Suchergebnisse

Nora Lafi is a historian working as a Senior Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. She specializes in the study of the Ottoman Empire and of the societies of the Middle East and North Africa and is a 2023/24 Senior Research Fellow at MECAM.

Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novels are penetrating explorations of the deep-seated unease within Africa's intellectual class amid French colonization — still relevant today

As a country that experienced successive waves of colonization imposed on a diverse Indigenous population, Taiwan is a multilingual society but power relations among languages are far from equal.

It's time for all of us to reflect on the brutal reality of this country's colonization and understand the true meaning of reconciliation. The truths are difficult, but listening is the first step to stop the silencing of Indigenous voices. This Canada Day, we must hear the voices of those who were never allowed to speak for themselves.

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




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




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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




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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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





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





Related links




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




Print version of this Talk (pdf)

"To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I'm only half a human now." That's what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross's estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country's War on Terror.The Abu Ghraib "Scandal"On April 28th, 2004, CBS News's 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word "scandal" still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI's role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.The Road to Abu Ghraib"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I'm not going to address the 'torture' word." So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush's administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their "Global War on Terror," but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing "evidence" of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, "The Road to Abu Ghraib," noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to "soften up" detainees, and took a "see no evil, hear no evil," approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn't apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that "physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they "did not apply precisely" in Iraq.In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: "Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison."Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.Simulating AtonementOnce the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and "equally sorry that people who've been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America."As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush's behavior was a classic case of "simulated atonement," aimed at offering an "appearance of genuine confession" while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an "apologia" for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein's reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, "accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime."True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush's apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America's war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.Weapons of American ImperialismOn March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his "fellow citizens." He opened by saying that "American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would "witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military."There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" and a country that "continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror." Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam's regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn't and he knew it.) If that wasn't enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it "aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda."Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had "no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein's portrait with a sign that said, "America is the friend of all Iraqis." To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.In his essay "Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives," Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that "the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle."As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I'm discussing as "prison imperialism.") The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)Beyond Spectacle and Towards JusticeWhat made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it's important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib's survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It's crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.Two decades after those photos were released, what's crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.This piece has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.

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



Lire en français




IR retains a traditional focus on the
game of power between states as its defining characteristic. But what, so asks Bertrand
Badie, if this means that our discipline is based on a negation of our humanity?
A giant in Francophone IR, Badie has labored to instead place human suffering
at the center of analysis of the international, by letting loose sociological
insights on a truly global empirical reality. In this Talk, Badie—amongst others—challenges the centrality of the idea of
state power, which makes little sense in a world where most of the IR agenda is
defined by issues emanating from state weakness; argues for the centrality of
suffering to a more apt IR; and uses this to contextualize the Trump Moment.




Print version (pdf) of this Talk



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



Unquestionably, it would be the matter of change. It is time to conceptualize,
and further than that, to theorize the change that is happening in the field of
International Relations (IR). Humans have always had the feeling that they are
living in a period of upheaval, but contemporary IR is really characterized by several
landmarks that illustrate the drastic extent of change. I see at least three of
them.



The first one concerns the inclusive nature of the international system.
For the first time in the history of mankind, the international system covers
nearly the whole humanity, while the Westphalian system was an exclusively European
dynamic in which the United States of America entered to turn it into a system,
that I would call, Euro-North-American.



The second element, around which publications abound (see notably Mary
Kaldor's work, Theory Talk #30), is the deep mutation of the nature of conflict. War used to be, in
the Westphalian model, a matter of competition between powers. Today we have
the feeling that weakness is replacing power, in that power cannot any longer
function as central explanatory term of conflictual situations, which are
rather manifestations of state weakness. Think of 'failing' or 'collapsing'
states, which refers to the coming apart of nations that have been built badly
as well as the deliquescence of social ties. This new form of conflictuality
completely turns the international environment upside down and constitutes a
second indicator of transformation.



The third aspect concerns mobility. Our international system used to be
fully based on the idea of territory and boundaries, on the idea that fixity
establishes the competences of States in a very precise way. In this
perspective, the state refers to territory—as the definition given by Max Weber
states very clearly—but today this territorial notion of politics is challenged
by a full range of mobilities, composed of international flows that can be
either material, informational, or human.



These are three indicators illustrating a deep transformation of the
inner nature of IR that encourage me to speak about 'intersocial relations'
rather than 'interstate relations'. The notion of interstate relations no
longer captures the entirety of the global game. Our whole theory of IR was
based on the Westphalian model as it came out of the peace of Westphalia, as it
was confirmed by the accomplishment of the nation-state construction process
and as it dominated the historical flow of international events until the fall
of the Berlin wall.



Until the fall of the wall, all that was not related to Europe or to the
United States of America, or more precisely North-America, was simply called 'periphery',
which says enough. Today, by contrast, the periphery is central at least
regarding conflictuality. We should therefore drop our Westphalian prism and
build up new analytical tools for IR that would take these mutations as their
point of departure. Doing away with our Westphalian approach to IR would mean
questioning both our classical IR theories and questioning the practical models
of action in international politics, which means the uses of diplomacy and
warfare.





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



You know when we write, when we work, we are first of all influenced by
our dissatisfaction. The classical Westphalian approach to IR, as I said
earlier, did not satisfy me as I had the feeling that it was focusing on events
that no longer had the importance that we kept giving them—for instance the arms
race, great power politics, or the traditional diplomatic negotiations—while I
was seeing, maybe this was the trigger, that the greatest part of suffering in
the world was coming from places that IR theory was not really covering.



I have always told my students that IR is the science of human suffering.
This suffering exists of course where we are—in Europe, in North America, they
exist everywhere in the world—but the greatest part is outside of the
Westphalian area, so the classical approach to IR gives a marginal and
distorted image. Africa and the Middle East seen through the Westphalian prism are
a dull image, strongly different from the extraordinary wealth, both for good and
bad, that these areas of the world have. I've also always held that in a world
where 6 to 9 million people starve to death each year, the main foci of traditional
IR were derisory. Even terrorism, to which we collectively attribute so much
importance, hardly comes near how important a challenge food security is.



My three latest books take a stand against traditional IR theories. In Diplomacy of
Connivance (2012) I tried to
show that the great power game is really a game way that is much more
integrated than we usually say and that this game plays out in all multilateral
fora. There is indeed a club, and that is precisely what I wanted to describe,
a club of powers—one which results to the detriment of less powerful members in
the international system.



In Le Temps des humiliés ('the
era of the humiliated', 2014), I tried to crystallize what the classical theory
could not express, which is domination seen through the lens of the dominated,
humiliation as felt by the humiliated, violence as experienced by the
desperate. For instance, even if we look at powers as accomplished as China
today—sharing the first place with the USA in terms of GDP—we have to admit
that their historical experience of humiliation constitutes a huge source of inspiration
when it comes to the elaboration of its foreign policy.



And then, in my last book Nous ne
sommes plus seuls au monde ('we are no longer alone in the world', 2016), this
critique was even more explicit. We are writing an IR that encompasses only about
one billion of human beings, while forgetting all the others. Today it is
simply no longer true that these old powers are setting the international
agenda. Global politics today is written by the little, the weak, the dominated;
often with recourse to extreme forms of violence, but this needs to be analyzed
and understood, which would mean to totally change the IR theory.



We should not forget that in large part, IR theory was a given as the USA
triumphed in 1945. The well-known 'great power politics' that dominates
traditional IR theory, inaugurated by Morgenthau and supported by so many others,
described what was true at that time: the ability of American power to set us
free from the Nazi monster. Today the challenge is strongly different, and it
is by the way meaningful that two of the greatest American internationalist
political scientists, Robert Keohane (TheoryTalk #9) and Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53),
have both written books that elude to the end of this global order
(respectively After Hegemony and Goodbye Hegemony). Well what interests
me is exactly to dig into what comes after hegemony.





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



First of all, I would advise them to rename their science, as I said
earlier, and to call it intersocial relations. The future of what we call IR
comes down to the ability to understand the extremely rich, multiple and
diversified interactions that are happening among and across the world's
societies. It does not mean that we have to completely abandon the state-centric
perspective, but rather dethrone states from the middle of this multiplicity of
actors in order to realize how very often these states are powerless when faced
with these different actors. That would be my first advice.



My second advice would be to look
ahead and not back. Do not let yourself be dominated by the Westphalian model,
and to try to build up what we need—since almost nothing has been done yet
today to construct this post-Westphalian, meta-Westphalian model. Beyond power,
there are things that we still misidentify or overlook while they are the driving
forces of today's and tomorrow's IR. From this point of view, sociology could
prove particularly useful. I consider, for instance, that Émile Durkheim is a very important inspiration to understand the
world today. Here is an author to study and to apply to IR.



The third advice that I would give them would be to not forget that IR
or intersocial relations are indeed the sciences of human suffering. We should
be able to place suffering at the core of the thinking. We've lost far too much
time staring at power, now it is time to move on to place human suffering at
the center. Why? First of all because it is ethically better; maybe will we be
able to learn from it? But also because in today's actual international
politics suffering is more proactive than power, which is not necessarily
optimistic but if recognized, would allow us a better questioning of new forms
of conflictuality. Perhaps unfortunately, the international agenda is no longer
fixed with canons, but with tears. Maybe this is the key point on which we
should concentrate our reflection.



Your insistence on placing suffering at the center of
IR scholarship seems to place you firmly alongside those who recognize "grievance" ratherthan "greed" as a central logic of international politics. What do you make of this parallel?



You are right: the idea of grievance, of recrimination, is a structuring
logic of the international game today. We did not see it coming for two
reasons. First of all because our traditional analysis of international
politics presupposed a unity of time, as if the African time, the Chinese time,
the Indian time and the European time where all identical. Yet this is
completely wrong because we, in our European culture, have not understood that
before Westphalia there were
political models, political histories, that profoundly marked the people that would
then shape contemporary politics. Remember that China is 4000 years of empire,
remember that precolonial Africa was composed of kingdoms, empires,
civilizations, philosophies, arts... Remember that India also is multi-millenary.
The Westphalian time came to totally deny and crush this temporality, this
historicity, almost in a negationist way, which means that, in the spirit of
those who were defending the Westphalian model, only this model was associated
to the Renaissance; and that the age of enlightenment and reason with a big R
had a calling to reformat the world as if it were a hard drive. This was a
senseless bet, a bet for which our European ancestors who led it had excuses
because at that time we did not know all these histories, at that time we did
not have all the knowledge we today have of the other and thus we simply
resolved it, through the negation of alterity. Yet, IR ought on the contrary aspire
to the accomplishment of alterity. Inevitably, all those who saw themselves
denied their historicity, over several centuries and even several millenaries,
accumulated a feeling of recrimination, of particularly deep grievances.



The second element is that all of this happened in a context of
disequilibrium of power resources, linked to different factors that reflected
indeed the fact that at a given moment of time western powers were both
literally and figuratively better armed than other societies. Abovementioned negation
of alterity was mapped onto, and amplified, by the forceful imposition of a
multilateral system that turned into the worst situation, into a proclaimed
hierarchy of cultures; as a result and there were, as Jules Ferry put it in the France
of the 19th century, 'races'; as in, 'We have the obligation to
educate inferior races'. It is not the beginning of history, but it is the
beginning of a history of humiliation. And through subsequent waves of globalization,
this humiliation has turned into a central nerve running through international
life. A nerve that has been used by both the powerful, who made a tool out of
humiliating the others to better dominate them (think here of the opium wars, colonization)
and simultaneously a nerve that fed the reaction of mobilization in the extra-Westphalian
world by those that had to stand up against those who were humiliating them. So
you see how it truly lies at the basis of IR. In my mind, it became a forceful paradigm,
it explains everything, even though others factors continue to weigh in on
actual dynamics.



In order to appreciate all this, we need a sociological approach, which
has for me two aspects. Both these aspects must be considered together for the
approach to be well understood. The first one is a timeless aspect, which is to
consider that everywhere and in all eras politics is a social product. Politics
cannot be understood as somehow outside society. This I would say contradicts the
majority of IR scholars, who believe excessively in the autonomy of politics
and of the state—even if only for analytical purposes. The second element of
this sociological approach is the historical or temporal component. That is
what I was talking about earlier: with globalization the social fabric strongly
progressed compared to the political fabric, and considering that intersocial
relations grew, we need a sociological approach to understand them.





Do you think that the Trump period constitutes a
fundamental break with the conduct of IR?



Trump himself maybe not, but what he represents certainly. If we look at
the USA today we see, since the new millennium, three models succeeding each
other. After 11-09 there was a time of neo-conservatism where globalization was
considered by American leaders as a means or maybe a chance to universalize the
American model, willingly or not. By force, as was the case in Iraq in 2003.
This model failed.



This lead to a second model which I would describe as a liberal model,
neo-liberal, incarnated by Obama who learnt from the lessons of the failure of neo-conservatism,
and had the courage to question the hypothesis hitherto considered as indisputable
of American leadership in the world, and who considered that the USA could win
only through soft power or smart power or free-trade. That is the reason why
Obama was just a little bit interventionist and was counting a lot on the TTIP
and on all these transregional agreements.



With Trump we arrive at a third model, one that I would call
neo-nationalist, that looks at globalization in a different way. In his perspective,
globalization constitutes a chance to satisfy the national American interests. The
idea of the national comes back after a long interlude of a globalizing vision.
It does not mean that we are not interventionist anymore. What happened in
Syria proves it. It means that we will intervene not according to the needs of
globalization but rather to American interests. It is about sharing a strong
and powerful image of the USA on the one hand and on the other serving the
concrete interests of the American people and nation.



This neo-nationalist model is not defended only by Trump, that is the
reason why I was saying that we should not consider Trump individually. We find
it exactly the same way with Putin. We find it by many other world leaders,
such as Erdogan or Duterte or Victor Orbán—really different figures—or Marshal
Sissi in Egypt.



We find it as well in attitudes, for instance Brexit in Great Britain, in
right-wing neo-populism in Europe: Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Wilders...  or in a certain left-wing neo-populism as
Mélenchon in France. It is in the air, seeming almost a passing fad. But it
constitutes perhaps a double rupture within IR. First of all because since the
emergence of globalization, let's say around the 70's, the national interest as
a thought category was bit by bit replaced with approaches in terms of collective
goods. Today by contrast we witness the abandonment of this image of collective
goods for a return to the national interest. This is very clear in Trump's renouncing
of the COP21 of Paris. At the same time, second, this constitutes some form of the
rehabilitation of the idea of power, which again seeps into the language of IR.




You know the IR scholar is not a neutral person, we have to use our science
towards positive action and for the definition of sound public policies. Going
against the idea of collective goods, casting doubt on the ideas of human
security, environmental security, food security, and sanitary security is
extremely dangerous because the composition of national interests and egoism
will never converge to a globally coherent policy. It is the weak that will
suffer first.



And the same time that power is reinstated as a driving principle of IR
praxis, the paradox is that great powers are becoming more and more powerless. If
we look only since 1989, and ask, when did state power ever triumph in IR?
Where did the strongest ever find a battleship enabling him to resolve a
problem to his benefit and according to his goals? Never. Not in Somalia, not
in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Palestine. Nowhere. Not in
Sahel, not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nowhere. So I am a little
worried, indeed, about this naive and old-fashioned rehabilitation of state
power.





Can we say that globalization, or rather the ambition of
integration at either the European or global scale, has failed? Can today be
considered a good moment to bury of the idea of integration?



I do not like burials, it is not an expression that I would use, but
your question is very pertinent. For around twenty years I have been saying and
teaching that regional integration constituted an intermediary and realistic
level of adaptation between the era of the nation state and that of globalization,
which means that I believed for a long time that regional integration was the
final step towards a global governance of the world.



I thought for a long time that what was not possible at the global
scale, a global government, was possible at the regional level and this would already
strongly simplify the world map and thus go in the way of this adhesion to the
collective dimension required by globalization. Nevertheless, not only Europe
suffers a setback, but all the regional constructions in the world are in a
similar situation. Mr. Trump openly shoves the NAFTA agreement, MERCOSUR is
down as every State that is composing it has recriminations against it, and we
could extend the list… All the forms of integration that have been set by
Chavez around his Bolivian ideal have ceased to exist; Africa progresses very
slowly in terms of regional integration; the Arab Maghreb Union, which is an
essential device, totally failed. Thus indeed the situation does not look good.



In the case of Europe there is a double phenomenon: on the one hand,
there is this really grave failure due to the secession of Great Britain from
Europe, and then there is a general malaise of the European model. Brexit is
really rare, if you look at the contemporary history of IR it is simply
unprecedented that a state shuts the door on a regional or global organization.
As far as I remember, it only happened a few times before, with Indonesia in
the UN in 1964, which lasted only 19 months. It happened with Morocco with the
African Union and Morocco is currently reintegrating in it. This British
situation came as a thunderbolt, worsened by the fact that paradoxically it is
not so much because of regional integration that the British voted against the
European Union. It was more from an anti-migration, xenophobic and nationalist
(in reference to that nationalism trend that I was earlier talking about)
perspective and what is dramatic is that we can clearly see that the
nationalist sentiment is really attacking the inner principles of regional
integration.



I was saying that in the European case there are internal problems which
run even deeper than the British defection, and I will underline at least two
of them. First of all there is a democratic deficit of Europe, meaning that
Europe was not able to match electoral spaces with the ones where decisions get
made; people still vote at the national level while the decisions are taken in
Brussels. In consequence, democratic control over these decisions is extremely
weak. How to resolve this equation? And here the breakdown is total since very
few people are coming up with suggestions. The other factor of this crisis is,
according to me, the fact that Europe has been built with success after World
War II in a progressive way around association and indeed, Durkheim proved it,
the integrative logic makes sense. Unity makes strength and it did make
strength once in Europe to prevent war, a third World War, and secondly to
encourage the reconstruction of European countries where economy was totally
collapsed. This time is now over and it is the fault of Europe to not have
known how to recontextualize itself, to react to the new contexts.



Paying one more time tribute to Durkheim who guessed it right, Durkheim
said that there are two ways of constructing social ties: around association
and around solidarity. I think that the time of association is now over, we
should enter in the time of solidarity, which does not consist in saying 'We
Germans are associated with Greece', but rather 'We Germans are joined together
with Greece because we know that if Greece collapses, in a long term
perspective, we will suffer the consequences'. Thus this idea of fundamental
unity is an idea that has been a little bit overlooked, abandoned by the
Europeans and now they find themselves in a complete paralysis.





Is the decolonization period still having an impact on
contemporary IR?



Oh totally, totally. I would first say because it is a major event in
the field of IR, which made the World switch from 51 sovereign States of the UN
in 1945 to 193 today but above all, a very aggravating circumstance, is that
this decolonization has been a complete failure and this failure weighs
enormously on international politics.



It has been a failure because decolonization assumed the format of copying
the western state model in countries that were accessing independence, while
this model was not necessarily adapted, which provoked a proliferation of
failed states, and these collapsed states had a terrible effect on IR.



Secondly because decolonization should have led to the enrichment and to
the substantial modification of multilateralism, by creating new institutions
able to take charge of new challenges resulting from decolonization. Yet,
except the creation of UNCTAD in 1964 and of
UNDP in 1965, there have been very little innovations in terms of global governance.
Thus global governance remains dominated by what I earlier called 'the club',
which means the great powers from the north, and this is very dysfunctional for
the management of contemporary crises. Then also because the ancient colonial
powers happen to find new forms of domination that did somehow complicate the
international game. Thus in fact decolonization is a daily aspect of the crisis
that the international system faces today.





In conclusion, which question should we have asked? In
other terms, which question have we forgot?



I found your questions very pertinent as it allowed the discussion of themes
that I consider essentials. Now, the big problem that makes me worry is the
great gap between the analysts and the actors in IR. I am not saying that the
analysts understood everything, far from it, but I think that IR theorists are
very conscious of some of these transformations I have mentioned. If you look
at some great authors such as James Rosenau, Ned Lebow or Robert Keohane, to
name just a few—there are way more—they all contributed to the reconstruction
of IR.



What truly strikes me is the autism of political actors, they think that
they are still at the time of the Congress of Vienna and that is an
extraordinary source of tension. Thus as long as this spirit of change does not
reach political actors, maybe Barack Obama was the first one to enter this game
and then the parenthesis was closed, as long as there will not be this move
towards the discovery of a new world, maybe as well through the inclusion in
our reflection about the international fabric such partners as China, it is not
normal that this very powerful China does not have any choice but to share the
paradigm and the model of action proper to occidental diplomacy, as long as we
would not have done this precise effort, well, we will remain in the negation
of the human, and that is the essential problem today, we are unable to
understand that at the end there is just one unity, which is the human being.



I had the chance to visit 105 countries and everywhere I met the same
men and the same women, with their pain, with their happiness, their hardship,
their joy, their sorrow, their needs that were everywhere identical. As long as
we will not understand that, well, we will be living in a world that is in total
contradiction with what it is truly and essentially. We will live in a world of
artifice and thus a world of violence.



Related links  



Read Badie's
The Arab Spring: A starting point (SER
Études 2011) here
(pdf)



Print version (pdf) of this Talk

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)