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Bertrand Badie on the Trump Moment, the Science
of Suffering, and IR between Power and Weakness



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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)



Print version (pdf) of this Talk

Loet Leydesdorff on the Triple Helix: How Synergies in University-Industry-Government Relations can Shape Innovation Systems





This is the sixth and last 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 relationship between technological innovation
processes and the nation state remains a challenge for the discipline of
International Relations. Non-linear and multi-directional
characteristics of knowledge production, and the diffusive nature of knowledge
itself, limit the general ability of governments to influence and steer
innovation processes. Loet Leydesdorff advances the framework of the "Triple
Helix" that disaggregates national innovation systems into
evolving university-industry-government eco-systems. In this Talk, amongst others, he shows that these eco-systems can be
expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales, and emphasizes that, though
politics are always involved, synergies develop unintentionally.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is the most relevant aspect
of the dynamics of innovation for the discipline of International Relations?



The
main challenge is to endogenize the notions of technological progress and
technological development into theorizing about political economies and nation states.
The endogenization of technological innovation and technological development
was first placed on the research agenda of economics by evolutionary economists
like Nelson and Winter in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the
question was how to endogenize the dynamics of knowledge, organized knowledge,
science and technology into economic theorizing. However, one can equally well
formulate the problem of how to reflect on the global (sub)dynamics of
organized knowledge production in political theory and International Relations.



From
a longer-term perspective, one can consider that the nation states – the
national or political economies in Europe – were shaped in the 19th
century, somewhat later for Germany (after 1871), but for most countries it was
during the first half of the 19th century. This was after the French
and American Revolutions and in relation to industrialization. These nation
states were able to develop an institutional framework for organizing the
market as a wealth-generating mechanism, while the institutional framework
permitted them to retain wealth, to regulate market forces, and also to steer
them to a certain extent. However, the market is not only a local dynamics; it
is also a global phenomenon.



Nowadays,
another global dynamics is involved: science and technology add a dynamics different
from that of the market. The market is an equilibrium-seeking mechanism at each
moment of time. The evolutionary dynamics of science and technology nowadays
adds a non-equilibrium-seeking dynamics over time on top of that, and this puts
the nation state in a very different position. Combining an equilibrium-seeking
dynamics at each moment of time with a non-equilibrium seeking one over time
results in a complex adaptive dynamics, or an eco-dynamics, or however you want
to call it – these are different words for approximately the same thing.



For
the nation state, the question arises of how it relates to the global market
dynamics on the one side, and the global dynamics of knowledge and innovation on
the other. Thus, the nation state has to combine two tasks. I illustrated this
model of three subdynamics with a figure in my 2006 book entitled The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled,
measured, simulated (see image). The figure shows that first-order interactions
generate a knowledge-based economy as a next-order or global regime on top of
the localized trajectories of nation states and innovative firms. These complex
dynamics have first to be specified and then to be analyzed empirically.



For
example, the knowledge-based dynamics change the relation between government
and the economy; and they consequently change the position of the state in
relation to wealth-retaining mechanisms. How can the nation state be organized
in such a way as to retain wealth from knowledge locally, while knowledge (like
capital) tends to travel beyond boundaries? One can envisage the complex system
dynamics as a kind of cloud – a cloud
that touches the ground at certain places, as Harald Bathelt, for example,
formulated.



How
can national governments shape conditions for the cloud to touch and to remain
on the ground? The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations can
be considered as an eco-system of bi- and tri-lateral relations. The three
institutions and their interrelations can be expected to form a system carrying
the three functions of (i) novelty production, (ii) wealth generation, and
(iii) normative control. One tends to think of university-industry-government
relations first as neo-corporatist arrangements between these institutional
partners. However, I am interested in the ecosystem shaped through the tri- and
bilateral relationships.



This
ecosystem can be shaped at different levels. It can be a regional ecosystem or
a national ecosystem, for instance. One can ask whether there is a surplus of synergy
between the three (sub-)dynamics of university-industry-government relations
and where that synergy can generate wealth, knowledge, and control; in which
places, and along trajectories for which periods of time – that is, the same
synergy as meant by "a cloud touching the ground".



For
example, when studying Piedmont as a region in Northern Italy, it is
questionable whether the synergy in university-industry-government relations is
optimal at this regional level or should better be examined from a larger perspective
that includes Lombardy. On the one
hand, the administrative borders of nations and regions result from the
construction of political economies in the 19th century; but on the
other hand, the niches of synergy that can be expected in a knowledge-based
economy are bordered also; for example, in terms of metropolitan regions (e.g.,
Milan–Turin–Genoa).



Since
political dynamics are always involved, this has implications for International
Relations as a field of study. But the dynamic analysis is different from
comparative statics (that is, measurement at different moments of time). The
knowledge dynamics can travel and be "footloose" to use the words of Raymond
Vernon, although it leaves footprints behind. Grasping "wealth from knowledge"
(locally or regionally) requires taking a systems perspective. However, the
system is not "given"; the system remains under reconstruction and can thus be
articulated only as a theoretically informed hypothesis.



In
the social sciences, one can use the concept of a hypothesized system
heuristically. For example, when
analyzing the knowledge-based economy in Germany, one can ask whether more synergy
can be explained when looking at the level of the whole country (e.g., in terms
of the East-West or North-South divide) or at the level of Germany's Federal
States? What is the surplus of the nation or at the European level? How can one
provide political decision-making with the required variety to operate as a
control mechanism on the complex dynamics of these eco-systems?



A
complex system can be expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales,
but as unintended consequences. To what extent and for which time span can
these effects be anticipated and then perhaps be facilitated? At this point,
Luhmann's theory comes in because he has this notion of different codifications
of communication, which then, at a next-order level, begin to self-organize
when symbolically generalized.



Codes
are constructed bottom-up, but what is constructed bottom-up may thereafter
begin to control top-down. Thus, one should articulate reflexively the
selection mechanisms that are constructed from the bottom-up variation by
specifying the why as an hypothesis.
What are the selection mechanisms? Observable relations (such as
university-industry relations) are not neutral, but mean different things for
the economy and for the state; and this meaning of the observable relations can
be evaluated in terms of the codes of communication.



Against
Niklas Luhmann's model, I would argue that codes of communication can be
translated into one another since interhuman communications are not
operationally closed, as in the biological model of autopoiesis. One also needs a social-scientific perspective on the
fluidities ("overflows") and translations among functions, as emphasized, for
example, by French scholars such as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In
evolutionary economics, one distinguishes between market and non-market
selection environments, but not among selection environments that are
differently codified. Here, Luhmann's theory offers us a heuristic: The complex
system of communications tends to differentiate in terms of the symbolic
generalizations of codes of communication because this differentiation is
functional in allowing the system to process more complexity and thus to be
more innovative. The more orthogonal the codes, the more options for
translations among them. The synergy indicator measures these options as
redundancy. The selection environments, however, have to be specified historically
because these redundancies—other possibilities—are not given but rather constructed
over long periods of time.





How did you arrive where
you currently work on?


I
became interested in the relations between science, technology, and society as
an undergraduate (in biochemistry) which coincided with the time of the student
movement of the late 1960s. We began to study Jürgen Habermas in the framework
of the "critical university," and I decided to continue with a second degree in
philosophy. After the discussions between Luhmann and Habermas (1971), I
recognized the advantages of Luhmann's more empirically oriented systems approach
and I pursued my Ph.D. in the sociology of organization and labour.



In
the meantime, we got the opportunity to organize an interfaculty department for
Science and Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam after a
competition for a large government grant. In the context of this department, I
became interested in methodology: how can one compare across case studies and
make inferences? Actually, my 1995 book The
Challenge of Scientometrics
had a kind of Triple-Helix model on the cover: How do cognitions, texts, and
authors exhibit different dynamics that influence one another?



For
example, when an author publishes a paper in a scholarly journal, this may add
to his reputation as an author, but the knowledge claimed in the text enters a
process of validation which can be much more global and anonymous. These
processes are mediated since they are based on communication. Thus, one can add
to the context of discovery (of authors) and the context of justification (of
knowledge contents) a context of mediation (in texts). The status of a journal,
for example, matters for the communication of the knowledge content in the article.
The contexts operate as selection environments upon one another.



In
evolutionary economics, one is used to distinguishing between market and
non-market selection environments, but not among more selection environments
that are differently codified. At this point, Luhmann's theory offers a new
perspective: The complex system of communications tends to differentiate in
terms of the symbolic generalization of codes of communication because this differentiation
among the codes of communication allows the system to process more complexity
and to be more innovative in terms of possible translations. The different
selection environments for communications, however, are not given but constructed
historically over long periods of time. The modern (standardized) format of the
citation, for example, was constructed at the end of the 19th
century, but it took until the 1950s before the idea of a citation index was
formulated (by Eugene Garfield). The use of citations in evaluative
bibliometrics is even more recent.



In
evolutionary economics, one distinguishes furthermore between (technological)
trajectories and regimes. Trajectories can result from "mutual shaping" between
two selection environments, for example, markets and technologies. Nations and
firms follow trajectories in a landscape. Regimes are global and require the
specification of three (or more) selection environments. When three (or more)
dynamics interact, symmetry can be broken and one can expect feed-forward and
feedback loops. Such a system can begin to flourish auto-catalytically when the
configuration is optimal.



From
such considerations, that is, a confluence of the neo-institutional program of
Henry Etzkowitz and my neo-evolutionary view, our Triple Helix model emerged in
1994: how do institutions and functions interrelate and change one another or,
in other words, provide options for innovation? Under what conditions
can university-industry-government relations lead to wealth generation and
organized knowledge production? The starting point was a workshop about Evolutionary Economics and Chaos Theory: New
directions for technology studies held in Amsterdam in 1993. Henry
suggested thereafter that we could collaborate further on university-industry
relations. I answered that I needed at least three (sub)dynamics from the
perspective of my research program, and then we agreed about "A Triple Helix of
University-Industry-Government Relations". Years later, however, we took our
two lines of research apart again, and in 2002 I began developing a
Triple-Helix indicator of synergy in a series of studies of national systems of
innovation.





What would you give as
advice to students who would like to get into the field of innovation and
global politics?



In
general, I would advise them to be both a specialist and broader than that.
Innovation involves crossing established borders. Learn at least two languages.
If your background is political science, then take a minor in science &
technology studies or in economics. One needs both the specialist profile and
the potential to reach out to other audiences by being aware of the need to
make translations between different frameworks. Learn to be reflexive about the
status of what one can say in one or the other framework.



For
example, I learned to avoid the formulation of grandiose statements such as
"modern economies are knowledge-based economies," and to say instead: "modern
economies can increasingly be considered as knowledge-based economies." The
latter formulation provides room for asking "to what extent," and thus one can
ask for further information, indicators, and results of the measurement.



In
the sociology of science, specialisms and paradigms are sometimes considered as
belief systems. It seems to me that by considering scholarly discourses as
systems of rationalized expectations one can make the distinction between
normative and cognitive learning. Normative learning (that is, in belief
systems) is slower than cognitive learning (in terms of theorized expectations)
because the cognitive mode provides us with more room for experimentation: One
can afford to make mistakes, since one's communication and knowledge claims
remain under discussion, and not one's status as a communicator. The cognitive
mode has advantages; it can be considered as the surplus that is further
developed during higher education. Normative learning is slower; it dominates
in the political sphere.





What
does the "Triple Helix" reveal about the fragmentation of "national innovation
systems"?



In
2003, colleagues from the Department of Economics and Management Studies at the
Erasmus University in Rotterdam offered me firm data from the Netherlands containing
these three dimensions: the economic, the geographical, and the technological dimensions
in data of more than a million Dutch firms. I presented the results at the
Schumpeter Society in Turin in 2004, and asked whether someone in the audience
had similar data for other countries. I expected Swedish or Israeli colleagues
to have this type of statistics, but someone from Germany stepped in, Michael
Fritsch, and so we did the analysis for Germany. These studies were first
published in Research Policy.
Thereafter, we did studies on Hungary, Norway, Sweden, and recently also China
and Russia.



Several
conclusions arise from these studies. Using entropy statistics, the data can be
decomposed along the three different dimensions. One can decompose national
systems geographically into regions, but one can also decompose them in terms
of the technologies involved (e.g., high-tech versus medium-tech). We were
mainly relying on national data. And of course, there are limitations to the
data collections. Actually, we now have international data, but this is
commercial data and therefore more difficult to use reliably than governmental
statistics.



For
the Netherlands, we obtained the picture that would more or less be expected:
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Eindhoven are the most knowledge-intensive and
knowledge-based regions. This is not surprising, although there was one surprise:
We know that in terms of knowledge bases, Amsterdam is connected to Utrecht and
then the geography goes a bit to the east in the direction of Wageningen. What
we did not know was that the niche also spreads to the north in the direction
of Zwolle. The highways to Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) are probably the most
important.



In
the case of Germany, when we first analyzed the data at the level of the
"Laender" (Federal States), we could see the East-West divide still prevailing,
but when we repeated the analysis at the lower level of the "Regierungsbezirke"
we no longer found the East-West divide as dominant (using 2004 data). So, the
environment of Dresden for example was more synergetic in Triple-Helix terms
than that of Saarbruecken. And this was nice to see considering my idea that
the knowledge-based economy increasingly prevails since the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. The discussion about two different
models for organizing the political economy—communism or liberal democracy—had
become obsolete after 1990.



After
studying Germany, I worked with Balázs Lengyel on Hungarian data. Originally,
we could not find any regularity in the Hungarian data, but then the idea arose
to analyze the Hungarian data as three different innovation systems: one around
Budapest, which is a metropolitan innovation system; one in the west of the
country, which has been incorporated into Western Europe; and one in the east
of the country, which has remained the old innovation system that is state-led
and dependent on subsidies. For the western part, one could say that Hungary
has been "europeanized" by Austria and Germany; it has become part of a
European system.



When
Hungary came into the position to create a national
innovation system, free from Russia and the Comecon, it was too late, as
Europeanization had already stepped in and national boundaries were no longer
as dominant. Accordingly, and this was a very nice result, assessing this
synergy indicator on Hungary as a nation, we did not find additional synergy at
the national (that is, above-regional) level. While we clearly found synergy at
the national level for the Netherlands and also found it in Germany, but at the
level of the Federal States, we could not find synergy at a national level for
Hungary. Hungary has probably developed too late to develop a nationally
controlled system of innovations.



A
similar phenomenon appeared when we studied Norway: my Norwegian colleague
(Øivind Strand) did most of our analysis there. To our surprise, the
knowledge-based economy was not generated where the universities are located (Oslo
and Trondheim), but on the West Coast, where the off-shore, marine and maritime
industries are most dominant. FDI (foreign direct investment) in the marine and
maritime industries leads to knowledge-based synergy in the regions on the West
Shore of Norway. Norway is still a national system, but the Norwegian
universities like Trondheim or Oslo are not so much involved in entrepreneurial
networks. These are traditional universities, which tend to keep their hands
off the economy.



Actually,
when we had discussions about these two cases, Norway and Hungary, which both
show that internationalization had become a major factor, either in the form of
Europeanization in the Hungarian case, or in the form of foreign-driven
investments (off-shore industry and oil companies) in the Norwegian case, I
became uncertain and asked myself whether we did not believe too much in our
indicators? Therefore, I proposed to Øivind to study Sweden, given the availability
of well-organized data of this national system.



We
expected to find synergy concentrated in the three regional systems of
Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö/Lund. Indeed, 48.5 percent of the Swedish
synergy is created in these three regions. This is more than one would expect
on the basis of the literature. Some colleagues were upset, because they had
already started trying to work on new developments of the Triple Helix, for
example, in Linköping. But the Swedish economy is organized and centralized in
this geographical dimension. Perhaps that is why one talks so much about
"regionalization" in policy documents. Sweden is very much a national
innovation system, with additional synergy between the regions.





Can governments alter
historical trajectories of national, regional or local innovation systems?



Let
me mention the empirical results for China in order to illustrate the
implications of empirical conclusions for policy options. We had no Chinese
data set, but we obtained access to the database Orbis of the Bureau van Dijk
(an international company, which is Wall Street oriented, assembling data about
companies) that contains industry indicators such as names, addresses,
NACE-codes, types of technology, the sizes of each enterprise, etc. However,
this data can be very incomplete. Using this incomplete data for China, we said
that we were just going to show how one could do the analysis  if one had full data. We guess that the
National Bureau of Statistics of China has complete data.
I did the analysis with Ping Zhou, Professor at Zhejiang University.



We
analyzed China first at the provincial level, and as expected, the East Coast
emerged as much more knowledge intense than the rest of the country. After
that, we also looked at the next-lower level of the 339 prefectures of China.
From this analysis, four of them popped up as far more synergetic than the
others. These four municipalities were: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and
Chongqing.



These
four municipalities became clearly visible as an order of magnitude more
synergetic than other regions. The special characteristic about them is that –as
against the others – these four municipalities are administered by the central
government. Actually, it came out of my data and I did not understand it; but
my Chinese colleague said that this result was very nice and specified this
relationship.



The
Chinese case thus illustrates that government control can make a difference. It
shows – and that is not surprising, as China runs on a different model – that
the government is able to organize the four municipalities in such a way as to
increase synergy. Of course, I do not know what is happening on the ground. We
know that the Chinese system is more complex than these three dimensions
suggest. I guess the government agencies may wish to consider the option of
extending the success of this development model, to Guangdong for example or to
other parts of China. Isn't it worrisome that all the other and less controlled
districts have not been as successful in generating synergy?



Referring
more generally to innovation policies, I would advise as a heuristics that
political discourse is able to signal a problem, but policy questions do not
enable us to analyze the issues. Regional development, for example, is an issue
in Sweden because the system is very centralized, more than in Norway, for
example. But there is nothing in our data that supports the claim that the
Swedish government is successful in decentralizing the knowledge-based economy
beyond the three metropolitan regions. We may be able to reach conclusions like
these serving as policy advice. One develops policies on the basis of intuitive
assumptions which a researcher is sometimes able to test.



As
noted, one can expect a complex system continuously to produce unintended
consequences, and thus it needs monitoring. The dynamics of the system are
different from the sum of the sub-dynamics because of the interaction effects
and feedback loops. Metaphors such as a Triple Helix, Mode-2, or the Risk
Society can be stimulating for the discourse, but these metaphors tend to develop
their own dynamics of proliferating discourses.



The
Triple Helix, for example, can first be considered as a call for collaboration
in networks of institutions. However, in an ecosystem of bi-lateral and
tri-lateral relations, one has a trade-off between local integration
(collaboration) and global differentiation (competition). The markets and the
sciences develop at the global level, above the level of specific relations. A
principal agent such as government may be locked into a suboptimum. Institutional
reform that frees the other two dynamics (markets and sciences) requires
translation of political legitimation into other codes of communication. Translations
among codes of communication provide the innovation engine.





Is there a connection
between infrastructures and the success of innovation processes?



One
of the conclusions, which pervades throughout all advanced economies, is that
knowledge intensive services (KIS) are
not synergetic locally because they can be disconnected – uncoupled – from the
location. For example, if one offers a knowledge-intensive service in Munich
and receives a phone call from Hamburg, the next step is to take a plane to
Hamburg, or to catch a train inside Germany perhaps. Thus, it does not matter
whether one is located in Munich or Hamburg as knowledge-intensive services
uncouple from the local economy. The main point is proximity to an airport or
train station.



This
is also the case for high-tech knowledge-based manufacturing. But it is
different for medium-tech manufacturing, because in this case the dynamics are
more embedded in the other parts of the economy. If one looks at Russia, the
knowledge-intensive services operate differently from the Western European
model, where the phenomenon of uncoupling takes place. In Russia, KIS
contribute to coupling, as knowledge-intensive services are related to state
apparatuses.



In
the Russian case, the knowledge-based economy is heavily concentrated in Moscow
and St. Petersburg. So, if one aims –as the Russian government proclaims – to create
not "wealth from knowledge" but "knowledge from wealth" – that is, oil revenues
–it might be wise to uncouple the knowledge-intensive services from the state
apparatuses. Of course, this is not easy to do in the Russian model because
traditionally, the center (Moscow) has never done this. Uncoupling
knowledge-intensive services, however, might give them a degree of freedom to
move around, from Tomsk to Minsk or vice
versa, steered by economic forces more than they currently are (via institutions
in Moscow).





Final question. What does path-dependency mean in the context of
innovation dynamics?



In
The Challenge of Scientometrics. The development, measurement, and
self-organization of scientific communications (1995), I used Shannon-type information theory to study
scientometric problems, as this methodology combines both static and dynamic
analyses. Connected to this theory I developed a measurement method for
path-dependency and critical transitions.



In
the case of a radio transmission, for example, you have a sender and a
receiver, and in between you may have an auxiliary station. For instance, the
sender is in New York and the receiver is in Bonn and the auxiliary station is
in Iceland. The signal emerges in New York and travels to Bonn, but it may be possible
to improve the reception by assuming the signal is from Iceland instead of
listening to New York. When Iceland provides a better signal, it is possible to
forget the history of the signal before it arrived in Island. It no longer
matters whether Iceland obtained the signal originally from New York or Boston.
One takes the signal from Iceland and the pre-history of the signal does not
matter anymore for a receiver.



Such
a configuration provides a path-dependency (on Iceland) in
information-theoretical terms, measurable in terms of bits of information. In a
certain sense you get negative bits of information, since the shortest path in
the normal triangle would be from New York to Bonn, and in this case the
shortest path is from New York via Iceland to Bonn. I called this at the time a
critical transition. In a scientific text for instance, a new terminology can
come up and if it overwrites the old terminology to the extent that one does
not have to listen to the old terminology anymore, one has a critical
transition that frees one from the path-dependencies at a previous moment of
time.



Thus,
my example is about radical and knowledge-based changes. As long as one has to
listen to the past, one does not make a critical transition. The knowledge-based
approach is always about creative destruction and about moving ahead,
incorporating possible new options in the future. The hypothesized future
states become more important than the past. The challenge, in my opinion, is to
make the notion of options operational and to bring these ideas into
measurement. The Triple-Helix indicator measures the number of possible options
as additional redundancy. This measurement has the additional advantage that one
becomes sensitive to uncertainty in the prediction.





Loet Leydesdorff is Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He is Honorary Professor of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor at the School of Management, Birkbeck, University of London, Visiting Professor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in Beijing, and Guest Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He has published extensively in systems theory, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation (see at http://www.leydesdorff.net/list.htm). With Henry Etzkowitz, he initiated a series of workshops, conferences, and special issues about the Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003 and held "The City of Lausanne" Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, in 2005. In 2007, he was Vice-President of the 8th International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS'07, Liège). In 2014, he was listed as a highly-cited author by Thomson Reuters. 





Literature and Related
links:



Science & Technology Dynamics,
University of Amsterdam / Amsterdam School of Communications
Research (ASCoR) 


Leydesdorff,
L. (2006). The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, Measured, Simulated. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.


Leydesdorff, L. (2001). A Sociological Theory of Communication: The Self-Organization of the
Knowledge-Based Society. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.


Leydesdorff,
L. (1995). The Challenge of Scientometrics . The development, measurement, and
self-organization of scientific communications. Leiden, DSWO Press, Leiden University.


http://www.leydesdorff.net/





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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Ann Tickner on Feminist
Philosophy of Science, Engaging the Mainstream, and (still) Remaining Critical
in/of IR







Feminist IR is still often
side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearing as one
of the last chapters of introductory volumes to the field, despite the
limitless efforts of people such as Cynthia Enloe (Theory Talk #48)
and J. Ann Tickner. She has laboured to point out and provincialize the
parochialism that haunts mainstream IR, without, however, herself retreating
and disengaging from some of its core concerns. In this Talk, Tickner elaborates—amongst others—on the specifics of a
feminist approach to the philosophical underpinnings of IR; discusses how
feminism relates to the distinction between mainstream and critical theory; and
addresses the challenges of navigating such divides.







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?



I think the biggest challenge for IR is
that it is relevant and helps us understand important issues in our globalized world.
I realize this is not a conventional answer, but too often we academics get
caught up in substantive and methodological debates where we end up talking only
to each other or to a very small audience. We tend to get too concerned with
the issue of scientific respectability rather than thinking about how to try to
understand and remedy the massive problems that exist in the world today. Steve
Smith's presidential address to the ISA in 2002 (read it here),
shortly after 9/11, reminded us of this. Smith chastised the profession for
having nothing to say about such a catastrophic event.





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



I've gone through quite a few transformations
in my academic career. My original identity was as an International Political
Economy (IPE) scholar; my first academic position was at a small liberal arts
college (College of the Holy Cross) where I taught a variety of IPE courses. In
graduate school I was interested in what, in the 1970s, we called 'North-South'
issues, specifically issues of global justice, which were not the most popular
subjects in the field. So I always felt a little out of place in my choice of
subject matter. In the 1980s when I started teaching, IR was mostly populated
by men. As a woman, one felt somewhat uncomfortable at professional meetings;
and there were very few texts by women that I could assign to my students. I
also found that many of the female students in my introductory IR classes were
somewhat uncomfortable and unmotivated by the emphasis placed on strategic
issues and nuclear weapons.



It was at about the time when I first
started thinking about these issues, I happened to read Evelyn Fox Keller's book Gender and Science,
a book that offers a gendered critique of the natural sciences (read an
'update' of the argument by Keller here, pdf).
It struck me that her feminist critique of science could equally be applied to
IR theory. My first feminist publication, a feminist critique of Hans Morgenthau's
principles of political realism, expanded on this theme (read full text here,
pdf).




Teaching at a small liberal arts college
where one was judged by the quality of one's work rather than the type of
research one was doing was very helpful—because I could follow my own, rather
non-conventional, inclinations. So I think my turn to feminism, after ten years
in the field, was a combination of my own consciousness-raising and feeling
that there was something about IR that didn't speak to me. Later, I was fortunate
to be hired by the University of Southern California, a large research
institution, with an interdisciplinary School of International Relations,
separate from the political science department. When I arrived in 1995, the
School had a reputation for teaching a broad array of IR theoretical approaches.
The support of these institutional settings and of a network of feminist
scholars and students, some of whom I discovered were thinking along similar
lines in the late 1980s, were important for getting me to where I am today.





What
would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or
understand the world in a global way?



It depends on the level of the student:
at the undergraduate level, a broad array of courses in global politics including
some economics and history. Language training is very important too, and ideally,
an overseas experience. We need to encourage our students to be curious and
have an open mind about our world.



At the graduate level, this is a more complicated
question. The way you phrased the question 'to understand the world in a global
way,' can be very different from training to become an IR scholar, especially in
the United States. I would emphasize the importance of a broad theoretical and
methodological training, including some exposure to the philosophy of science,
and to non-Western IR if possible, or at least at a minimum, to try to get
beyond the dominance of American IR, which still exists even in places outside
the US.





Why should IR scholars incorporate
gender in the study of world politics? What are the epistemological and
ontological implications of adopting a feminist perspective in IR?



Feminists would argue that incorporating
feminist perspectives into IR would fundamentally transform the discipline.
Feminists claim that IR is already gendered, and gendered masculine, in the
types of questions it asks and the ways it goes about answering them. The
questions we ask in our research are never neutral - they are a choice,
depending on the researcher's identity and location. Over history, the
knowledge that we have accumulated has generally been knowledge about men's
lives. It's usually been men who do the asking and consequently, it is often
the case that women's lives and women's knowledge are absent from what is
deemed 'reliable' knowledge. This historical legacy has had, and continues to
have, an effect on the way we build knowledge. Sandra Harding,
a feminist philosopher of science, has suggested that if were to build
knowledge from women's lives as well, we would broaden the base from which we
construct knowledge, and would therefore get a richer and more complex picture
of reality.



One IR example of how we limit our research
questions and concerns is how we calculate national income, or wealth—the kind
of data states choose to collect and on which they base their public policy. We
have no way of measuring the vast of amount of non-remunerated reproductive and
caring labour, much of which is done by women. Without this labour we would not
have a functioning global capitalist economy. To me this is one example as to
why putting on our gender lenses helps us gain a more complete picture of
global politics and the workings of the global economy.



Feminists have also argued that the
epistemological foundations of Western knowledge are gendered. When we use
terms such as rationality, objectivity and public, they are paired with terms
such as emotional, subjective and private, terms that are seen as carrying less
weight. By privileging the first of these terms when we construct knowledge we
are valuing knowledge that we typically associate with masculinity and the
public sphere, historically associated with men. Rationality and objectivity
are not terms that are overtly gendered, but, when asked, women and men alike
associate them with masculinity. They are terms we value when we do our
research.





In one of the foundational texts of
Feminist IR, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists
and IR Theorists' (1997, full text here, pdf),
you highlighted three particular (gendered) misunderstandings that continue to
divide Feminists and mainstream IR theorists. To what extent do these
misunderstandings continue to inform mainstream perceptions of Feminist
approaches to the study of international politics?




I think probably they still do, although
it's always hard to tell, because the mainstream has not engaged much with
feminist approaches. I've been one who's always calling for conversations with
the mainstream but, apart from the forum responding to the article you mention,
there have been very few. In a 2010 article, published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, I looked
back to see if I could find responses to my 1997 article to which you refer. I
found that most of the responses had come from other feminists. The lack of
engagement, which other feminists have experienced also, makes it hard to know about
the misunderstandings that still exist but my guess would be that they remain. However
I do think there has been progress in accepting feminism's legitimacy in the
field. It is now included in many introductory texts.



The first misunderstanding that I
identified is the meaning of gender. I would hope that the introduction of
constructivist approaches would help with understanding that gender is social
construction - a very important point for feminists. But I think that gender is
still largely equated with women. Feminists have tried to stress that gender is
also about men and about masculinity, something that seems to be rather hard to
accept for those unfamiliar with feminist work. I think it's also hard for the
discipline to accept that both international politics as practice and IR as a
discipline are not gender neutral. Feminists claim that IR as a discipline is
gendered in its concepts, its subject matter, the questions it asks and the way
it goes about answering them. This is a radical assertion for those unfamiliar
with feminist approaches and it is not very well understood.



Now to answer the second misunderstanding
as to whether feminists are doing IR. I think there has been some progress here,
because IR has broadened its subject matter. And there has been quite a bit of
attention lately to gender issues in the 'real world' - issues such as sexual violence,
trafficking, and human rights. Of course these issues relate not only to women
but they are issues with which feminists have been concerned. Something I
continue to find curious is that the policy and activist communities are
generally ahead of the academy in taking up gender issues. Most international
organizations, and some national governments are under mandates for gender
mainstreaming. Yet, the academy has been slow to catch up and give students the
necessary training and skills to go out in the world and deal with such issues.




The third misunderstanding to which I
referred in the 1997 article is the question of epistemology. While, as I
indicated, there has been some acceptance of the subject matter, with which
feminists are concerned, it is a more fundamental and contentious question as
to whether feminists are recognized as 'doing IR' in the methodological sense. As
the field broadens its concerns, IR may see issues that feminists raise as
legitimate, but how we study them still evokes the same responses that I
brought up fifteen years ago. Many of the questions that feminists ask are not
amenable to being answered using the social scientific methodologies popular in
the field, particularly in the US. (I should add that there is a branch of IR
feminism that does use quantitative methods and it has gained much wider
acceptance by the mainstream.) The feminist assumption that Western knowledge
is gendered and based on men's lives is a challenging claim. And feminists
often prefer to start knowledge from the lives of people who are on the margins
– those who are subordinated or oppressed, and of course, this is very
different from IR which tends toward a top-down look at the international
system. One of the big problems that have become more evident to me over time
is that feminism is fundamentally sociological – it's about people and social
relations, whereas much of IR is about structures and states operating in an
anarchic, rather than a social, environment. I find that historians and
sociologists are more comfortable with gender analysis, perhaps for this reason.
I'm not sure that these misunderstanding are ever going to be solved or that
they need to be solved.





Although Feminist methodology is
often conflated with ethnographic approaches, 
in 'What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers
to International Relations Methodological Questions' (2005, pdf here),
you argued that there is no unique Feminist research methodology. Nonetheless,
Feminist IR is well known for using an autoethnographic approach. What does this approach add to
the study of gender in IR? What might account for the relative dearth of
autoethnography in other IR paradigms?



I think it is important to remember that
feminists use many different approaches coming out of very different
theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, socialism, constructivism, postpositivism,
postcolonialism and empiricism. So there are many different kinds of feminisms.
If you look specifically at what has been called 'second-generation feminist IR,'
the empirical work that followed the so-called 'first generation' that
challenged and critiqued the concepts and theoretical foundations of the field,
much of it, but not all, (discourse analysis is quite prevalent too), uses
ethnographic methods which seem well suited to researching some of the issues I
described earlier. Questions about violence against women, domestic servants,
women in the military, violent women, women in peace movements– these are the
sorts of research questions that demand fieldwork and an ethnographic approach.
Because as I stated earlier, IR asks rather different kinds of questions, it
does not generally adopt ethnographic methods. Feminists who do this type of
ethnographic research tell me that their work is often more readily received
and understood by those who do comparative politics, because they are more comfortable
with field research. And since women are not usually found in the halls of
power – as decision-makers. IR feminists are particularly concerned with issues
having to do with marginalized and disempowered peoples' lives. Ethnography is
useful for this type of research.



I see autoethnography as a different issue.
While the reflexive tradition is not unique to feminists, feminism tends to be
reflectivist. As I said earlier, feminists are sensitive to issues about who the
creators of knowledge have been and whose knowledge is claimed to be universal.
Most feminists believe that there is no such thing as universal knowledge. Consequently,
feminists believe that being explicit about one's positionality as a researcher
is very important because none of us can achieve objectivity, often called 'the
view from nowhere'. So while striving to get as accurate and as useful
knowledge as we can, we should be willing to state our own positionality. One's
privilege as a researcher must be acknowledged too; one must always be
sensitive to the unequal power relations between a researcher and their
research subject – something that anthropology recognized some time ago. Feminists
who do fieldwork often try to make their research useful to their subjects or do
participatory research so that they can give something back to the community. All
these concerns lead to autoethnographic disclosures. They demand a reflexive
attitude and a willingness to describe and reassess your research journey as
you go along. This autoethnographic style is hard for researchers in the positivist
tradition to understand. While we all strive to produce accurate and useful
knowledge, positivists' striving for objectivity requires keeping subjectivity
out of their research.





Robert W. Cox (Theory Talk #37)
famously distinguished two approaches to the study of international politics:
problem-solving theory and critical theory. How does the emancipatory project
of the latter inform your perspective of IR and its normative goals? And is
this distinction as valid today as it was when Cox first formulated it, over 3
decades ago?



Yes
I think it's still an important distinction. It's still cited very often which
suggests it's still valid, although postmodern scholars (and certain feminists)
have problems with Western liberal notions of emancipation. I see my own work
as being largely compatible with Cox's definition of critical theory. Like many
feminists, I view my work as explicitly normative; I say explicitly because I
believe all knowledge is normative although not all scholars would admit it. What
Cox calls problem-solving theory is also normative in the conservative sense of
not aiming to changing the world. A normative goal to which feminists are
generally committed is understanding the reasons for women's subordination and
seeking ways to end it. It's also important to note that the IR discipline was borne
with the intention of serving the interests of the state whereas academic feminism
was borne out of social movements for women's emancipation. The normative goals
of my work are to demonstrate how the theory and practice of IR is gendered and
what might be the implications of this, both for how we construct knowledge and
how we go about solving global problems.





Much of your work addresses the
parochial scope and neopositivist inclination of International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially in the United
States. What distinguishes other
'Western' institutional and political contexts (in the UK, Europe, Canada and Oceania) from the American
study of IR?  How and why is
critical/reflectivist IR marginalized in the American context? What is the
status of these 'debates' in non-Western
institutional contexts?



With respect to the parochial scope of US
IR, I refer you to a recent book, edited by Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver,
International
Relations Scholarship Around the World. It contains chapters by authors from around the world, some of whom
suggest IR in their country imitates the US and some who see very different IRs.
The chapter by Thomas J. Biersteker, ('The Parochialism of Hegemony:
Challenges for 'American' International Relations', read it here in pdf)
reports on his examination of the required reading lists for IR Ph.D.
candidates in the top ten US academic institutions. His findings suggest that
constructivism accounts for only about 10% of readings and anything more
radical even less. Over 90% of assigned works are written by US scholars. The dominance
of quantitative and rational choice approaches in the US may have something to
do with IR generally being a subfield of political science. Critical approaches
often have different epistemological roots. And I stress 'science' because
while IR is also subsumed in certain politics departments in other countries,
the commitment to science, in the neopositivist sense, is something that seems
to be peculiarly American. Stanley Hoffman's famous observation, made over
thirty years ago, that Americans see problems as solvable by the scientific
method is still largely correct I believe (read article here, pdf).
I find it striking that so many formerly US based and/or educated critical
scholars have left the US and are now based elsewhere – in Canada, Australasia,
or Europe.



Biersteker
sees the hegemony of American IR extending well beyond the US. But there is
generally less commitment to quantification elsewhere. This may be due to IR's historical
legacy emerging out of different knowledge traditions or being housed in
separate departments. In France, IR emerged from sociological and legal traditions
and, in the UK, history and political theory, including the Marxist tradition,
have been influential in IR. And European IR scholars do not move as freely
between the academy and the policy world as in the US. All these factors might encourage
more openness to critical approaches. I am afraid I don't know enough about
non-Western traditions to make an informed comment. But we must recognize the
enormous power differentials that exist with respect to engaging IR's debates. Language
barriers are one problem; having access to research funds is an enormous
privilege. Scholars in many parts of the world do not have the resources or the
time to engage in esoteric academic debates, nor do they have the resources to
attend professional meetings or access certain materials. The production of
knowledge is a very unequal process, dominated by those with power and resources;
hence the hegemonic position of the US that Biersteker and others still see.





As methodological pluralism now
retains the status of a norm in the field, John M. Hobson (Theory Talk #71) recently argued that the question
facing IR scholars no longer revolves around the debate between positivist
and postpositivist approaches. Rather, the primary meta-theoretical question
relates to Eurocentrism, that is, 'To be or not to be a Eurocentric, that is the
question.' To what extent do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?



Given
my answer to the last question, I am not sure that methodological pluralism has
reached an accepted status in the US yet. However, John M. Hobson has produced
a very thoughtful and engaging book that asks very provocative questions. Unfortunately,
I doubt many IR scholars in the US have read it and would be rather puzzled by
Hobson's claim. But certainly the Eurocentrism of the discipline is something
to which we should be paying attention. I find it curious how little IR has
recognized its imperial roots or engaged in any discussion of imperialism. As
Brian Schmidt and other historical revisionists have told us, when IR was borne
at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism was a central preoccupation
in the discipline. Race also has been ignored almost entirely by IR scholars.  



To
Hobson's specific claim that the important question for IR now is about being
or not being Eurocentric rather than about being positivist or postpositivist, I
do have some problems with this. I am concerned with Hobson's painting
positivism and postpostivism with the same Eurocentric brush. Yes, they are
both Eurocentric; but postpositivists or critical theorists – to use Cox's term
– are at least open to being reflective about how they produce knowledge and
where it comes from. If one can be reflective about one's knowledge it does
allow space to be aware of one's own biases. Those of us on the critical side
of Cox's divide can at least be reflective about the problems of Eurocentrism,
whereas positivists don't consider reflexivity to be part of producing good
research. Nevertheless, Hobson has made an important statement. He has written
a masterful and insightful book and I recommend it all IR scholars.





Last question. Your recent work is
part of an emergent collective dialogue that aims to 'provincialize' the
Western European heritage of IR. In a recent article
entitled 'Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities
for Dialogue in International Relations' you highlight the need for
non-Eurocentric approach to the study of IR. In IR,
what are the prospects for genuine dialogue across methodological and geographical borders?
Where do you see this dialogue taking place?



This is a very tough issue. There are
scholars like Hobson who talk about a non-Eurocentric approach, but given what
I said about resources, about language barriers, and about inequalities in the
ability to produce knowledge, this is difficult. As I've said at many times and
in many places, the power difference is an inhibitor to any genuine dialogue.
So, where is dialogue taking place? Among those, such as Hobson, who advocate a
hybrid approach that takes other knowledge traditions seriously and sees them
as equally valid as one's own. And mostly on the margins of what we call 'IR', where
some very exciting work is being produced. Feminism is one such site. Feminist
approaches are dedicated to dialogic knowledge production, or what they call
knowledge that emerges through conversation. Feminists believe that theory can
emerge from practice, listening to ordinary people and how they make sense of
their lives. I also think that projects like the one undertaken by Wæver and
Tickner (which is still ongoing) that is publishing contributions from scholars
from very different parts of the world is crucial.





J. Ann Tickner is
Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University. She is also a
Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California where she taught for
fifteen years before coming to American University. Her principle areas of
teaching and research include international theory, peace and security, and
feminist approaches to international relations. She served as President of the
International Studies Association from 2006-2007. Her books include Gendering
World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (Columbia
University Press, 2001), Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia University
Press, 1992), and Self-Reliance Versus
Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States
(Columbia University Press, 1987).







Related links





Faculty Profile at American University
Read
Tickner's Hans Morgenthau's Principles of
Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation (Millennium, 1988) here (pdf)
Read Tickner's You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and
IR Theorists (1997 International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) 
Read Tickner's What Is Your
Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations
Methodological Questions (2005, International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

John M. Hobson
on Eurocentrism, Historical Sociology and the Curious Case of Postcolonialism







International
Relations, it is widely recognized, is a Western discipline, albeit one that
claims to speak for global conditions. What does that mean are these regional
origins in and by themselves a stake in power politics? This Eurocentrism is
often taken as a point of departure for denouncing mainstream approaches by self-proclaimed
critical and postcolonialist approaches to IR. John Hobson stages a more
radical attack on Eurocentrism, in which western critical theories, too, are
complicit in the perpetuation of a dominantly western outlook. In this extensive
Talk, Hobson, among others, expounds
his understanding of Eurocentrism, discusses the imperative to historicize IR,
and sketches the outline of possible venues of emancipation from our provincial
predicament.



Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



In my view, there
are two principal inter-related challenges that face IR. The first is the need
to deal with the critique that the discipline is constructed on Eurocentric
foundations. This matters both for critical and conventional IR. The latter
insists that it works according to value-free positivistic/scientifistic
principles. But if it is skewed by an underlying Western-centric bias, as I
have contended in my work, then the positivist mantra turns out to constitute a
smokescreen or veil behind which lies the dark Eurocentric face of conventional
IR. And of course, if Eurocentrism in various forms infects much of critical
IR, then it jeopardizes its critical credentials and risks falling back into
problem-solving theory. For these reasons, then, I feel that the critique of
Eurocentric IR and international political economy (IPE) poses nothing short of
an intellectually existential challenge to these disciplines.



The second inter-related
challenge is that if we accept that the discipline is essentially Eurocentric
then we need to reconstruct IR's foundations on a non-Eurocentric basis and
then advance an alternative non-Eurocentric research agenda and empirical
analysis of the international system and the global political economy. This is
a straightforward challenge vis-à-vis conventional IR/IPE theory but it is more
problematic so far as critical IR/IPE is concerned (which is why my answer is
somewhat extended). The more postmodern wing of the discipline would view with
inherent skepticism any attempt to reconstruct some kind of (albeit
alternative) grand narrative. And the postmodern postcolonialists would likely
concur. It is at this point that the thorniest issue emerges in the context of postcolonial
IR theory. For however hard this is to say, I feel that simply proclaiming the
Eurocentric foundations of the discipline does not hole its constituent
theories deep beneath the waterline; a claim that abrades with the view of most
postcolonialists who view Eurocentrism as inherently illegitimate either
because it renders it imperialist (which I view as problematic since there are
significant strands of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism and scientific racism) or
because they conflate Eurocentrism with the unacceptable politics of (scientific)
racism (which I also find problematic notwithstanding the point that there are
all manner of overlaps and synergies between these two generic Western-centric
discourses, all of which is explained in my 2012 book, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics). The key point—one
which will undoubtedly get me into a lot of trouble with postcolonialists—is
that I feel we need to recognize that in the end Eurocentric IR (and IPE)
theory constitutes a stand-point approach, just like any other, and its merits
or de-merits can ultimately only be evaluated against the empirical record,
past and present (notwithstanding the points that I find Eurocentrism to be
deeply biased and that what I find so deeply galling about it is its dismissive
'put-down' modus operandi of all
things non-Western, wherein all non-Western achievements are dismissed outright,
alongside the simultaneous (re)presentation of everything that the West does as
progressive and/or pioneering).



So the second
principal challenge facing the discipline—one which will no less get me into
trouble with many postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers—is the need to
reconstruct an alternative non-Eurocentric set of disciplinary foundations,
which can then generate fresh empirical narratives of the international system
and the global political economy. For my view is that only by offering an
alternative research agenda and empirical analysis of the world economy can IR
and IPE be set free from their extant Eurocentric straitjackets and the
Sisyphean prison within which they remain confined, wherein IR and IPE scholars
simply re-present or recycle tired old Eurocentric mantras and tropes in new
clothing ad infinitum. For if nothing
else, the absence of an alternative reconstruction and empirical analysis means
that IR and IPE scholars are most likely simply to default to, or retreat back
into, their Eurocentric comfort zone. Accordingly, then, the battle between
Eurocentrism and non-Eurocentrism needs to be taken to the empirical field and
away from the high and rarified intellectually mountainous terrain of
metanarratival sparring contests.





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



Another way of
asking this question would be: what influenced you to become a non-Eurocentric
thinker? I get asked this question a lot, especially by non-white people. A
good deal of this is related to my life-experience, much of which is
sub-conscious of course and both too personal and too detailed to openly reflect
upon here (sorry!) More objectively, the initial impetus came around 1999 when
I came across a book on Max Weber by the well-respected Weberian scholar, Bryan Turner, in
which he argued inter alia that Weber's
sociology had Orientalist properties; none of which had occurred to me before.
Following this up further I became convinced that Weber was indeed Eurocentric,
as was Marx. More importantly, I came to see this as a huge problem that
infected not just Marx and Weber but pretty much all of historical sociology
(which was reinforced in my mind when I came to read James Blaut's books, The Colonizer's Model of the World (find
it here), and Eight Eurocentric Historians). So I set
out to develop an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history and
historical sociology as a counter (which resulted in my 2004 book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation).




Two further key IR
texts that I became aware of were L.H.M. Ling's seminal 2002 book, Postcolonial International Relations and
Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's equally brilliant 2004 book International Relations and the Problem of
Difference, both of which led me to explore further the Eurocentric nature
of IR and later IPE. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the influence
of Albert Paolini; a wonderful colleague whom I had the pleasure to know at La
Trobe University in Melbourne back in the early 1990s before his exceedingly
unfortunate and premature death (and who, I must say, was way ahead of the game
compared to me in terms of developing the critique of Eurocentrism in IR (see
his book, Navigating Modernity (1997)).
However, it would be unfair to the many others who have influenced me in
countless ways to single out only these books and writers, though I hope you'll
forgive me for not mentioning them so as to avoid providing yet another overly
extended answer!



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



This is an excellent but very challenging question and I want to try and make
a succinct answer (though I shall build on it in some of the answers I will
provide later on). The essential argument I make about 'thinking
inter-culturally' is that while the more liberal side of the discipline thinks
that its cosmopolitanism does just this, its Eurocentrism actually prevents it
from fulfilling this. Because ultimately, cosmopolitanism wants to impose a
Western standard of civilization upon the world, thereby advancing cultural
monism rather than cultural pluralism. And this is merely the loudest
expression of a spectre that haunts much of the discipline. But I guess that in
the end, to achieve genuine cultural pluralism and to think inter-culturally
requires us to take seriously how other non-Western peoples think of what their
cultures comprise and what it means to them, and how their societies and states
work along such lines. Dismissing them, as Eurocentrism always does, as
inferior, backward and regressive denies this requirement outright.
Interestingly, my great grandfather, J.A. Hobson flirted
with this idea in his book, Imperialism: A Study
(though this has largely escaped the notice of most people since few have read
the more important second part of that book where all this is considered). But
this is merely a first step, for as I will explain later on in the interview,
ultimately thinking inter-culturally requires an analysis of the dialogical
inter-connections and mutual co-constitutive relations between West and
non-West which, in turn, presupposes not merely the presence of Western agency
but also that of non-Western agency in the making of world politics and the
global political economy. 



All of which is clearly a massive challenge and I am certainly not
advocating that the discipline of IR engage in deep ethnographical study and
that it should morph into anthropology. And in any case I think that there are
things we can do more generally to transcend Eurocentrism while learning more
about the other side of the Eurocentric frontier without going to this extreme.
I shall talk about such conceptual moves later on in this interview. One such theoretical
move that I talk about later is the need to engage historical sociology (albeit
from a non-Eurocentric perspective) or, more precisely global historical sociology. Again, though, I'm not advocating that
the discipline should morph into historical sociology. And I'm aware that one
of the biggest obstacles to IR making inroads into historical sociology is the
sheer size of the task that this requires. It has always come naturally to me
because that is where I came from before I joined the IR academic community.
But there is quite a bit of historical sociology of IR out there now so I do
think it possible for new PhD students to enter this fold. All of this said,
though, I'm unsure if I have answered your question adequately.





The west is often seen as the source of
globalization and innovation, which have historically radiated outwards in a
process without seeming endpoint. What is wrong with this picture, and, perhaps
more interestingly, why does it remain so pervasive?



In essence I
believe this familiar picture—one which is embraced by conventional and many
critical IR/IPE and globalization theorists—is wrong because this linear
Western narrative brackets out all the many inputs that the non-West has made
(which returns me to the point made a moment ago concerning the dialogical
relations that have long existed between West and non-West). In my
aforementioned 2004 book I argued that the West did not rise to modernity as a
result of its own exceptional rational institutions and culture but was
significantly enabled by many non-Western achievements and inventions which
were borrowed and sometimes appropriated by the West. In short, without the
Rest there might be no modern West. Moreover, while the West has been the
principal actor in globalization since 1945, the globalization that preceded it
(i.e., between 1492 and c.1830) was non-Western-led (as was the process of
Afro-Eurasian regionalization that occurred between c.600 and 1492 out of which
post-1492 globalization emerged). And even after 1945 I believe that
non-Western actors have played various roles in shaping both globalization and
the West, all of which are elided in the standard Eurocentric linear Western
narrative of globalization.



But why has this
image remained so persistent? This is potentially a massive question though it
is a very important one for sure. Conventional theorists are most likely to
disagree outright with my alternative picture in part because they are entirely
comfortable with the notion that the 'West is best' and that the West single-handedly
created capitalism, the sovereign inter-state system and the global economy.
Critical theorists are rather more problematic to summarize here. But one that
springs to mind is the type of argument that Immanuel Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) made in a1997 article, in which he insisted that it be an imperative to hold the
West accountable for everything that goes on in the world economy so that we
can prosecute its crimes against the world. Arguments that bring non-Western
agency in, as I seek to do, he dismisses as deflecting focus away from the West
and thereby diluting the nature of the crimes that the West has imparted and
therefore serves merely to weaken the case for the critical prosecution. I
fundamentally disagree with him for reasons that I shan't go into here (but
will touch upon below). But in my view it is (or should be) a key
debate-in-the-making not least because I suspect that many other critical
theorists might agree with him and, more importantly, because it brings
fundamentally into question of what Eurocentrism is and of what the antidote to
it comprises. Either way, though, critical theorists, at least in my view, often
buy into the Western linear narrative, albeit not by celebrating the West but by
critiquing it. All of which means that both conventional and many critical IR scholars
effectively maintain the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the discipline though for
diametrically opposed reasons; and which, at the risk of sounding paranoid,
suggests a deeply subliminal conspiracy against the introduction of non-Eurocentrism.



Nevertheless one
final but rather obvious point remains. For the biggest reason why Eurocentrism
persists is because it makes Westerners feel good about themselves. And at the
risk of sounding like sour grapes (notwithstanding very decent sales for my non-Eurocentric
books), I have been struck by the fact that there seems to be an insatiable
appetite—particularly among the Western public readership—for high profile
Eurocentric books that celebrate and glorify Western civilization; though, to
be brutally frank, many of these rarely add anything new to that which has been
said countless times in the last 50 years, if not 200—notwithstanding Ricardo
Duchesne's recent avowedly Eurocentric book The
Uniqueness of Western Civilization as constituting a rare exception in this
regard. All of which means that writing non-Eurocentric books is unlikely to
get your name onto the bestseller list (though granted, the same is true for many
of the Eurocentric books that have been written!)





International theory and political theory
originates mainly from Europe, but makes universal claims about the nature of
politics. How does international theory betray its situated roots and how do
these roots matter for how we should think about theory?



I'm not sure
that I can answer this question in the space allowed but I'll try and get to the
broad-brush take-home point. I guess that when thinking about modern IR theory
we can find those theorists who in effect advocate a normative Western
imperialist posture even if they claim to be doing otherwise. Robert Gilpin's
work on hegemonic stability theory is perhaps the clearest example in this
respect. Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he claims, is non-imperialist because it always seeks to help the rest of the
world, not exploit it. But the exercise of hegemony, it turns out, returns us
to the old 19th century trope of the civilizing mission where
Western practices and principles are transferred and imposed on non-Western
societies in order to culturally convert them along Western lines. And this in
turn issues from the assumption that the British and American interests are not
selfish but are universal. This mantra is there too in Robert Keohane's (Theory Talk #9) book, After Hegemony, where cultural conversion of non-Western societies to
a neoliberal standard of civilization by the international financial
institutions through structural adjustment is approved of; an argument that is
developed much more expansively in his later work on humanitarian intervention.
And this trope forms the basis of cosmopolitan humanitarian interventionist
theory more generally, where state reconstruction, which is imposed once
military intervention has finished, is all about re-creating Western political
and economic institutions across the world. I don't doubt for a moment the
sincerity of the arguments that these authors make. But they can make them only
because they believe that the Western interest is truly the universal. In such
ways, then, IR betrays its roots.



Ultimately,
Western IR theory constructs a hierarchical conception of the world with the
West standing atop and from there we receive an image of a procession or
sliding scale of gradated sovereignties in the non-Western world. For much of
IR theory that has neo-imperialist normative underpinnings, it is this
construction which legitimizes Western intervention in the non-Western world,
thereby reproducing the legal conception of the (imperialist) standard of
civilization that underpinned late 19th century positive law.
Nevertheless, there has been a significant strand of anti-imperialist
Eurocentrism within international theory (and before it a strand of anti-imperialist
scientific racism, as in the likes of Charles HenryPearson and LothropStoddard). But once again, as we find in Samuel Huntington's famous 1996
book, The Clash of Civilizations—which
comprises a modern equivalent of Lothrop Stoddard's Eugenicist texts, The Rising Tideof Color (1920) and Clashing Tides of Color
(1935)—the West is held up as the highest expression of civilization, with
non-Western societies viewed as socially inferior such that the West's mandate
is not to imperially intervene across the world but to renew its uniquely
Western civilized culture in the face of regressive and rampant non-Western
regions and countries (particularly Middle Eastern Islam and Confucian China). Hedley Bull's
anti-imperialist English School argument provides a complementary variant here
because, he argues, it is the refusal of non-Western states to become Western
wherein the source of the (unacceptable) instability of the global
international society ultimately stems. All of which, as you allude to in your
question, rests on the conflation of the Western interest with the universal. It
is for this reason, then, that the cardinal principle of critical
non-Eurocentrism comprises the need to undertake deep (self) reflexivity and to
remain constantly vigilant to Eurocentric slippages.



In turn, this returns
me to the point I made before: that IR theory does not think inter-culturally
because it denies the validity of non-Western cultures. Because it does so,
then it ultimately denies the full sovereignty of non-Western states. For one
of the trappings of sovereignty is what Gerry Simpson usefully refers to as
'existential equality', or 'cultural self-determination'. It seems clear to me
that the majority of IR theory effectively denies the sovereignty of
non-Western states because it rejects cultural pluralism and hence cultural
self-determination as a function of its intolerant Eurocentric monism. The
biggest ironies that emerge here, however, are two-fold; or what I call the
twin self-delusions of IR. First, while conventional IR theory proclaims its
positivist, value free credentials that sit comfortably with cultural pluralist
tolerance, nevertheless as I argued in my answer to your first question, this
positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which
lies the face of intolerant Eurocentric cultural monism. And second, it means
that while IR proclaims that its subject matter comprises the objective
analysis of the international system which focuses on anarchy and the sovereign
state, nevertheless it turns out that what it is really all about is narrating
an analysis of Western hierarchy and the 'hyper-sovereignty' of Western states versus
the 'conditional sovereignty/gradated sovereignty' of non-Western states.





Linking your work to Lizée's as
a critique of extrapolating 'universals' on the basis of narrow (Western)
experiences, Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44) wrote as follows: 'Perhaps the
cure for the disease that Hobson and Lizée diagnose is a rethinking of what
"theory" means beyond empirical generalizations, so that future
international theorists can avoid the sins of the past.' What is your
conception of what theory is or should be?



As noted
already, I am all in favor of developing non-Eurocentric theory. To sketch this
out in the most generic terms I begin with the proposition that Eurocentric IR/IPE
theory is monological, producing a reductive narrative in which only the West talks
and acts. It is essentially a 'winner/loser' paradigm that proclaims the non-West
as the loser or is always on the receiving end of that which the West does, thereby
ensuring that central analytical focus is accorded to the hyper-agency of the
Western winner. And its conception of agency is based on having predominant
power. We find this problem particularly within much of critical IR theory,
where because the West is dominant so it qualifies as having (hyper) agency
while the subordinate position of the non-West means that it has little or no
agency. In turn, particularly within conventional IR and IPE we encounter a
substantialist ontology, where the West is thought to occupy a distinct and
autonomous domain. From there everything else follows. And even in parts of
critical IR and IPE where relationalism holds greater sway we often find that
the West still occupies the center of intellectual gravity in the world.



My preference is
for a fully relationalist approach which replaces the monologism of Eurocentrism
and its reification of the West with the aforementioned conception of dialogism
that brings the non-West into the discussion while simultaneously focusing on
the mutually constitutive relations between Western and non-Western actors. It
also allows for the agency of the non-West alongside the West's agency (even
though clearly after c.1830 the West has been the dominant actor). This in
effect replaces Eurocentrism's either/or problematique with a both/and logic,
enabling us to reveal a space in which non-Western agency plays important roles
without losing focus of Western agency, even when it takes a dominant form as
it did after c.1830. In this way then, to reply to Wallerstein's argument discussed
earlier, one does not have to dilute the critique of the West when bringing
non-Western agency in for both can be situated alongside each other. While I
could of course say much more here, these conceptual moves are paramount to me and
inform the basis of my empirical work on the international system and the
global political economy.



All in all, IR theory
needs to take a fully global
conception of agency much more seriously; structuralist theory in its many
guises is necessary but is ultimately insufficient since it diminishes or
dismisses outright the prospect or existence of non-Western agency. Moreover, I
seek to blend materialism and non-materialism, which means that neither constructivism
nor poststructuralism can quite get us over the line. Even so, blending
materialism and non-materialism is not an especially hard task to achieve
though IR's preferred ontologically reductionist stance certainly makes this a
counter-intuitive proposition.





You combine historical sociology with
international relations. What promises does this interdisciplinary approach
hold? Why do we need historical sociologies of IR?



Following on
from my previous answer I argue that a relationalist non-Eurocentric historical
sociology of IR is able to problematize the entities that IR takes for granted—states,
anarchy (as well as societies and civilizations)—in order to reveal them, to
quote from the marvelous introduction that Julian Go and George Lawson have
written for their forthcoming edited volume Global
Historical Sociology, as 'entities in motion'. Indeed such entities are
never quite complete but change through time. Here it is worth quoting Go and
Lawson further, where they argue that



'social
forms are "entities-in-motion": they are produced, reproduced, and breakdown
through the agency of historically situated actors. Such entities-in-motion,
whether they are states, empires, or civilizations often appear to be static
entities with certain pre-determined identities and interests. But the
relational premise, and perhaps promise, of GHS is its attempt to denaturalize
such entities by holding them up to historical scrutiny'.



It is precisely
this global historical sociological problematique that underpins the approach
that I develop in a forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Reorient International Political Economy
where inter alia, I show how many of
the major processes of the global economy are never complete but are constantly
mutating as they are shaped by the multiple interactions of Western and
non-Western actors. To take the origins of capitalism or globalization as an
example, I show how these have taken not a Western linear trajectory but a
highly discontinuous path as West and non-West have interacted in complex ways.




A good number of
IR historical sociologists have focused specifically on particular historical
issues—especially that of the rise of the sovereign state in Europe. Such
analyses have in my view proven to be extremely valuable because they allow us
to puncture some of the myths that surround 'Westphalia' that populate standard
or conventional IR reportage (particularly that found in undergraduate text-books).
But ultimately I feel that the greatest worth of the historical sociology of IR
project lies in using history (understood in historical-sociological terms
rather than according to traditional historians' precepts) as a means of
problematizing our understanding of the present international system and global
political economy. Thus, for me, historical sociology is ultimately important
because it can disrupt our understanding and explanations of the present. And I believe that this kind of
inter-disciplinarity can bear considerable fruit (notwithstanding the
difficulty that this task poses for IR scholars).





You famously criticized IR's Eurocentrism
and argued for the need for inter-cultural thinking. What is inter-cultural
thinking and how can it benefit IR?



As I already
discussed what inter-cultural thinking is a bit before, I shall consider how it
might benefit IR and indeed the world in various ways. First, if the rise of
the West into modernity owes much of this achievement to the help provided by
non-Western ideas, institutions and technologies, then acknowledging this debt
could go a long way to healing the wounds that the West has inflicted upon the
non-West's sense of self-esteem. Moreover, the hubristic claim ushered in by
Eurocentrism, that the West made it to the top all by itself and that the very
societies which helped it get there are then immediately denounced as inferior
and uncivilized, significantly furnishes the West with the imperialist mandate
to intervene and remake non-Western societies in the image of the West. So in
essence, the help that the once-more advanced non-Western societies that the
West benefited from is rewarded by 150 years of imperial punishment! Of course,
IR scholars do not really study the rise of the West, but it is implicit in so
much of what they write about. So acknowledging this debt could challenge the
West's self-appointed mandate to remake the world in its own image as well as
problematize many of the historical assumptions that lie either explicitly or
implicitly within IR.



Second, and
flowing on from the previous point, thinking inter-culturally means recognizing
the manifold roles that the non-West has played in shaping the rise of Western
capitalism and the sovereign state system as well as the global economy, as I
have just argued, but also appreciating their societies and cultures on their
own terms rather than simply dismissing them as unfit for purpose in the modern
world. Less Western Messianism and Western hubris, more global understanding
and empathy, is ultimately what I'm calling for. But none of this is possible
while Eurocentrism remains the go-to modus
operandi of IR and IPE. And this is important for IR not least because
significant parts of it have informed Western policy, most especially US
foreign policy.



Third, a key
benefit that inter-cultural thinking could bring to IR is that while the
discipline presumes that it furnishes objective analyses of the international
system, the upshot of my claim that the discipline is founded on Eurocentrism
is that all the discipline is really doing is finding ways to reaffirm the
importance of Western civilization in world politics, defending it and often
celebrating it, rather than learning or discovering new things about the world
and world politics. I believe that only a non-Eurocentric approach can deliver
that which IR thinks it's doing already but isn't.





You've said that 'what makes an argument
[institutionally] Eurocentric…lies with the nature of the categories that are
deployed to understand development. And these ultimately comprise the perceived
degree of 'rationality' that is embodied within the political, economic,
ideological, and social institutions of a given society.' In order to think
inter-culturally, does IR needs new conceptions of rationality, or standards
other than rationality altogether?



What an
extremely interesting and perceptive question which has really got me thinking!
Again, it's something that I've been aware of in the recesses of my mind but
have never really thought through. Certainly the essence of Eurocentrism lies
in the reification of Western rationality (or what Max Weber called Zweckrationalität)
and its simultaneous denial to non-Western societies. But what with all the
revelations that have happened in Britain in the last decade, where a seemingly
never ending series of fraudulent practices have been uncovered within British
public life—whether it be MPs' expenses scandals, banking scandals, newspaper
scandals and the like—then one really wonders about the extent to which the
West operates according to the properties of Zweck-rationality that Weber
proclaimed it to have. Corruption and fraud happen in the West but clearly they
are much more hidden than in those instances where it occurs in non-Western
countries (notwithstanding the revelations mentioned a moment ago). But if one
were to open the lid of many large Western companies, for example, and delve
inside one might well find all sorts of 'rationality-compromising' or
'rationality-denial' practices going on. To mention just two obvious examples:
first, promotions are often tainted by personal linkages rather than always
founded on merit; and second, managers often mark out and protect their own
personal position/territory even when it (frequently) goes against the
'rational' interests of the said organization.



To return to
your question, then, one could conclude that many Western institutions are far
less rational than Eurocentrism proclaims, which in turn would challenge the
foundations of Eurocentrism. Of course, corruption and fraud are not unique to
the West, but it is the West that proclaims its unique 'rational standard of
civilization'. Whether, therefore, we need to abandon the term (Zweck)
rationality on the grounds that it is an impossibly conceived ideal type
remains the question. Right now I don't have an answer though I'll be happy to
mull over this in the coming years.





You've written that engaging with the
East 'creates a genuinely global
history' and articulate a 'dream wherein the peoples of the Earth can finally
sit down at the table of global humanity and communicate as equal partners'. Do
you consciously operate with an 'ontology' of 'peoples' and 'civilizations' as
opposed to 'individuals'? How do you conceive of the relationship between
global humanity and plural peoplehood? Is there an underlying philosophical or
anthropological view that you are drawing on in these and similar passages?



Certainly I
prefer to think of peoples and even of civilizations rather than individuals
and states, though I'll confess right now that dealing theoretically with
civilizations and articulating them as units of analysis is extraordinarily
challenging. At the moment I leave this side of things to better people than
me, such as Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15) and his recentpioneering work on civilizations. The term 'global humanity' concerns me
insofar as it is often a politically-loaded term, particularly within
cosmopolitanism, where its underbelly comprises the desire to define a single
civilizational identity (i.e., a Western one) for 'global humanity'. In essence,
cosmopolitanism effectively advances the conception of a 'provincial (i.e.,
Western) humanity' that masquerades as the global. So I prefer the notion of
plural peoplehood, so as to allow for difference. I wouldn't say that I am
operating according to a particular philosophical view although it strikes me
that such a notion is embodied in Johann Gottfried Herder's
work which, on that dimension at least, I am attracted to. But to be honest,
this is generally something that I have not explored though it is something
that I've thought that I'd like to research for a future book (notwithstanding
the point that I'll need to finish the book that I have started first!).





In your reply toErik Ringmar, you draw on psychoanalytic metaphors to discuss the benefits
of overcoming Eurocentrism, writing that, 'Eurocentrism leads to the repression
and sublimation of the Other in the Self. Thus, doing away with Eurocentrism
can end the socio-psychological angst and alienation that necessarily occurs
through such sublimation.' How do you envision what we now call the West (or
Europe) after its socio-psychological transformation? What does a world after
angst and alienation look like? Is it possible, and is that the goal you think
IR theory should aim at?  



Another massively challenging and fascinating
question, let me have a go. Since you raised the issue of socio-psychological/psycho-analytical
theory (though it is something that I am no expert on), it has always struck me
that Eurocentrism itself is not simply a construct designed to advance Western
power and Western capitalist interests in the world. This seems too
mechanistic. For recall that it was a series of largely independent sojourners,
travel-writers, novelists, journalists and others rather than capitalists who
played such an important role in constructing Eurocentrism. Something more
seems to be at play. One can think of the battles between 'Mods and Rockers' or
Skinheads and heavy metal fans in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, who detested
each other simply because they held different identities and prized different
cultural values. Most importantly, I feel, the constant need to denounce, put
down and dismiss the Other as inferior seems reminiscent of those kinds of
people we sometimes meet who, in constantly putting down others to falsely elevate
themselves to a position of superiority, ultimately reveals merely their own
insecurities. The same issues, of course, underpin racism and Eurocentrism. The
West rose to prominence in my view as a late-developer and having got to the
top it very quickly came to view its duty as one of punishing all others for
being different – all done, of course, in the name of helping or civilizing the
very 'global humanity' that had done so much to help the West rise to the top
in the first place! And to want to culturally convert everyone in the world
according to the Western standard of civilization seems to be symptomatic of a
deeply insecure mindset. A secure person or society for that matter does not
feel threatened by, but openly embraces, difference.



Can we move beyond this stand-off given that
such a mentality has been hard-wired within Western culture for at least three
centuries? And ten if you count the sometimes terse relations between Europe
and Middle Eastern Islam that emerged after 1095! We need to move beyond an
identity that is based only on putting others down. It's 'bad karma' and, like
all bad karma, damages the Western self, not just the non-Western other. But to
transcend this identity-formation process requires us to do away with
logocentrism; clearly a very big task. Nevertheless, that is exactly what my
writings are all about. And it is something that I think IR theory needs to
strive to achieve. Because IR theory is to an extent performative then I live
in the hope, at least, that such a mentality might, just might somehow seep
into international public life, though if it were to happen I strongly suspect
that I would not be around to see it. Still, your question—what would a world
beyond Eurocentrism look like?—though very important is nevertheless perhaps
too difficult to answer without seeming like a hopeless idealist… other than to
say that it could be rather better than the current one.





You write
that 'IPE should aim to be an über-discipline, drawing on a wide range
of disciplines in order to craft a knowledge base that refuses to become lost
in disciplinary over-specialization and the depressing academic narcissism of
disciplinary methodological differentiation and exclusion.' Why do you prefer
that IPE should be the überdiscipline,
instead of IR (or something else altogether), with IPE as a subset?



My degree was in Political Economy, my Masters
in Political Sociology and my PhD in Historical Sociology and (International)
Political Economy. Despite the fact that the majority of my academic career to
date has been in IR research, I have always returned at various points to my
old haunting ground, IPE (as I have most recently). I have always found IR a
little alienating for its reification of politics, divorced from political
economy. I'm not a Marxist, but I share in the view that political economy, if
not always directly underpinning developments and events in the international
system is, however, never far away.



The quote that you took for this question came
from the end of my 2-part article that came out in the 20th
anniversary edition of Review of
International Political Economy. This was partly responding to Benjamin
Cohen's (Theory Talk #17) 2008 seminal book, International Political Economy: A
Intellectual History. One of the challenges that I issued to my IPE readership,
echoing Cohen, is the need for IPE to return to 'thinking big' (in large part
as a reaction to the massive contraction of the discipline's boundaries that
has been effected by third wave American IPE, which labors under the intellectual
hegemony of Open Economy Politics). In that context, then, I argued that IPE
needs to expand its boundaries outwards not only to allow big or macro-scale issues
to return to the discipline's research agenda but also to incorporate insight
from other disciplines. For in my view IPE has the potential to blend the
insights of many other disciplines that can in turn transcend the sometimes
myopic or tunnel-vision-based nature of their particular constituent specialisms.



One of the implications of 'thinking big' is
that IPE should be able to cover much of that which IR does… and more. Like
Susan Strange, who expressed her exasperation with IR for its exclusion of
politico-economic matters, so I feel that the solution lies not with IR
colonizing IPE (which is not likely for the foreseeable future!) but with IPE
expanding its currently narrow remit. If it could achieve this it could become
the 'über-discipline', or the
'master discipline', of the Social Sciences, notwithstanding the point that my
postcolonial and feminist friends will no doubt upbraid me for using such terrible
terms!





Final question. Beyond the East outside
the West, Greece is now being remade as the 'East' within the West, with a
range of measures applied to it that had hitherto been the preserve for the
'East' or Global South. How can your work help to make sense of the stakes?



Your question
reminds me of a similar one that I was asked in an interview for Cumhurieyet Strateji Magazine concerning
Turkey's ongoing efforts to join the EU, the essence of my answer comprising: 'be
careful what you wish for'. One of the things that I have felt uneasy about is
the way, as I see it (and I might not be quite right in saying this), that European
Studies (as a sub-discipline) sometimes appears as rather self-affirming,
thereby reflecting the core self-congratulatory modus operandi of the EU. I am not anti-European or in any way ashamed
to be Western (as some of my critics might think). But I'm deeply uneasy about
the EU project, specifically in terms of its desire to expand outwards, not to
mention inwards as we are seeing in the case of Greece today. For this has the
whiff of the old civilizing mission that had supposedly been put to rest back
at the time of the origins of the European Economic Community. Although Greece
is a member of the EU (notwithstanding its non-European roots), it seems clear
that what is going on today is a process of intensified internal colonization
under the hegemony of Germany, wherein Greece is subjected to the German
standard of civilization. All of which brings into question the
self-glorification of the self-proclaimed 'socially progressive' EU project.
And to return to my discussion of Turkey I recognize that candidate countries
have their reasons for wanting to
join the EU. But I guess that what my work is ultimately about is restoring a
sense of dignity to non-Western peoples, in the absence of which they will
continue to self-deprecate and live in angst in the long cold shadow of the
West. All of which brings me back to the answers I made to quite a few of the
earlier questions. So I would like to close by saying how much I have enjoyed answering
your extremely well-informed questions and to thank you most sincerely for
inviting me to address them.



Professor Hobson gained his
PhD from the LSE (1991), joined the University of Sheffield as Reader and is
currently Professor of Politics and International Relations. Previously he
taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne (1991–97) and the University of Sydney
(1997–2004). His main research interest concerns the area of
inter-civilizational relations and everyday political economy in the context of globalization, past and present. His work is principally involved in carrying
forward the critique of Eurocentrism in World History/Historical Sociology, and
International Relations.





Related
links





Faculty Profile at the University of Sheffield
Read Hobson's The Postcolonial Paradox of Eastern
Agency (Perceptions 2014) here
(pdf) 
Read Hobson's Is critical theory always for the white West
and for Western imperialism? (Review of International Studies 2007) here
(pdf)





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Print version of this Talk (pdf)