case when it's faced with reality, because every generation faces new challenges, different from the challenges that the other generation faced, so all of this adding to the corruption that grows like a tumor inside [inaudible 00:18:54] infecting all the aspects after [inaudible 00:18:58] for about like the environment, infrastructure, and economic crisis led to the birth of this protest and this revolution that emerged inside the streets of Lebanon. RN: I think that young people, and I'm one of them, we saw this revolution as a window of hope to change the current corrupted situation in the country, and maybe to take part of the decision making process, to give our opinion, our thoughts. RM: Do you see some of the topics that have come up in debates, and young people's desire to protest and take part in the revolution, do you see that as a meaningful pathway to change? RN: I think so. I think young people believe in these social movements because these social movements are based on the free minds, and are detached from sectarianism, and from inequality between the Lebanese people, and maybe these social movements can create in the future political parties that can govern Lebanon and help it to develop like other countries in the world. RM: This year, under the banner of of Changing the Face of Politics, NDI is launching a decade-long campaign to accelerate the pace of change on all aspects of women's empowerment, and that includes their participation in leadership and politics. I wanted to ask you what you see as young people's role in changing the face of politics, and ensuring that young women specifically can participate and have a meaningful role in politics, and particularly in the context of Lebanon, this new politics that you all are attempting to usher in. RN: I think that [inaudible 00:20:44] young people are making a step to bridge this gap between politics and youth people, because they are taking on important issues, such as climate change, mass immigration, and even women empowerment, however, I think that we still have a bit of problem inside the third-world countries, but as for women empowerment, I think Lebanon and and outside in other countries young people believe in gender equality between man and woman, and they don't consider gender as an indication for holding a political position. In fact, we support us young people that competence, performances and efficiency are the only conditions for judging a person in a position of power, and not being a woman or a man. Thus, if we take charge in Lebanon, I think you will see more women engaged in the politics. For example, right now in Lebanon we are demanding the vote of the law for women's quota in all Lebanese election as a step to engage more women in the political life of the country. RM: Do you think that this culture of youth debate, and young people sharing their voices on these important political topics, do you think that this trend will continue, in that it's important that young people continue to use debate to speak out about politics? RN: The debating concept is important because first, it lets you build constructive arguments in a persuasive way, and you don't only talk just to talk, you have to talk with a logic and reason. Young people can express their opinion with public speaking skills, and to accept the opinion of other people without deciding them, or offending them, as I mentioned before. RM: I really want to thank you for taking time out to share more with us about your political experience, and to talk about the political trends that we're witnessing in Lebanon. I think that a lot of what you shared can be really relevant for young people, and for others that are participating in politics, to really understand how this development skills and development of knowledge around debate can be useful for a political career. RN: I would like also to thank NDI for all the training they did with us, and it was really a lifetime experience with them, and with It's About Time show. RM: Great. Thank you. RN: Thank you so much. RM: NDI has worked with thousands of young people on the art of competitive policy debate, and has ongoing debate programs in three regions. To learn more about NDI youth debate programs, or access program resources, visit the Youth Leading Debate Initiative, on NDI.org. In Moldova, NDI is facilitating the seventh iteration of the Challenger Program, which aims to help create the next generation of political leaders, policymakers, and civil servants. Challenger equips young people with the knowledge and skills to develop realistic public policies that respond to the needs and priorities of the people in Moldova. The youth debates take place in the second phase of the program, the policy debate school. During the program, the participants acquire research and analytical skills, and they also take part in developing a youth manifesto, which addresses important national problems faced by young people in the country. I would now like to introduce you to Silena, who is a member of the Challenger Program, and is going to join us to talk a little bit about her experience. Hey, Silena, thanks for joining us today. Selina Dicusar: Hello. Thank you for having me. RM: I'd like to just start with you giving us a brief introduction about yourself, and telling us about your experience in the program. SD: Okay. My name is Selena Dicusar. I am 20-years-old. I was born in the Republic of Moldova. Currently, I'm studying Moldova, at the international relations. SD: I am a member of the Communication PR Department of the Erasmus Student Network Chisinau, but elections are currently underway, and I will run for Vice President. I am also participant of Challenger, and a double winner of the Best Speaker Award. RM: Selena, thank you for that introduction. Can you tell me about your experience in the Challenger Program, why did you decide to join in the first place, and what do you think you gained from your participation in the program? SD: It's certainly the most complex intense and in depth project that I've ever been involved in. I've had a unique experience participating in a project which changed my attitude towards politics, and taught me new skills. Firstly, I learned to value my knowledge in terms of languages and to apply them correctly in research. Secondly, I have learned to think critically, and always question any information I receive or process. And last but not least, I learned how to develop solutions. About opportunities, yes, what I gained in Challenger helped me to properly recommend myself to the mayor of my native village, and prove that my ideas will help improve the situation in the village. RM: Thank you. I think you brought up some really excellent points, particularly about this need to challenge information that we receive from different sources, and to really kind of understand what's being proposed for our different communities. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the debate skills? You mentioned that they connect to your political participation outside the program. What about the debate component helps prepare you for political engagement outside the program? SD: First of all, the debate helped me understand how to make a manifesto, because we are writing manifestos in the program, and I think this is one of the most important skills that I have learned, and that have certainly helped me to engage more in politics out of the program. RM: Great. Thank you. I want to talk a little bit about I know that you do quite a bit of work on the local level, and that you've been doing some work with the local mayor, so I want to talk about this trend that we're seeing, which is a bit of a disconnect between young people and formal political institutions, and we're really seeing young people kind of disengage from formal politics. I'm wondering based on your work in the community and on the local level what you think about this trend in young people moving away from formal politics, and also if you think that working on a local level is part of a solution or a viable pathway for young people to participate in politics. SD: First of all, it is mandatory that parties and politicians stop underestimating youth. They shouldn't only change their attitudes, but also encourage young people to join parties, giving them the opportunity to work on the issues that interest them, and unfortunately one of the biggest issues between young people, political institutions, and parties in Moldova that they don't hear each other. Young people are often not appreciated fairly, they are not heard, and these of course discourages them from further action. Local political participation is certainly a viable path that many Moldovans are unaware of, specifically my case about three or four young people and one curator from another city work on projects in our city [inaudible 00:28:24], those are the critical shortage of young people work is proceeding slowly. Most likely this is due to the fact that such work requires time and dedication. Is almost not rewarded financially, and among our youth experience is not in the first place for all. The situation is improving, the new generation is more politically active. RM: Thank you, Selena, and I think a lot of the points that you made about how parties need to change their strategy about the way that they engage young people is really important, and also this need to work at multiple levels, that we're working at the lower level, but we're also creating opportunities at the national level, too, and I think your work experience speaks to that as well. I want to talk a bit about young women's participation. This year, under the banner of changing the face of politics, NDI is launching a decade-long campaign to accelerate the pace of change on all aspects of women's empowerment, and this includes women's participation in politics. I want to ask you what you feel like young people's role is in ensuring that the face of politics changes, and that young women have more opportunities to participate. SD: First of all, it seems to me that the new generation which is now growing up is more aware of the problems that humanity faces. This is a generation that can embrace changes slowly, and their role in ensuring that participation of women in politics is first of all to learning how to accept the leadership of a woman, and question the abilities of women and men working in the same area on the wages of equal criteria, and to better involve young women in politics we must first of all educate them because an educated woman is a strong woman who can defend her interests. RM: Thank you. I think you know the point about it being a generational change, I think that's echoed in the other, the conversations with other young people, as well, is it seems like this generation is more willing to ensure that participation is inclusive, and then that includes young women as part of the conversation. I really want to thank you for joining us today, and for sharing some insights about your participation in the program, and how you see your participation in Challenger really helping create political space for young people. Is there anything you want to add, in closing? SD: I would like very much to thank the people coming here that created this program. It's a big challenge for Moldova to teach a generation of people that is aware of politics, that can change the political situation in the country, and the political culture, as well. I think if we get to teach more people how politics works, probably there will be a positive change in my country. RM: Again, I just want to thank you for joining us, and answering the questions. I really wish you the best of luck in everything that you pursue, moving forward. SD: Thank you very much. RM: Thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI, or to listen to other Dem Works podcasts, please visit us at NDI.org.
Podcast Participants; Given Kapolyo, Rafka Noufal, Selina Dicusar.
24. Increasing Youth Political Inclusion through Debate
Democracy (General), #NDI #National Democratic Institute #Women #Citizen Participation #Youth
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Bertrand Badie on the Trump Moment, the Science of Suffering, and IR between Power and Weakness
Lire en français
IR retains a traditional focus on the game of power between states as its defining characteristic. But what, so asks Bertrand Badie, if this means that our discipline is based on a negation of our humanity? A giant in Francophone IR, Badie has labored to instead place human suffering at the center of analysis of the international, by letting loose sociological insights on a truly global empirical reality. In this Talk, Badie—amongst others—challenges the centrality of the idea of state power, which makes little sense in a world where most of the IR agenda is defined by issues emanating from state weakness; argues for the centrality of suffering to a more apt IR; and uses this to contextualize the Trump Moment.
Print version (pdf) of this Talk
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?
Unquestionably, it would be the matter of change. It is time to conceptualize, and further than that, to theorize the change that is happening in the field of International Relations (IR). Humans have always had the feeling that they are living in a period of upheaval, but contemporary IR is really characterized by several landmarks that illustrate the drastic extent of change. I see at least three of them.
The first one concerns the inclusive nature of the international system. For the first time in the history of mankind, the international system covers nearly the whole humanity, while the Westphalian system was an exclusively European dynamic in which the United States of America entered to turn it into a system, that I would call, Euro-North-American.
The second element, around which publications abound (see notably Mary Kaldor's work, Theory Talk #30), is the deep mutation of the nature of conflict. War used to be, in the Westphalian model, a matter of competition between powers. Today we have the feeling that weakness is replacing power, in that power cannot any longer function as central explanatory term of conflictual situations, which are rather manifestations of state weakness. Think of 'failing' or 'collapsing' states, which refers to the coming apart of nations that have been built badly as well as the deliquescence of social ties. This new form of conflictuality completely turns the international environment upside down and constitutes a second indicator of transformation.
The third aspect concerns mobility. Our international system used to be fully based on the idea of territory and boundaries, on the idea that fixity establishes the competences of States in a very precise way. In this perspective, the state refers to territory—as the definition given by Max Weber states very clearly—but today this territorial notion of politics is challenged by a full range of mobilities, composed of international flows that can be either material, informational, or human.
These are three indicators illustrating a deep transformation of the inner nature of IR that encourage me to speak about 'intersocial relations' rather than 'interstate relations'. The notion of interstate relations no longer captures the entirety of the global game. Our whole theory of IR was based on the Westphalian model as it came out of the peace of Westphalia, as it was confirmed by the accomplishment of the nation-state construction process and as it dominated the historical flow of international events until the fall of the Berlin wall.
Until the fall of the wall, all that was not related to Europe or to the United States of America, or more precisely North-America, was simply called 'periphery', which says enough. Today, by contrast, the periphery is central at least regarding conflictuality. We should therefore drop our Westphalian prism and build up new analytical tools for IR that would take these mutations as their point of departure. Doing away with our Westphalian approach to IR would mean questioning both our classical IR theories and questioning the practical models of action in international politics, which means the uses of diplomacy and warfare.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
You know when we write, when we work, we are first of all influenced by our dissatisfaction. The classical Westphalian approach to IR, as I said earlier, did not satisfy me as I had the feeling that it was focusing on events that no longer had the importance that we kept giving them—for instance the arms race, great power politics, or the traditional diplomatic negotiations—while I was seeing, maybe this was the trigger, that the greatest part of suffering in the world was coming from places that IR theory was not really covering.
I have always told my students that IR is the science of human suffering. This suffering exists of course where we are—in Europe, in North America, they exist everywhere in the world—but the greatest part is outside of the Westphalian area, so the classical approach to IR gives a marginal and distorted image. Africa and the Middle East seen through the Westphalian prism are a dull image, strongly different from the extraordinary wealth, both for good and bad, that these areas of the world have. I've also always held that in a world where 6 to 9 million people starve to death each year, the main foci of traditional IR were derisory. Even terrorism, to which we collectively attribute so much importance, hardly comes near how important a challenge food security is.
My three latest books take a stand against traditional IR theories. In Diplomacy of Connivance (2012) I tried to show that the great power game is really a game way that is much more integrated than we usually say and that this game plays out in all multilateral fora. There is indeed a club, and that is precisely what I wanted to describe, a club of powers—one which results to the detriment of less powerful members in the international system.
In Le Temps des humiliés ('the era of the humiliated', 2014), I tried to crystallize what the classical theory could not express, which is domination seen through the lens of the dominated, humiliation as felt by the humiliated, violence as experienced by the desperate. For instance, even if we look at powers as accomplished as China today—sharing the first place with the USA in terms of GDP—we have to admit that their historical experience of humiliation constitutes a huge source of inspiration when it comes to the elaboration of its foreign policy.
And then, in my last book Nous ne sommes plus seuls au monde ('we are no longer alone in the world', 2016), this critique was even more explicit. We are writing an IR that encompasses only about one billion of human beings, while forgetting all the others. Today it is simply no longer true that these old powers are setting the international agenda. Global politics today is written by the little, the weak, the dominated; often with recourse to extreme forms of violence, but this needs to be analyzed and understood, which would mean to totally change the IR theory.
We should not forget that in large part, IR theory was a given as the USA triumphed in 1945. The well-known 'great power politics' that dominates traditional IR theory, inaugurated by Morgenthau and supported by so many others, described what was true at that time: the ability of American power to set us free from the Nazi monster. Today the challenge is strongly different, and it is by the way meaningful that two of the greatest American internationalist political scientists, Robert Keohane (TheoryTalk #9) and Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53), have both written books that elude to the end of this global order (respectively After Hegemony and Goodbye Hegemony). Well what interests me is exactly to dig into what comes after hegemony.
What would a student need to become a specialist in International Relations or understand the world in a global way?
First of all, I would advise them to rename their science, as I said earlier, and to call it intersocial relations. The future of what we call IR comes down to the ability to understand the extremely rich, multiple and diversified interactions that are happening among and across the world's societies. It does not mean that we have to completely abandon the state-centric perspective, but rather dethrone states from the middle of this multiplicity of actors in order to realize how very often these states are powerless when faced with these different actors. That would be my first advice.
My second advice would be to look ahead and not back. Do not let yourself be dominated by the Westphalian model, and to try to build up what we need—since almost nothing has been done yet today to construct this post-Westphalian, meta-Westphalian model. Beyond power, there are things that we still misidentify or overlook while they are the driving forces of today's and tomorrow's IR. From this point of view, sociology could prove particularly useful. I consider, for instance, that Émile Durkheim is a very important inspiration to understand the world today. Here is an author to study and to apply to IR.
The third advice that I would give them would be to not forget that IR or intersocial relations are indeed the sciences of human suffering. We should be able to place suffering at the core of the thinking. We've lost far too much time staring at power, now it is time to move on to place human suffering at the center. Why? First of all because it is ethically better; maybe will we be able to learn from it? But also because in today's actual international politics suffering is more proactive than power, which is not necessarily optimistic but if recognized, would allow us a better questioning of new forms of conflictuality. Perhaps unfortunately, the international agenda is no longer fixed with canons, but with tears. Maybe this is the key point on which we should concentrate our reflection.
Your insistence on placing suffering at the center of IR scholarship seems to place you firmly alongside those who recognize "grievance" ratherthan "greed" as a central logic of international politics. What do you make of this parallel?
You are right: the idea of grievance, of recrimination, is a structuring logic of the international game today. We did not see it coming for two reasons. First of all because our traditional analysis of international politics presupposed a unity of time, as if the African time, the Chinese time, the Indian time and the European time where all identical. Yet this is completely wrong because we, in our European culture, have not understood that before Westphalia there were political models, political histories, that profoundly marked the people that would then shape contemporary politics. Remember that China is 4000 years of empire, remember that precolonial Africa was composed of kingdoms, empires, civilizations, philosophies, arts... Remember that India also is multi-millenary. The Westphalian time came to totally deny and crush this temporality, this historicity, almost in a negationist way, which means that, in the spirit of those who were defending the Westphalian model, only this model was associated to the Renaissance; and that the age of enlightenment and reason with a big R had a calling to reformat the world as if it were a hard drive. This was a senseless bet, a bet for which our European ancestors who led it had excuses because at that time we did not know all these histories, at that time we did not have all the knowledge we today have of the other and thus we simply resolved it, through the negation of alterity. Yet, IR ought on the contrary aspire to the accomplishment of alterity. Inevitably, all those who saw themselves denied their historicity, over several centuries and even several millenaries, accumulated a feeling of recrimination, of particularly deep grievances.
The second element is that all of this happened in a context of disequilibrium of power resources, linked to different factors that reflected indeed the fact that at a given moment of time western powers were both literally and figuratively better armed than other societies. Abovementioned negation of alterity was mapped onto, and amplified, by the forceful imposition of a multilateral system that turned into the worst situation, into a proclaimed hierarchy of cultures; as a result and there were, as Jules Ferry put it in the France of the 19th century, 'races'; as in, 'We have the obligation to educate inferior races'. It is not the beginning of history, but it is the beginning of a history of humiliation. And through subsequent waves of globalization, this humiliation has turned into a central nerve running through international life. A nerve that has been used by both the powerful, who made a tool out of humiliating the others to better dominate them (think here of the opium wars, colonization) and simultaneously a nerve that fed the reaction of mobilization in the extra-Westphalian world by those that had to stand up against those who were humiliating them. So you see how it truly lies at the basis of IR. In my mind, it became a forceful paradigm, it explains everything, even though others factors continue to weigh in on actual dynamics.
In order to appreciate all this, we need a sociological approach, which has for me two aspects. Both these aspects must be considered together for the approach to be well understood. The first one is a timeless aspect, which is to consider that everywhere and in all eras politics is a social product. Politics cannot be understood as somehow outside society. This I would say contradicts the majority of IR scholars, who believe excessively in the autonomy of politics and of the state—even if only for analytical purposes. The second element of this sociological approach is the historical or temporal component. That is what I was talking about earlier: with globalization the social fabric strongly progressed compared to the political fabric, and considering that intersocial relations grew, we need a sociological approach to understand them.
Do you think that the Trump period constitutes a fundamental break with the conduct of IR?
Trump himself maybe not, but what he represents certainly. If we look at the USA today we see, since the new millennium, three models succeeding each other. After 11-09 there was a time of neo-conservatism where globalization was considered by American leaders as a means or maybe a chance to universalize the American model, willingly or not. By force, as was the case in Iraq in 2003. This model failed.
This lead to a second model which I would describe as a liberal model, neo-liberal, incarnated by Obama who learnt from the lessons of the failure of neo-conservatism, and had the courage to question the hypothesis hitherto considered as indisputable of American leadership in the world, and who considered that the USA could win only through soft power or smart power or free-trade. That is the reason why Obama was just a little bit interventionist and was counting a lot on the TTIP and on all these transregional agreements.
With Trump we arrive at a third model, one that I would call neo-nationalist, that looks at globalization in a different way. In his perspective, globalization constitutes a chance to satisfy the national American interests. The idea of the national comes back after a long interlude of a globalizing vision. It does not mean that we are not interventionist anymore. What happened in Syria proves it. It means that we will intervene not according to the needs of globalization but rather to American interests. It is about sharing a strong and powerful image of the USA on the one hand and on the other serving the concrete interests of the American people and nation.
This neo-nationalist model is not defended only by Trump, that is the reason why I was saying that we should not consider Trump individually. We find it exactly the same way with Putin. We find it by many other world leaders, such as Erdogan or Duterte or Victor Orbán—really different figures—or Marshal Sissi in Egypt.
We find it as well in attitudes, for instance Brexit in Great Britain, in right-wing neo-populism in Europe: Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Wilders... or in a certain left-wing neo-populism as Mélenchon in France. It is in the air, seeming almost a passing fad. But it constitutes perhaps a double rupture within IR. First of all because since the emergence of globalization, let's say around the 70's, the national interest as a thought category was bit by bit replaced with approaches in terms of collective goods. Today by contrast we witness the abandonment of this image of collective goods for a return to the national interest. This is very clear in Trump's renouncing of the COP21 of Paris. At the same time, second, this constitutes some form of the rehabilitation of the idea of power, which again seeps into the language of IR.
You know the IR scholar is not a neutral person, we have to use our science towards positive action and for the definition of sound public policies. Going against the idea of collective goods, casting doubt on the ideas of human security, environmental security, food security, and sanitary security is extremely dangerous because the composition of national interests and egoism will never converge to a globally coherent policy. It is the weak that will suffer first.
And the same time that power is reinstated as a driving principle of IR praxis, the paradox is that great powers are becoming more and more powerless. If we look only since 1989, and ask, when did state power ever triumph in IR? Where did the strongest ever find a battleship enabling him to resolve a problem to his benefit and according to his goals? Never. Not in Somalia, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Palestine. Nowhere. Not in Sahel, not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nowhere. So I am a little worried, indeed, about this naive and old-fashioned rehabilitation of state power.
Can we say that globalization, or rather the ambition of integration at either the European or global scale, has failed? Can today be considered a good moment to bury of the idea of integration?
I do not like burials, it is not an expression that I would use, but your question is very pertinent. For around twenty years I have been saying and teaching that regional integration constituted an intermediary and realistic level of adaptation between the era of the nation state and that of globalization, which means that I believed for a long time that regional integration was the final step towards a global governance of the world.
I thought for a long time that what was not possible at the global scale, a global government, was possible at the regional level and this would already strongly simplify the world map and thus go in the way of this adhesion to the collective dimension required by globalization. Nevertheless, not only Europe suffers a setback, but all the regional constructions in the world are in a similar situation. Mr. Trump openly shoves the NAFTA agreement, MERCOSUR is down as every State that is composing it has recriminations against it, and we could extend the list… All the forms of integration that have been set by Chavez around his Bolivian ideal have ceased to exist; Africa progresses very slowly in terms of regional integration; the Arab Maghreb Union, which is an essential device, totally failed. Thus indeed the situation does not look good.
In the case of Europe there is a double phenomenon: on the one hand, there is this really grave failure due to the secession of Great Britain from Europe, and then there is a general malaise of the European model. Brexit is really rare, if you look at the contemporary history of IR it is simply unprecedented that a state shuts the door on a regional or global organization. As far as I remember, it only happened a few times before, with Indonesia in the UN in 1964, which lasted only 19 months. It happened with Morocco with the African Union and Morocco is currently reintegrating in it. This British situation came as a thunderbolt, worsened by the fact that paradoxically it is not so much because of regional integration that the British voted against the European Union. It was more from an anti-migration, xenophobic and nationalist (in reference to that nationalism trend that I was earlier talking about) perspective and what is dramatic is that we can clearly see that the nationalist sentiment is really attacking the inner principles of regional integration.
I was saying that in the European case there are internal problems which run even deeper than the British defection, and I will underline at least two of them. First of all there is a democratic deficit of Europe, meaning that Europe was not able to match electoral spaces with the ones where decisions get made; people still vote at the national level while the decisions are taken in Brussels. In consequence, democratic control over these decisions is extremely weak. How to resolve this equation? And here the breakdown is total since very few people are coming up with suggestions. The other factor of this crisis is, according to me, the fact that Europe has been built with success after World War II in a progressive way around association and indeed, Durkheim proved it, the integrative logic makes sense. Unity makes strength and it did make strength once in Europe to prevent war, a third World War, and secondly to encourage the reconstruction of European countries where economy was totally collapsed. This time is now over and it is the fault of Europe to not have known how to recontextualize itself, to react to the new contexts.
Paying one more time tribute to Durkheim who guessed it right, Durkheim said that there are two ways of constructing social ties: around association and around solidarity. I think that the time of association is now over, we should enter in the time of solidarity, which does not consist in saying 'We Germans are associated with Greece', but rather 'We Germans are joined together with Greece because we know that if Greece collapses, in a long term perspective, we will suffer the consequences'. Thus this idea of fundamental unity is an idea that has been a little bit overlooked, abandoned by the Europeans and now they find themselves in a complete paralysis.
Is the decolonization period still having an impact on contemporary IR?
Oh totally, totally. I would first say because it is a major event in the field of IR, which made the World switch from 51 sovereign States of the UN in 1945 to 193 today but above all, a very aggravating circumstance, is that this decolonization has been a complete failure and this failure weighs enormously on international politics.
It has been a failure because decolonization assumed the format of copying the western state model in countries that were accessing independence, while this model was not necessarily adapted, which provoked a proliferation of failed states, and these collapsed states had a terrible effect on IR.
Secondly because decolonization should have led to the enrichment and to the substantial modification of multilateralism, by creating new institutions able to take charge of new challenges resulting from decolonization. Yet, except the creation of UNCTAD in 1964 and of UNDP in 1965, there have been very little innovations in terms of global governance. Thus global governance remains dominated by what I earlier called 'the club', which means the great powers from the north, and this is very dysfunctional for the management of contemporary crises. Then also because the ancient colonial powers happen to find new forms of domination that did somehow complicate the international game. Thus in fact decolonization is a daily aspect of the crisis that the international system faces today.
In conclusion, which question should we have asked? In other terms, which question have we forgot?
I found your questions very pertinent as it allowed the discussion of themes that I consider essentials. Now, the big problem that makes me worry is the great gap between the analysts and the actors in IR. I am not saying that the analysts understood everything, far from it, but I think that IR theorists are very conscious of some of these transformations I have mentioned. If you look at some great authors such as James Rosenau, Ned Lebow or Robert Keohane, to name just a few—there are way more—they all contributed to the reconstruction of IR.
What truly strikes me is the autism of political actors, they think that they are still at the time of the Congress of Vienna and that is an extraordinary source of tension. Thus as long as this spirit of change does not reach political actors, maybe Barack Obama was the first one to enter this game and then the parenthesis was closed, as long as there will not be this move towards the discovery of a new world, maybe as well through the inclusion in our reflection about the international fabric such partners as China, it is not normal that this very powerful China does not have any choice but to share the paradigm and the model of action proper to occidental diplomacy, as long as we would not have done this precise effort, well, we will remain in the negation of the human, and that is the essential problem today, we are unable to understand that at the end there is just one unity, which is the human being.
I had the chance to visit 105 countries and everywhere I met the same men and the same women, with their pain, with their happiness, their hardship, their joy, their sorrow, their needs that were everywhere identical. As long as we will not understand that, well, we will be living in a world that is in total contradiction with what it is truly and essentially. We will live in a world of artifice and thus a world of violence.
Related links
Read Badie's The Arab Spring: A starting point (SER Études 2011) here (pdf)
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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace
This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.
A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')
My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.
In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.
Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.
The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.
Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.
My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.
Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.
Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.
My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.
Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.
In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.
As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.
Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.
I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.
When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.
I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.
One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.
I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.
This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.
Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.
The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.
Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?
Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.
The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.
This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.
The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.
Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?
Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).
This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.
But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.
Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).
For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.
What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.
You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?
The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.
While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.
By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort. There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.
Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.
You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?
When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.
Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.
Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.
When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.
Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.
An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.
Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.
Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?
Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.
Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.
A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.
My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.
But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.
Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.
Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?
The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.
Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.
Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.
My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?
American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.
The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.
Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.
The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.
It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.
Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'
Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.
Related links
Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)
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Mary Elizabeth King on Civil Action for Social Change, the Transnational Women's Movement, and the Arab Awakening
Nonviolent resistance remains by and large a marginal topic to IR. Yet it constitutes an influential idea among idealist social movements and non-Western populations alike, one that has moved to the center stage in recent events in the Middle East. In this Talk, Mary King—who has spent over 40 years promoting nonviolence—elaborates on, amongst others, the women's movement, nonviolence, and civil action more broadly.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?
The field of International Relations is different from Peace and Conflict Studies; it has essentially to do with relationships between states and developed after World War I. In the 1920s, the big debates concerned whether international cooperation was possible, and the diplomatic elite were very different from diplomats today. The roots of Peace and Conflict Studies go back much further. By the late 1800s peace studies already existed in the Scandinavian countries. Studies of industrial strikes in the United States were added by the 1930s, and the field had spread to Europe by the 1940s. Peace and Conflict Studies had firmly cohered by the 1980s, and soon encircled the globe. Broad in spectrum and inherently multi-disciplinary, it is not possible to walk through one portal to enter the field.
To me it is also important that Peace and Conflict studies is not wary of asking the bigger hypothetical questions such as 'Can we built a better world?' 'How do we do a better job at resolving conflicts before they become destructive?' 'How do we create more peaceable societies?' If we do not pose these questions, we are unlikely to find the answers. Some political scientists say that they do not wish to privilege either violence or nonviolent action. I am not in that category, trying not to privilege violence or nonviolent action. The field of peace and conflict studies is value-laden in its pursuit of more peaceable societies. We need more knowledge and study of how conflicts can be addressed without violence, including to the eventual benefit of all the parties and the larger society. When in 1964 Martin Luther King Jr received the Nobel Peace Prize, his remarks in Oslo that December tied the nonviolent struggle in the United States to the whole planet's need for disarmament. He said that the most exceptional characteristic of the civil rights movement was the direct participation of masses of people in it. King's remarks in Oslo were also his toughest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals across the world were concerned about world peace:
I venture to suggest [above all] . . . that . . . nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations . . . which [ultimately] make war. . . .
In the half century since King made his address in Oslo, nonviolent civil resistance has not been allocated even a tiny fraction of the resources for study that have been dedicated to the fields of democratization, development, the environment, human rights, and aspects of national security. Many, many questions beg for research, including intensive interrogation of failures. Among the new global developments with which to be reckoned is the enlarging role of non-state, non-governmental organizations as intermediaries, leading dialogue groups comprised of adversaries discussing disputatious issues and working 'hands-on' to intervene directly in local disputes. The role of the churches and laity in ending Mozambique's civil war comes to mind. One challenge within IR is how to become more flexible in viewing the world, in which the nation state cannot control social change, and with the widening of civil space.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I came from a family that was deeply engaged with social issues. My father was the eighth Methodist minister in six generations from North Carolina and Virginia. The Methodist church in both Britain and the United States has a history of concern for social responsibility ― a topic of constant discussion in my home as a child and young adult. When four African American students began the southern student sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, by sitting-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, I was still in college. Although I am white, I began to think about how to join the young black people who were intentionally violating the laws of racial segregation by conducting sit-ins at lunch counters across the South. Soon more white people, very like me, were joining them, and the sweep of student sit-ins had become truly inter-racial. The sit-in movement is what provided the regional base for what would become a mass U.S. civil rights movement, with tens of thousands of participants, defined by the necessity for fierce nonviolent discipline. So, coming from a home where social issues were regularly discussed it was almost natural for me to become engaged in the civil rights movement. And I have remained engaged with such issues for the rest of my life, while widening my aperture. Today I work on a host of questions related to conflict, building peace, gender, the combined field of gender and peace-building, and nonviolent or civil resistance. At a very young age, I had started thinking as a citizen of the world and watching what was happening worldwide, rather than merely in the United States.
Martin Luther King (to whom I am not related) would become one of history's most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. He was the most significant exemplar for what we simply called The Movement. Yet the movement had two southern organizations: in 1957 after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, he created, along with others, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The other organization was the one for which I worked for four years: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pron. snick), which initially came into being literally to coordinate among the leaders of the student sit-in campaigns. As the sit-ins spread across the South, 70,000 black, and, increasingly, white, students participated. By the end of 1960, 3,600 would have been jailed.
SCLC and SNCC worked together but had different emphases: one of our emphases in SNCC was on eliciting leadership representing the voices of those who had been ignored in the past. We identified many women with remarkable leadership skills and sought to strengthen them. We wanted to build institutions that would make it easier for poor black southern communities to become independent and move out of the 'serfdom' in which they lived. Thus we put less prominence on large demonstrations, which SCLC often emphasized. Rather, we stressed the building of alternative (or parallel) institutions, including voter registration, alternative political parties, cooperatives, and credit unions.
What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
One requirement is a subject that has virtually disappeared from the schools in the United States: the field of geography. It used to be taught on every level starting in kindergarten, but has now been melded into a mélange called 'social sciences'. You would be surprised at how much ignorance exists and how it affects effectiveness. I served for years on the board of directors of an esteemed international non-profit private voluntary organization and recall a secretary who thought that Africa was a country. This is not simplistic — if you don't know the names of continents, countries, regions, and the basic political and economic history, it's much harder to think critically about the world. Secondly, students need to possess an attitude of reciprocity and mutuality. No perfect country exists; there is no nirvana without intractable problems in our world. No society, for example, has solved the serious problems of gender inequity that impede all spheres of life. Every society has predicaments and problems that need to be addressed, necessitating a constant process. So we each need to stand on a platform in which every nation can improve the preservation of the natural environment, the way it monitors and protects human rights, transitions to democratic systems, the priority it places on the empowerment of women, and so on. On this platform, concepts of inferior and superior are of little value.
You also co-authored an article in 1965 about the role of women and how working in a political movement for equality (the civil rights movement) has affected your perceptions of the relationship between men and women. Do you believe that the involvement of women in the Civil Rights Movement brought more gender equality in the USA and do you think involvement in Nonviolent Resistance movements in other places in the world could start such a process?
From within the heart of the civil rights movement I wrote an article with Casey Hayden, with whom I worked in Atlanta in the main office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Casey (Sandra Cason) and I were deeply engaged in a series of conversations involving other women in SNCC about what we had been learning, the lessons from our work aiding poor black people to organize, and asking ourselves whether our insights from being part of SNCC could be applied to other forms of injustice, such as inequality for women. The document reflected our growth and enlarging understanding of how to mobilize communities, how to strategize, how to achieve lasting change, and was a manifestation of this expanding awareness. The title was Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo. Caste is an ancient Hindu demarcation that not only determines an individual's social standing on the basis of the group into which one is born, but also differentiates and assigns occupational and economic roles. It cannot be changed. Casey and I thought of caste as comparable to the sex of one's birth. Women endure many forms of prejudice, bias, discrimination, and cruelty merely because they are female. For these reasons we chose the term caste. We sent our memorandum to forty women working in local peace and civil rights movements of the United States. The anecdotal evidence is strong that it inspired other women, who started coming together collectively to work on their own self-emancipation in 'consciousness raising groups.' It had appeared in Liberation magazine of the War Resisters League in April 1966 and was a catalyst in spurring the U.S. women's movement; indeed, the consciousness-raising groups fuelled the women's movement in the United States during the 1970s. Historians reflect that the article provided tinder for what is now called 'second-wave feminism', and the 1965 original is anthologized as one of the generative documents of twentieth-century gender studies.
We have to remember that women's organizations are nothing new, but have been poorly documented in history and that much information has been lost. Women have been prime actors for nonviolent social change in many parts of the world for a long time. New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote, in 1893, after decades of organizing. Other countries followed: China, Iran, later the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Japan would not vote until 1946. IR expert Fred Halliday contends that one of the most remarkable transnational movements of the modern age was the women's suffrage movement. The movement to enfranchise women may have been the biggest transnational nonviolent movement of human history. It was a significant historical phenomenon that throws light on how it is sometimes easier to bring about social and political change now than in the past.
Nonviolent movements seem to be growing around the world, and not only in dictatorships but also in democracies in Europe and the USA. How do you explain this?
I think that the sharing of knowledge is the answer to this question. Study in the field of nonviolent action has accelerated since the 1970s, often done by people who are both practitioners and scholars, as am I. Organizing nonviolently for social justice is not new, but the knowledge that has consolidated during the last 40 years has been major. The works of Gene Sharp have been significant, widely translated, and are accessible through the Albert EinsteinInstitution. His first major work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in three volumes, came out in 1973 (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers). It marked the development of a new understanding of how this form of cooperative action works, the conditions under which it can be optimized, and the ways in which one can improve effectiveness. Sharp's works have since been translated into more than 40 languages. Also valuable are the works and translations of dozens of other scholars, who often stand on his shoulders. Today there may be 200 scholar-activists in this field worldwide, with a great deal of work now underway in related fields. Knowledge is being shared not only through translated works, but also through organizations and their training programs, such as the War Resisters League International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, each of which came into existence in Britain around World War I. Both are still running seminars, training programs, and distributing books. George Lakey's Training for Change and a new database at Swarthmore College that he has developed are sharing knowledge. So is the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which has built a dramatic record in a short time, having run more than 400 seminars and workshops in more than 139 countries. The three major films that ICNC has produced (for example, 'Bringing Down a Dictator'), have been translated into 20 languages and been publicly broadcast to more than 20 million viewers.
After its success, leaders from the Serbian youth movement Otpor! (Resistance) that in 2000 disintegrated the Slobodan Milošević dictatorship formed a network of activists, including experienced veterans from civil-resistance struggles in South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine to share their experiences with other movements. People can now more easily find knowledge on the World Wide Web, often in their original language or a second language, and they can find networks that share information about their experiences, including their successes and failures.
I reject the Twitter explanation for the increased use of nonviolent action or civil resistance, because all nonviolent movements appropriate the most advanced technologies available. This pattern is related to the importance of communications for their basic success. Nonviolent mobilizations must be very shrewd in putting across their purpose, their goals and objectives, preparing slogans, and conveying information on how people can become involved. In order for people to join—bearing in mind that numbers are important for success—it is critically important to make clear what goal(s) you are seeking and why you have elected to work with civil resistance. This decision is sometimes hard to understand for people who have suffered great cruelty from their opponent, and who maintain 'but we are the victims', making the sharing of the logic of the technique of civil resistance vital.
What would you say is the importance of Nonviolent Resistance Studies in the field of International Relations and Political Science? And how do you counter those who argue that some forms of structural domination are only ended through violence?
In this case we can look at the evidence and stay away from arguing beliefs or ideology. Thanks to political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who have produced a discerning work, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011), we now have empirical evidence that removes this question from mystery. They studied 323 violent and nonviolent movements that occurred between 1900 and 2006 and found that the nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent struggles in achieving their goals, while incurring fewer costly fatalities and producing much greater prospects for democratic outcomes after the end of the campaign. They found only one area in which violent movements have been more successful, and that is in secessions. So, we don't need to dwell in the realm of opinion, but can read their findings. Other scholars have written about the same issues using qualitative data ― by doing interviews, developing case studies, and analytical descriptions ― but the work of Chenoweth and Stephan is quantitative, putting it in a different category due to its research methods.
Reading 'Why Civil Resistance Works' it caught my eye that nonviolent campaigns seem less successful in the Middle East and Asia than in other regions. Did you see that also in your own work? And if so, do you have an explanation for it? In addition, do you believe that the 'Arab Awakening' is a significant turn in history, or did the name arise too quickly and will it remain a temporary popular phrase?
What I encountered in working in the Middle East was an expectation, notion, or hope among people that a great leader would save them and bring them out of darkness. This belief seems often to have kept the populace in a state of passivity. Sometimes such pervasive theories of leadership are deeply elitist: one must be well educated to be a leader, one must be born into that role, one must be male, or the first son, etc. Such concepts of leadership discourage the taking of independent civil action.
I think that the Arab Awakening has been significant for a number of reasons. As one example, there had been a widespread (and patronizing) assumption in the United States and the West that the Arabs were not interested in democracy. We have heard from various sources including Israel for decades that Arabs are not attracted to democracy. As a matter of fact, I think that all people want a voice. All human beings wish to be listened to and to be able to express their hopes and aspirations. This is a fundamental basis of democracy and widely applicable, although democracy may take different forms. The Arab Awakening rebutted this arrogant assumption. This does not mean that the course will be easy. One of my Egyptian colleagues said to me, 'We have had dictatorship since 1952, but after Tahir Square you expect us to build a perfect democracy in 52 weeks! It cannot happen!'
Among the first concessions sought by the 2011 Arab revolts was rejection of the right of a dictator's sons to succeed him. The passing of power from father to son has been a characteristic of patriarchal societies, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Anthropologist John Borneman notes, 'The public renunciation of the son's claim to inherit the father's power definitively ends the specific Arab model of succession that has been incorporated into state dictatorships among tribal authorities'. In Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen (not all of which are successes), such movements have sought to end the presumption of father-son inheritance of rule.
I believe that we are seeing the start of a broad democratization process in the Middle East, not its end. The learning and preparation that had been occurring in Egypt prior to Tahrir Square was extensive. Workshops had been underway for 10 to 15 years before people filled Tahrir Square. Women bloggers had for years been monitoring torture and sharing news from outside. One woman blogger translated a comic book into Arabic about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, from the 1960s, and had it distributed all over Cairo. Labor unions had been very active. According to historian Joel Beinin, from 1998 to 2010 some 3 million laborers took part in 3,500 to 4,000 strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other actions, realizing more than 600 collective labor actions per year in 2007 and 2008. In the years immediately before the revolution, these actions became more coherent. Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, set up a Facebook page and used Google technologies to share ideas and knowledge about what ordinary people can do. The April 6 Youth Movement, set up in 2008, three years before Tahrir, sent one of its members to Belgrade in 2009, to learn how Otpor! had galvanized the bringing down of Milošević. He returned to Cairo with materials and films, lessons from other nonviolent movements, and workshop materials. This all goes back to the sharing of knowledge. Yet the Egyptians have now come to the point where they must assume responsibility and accountability for the whole and make difficult decisions for their society. It will be a long and difficult process. And it raises the question of what kind of help from outside is essential.
Why do you raise this point; do you think outside help is essential?
I know from having studied a large number of nonviolent movements in different parts of the globe that the sharing of lessons laterally among mobilizations and nonviolent struggles is highly effective. African American leaders were traveling by steamer ship from 1919 until the outbreak of World War II to the Indian subcontinent, to learn from Gandhi and the Indian independence struggles. This great interchange between black leaders in the United States and the Gandhian activists, as the historian Sudarshan Kapur shows in Raising Up A Prophet (1992), was critically significant in the solidification of consensus in the U.S. black community on nonviolent means. I have written about how the knowledge moved from East to West in my book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Scholarly exchanges and interchanges among activists from other struggles are both potentiating and illuminating. Most observers fail to see that nonviolent mobilizations often have very deep roots involving the lateral sharing of experience and know-how.
You have written a book about the first uprising, or 'intifada', in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 1987 and 1993. The second Palestinian uprising did not contain much nonviolent tactics though. Do you foresee another uprising soon? If not, why? If yes, do you think that Nonviolent Actions will play again an important role in that uprising, or is it more likely to turn violent?
Intifada is linguistically a nonviolent word: It means shaking off and has no violent implication whatsoever. (This word is utterly inappropriate for what happened in the so-called Second Intifada, although it started out as a nonviolent endeavor.) In the 1987 intifada, virtually the entire Palestinian society living under Israel's military occupation unified itself with remarkable cohesion on the use of nonviolent tools. The first intifada (1987-1993, especially 1987-1990) benefited from several forces at work in the 1970s and 1980s, about which I write in A Quiet Revolution (2007), one of which came from Palestinian activist intellectuals working with Israeli groups, who wanted to end occupation for their own reasons. These Israeli peace activists thought the occupation degraded them, made them less than human, in addition to oppressing Palestinians. The second so-called intifada was not a 'shaking off'. For the first time, it bade attacks against the Israeli settlements, which had not occurred before.
Let me put it this way: in virtually every situation, there is some potential for human beings to take upon themselves their own liberation through nonviolent action. We may expect that such potential is dormant and waiting for enactment. Disciplined nonviolent action is underway in a number of village-based struggles against the separation barrier in the West Bank right now, in which Israeli allies are among the action takers. As another example, the Freedom Theatre in Jenin is using Freedom Rides, a concept adopted from the U.S. southern Civil Rights Movement, riding buses to the South Hebron Hills villages and along the way using drama, music, and giant puppets as a way of stimulating debate about Israeli occupation. Bloggers and writers share their experiences (see e.g. this post by Nathan Schneider). For the first time, as we speak, the Freedom Bus will travel from the West Bank to make two performances in historic pre-1948 Palestine (Israel), in Haifa and the Golan, in June 2013. A Palestinian 'Empty Stomach' campaign, led by Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, has had some success in using hunger strikes to press Israeli officials for certain demands. With the purpose of prevailing upon Israel to conform to international resolutions pertaining to the Palestinians and to end its military occupation, Palestinian civic organizations in 2005 launched a Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign, drawing upon the notable example of third-party sanctions applied in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The Palestinian Authority has called for non-state observer status at the United Nations and supports the boycotting of products from Israeli settlements resistance.
More and more Palestinians are now saying, 'We must fight for our rights with nonviolent resistance'. Many Israelis are also deeply concerned about the future of their country. I recently got an email from an Israeli who was deeply affected by reading Quiet Revolution and has started to reach out to Palestinians and take actions to bring to light the injustices that he perceives. Tremendous debate is underway about new techniques, novel processes, and how to shift gears to more effective mutual action. The United States government and its people continue to pay for Israel's occupation and militarization, which has abetted the continuation of conflict, although it is often done in the name of peace! The United States has not incentivized the building of peace. It has done almost nothing to help the construction of institutions that could assist coexistence.
Also, it is very important for the entire world, including Israelis, to recognize intentional nonviolent action when they see it. The Israeli government persisted in denying that the 1987 Intifada was nonviolent, when the Palestinian populace had been maintaining extraordinary nonviolent discipline for nearly three years, despite harsh reprisals. Israeli officials continued to call it 'unending war' and 'the seventh war'. Indeed, it was not perfect nonviolent discipline, but enough that was indicative of a change in political thinking among the people in the Palestinian areas that could have been built upon. Although some Israeli social scientists accurately perceived the sea change in Palestinian political thought about what methods to use in seeking statehood and the lifting of the military occupation, the government of Israel generally did not seize upon such popularly enacted nonviolent discipline to push for progress. My sources for Quiet Revolution include interviews with Israelis, such as the former Chief Psychologist of the Israel Defense Force and IDF spokesperson.
Your latest book is about the transitions of the Eastern European countries from being under Soviet rule to independent democracies. You chose to illustrate these transitions with New York Times articles. Why did you chose this approach; do you think the NY Times was important as a media agency in any way or is there another reason?
There is another reason: The New York Times and CQ Press approached me and asked if I would write a reference book on the nonviolent revolutions of the Eastern bloc, using articles from the Times that I would choose upon which to hang the garments of the story. The point of the work is to help particularly young people learn that they can study history by studying newspapers. The book gives life to the old adage that newspaper reporters write the first draft of history. In the book's treatment of these nonviolent revolutions, I chose ten Times articles for each of the major ten struggles that are addressed, adding my historical analysis to complete the saga for each country. It had been difficult for Times reporters to get into Poland, for example, in the late 1970s and the crucial year of 1980; they sometimes risked their lives. Yet it's in the nature of journalism that their on-the-spot reportage needed additional analysis; furthermore newspaper accounts often stress description.
After the 1968 Prague Spring, when the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops and tanks from five Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia, crushing that revolt, across Eastern Europe a tremendous amount of fervent work got underway by small non-official committees, often below the radar of the communist party states. This included samizdat (Russian for 'self published'), works not published by the state publishing machinery, underground publications that were promoting new ways of thinking about how to address their dilemma. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania were the most active in the Eastern bloc with their major but covert samizdat. As it was illegal in Czechoslovakia for a citizen to own a photocopy machine, 'books' were published by using ten pieces of onion-skin paper interspersed with carbon sheets, 'publishing' each page by typing it and its copies on a manual typewriter.
The entire phenomenon of micro-committees, flying universities, samizdat boutiques, seminars, drama with hidden meanings, underground journals, and rock groups transmitting messages eluded outside observers, who were not thinking about what the people could do for themselves. The economists and Kremlinologists who were observing the Eastern bloc did not discern what the playwrights, small committees of activist intellectuals, local movements, labor unions, academicians, and church groups were undertaking. They did not imagine the scope or scale of what the people were doing for themselves with utmost self-reliance. In essence, no one saw these nonviolent revolutions coming, with the exception of the rare onlooker, such as the historian Timothy Garton Ash. Even today the peaceful transitions to democracy of the Eastern bloc are sometimes explained by saying 'Gorby did it', when Gorbachev did not come to power until 1985. Or by attributing the alterations to Reagan's going to Berlin and telling Gorbachov to tear down the Wall.
By December 1981, Poland was under martial law, which unleashed a high degree of underground organizing, countless organizations of self-help, reimagining of the society, and the publishing of samizdat. Still, even so, some people believe that this sweeping political change was top-down. It is indisputably true that nonviolent action usually interacts with other forces and forms of power, but I would say that we need this book for its accessible substantiation of historically significant independent nonviolent citizen action as a critical element in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
You also mention Al Jazeera as an important media agency in your most recent blog post at 'Waging Nonviolence'. You wrote that Al Jazeera has an important role in influencing global affairs. Could you explain why? And more generally, how important is diversification of media for international politics?
Al Jazeera generally has not been taking the point of view of the official organs of governments of Arab countries and has usually not reported news from ministries of information. Additionally, it often carries reports from local correspondents in the country at issue. If you are following a report from Gaza, it is likely to be a Gazan journalist who is transmitting to Al Jazeera. If it is a report from Egypt, it may well be an Egyptian correspondent. Al Jazeera also has made a point of reporting news from Israel, and utilizing reporters in Tel Aviv, which may be a significant development. Certainly in the 2010-2011 Arab Awakening, it made a huge difference that reports were coming directly from the action takers rather than the official news outlets of Arab governments.
President George W. Bush did not want Al Jazeera to come to the United States, because he considered it too anti-American. I remember reading at the time that the first thing that Gen. Colin Powell said to Al Jazeera was 'can you tone it down a little?' when asking why Al Jazeera couldn't be less anti-American in its news. To me, either you support free speech or you do not; it's free or it's not: You can't have a little bit of control and a little bit of freedom.
Until recently, Al Jazeera was not easily available in the United States, except in Brattleboro, Vermont; Washington, DC; and a few other places. It was difficult to get it straight in the United States. I mounted a special satellite so that I could get Al Jazeera more freely. This does not speak well for freedom of the press in the United States. This may change with the advent of Al Jazeera America, although we still do not know to what degree it will represent an editorially free press.
News agencies are important for civil-resistance movements for major reasons. Popular mobilizations need good communications internally and externally! People need to understand clearly what is the purpose and strategy and to be part of the making of decisions. Learning also crucially needs to take place inside the movement: activist intellectuals often act as interpreters, framing issues anew, suggesting that an old grievance is now actionable. No one expects the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker, and everyone else in the movement to read history and theory.
When news media are interested and following a popular movement of civil resistance, they can enhance the spread of knowledge. In the U.S. civil rights movement, the Southern white-owned newspapers considered the deaths of black persons or atrocities against African Americans as not being newsworthy. There was basically a 'black-out', if you want to call it that, with no pun. Yet dreadful things were happening while we were trying to mobilize, organize, and get out the word. So SNCC created its own media, and Julian Bond and others and I set up nationwide alternative outlets. Eventually we had 12 photographers across the South. This is very much like what the people of the Eastern bloc did with samizdat — sharing and disseminating papers, articles, chapters, even whole books. The media can offer a tremendous boost, but sometimes you have to create your own.
Last question. You combine scholarship with activism. How do you reconcile the academic claim for 'neutrality' with the emancipatory goals of activism?
To be frank, I am not searching for neutrality in my research. Rather, I strive for accuracy, careful transcription, and scrupulous gathering of evidence. I believe that this is how we can become more effective in working for justice, environmental protection, sustainable development, pursuing human rights, or seeking gender equity as critical tools to build more peaceable societies. Where possible I search for empirical data. So much has been ignored, for example, with regards to the effects of gendered injustice. I do not seek neutrality on this matter, but strong evidence. For example, since the 1970s, experts have known that the education of women has profoundly beneficial and measurable effects across entire societies, benefiting men, children, and women. Data from Kerala, India; Sri Lanka; and elsewhere has shown that when you educate women the entire society is uplifted and that all indicators shift positively. The problem is that the data have for decades been ignored or trivialized. We need much more than neutrality. We need to interpret evidence and data clearly to make them compelling and harder to ignore. I think that we can do this with methodologies that are uncompromisingly scrupulous.
Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace and and is Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, at the American University in Washington, D.C. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Her most recent book is The New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Times Reference and CQ Press/Sage, 2009), chronicling the nonviolent transitions that took place in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She is the author of the highly acclaimed A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books, 2007; London: Perseus Books, 2008), which examines crucial aspects of the 1987 uprising overlooked or misunderstood by the media, government officials, and academicians.
Related links
King's personal page Read the book edited by King on Peace Research for Africa (UNU, 2007) here (pdf) Read the book by King Teaching Model: Nonviolent Transformation of Conflict (UNU, 2006) here (pdf)
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
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Dirk Messner on the dynamics of global change and the significance of international science and technology cooperation in the post-Western world
This is the fifth in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
In recent years, the analysis of new emerging powers and shifting global order has become central to the study of international relations. While International Relations, aiming to evolve into a truly global discipline, is only just about to start opening up towards Non-Western perspectives, global power shifts have already led to a restructuring of global governance architecture in large fields of political reality and practice. Dirk Messner illustrates how far global power shifts have to lead to new patterns of international cooperation using international science and technology cooperation as a case in point. He argues that investment in joint knowledge creation and knowledge exchange is vital for managing the earth system. Messner also points to the multitude of tasks related to socio-technical systems which the political sphere is currently facing, particularly with regard to the challenge of managing the climate system.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is the most important challenge facing global politics that should be the central debate in the discipline of International Relations?
The biggest challenge of the next decades which we have to come to terms with is governing the big global commons. When I say global commons I do have in mind the atmosphere, the climate system, and other parts of the earth system, but also international financial markets and global infrastructures, such as the Internet – stability of these and other global commons is a public good much required. We need to stabilize the global commons and then manage them in a cooperative manner.
Three dynamics of global change make it specifically challenging to manage these global commons. The first wave of global change is the globalization wave; the economic globalization, cross-border dynamics, global value chains. It becomes evident that in many areas and especially when it comes to the global commons, regulation exceeds the capacity of individual nation states. The international community is required to institutionalize multilateralism and efficient global governance mechanisms in order to properly address issues arising from global dynamics. The second big global change is the shift from a Western to a post-Western world order. Global power shifts remaking the international system impede governing global commons. The third wave of global change is related to climate change, which adds a new dimension of global dynamics; human beings now have to learn how to steer, to stabilize, and how to govern the earth system as such. We are not only a species living on this planet, depending from resources and ecosystems of the earth systems. With the acceleration of economic globalization during the 1990s and the emergence of new, non-Western economic drivers of change, like China, humankind now significantly impacts the physical structures of the earth system. This trend is new. For the first 4,6 billion years of the existence of the earth system it was driven by the laws of physics, the dynamics of biology and bio-chemical processes. Homo sapiens appeared 220.000 years ago, and the impact of our species on the earth system has been marginal until the industrial revolution started 250 years ago. During the last decades human mankind became a major driver of change at a planetary scale.
How did you arrive in your current thinking about these issues?
I have always been interested in international relations, international policy dimensions, and the global economy. I started at the Free University of Berlin at the beginning of the 80's towards the mid-80's, studying Political Science and Economics. One among those professors who have been particularly important to me is Elmar Altvater. He was the supervisor of my diploma as well as of my Ph.D., and he sent me abroad. This resulted being a pivotal experience to me. I studied the last year of my first degree in Seoul, in South Korea. It was the period, the 80's, when the four Asian Tiger states emerged following Japan's example: South Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapur. I had the chance to visit these countries, study there and learn a lot about Asia. I was fascinated by the dynamics of emerging economies and what this implied for the international arena. Somewhat later, the Latin American continent became the center of my interest. I did research in Nicaragua, Uruguay, Chile and some other Latin American countries, trying to understand liberalization-movements, how weaker actors come under pressure in Western-dominated global settings, but also how some countries managed it to become dynamic parts of the global economy (like the "Asian tigers" or Chile) and why others failed. I learnt that it is crucial to understand dynamics of global change in order to being able to build solid and inclusive economic structures and legitimate political systems at national levels. There has always been a political impulse that pulled me into certain fields I decided to work in.
What is your advice for students who would like to get into the field of global change research or international cooperation?
My first advice is: visit and work in different countries and different cultural and political settings. It is one thing to learn from scholars or books, but having studied and having lived in different contexts and countries is absolutely a key experience. This is the way to understand global dynamics, to get a feeling for differences and similarities. My second advice stems from my experience and conviction that we need much more interdisciplinary research than we currently have. We talk a lot about interdisciplinarity, however, we do not have career paths that systematically build interdisciplinary teams.
Looking particularly at global environmental changes and the future of the earth system, at the end of the day, social scientists and natural scientists need to learn how to work together and to understand each other. The future of the oceans, for example, is not a question that can be understood by ocean biologists only. They are the people studying how these elements of the earth system are actually working, the dynamics and drivers - focusing on physical, chemical, and biochemical processes. But when we look at the oceans towards 2100 from the perspective of global change, the most important drivers are now us human beings, our economies, our consumption patterns, our greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts on the oceans. And this implies that to understand dynamics of global change, we need to analyze the interactions, interdependences and feedback loops between three systems: the ecological system(s); social systems (our economies and societies) driven by humans; the technical systems and infrastructures. Therefore natural scientists, social scientists, and engineers need to interact very closely. In the German Advisory Council on Global Change we call this approach: Transformation Research. Currently, we do not possess the appropriate university structures to adequately address this sort of problems. This is an immense institutional challenge. If I were a young scholar I would move into this direction, crossing disciplinary boundaries as much as possible.
What is the role of science and technologies in the dynamics of global change?
There are multiple important dimensions, but I would like to focus on some of them by moving through the aforementioned waves of global change. Technology is driving economic globalization, the first wave of global change. So we need to understand the dynamics of new technologies, especially the impact of ICTs, in order to understand the dynamics of economic globalization. The World Wide Web and social communication media are restructuring industrialization processes and global value chains. ICT infrastructure is also displaying a big potential for less developed regions. In Africa, for example, we saw many African countries jumping from the old telephone technologies to smartphones within less than a decade, because the old, maintenance and capital intensive communications infrastructure was no longer needed. Many African people now have access to smartphones, thus to communication- and information networks, and begin to reshape prize constellations and the global economy. Because of its restructuring effects, the impact of ICTs is relevant in all areas of the global economy. The global trend towards urbanization is similarly related to ICTs. Currently, we approach the global economy via data on national economies. But this might be about to change, as global mega-cities develop into global knowledge and financial hubs, building their own networks. In 2040, 80 percent of the global production, global GDP, global consumption, global exchange might be concentrated in 70 to 80 global cities or city regions.
Technology is also linked to the second wave of global change – the tectonic global power shift – in the way that investment in technology and knowledge in emerging economies are growing rapidly. We are not only facing economic and political power shifts, but also a remaking of the global science and research system itself. From my perspective, international cooperation in the field of science and technology research between "old powers" and "new powers", between Western countries and non-Western countries is extremely important for two reasons: First, we need to pool know-how in order to solve core global challenges and to develop patterns for managing the global commons. Interaction and cooperation in the field of science and technology is especially important for the creation of knowledge that is "better" in any way. For instance, in the field of adaptation policies to the impacts of climate change, most of the knowledge on how societies and local communities actually work or respond under these conditions exists in non-Western societies. The generation of knowledge is context dependent. We need to interact with colleagues from the respective countries for mutual learning and common knowledge improvement. My second argument is that, as an effect of the global power shift, traditional development cooperation is losing legitimacy. Many of these societies, from China to Peru, from Kenya to Vietnam, are no longer interested in our usual business, in our "aid-packages", our money, our experts or our concepts. What they are more interested in is true and reciprocal knowledge exchange and joint knowledge creation. Therefore, investments in respective forms and institutions of knowledge exchange and creation will be a central pillar of/for future oriented development cooperation or international cooperation and beneficial for all partners involved. Joint knowledge creation is a precondition for joint action and legitimate global governance initiatives.
The role of technologies with regard to the implications of climate change is crucial and multifaceted. In the German Advisory Council on Global Change we put forth suggestions concerning the transformation towards a low-carbon global economy. We are relatively optimistic in a technological sense. This statement is partly based on the Global Energy Assessment (GEA) research, which has been driven by Nebojsa Nakicenovic, one of our colleagues, who is working on energy modeling. The perspective there is that we know which kind of technologies we need for the transformation into a low-carbon or even zero-carbon economy. We can even calculate the investment costs and structures of different countries and regions. But we do know relatively little about the transformation processes of entire societies, economies and, eventually, the international system towards low-carbon systems. The transformation towards a low-carbon society is a "great transformation". In the entire history of mankind there might be only two examples for such a profound change: the industrial revolution 250 years ago and the Neolithic revolution 10.000 years ago, which induced the practices of agriculture. Today, we thus witness the third great transformation: the decoupling from fossil resources, from high-carbon to zero-carbon. To achieve the 2° Celsius goal, a complete decarbonization of the basic infrastructures of the global economy (the energy systems, the urban infrastructures and systems, the land use systems) is required – within a very limited period of time, until 2070. Comprehensive knowledge is key to achieve this. Let me emphasize once more the significance of international cooperation in the field of science and technology research, particularly in the IPCC context. I am sure that politicians from China, India, or Brazil only accept what the IPCC is presenting as objective knowledge, as the stand of the art knowledge, because their national scientists are deeply involved. If this were a classical western-based knowledge project it would have resulted in a lack of legitimacy. In the case of global climate policy, it is obvious that investment in joint knowledge creation is also about creating legitimacy for joint action.
What are the main obstacles of the low-carbon transformation?
The first two great transformations have been evolutionary processes. No one "planned" the industrial revolution, not to mention the Neolithic revolution. These have been evolutionary dynamics. The sustainability transformation instead needs to be a governed process right from the beginning. In our institute, we looked at different transformation dynamics, not only the really big ones, the Neolithic, industrial, and the current sustainability transformation. We also examined structural adjustment programs in Latin America and Africa, the collapse of communism at the end of the 80s, the abolition of slavery, and similar other key transformations of human societies. Based on this historical perspective, we have identified four main drivers of transformation: The first one is crisis, this is the most important one. Confronted with strong crises, society and probably also individuals react and change direction. The second important driver is very often technology and scientific (r)evolution. The third driver is vision: If you are confronted with a problem but you do not know where to go to, transformation becomes very difficult. The European Union is the product of a fresh vision among elites after World War II; the United Nations is a result of the disasters of the first half of the 20th century. Advancing a vision is an essential means to move or to transform in a goal-oriented manner. Sustainability, of course, is also a vision. The fourth and last driver of transformation is "knowledge": you know that you have a certain problem constellation, and though the crisis is still not there, you react based on your knowledge in a preventive way.
For the low-carbon transformation, the fourth driver currently is absolutely key. We are able to address problems which would otherwise become much worse in the future, although the climate crisis is latent still – in contrast to, for example, the financial crisis, which is more visible in its effects. The impacts of a global warming of 4 or 5 degrees are still not visible. This makes for a huge difference. In fact, humans are not very good at acting and transforming significantly based on knowledge only. In combination with visible, tangible crises, knowledge is a strong driver of change, but without crisis, it is merely sufficient. Transformations based on knowledge and preventive action only are rare. The ozone hole is one positive example; solving the problem was possible because it required less complex technological change, affecting few industries only. Human beings are risk-averse in a sense, we are conservative, we do not like to change rapidly; we are path-dependent. John Maynard Keynes once said: "It is easy to develop new concepts and ideas. The difficult thing is to forget the old ones". Therefore, scientific tools are needed in order to sketch out future scenarios. Based on scientific knowledge, we need to convince our societies, our political decision-makers that it is necessary and possible to transform societies and economies towards sustainability – in order to avoid disruptive change in the earth system. Pushing towards sustainability at a point where the crisis has not yet materialized implies a specific and new role for science in managing global dynamics. Organizing a deep transformation towards sustainability avoiding significant crises driven by Earth system changes would be a cultural learning process – a civilizational shift.
What are the effects of growing multipolarity for global governance processes?
To start optimistically, I would argue that in contrast to historical situations in which this kind of tectonic power shifts led to conflicts or even wars, the current situation is different. The world is highly interconnected and economic interdependencies are stronger than ever. Charles Kupchan is differentiating between "war", "cold peace" and "warm peace". I think that a big "war" is not very probable, and "cold peace" is what we are in actually. "Warm peace" would be cooperative global governance: we identify our problems, have a joint problem analysis, and subsequently start acting cooperatively on them. But this does not describe the contemporary situation. While there are no severe global conflicts, we do not solve many of the global interdependency problems.
There are many barriers to global cooperation and I would like to mention two or three of those. The first one consists of power conflicts and power struggles. Hopefully realists such as John Mearsheimer are not right in claiming that "a peaceful rise of China is not possible". But the fundamental point remains that the re-organization and shuffling of power resources is rendering cooperation extremely difficult. The second point is that all the important global actors currently have severe domestic challenges to manage. The European countries are coping with the European dept crisis. Similarly, the United States is concerned with financial turbulences and rising social inequalities. China has to keep its annual growth rate of about 8 to 12 per cent and meanwhile stabilize its rapid modernization process. In India, there is still a large group of people suffering from poverty. So, managing that and trying to be a responsible global actor at the same time is not easy at all. In brief, all actors that we would like to see taking on a more responsible role on the global level are overcommitted domestically.
There is consensus among different disciplines on what cooperation is actually about. At the Centre for Global Cooperation Research we did a study on The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation (2013) based on insights of very different disciplines – evolutionary biology, social anthropology, cognitive sciences, psychology, political sciences, behavioral economics – to find out what the basic mechanisms are which help human beings to cooperate at any scale towards global corporation in a world of nine billion people. Finally, we identified seven factors promoting cooperation: trust, communication, joint we-identities, reputation, fairness, enforcement – and reciprocity, which is the most fundamental prerequisite. These factors form an enable environment for cooperation and they are manmade. In contexts, actor constellations, systems, in which these basic mechanisms of cooperation are strong, they help to embed power dynamics, to solve social dilemma problems and to manage interdependencies. In contrast, contexts, actor constellations, and systems in which theses basic mechanisms of cooperation are weak, will be driven mainly by power dynamics and struggles. By looking at these factors one immediately understands why the G20 context is so difficult. We have been able to create and to well establish these factors in our old settings; in the European Union, the Western world, the transatlantic community. But now we are sitting together with new actors rather unknown. The G7/G8 world – the OECD driven and the western driven global economy and global politics – has moved towards G20 since it was acknowledged that one cannot manage any global turbulence without emerging economies. The G20 was created or rather called to meet in 2008, a few days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers when many feared the collapse of the world's financial markets. Most western economies were highly indebted, whereas the emerging economies, especially China, were holding large currency reserves. From a behavioral perspective we have to invest in these basic factors of cooperation in the G 20 context in order to create the essential preconditions of joint action to solve the big global problems. This represents a long-term project, and unfortunately many of these global problems are highly challenging from the time perspective: a tension derives from the gap between time pressure in many of these areas and the time it probably needs to build up these basic mechanisms of cooperation. In fact, the major feeling is that international cooperation is even weaker now than a decade ago. I usually visualize the current situation of the G20 as a round table with 20 seats but no one is sitting there. Charles Kupchan's "No one's world" or Ian Bremmer's "The G0 world" deal with the same problem: international cooperation, global governance is currently so difficult, although all these interdependency problems rendered the problem of managing the global commons fully obvious. If you talk to our Foreign Ministers or Finance Ministers or Chancellors and Presidents, they of course all know exactly what is out there in terms of globalization impacts. But organizing the necessary global consensus and the governance and cooperation structures is tremendously difficult.
How far is the discipline of development research affected by global change?
This is a complex question, to which I do not have a definite answer. The whole field of development research is currently about to get redefined. In the past, the concept of development was clear: On the one side, there was the developed world, the OECD-world, consisting of 35-40 countries and on the other side, the "underdeveloped" part of the world, all other countries. Understanding the differences between developed and developing, along with thinking about the basic drivers of modernization and wealth creation in less developed countries was at the core of development research for a long period. How can poor countries become rich and as developed as OECD countries already are?
Today, it is highly questionable if even the broader categories of "development research" still serve to analyze the new realities. Do we currently still need "development economists", and how would they differ from classical "economists" doing research in those European countries suffering most from the debt crisis, high unemployment and weak institutions? Situations in many OECD countries nowadays look like what one would expect from a still developing or emerging economy, and the other way around. So, what distinguishes development research? This is an important question. Studying non-OECD countries, do we still need development research based governance theories or democratization theories – thus, theories that are systematically different from those we apply in our research on OECD countries? The discipline of development research is under immense pressure. This debate is linked to the second wave of global change we talked about: the post-western world order, emerging economies catching up, convergence trends in the global economy.
If you look at the role of international technology transfer, the same scenario arises: the North-South, donor-recipient categories have dissolved. Technology transfer has lost its distinct direction, and it is much more reciprocal and diffuse than it used to be. There are several studies currently pointing to the fact that investment rates in R&D and in technology creation are growing fast in several regions around the globe, whereas in many OECD-countries, investment is stagnating, or even decreasing. The whole map of knowledge, if you like to say so, is about to undergo deep changes. This implies that the common assumption that knowledge is based in OECD countries and transferred to the South via development cooperation is just not working any longer. We need new patterns of cooperation between different countries in this area. And we need research on global development dynamics which will be different from classical development research which has been based on the assumption of a systemic North-South divide for a long time.
How do institutions such as the World Bank react to the emerging and redefined agenda of development?
The current reorientation of the World Bank as a Knowledge Bank originates from the assumption that knowledge is just as important as money for global development. The second point is that more and more of their partners in non-OECD countries, classical developing and emerging economies, are more and more interested in the knowledge pools of the World Bank and less in their experts. And: dynamic developing countries and emerging economies are even more interested in investments in their own knowledge systems and joint knowledge creation with the World Bank. The old North-South knowledge transfer model is eroding. You might say that there currently are two contradictory global trends: on the one hand via social media and the Internet, knowledge is being widely distributed – broader than ever before and actually, theoretically accessible at any point in the world –, on the other hand the proliferation of knowledge is accompanied with access restriction and control, and the growing privatization of knowledge. Aiming to play a constructive role in collaborative knowledge generation, the World Bank invests a lot in building up freely accessible data bases and open research tools, including the provision of governance or development indicators of any kind. However, this is a difficult process that is developing slowly.
The World Bank is currently undergoing several basic re-orientations. The structures inside of the World Bank are about to become less hierarchical and more horizontal. Originally, the World Bank has been a much more western dominated organization as the Bretton Woods institutions were formed by the United States and its allies. If you look into the governance structures of the World Bank today, it is still largely dominated by OECD countries, but you can notice that this is changing. It is a global organization but 90 % of people working there have been studying at Anglo-Saxon universities. Actors especially from emerging economies have been criticizing that for long, claiming that the World Bank as a global organization should have to be represented by a global citizenship. Although this had slowly started to change already, all the knowledge and all the qualification procedures still remained very western dominated. So they asked the World Bank to diversify its partner structures, to reach out and cooperate with research institutions from around the world. This is what the World Bank is trying to do at the moment, which is really a break with its culture. Because even though the World Bank is a global organization, it has always been a very inward-looking organization. The World Bank was strong, with fantastic professionals and researchers inside, but without cooperating tools. Now they are trying to broaden their cooperation structures and to learn from and together with other institutions.
What are the opportunities and difficulties of big data analysis for global development?
Access to any kind of data is important for any kind of knowledge creation. It has been very limited for many developing countries over a very long time. So, thinking about how to assure access to serious data is significant. This would be my first point. My second point is that, when it comes to big data and the question of managing large amounts of indicators on, for example, cross-country or cross-sector modeling, I think the new technologies are opening up new research possibilities and opportunities. Big data provides the opportunity to identify patterns. Looking for similar dynamics in very different systems is a very interesting exercise, because you get deeper insights into the basic dynamics of systems. This is what I have learned from my colleague Nakicenovic, whom I have mentioned before, and who is working on the Global Energy Assessment, or from Juergen Kurths, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who is studying basic structures and dynamics of very different complex systems like air traffic networks, global infrastructures and social media networks. Managing big data allows you to see patterns which cannot be seen if you only work with case studies. However, to understand the dynamics of countries and sectors, new actor constellations or communities, you need to go into detail and in this specific moment, big data is only the starting point, the background: you also need qualified, serious, very often qualitative data on the ground. Big data and qualified, specific data: they complement each other.
For sure, an important aspect of big data is that for the most part, it is gathered and stored by private businesses. We started this interview talking about global commons and we actually just defined a global commons: data on development should be a global commons, and we need standards and rules of managing those. Private actors could play a role, but within a set of rules defined by societies and policies, and not the private business sector.
Dirk Messner is the Director of the "German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)" since 2003 and teaches at the Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen. He is Co-Director of the "Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR)", University Duisburg-Essen, which was established in 2012. He furthermore is Co-Chair of the "German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU)", member of the "China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development", member of the "Global Knowledge Advisory Commission" of the World Bank and member of the "European Commission's Scientific Advisory Board for EU development policy". Dirk Messner's research interests and work areas include globalisation and global governance, climate change, transformation towards low carbon economies, and development policy. He directed many international research programs and thus created a close international research network.
related links:
Profile at German Development Institute Messner, Dirk / Guarín, Alejandro / Haun, Daniel (eds.) (2013): The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation, Global Cooperation Research Papers 1, Centre for Global Cooperation Research (pdf)
Read Jing Gu, John Humphrey, and Dirk Messner's (2007) Global Governance and Developing Countries: The Implications of the Rise of China here (pdf)
Messner, Dirk (2007): The European Union: Protagonist in a Multilateral World Order or Peripheral Power in the »Asia-Pacific« Century? (pdf)
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There are a lot of moving parts to the MMT program. I want to focus on one of these parts today: the relation between monetary and fiscal policy. One thing I find appealing about MMT scholars is their attention to monetary history and institutional details. I've learned a lot from them in this regard. But as is often the case with details, one has to worry about whether they help shed light on a specific question of interest, or whether they sometimes let us not see the forest for the trees. And in terms of the broader picture, since I grew up in that branch of macroeconomics that tries to take money, banking, and debt seriously (i.e., not standard NK theory), I sometimes have a hard time understanding what all the fuss is about. Much of standard monetary theory (SMT) seems perfectly consistent with some of the ideas I seen discussed in MMT proponents; see, for example, The Failure to Inflate Japan.
This post is devoted to better understanding a contribution by Eric Tymoigne. Eric is one of the people I go to whenever I want to learn more about MMT (if you're interested in MMT, you should follow him on Twitter @tymoignee). In this post, I discuss his article "Modern Monetary Theory, and Interrelations Between the Treasury and Central Bank: The Case of the United States." (JEI 2014). Passages quoted from his paper are highlighted in blue. The working paper version of the paper can be found here. Eric has kindly agreed to respond to my comments and let me post our conversation. We had to some editing, hopefully this did not disrupt the flow too much. In any case, I hope you find it interesting. And, as always, feel free to join in on the conversation in the comments section below. -- DA
One of the main contributions of modern money theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space. Not only can they issue their own currency to spend and to service their public debt denominated in their own unit of account, but also any self-imposed constraint on budgetary operations can be easily bypassed.
I'm curious to know what the contribution is here relative to standard monetary theory (SMT). In SMT, the government can also issue its own currency to spend and to service the public debt denominated in its own unit of account. So this degree of "flexibility" is already accounted for. As for "self-imposed constraints on budgetary operations," SMT takes several approaches to this issue, depending on the purpose of the analysis. One approach is to take these constraints as given and then to study their implications. But it is also common to consolidate the central bank, treasury and government into a single authority, which implies no self-imposed constraints on budgetary operations.
Perhaps what is meant is that MMT shows how existing self-imposed constraints on budgetary operations can be (or are) bypassed in reality. This leads us to question, however, concerning what those self-imposed constraints are doing there in the first place. Are they there by design and, if so, why? Or are they there by accident (and, if so, how in the world did this happen)?
ET: Yes consolidation is not unique to MMT as we have said repeatedly. Not only is it used quite commonly in the economic literature, but also it is a common rhetorical tool in economic talks, discourse, etc.
DA: Right, so everyone understands this (at least, they should)--it's perfectly consistent with standard monetary theory. So far, so good.
ET: Most economists, politicians and the public don't understand this or its implications. They will interpret the above as saying that it is obvious that the government can create money but it is not a normal way to proceed and it is inflationary. MMT just pushes consolidation to its logical conclusions and shows that institutional details do back those conclusions. In a consolidated framework, the federal government can only implement spending by creating money, this is not abnormal and it is not inflationary by itself. There is no other way to find the necessary dollars to spend. Here is what consolidation means in terms of balance sheets:
For the federal government, taxes destroy currency (L1 falls) and claims on non-fed sectors falls (A1 falls) (an alternative offsetting operation is net worth of government rises). When US spends, it credits accounts (L1 rises). Similarly, bond issuance does not lead to a gain of any asset for the government; all it does is replace a non-interest earning government liability (monetary base) with an interest-earning government liability (Treasury securities).
DA: I am not going to argue against your accounting. As for bond-issuance, in SMT, an open-market operation is modeled as a swap of zero-interest reserves for interest-bearing treasuries. The interest on treasuries is explained by their relative illiquidity (another self-imposed constraint). The economic consequences of such a swap depends on a host of factors, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
ET: Sure, in addition, self-imposed financial constraints (e.g. debt ceiling, no direct financing by the Fed, no monetary power for treasury) have been put in place at various times with the argument that they impose discipline in public finances. MMT argues, these financial constraints are not necessary and are bypassed routinely through Treasury-Central Bank coordination.
DA: Sure, the standard view is that these self-imposed constraints are designed to impose discipline in public finance. The proposition that these financial constraints are or are not necessary, however, must be based on a set of assumptions that may or may not be satisfied in reality. (The fact that these constraints may be bypassed through Treasury-Central Bank coordination does not seem relevant to me -- the conflict emphasized by SMT is between an "independent" central bank and the legislative authority (e.g., the Fed and Congress, not the Fed and Treasury). I'm not sure why a new theory is needed here. We know, for example, that if the legislative branch of government fully trusts itself (and future elected representatives) to behave in a fiscally responsible manner, the notion of an "independent" central bank (and other self-imposed constraints) makes little sense.
ET: Remember that MMT emphasizes the irrelevance of financial/nominal constraints for monetarily sovereign governments (bond vigilantes, risk of insolvency of social security, etc.). One can do that by using the consolidated government (taxes don't finance, bonds don't finance, government spends by crediting accounts, etc.) or by using the unconsolidated government (the central bank helps the Treasury, the Treasury helps the central bank). The second method conforms to actual federal government operations but it is much less easy to use rhetorically and it waters down the core point: government finances are never a financial issue as long as monetary sovereignty applies.
Given that point, as you note, financial constraints are not only irrelevant, but also disruptive and used for political games. MMT wants to make government financial operations as smooth and flexible as possible. Once society has decided how, and to what degree, government should be involved in solving socioeconomic problems, finding the money should not be an issue when monetary sovereignty prevails. That means demystifying and eliminating financial barriers to government operations so the political debate can focus on solving real issues (environment issues, socio-economic issues, etc.). Fearmongering about the public debt and fiscal deficits makes for poor political debates and policy prescriptions.
There is a view, expressed by Paul Samuelson, that if we tell policymakers and the public that there are no financial limits to government spending, policymakers will spend like mad; therefore, economists need to lie to policymakers and the public (and themselves). This is nonsense. We ought to discuss policy choices not on the basis of Noble Lies but rather on the basis of sound and informed premises. Economists needs to make sure that policymakers focus on resource constraints.
In addition, political constraints on government should be geared toward improving the transparency and participatory aspects of government (e.g. limit role of big money in elections, limit wastes, etc.). We already have a government that passes a budget (it needs to do so for transparency and accountability purposes), we already have an auditing process, and we already have some (limited) democratic process, so aim at improving these aspects. MMT proponents are not naive, we know that some politicians are self-interested, we know that policy implementation may lead to mistakes, we know people may try to game the system ("free riders"); however we trust that a transparent and democratic government can (and does) get through these issues. MMT does not see financial constraints as helping in any ways, rather they inhibit the democratic process.
Of course, MMT proponents also have a policy agenda (Job guarantee, financial regulation based on Minsky, etc.) because we do not see market mechanisms as self-promoting full employment, price stability and financial stability. As such, as you said, MMT proponents favor alternative means to achieve these goals through direct government intervention. We don't see the central bank as an effective means to promote price stability. The central bank should focus on financial stability through interest-rate stabilization and financial regulation (an area where the Fed has not performed well).
Finally, yes independence of the central bank is seen as a big deal but MMT disagrees for two reasons. First, MMT emphasizes the lack of effectiveness of monetary policy in managing the business cycle and, second, and probably more importantly, MMT notes that central-bank independence in terms of interest-rate setting and goal settings does not mean independence from the financial needs of the Treasury.
DA: I think it's fair to say most people want to see government operations run smoothly, and would welcome a sober debate over the issues at hand without the fear-mongering that some like to promote. The broad objective seems the same--the debate is more over implementation--how monetary and fiscal policy is to be coordinated--given human frailties.
Having said this, I think you go too far by asserting that "government finances are never an issue as long as monetary sovereignty applies." Of course, technical default on nominal debt is not an issue (we all understand this). But SMT also recognizes the importance of economic default on nominal debt. True, a government can always print money to satisfy its nominal debt obligation, but if money printing dilutes the purchasing power of money, this is a de facto default.
On a related issue, SMT asks "what are the limits to seigniorage?" The fact that a government can print money does not give it the power to command resources without constraint. People can (and do) find substitutes for government money (they may also substitute out of taxed activities into non-taxed activities). SMT treats the limits to seigniorage as a financial constraint. Maybe MMT has a different label for this constraint? Perhaps it is related to what I hear MMT proponents call an "inflation constraint." Maybe one way to reconcile MMT with SMT on this score is by recognizing that SMT usually assumes (sometimes incorrectly) that the inflation constraint is always binding. If this is the case, a monetarily-sovereign government does have a financial constraint, even according to MMT.
ET: Yes, ability to create a currency does not mean ability to command resources because there may not be a demand for the currency. That is where tax liabilities and other dues owed to the government become important (cf. the chartalist theory of money, a component of MMT). That's also why taxes, monetary creation and bond issuance are not conceptualized by MMT as alternative financing means but rather as complementary. The government imposes a tax liability, spends by issuing the currency necessary to pay the tax liability, then taxes and issues bonds. Spending may be inflationary indeed and so there is an inflation constraint; but it is not a financial constraint, it is a resource constraint.
About the "printing" of money by government, inflation and economic default. Regarding the first two, there is no evidence of an automatic relation between money and inflation. In a consolidated view, government always spends by monetary creation but controls the impact on inflation via taxes and the impact on interest rates via bond issuance. In an unconsolidated view, the central bank routinely finances and refinances the Treasury by helping some of the auction bidders and by participating in the auction.
Finally, regarding economic default, governments routinely "default" in that sense with no problems. I don't see that as a relevant concept unless someone can show that economic default raises interest rates or generates rising inflation (it does not); here again, there is no automatic link between inflation and interest rates. That link depends on how the central bank reacts; if it does not then market participants don't either.
DA: Let me return to the manner in which the Fed/Treasury/Congress are consolidated (or not) in SMT and why this matters, in your view. In some SMT treatments, Congress decides spending and taxes, which implies a primary deficit. It's up to the Treasury to finance that deficit, with the Fed playing a supporting role (by determining interest rate and issuing reserves for treasury debt). What's wrong with this approach?
ET: That goes in the right direction with an understanding that the government really has no control over its fiscal position. All this, which relates to the implementation of monetary sovereignty, helps understand why the financial crowding out is not operative, why monetary financing is not by definition inflationary, why i > g is normal. It helps explain why the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the public debt and deficits in nonsense. I recently wrote a piece for Challenge Magazine on that topic. Surpluses are celebrated, governments implement austerity during a recession to "live within our means", Social Security needs to be fixed to avoid bankrupting it, governments need to save more, etc. All of this is incorrect.
DA: I'm not sure why you claim SMT leads to the idea of i > g. The case i < g is perfectly consistent with SMT (see Blanchard's 2019 AEA Presidential address, and also my posts here and here). The correct criticism (I think) is that mainstream economists have assumed i > g as being the empirically relevant case (it is not).
ET: That is what I meant. MMT links that to monetary sovereignty.
DA: I think that's correct. I should like to add that mainstream economists (apart from a small set of monetary theorists) have not appreciated the role of high-grade sovereign debt as an exchange medium in wholesale financial markets and as a global store of value, which in my view likely explains a lot of the "missing inflation." But as for "surpluses being celebrated," you are now talking about individual viewpoints and not SMT per se. There were plenty of calls out there for countercyclical fiscal policy based on standard macroeconomic principles. But I do agree virtually all mainstream economists are (perhaps overly) concerned about "long-run fiscal sustainability." The view is that at the end of the day, stuff has to be paid for -- and that having the ability to print money, while granting an extra degree of flexibility, does not get around this basic fact.
DA: I'd like to ask you about this statement you make:
In (the unconsolidated) case, the Treasury collects taxes and issues securities before it can spend. However, federal taxes and bond offerings also serve another highly important function that is overlooked in standard monetary economics. Specifically, federal taxes and bond offerings result in a drainage of funds from the banking system, and MMT carefully analyzes the implication of this fact. From that analysis, MMT argues that federal taxes and bond offerings are best conceptualized as devices that maintain price and interest-rate stability, respectively (of course, the tax structure also has some important role to play in terms of influencing incentives and income distribution; something not disputed by MMT).
DA: Well, yes, taxes serve both as a revenue device (permitting the government to gain control over resources that would otherwise be in control of the private sector) and as a way to control inflation. I'm not sure about the idea of the Treasury offering bonds for the purpose of achieving interest-rate stability (though this may happen to some extent when the treasury determines which maturity to offer). I don't think this is the way things work in the U.S. today.
ET: Taxes and issuance of treasuries drain reserves and so raise the overnight rate. Hence, on a daily basis, a fiscal surplus raises the overnight rate and a fiscal deficit lowers it. There has been significant Treasury-Fed coordination to smooth the impact of taxes (and treasury spending) on the money market.
DA: Fine, but so what? We all understand "coordination" between Fed and Treasury exists at the operational level.
ET: I think you are too kind to other economists and policymakers. On taxes as price-stabilizing factors, there is indeed some similarities here. On the role of treasuries for interest-rate stability, it does work like this today. It may not be obvious because of the current emphasis on treasuries as Treasury's budgetary tools, but Treasury has issued securities for other purposes than its budgetary needs. In the US, this occurred most recently during the 2008 crisis (SFP bills). In Australia, in the early 2000s, the Treasury issued securities while running surpluses in order to promote financial stability.
DA: But even if this is not the way things actually work (in my view, it's the Fed that stabilizes interest rates, possibly through OMOs involving U.S. Treasuries), I'm not sure what point is being made. I think we can all agree that monetary and fiscal policy can be thought of as being consolidated in some manner. What would be good to know is how a specific MMT consolidation matters (relative to other specifications) for a specific set of questions being addressed. There is nothing in the abstract or introduction of this paper that suggests an answer to this question.
ET: The point being made is that in a consolidated government, tax and bond issuance lose the financial purpose they have for the Treasury but keep their price and interest-stability purposes.
DA: In standard monetary theory, tax and bond issuance keeps its funding purposes for the government and at the same time can be used to influence the price-level (inflation) and interest rates. Is this wrong? I don't think so. At some level, taxes (a vacuum cleaner sucking up money from the private sector) must have some implications for the ability of government to exert command over real resources in the economy. What we label this ability (whether "funding" or ''finance" or whatever, seems inconsequential).
ET: Ok here comes the crucial difference between financial and real sides of the economy. In financial terms, taxes do not increase the capacity of the government to spend, i.e. the government does not earn any money from taxing; taxes destroy the currency. In financial terms, there is no reason to fear a fiscal deficit; deficits are the norm, are sustainable and help other sectors grow their financial net wealth. As such, it is not because a government wants to spend more that it must tax more or lower spending somewhere else. That is the PAYGO mentality. This mentality makes policymakers think of spending and taxing in terms of how they impact the fiscal balance instead of their impact on employment, inflation, incentives, etc. While deficits may have negative consequences, they are not automatic. If one takes a look at the evidence, deficits have no automatic negative impacts on interest rates, tax rates, public-debt sustainability, or inflation.
In real terms, the necessity to increase tax rates to prevent inflation, and so move more resources to the government, depends on the state of the economy and the permanency of the increase in government spending relative to the size of the economy. In an underemployed economy, the government can spend more without raising tax rates. In a fully employed economy, shifting resources to the government without generating inflation does require raising tax rate and/or putting in place other measures such as rationing, price controls, and delayed private-income payment. Here Keynes's "How to Pay for the War" provides the roadmap. Standard economics is full-employment economics so opportunity costs are always present. MMT follows Kalecki, Keynes and the work of their followers (have a look at Lavoie's "Foundations of Post Keynesian Economic Analysis") and note that capitalist economies are usually underemployment and economic growth is demand driven. Put in a picture, the economy is usually at point a.
Put succinctly, the real constraint is conditionally relevant, the financial constraint is irrelevant if monetary sovereignty prevails. That is the proper way to frame the policy debates and to advise policymakers; don't worry about the money, worry about how spending impacts the economy.
ET: Moving to another topic, consolidation of the government brings to the forefront forces that are operating in the current system but that are buried under institutional complications. Namely that a fiscal deficit lowers interest rates and treasuries issuance brings them back up, that spending must come before taxing and treasuries issuance, that monetary financing of the government is not intrinsically unsound and does not mean that tax and treasuries issuance don't have to be implemented.
DA: The statement that "deficit lower interest rates" needs considerable qualification. Among other things, it depends on the monetary policy reaction function. As for the claim that spending *must* come before taxes, this is not a universally valid statement (even if it may be true in some circumstances. But even more importantly, who cares? Mainstream theory does not suggest that monetary financing is intrinsically unsound (seigniorage is fine, if it respects inflation ceiling). As for money, taxes and bonds not being alternative "funding" sources, I worry that this semantics. You can call X a "funding" source or not -- it's just a label. The real question is: what are the macroeconomic implications of X?
ET: Let me emphasize where I agree. Yes, evidence shows the central role of monetary policy for the direction of interest rates, fiscal policy is at best a very small driver. And yes, one ought to focus on the real implications of government spending and we ought to forget about the financial implications. A fiscal deficit is not unsustainable nor abnormal; deficits are the stylized fact of government finances and are financially sustainable if monetary sovereignty is present. So don't try to frame the policy debate and set policy in terms of household finances, bankruptcy, fixing the deficit, etc.
To conclude I see three reasons why the "taxes/bonds don't finance the government" rhetoric is helpful:
1- It is strictly true for the federal government (i.e. consolidation).
2- it brings to the forefront some lesser-known aspects of taxes and treasuries issuance: impacts on money market, role of central bank in fiscal policy, role of treasury in monetary policy.
3- It changes the narrative in terms of policy and political economy: government does not rely on the rich to finance itself, taxes should be set to remove the "bads" not to finance the government (e.g. one should not set tax rates on pollution with the goal of balancing the budget but with the goal of curbing pollution to whatever is considered appropriate, that may lead to much higher tax rates than what is needed to balance the budget), PAYGO is insane, one should focus on the real outcomes of government policies not the budgetary outcomes.
DA:
1. I think this is semantics.
2. Not sure how it helps in this regard.
3. I think all of these positions are defensible without the statement "taxes/bonds don't finance the government", so if this is the ultimate goal (and I think it should be), perhaps we should set aside semantic debates and focus on the real issues at hand.
ET: 1 is not semantic. I know you have in mind taxes as a means to leave resources to the government. MMT makes a clear difference between financial (ability to find the money) and resources constraint (ability to get the goods and services) as explained above. The financial constraint is highly relevant for non-monetarily sovereign governments so it should be noted and clearly separated from the real constraint. Too many policy discussions and decisions by policymakers operating under monetary sovereignty are based on an inexistent inability to find money and the imagined dear financial consequences of budgeting fiscal deficits. 2 helps to understand how monetary sovereignty is implemented in practice. On 3, yes focus on the real issues.
DA: We agree on 3! Thank you for an interesting discussion, Eric. There's so much more to talk about, but let's leave that for another day.
