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Cyrine Kortas is a Tunisian postdoctoral fellow at MECAM centre, majored in English literature. She is an associate professor at the Higher Institute of Languages, Gabes, Tunisia and a researcher at the LAD lab unit at the faculty of arts and humanities Sfax. Her research interests include: comparative literature, feminist and gender studies, as well as teaching literature in EFL classrooms.

C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Saarland University. His first book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. He is working on his second book project entitled Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French, and Ottoman Literatures.

Alessia Carnevale holds a PhD in Civilizations of Asia and Africa from Sapienza University of Rome. Her doctoral thesis deals with Tunisian counter-culture and the 'committed song' of the 1970s-1980s. She previously graduated in Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Naples l'Orientale. Her research explores the relations between culture and politics, issues of collective memories and (counter)narratives, and grassroots/top-down interventions in the cultural field.

Research shows that women are less likely to point out and penalize mistakes in science, and publish fewer comments and failed replications in scientific journals. What does this mean for the social sciences?BITSS Program Manager Grace Han interviews David Klinowski (Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business) about his forthcoming publication, "Voicing Disagreement in Science: Missing Women."Credit: Suad Kamardeen via UnsplashWhat does it mean for the state of social science when half of all published studies fail to replicate? A recent Nature article reported that, according to some studies, 35–70 percent of published results don't support replication with new data. "Often, researchers cannot even reproduce results when using the same data and code as the original paper, because key information is missing," the authors wrote.Despite glaring issues with the credibility of published research, replicating results remains disincentivized, and stark inequalities in their production and publication exacerbate this challenge. At the 2023 BITSS Annual Meeting, David Klinowski, visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business, discussed determinants of gender gaps in education and labor markets. His forthcoming publication, Voicing Disagreement in Science: Missing Women, shows that women are less likely to point out and penalize mistakes in science and publish fewer comments and failed replications in scientific journals.We talked to David about why women are missing from academic criticisms and what this means for the social sciences. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.Grace Han: Your research indicates that women are missing from critiques and failed replications. Why do you think that is?David Klinowski: Many factors may influence a researcher's decision to criticize a published paper, some of which may have a gender component. For example, a researcher may be more or less willing to express criticism depending on her level of seniority or whether she has coauthors to pursue the criticism with. If women tend to be more junior than men, or have fewer coauthors, then these differences could contribute to the gender gap in critiques and failed replications.Opportunity costs may also play a role. Our profession values critiques and replications much less than it values novelty. Researchers may naturally choose to focus on doing original work rather than attempting to replicate or criticize others' work.Women may also suffer backlash to a larger degree than men for criticizing work. Research has found that women are often penalized for displaying male-stereotypical behaviors, such as assertiveness. If writing a critique or a failed replication is perceived as confrontational, then women may be reluctant to write these papers for fear of backlash. It is also possible that women criticize as much as men do but their criticisms are more often rejected during peer review.What are the impacts of women's comparative absence from such criticisms?DK: It is hard to say. Publishing a critique in a top journal could advance the critic's career. She could gain recognition from her peers, and citations to her work. And the process of replicating someone's work could be a great learning experience. But if negative consequences such as backlash are larger for women, then it may be entirely rational for women not to participate.We should also worry about what impact the lack of female-authored critiques and failed replications has on science itself. Is the process of self-correction in science slower as a result? Are there views and insights that never emerge as a result?What does the relative absence of women from critical publications say about the scientific literature and publishing process at large?DK: One way to interpret the results is that they illustrate how difficult and fraught it is to express post-publication criticism. It is not always easy to find out whether a replication exists, or to know what a critique may imply about the original paper. Original authors may be terrified of scrutiny, and may not be eager to share their code, data, or other details of their work.What can be done to increase women's participation in academic criticisms? Is this wise given the potential risks and professional blowback?DK: I think a promising approach is to make it easier and more rewarding for researchers to participate. To even start to scrutinize or replicate a paper, researchers must be able to access its data, code, and methods. BITSS does a great job at educating scholars on why and how to do transparent and reproducible research.One way to prevent authors from feeling singled out when their work is criticized or replicated may be to conduct replications via a "replication audit," an organized effort by multiple researchers to replicate a large number of studies. The Replication Games [convened by I4R,] is one such effort. Researchers may find it more attractive to participate in replication audits than to replicate a single study on their own.Afterwards, replicators become coauthors of a meta-paper that combines the different replications conducted, but their names are not associated with the particular paper they replicated. To increase participation of women and other researchers in academic criticisms, we need more of this type of careful design of the incentives and institutions.In March, alongside the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and Economists for Equity at UC Berkeley, CEGA will co-host the Berkeley Replication Games, which will focus on the participation of underrepresented researchers.To find out more and register, check out our event page.The Gender Gap in Academic Criticism was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pınar Bilgin on Non-Western IR, Hybridity, and the One-Toothed Monster called Civilization





Questions of civilization underpin much of IR scholarship—whether explicitly (in terms of the construction of non-Western 'others') or implicitly (in the assumption that provincial institutions from Europe constitute a universal model of how we ought to relate to one another in international politics). While this topic surfaces frequently in debates about postcolonial international politics, few scholars are able to tackle this conundrum with the same sense of acuteness as Pınar Bilgin. In this Talk, she—amongst others—elaborates on not doing Turkish IR, what postsecular IR comprises, and discusses her own position in regards to that one-toothed monster called civilization.




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?



What I think is the biggest challenge in current IR is not so much a debate, but the difficulty for students of IR to come up with ways of making sense of the world in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities and others' contributions and contestations. International Relations as we know it at the moment and as offered in the standard textbooks, portrays a world that they really don't recognize as the world that they live in. And I should point out that I am not just speaking of Non-Western experiences and sensibilities—there is in any case a growing body of literature on Non-Western IR, and you have spoken to Amitav Acharya (Theory Talk #42), Siba Grovogui (Theory Talk #57) and others—but I am also referring to all those perspectives in which international knowledge are presented and which the textbooks do not usually reflect, including feminist perspectives for instance (such as Ann Tickner, Theory Talk #54), or perspectives from the Global South some of which actually fall into the definition of 'the West'. So when I speak of ways of making sense of the world in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities, I am referring to the agenda of Critical Theory of IR. I do think we have come a long way since the early 1990s when I was a student of IR and Critical Theory was beginning to make its mark then, but we still have a long way to go. For instance, critical approaches to security have come a long way in terms of considering insecurities of specific social groups that mainstream approaches overlook, but it has a long way to go still in terms of actually incorporating insecurities as viewed by those people, instead of just explaining them away. 



As for the principal debate in IR, the debate that goes on in my mind is how to study IR in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities and acknowledges other contributions as well as contestations. This is not the principal debate in the field, but the field that comes closest is the one that I try and contribute to, and that is the field of non-Western approaches to IR. It is not exactly a debate, of course, in the sense that the very mainstream Western approaches that it targets are not paying any attention. So it's the critics themselves who have their disagreements, and on the one hand there are those who point to other ways of thinking about the international, Stephen Chan comes to mind as the producer of one of the early examples of that. I can think of Robbie Shilliam's more recent book on the subject, thinking about the international from non-Western perspectives. On the other hand are those who survey IR in different parts of the world, to see how it is done, what their concerns and debates are. Ole Waever, Arlene Tickner and David Blaney's three-volume series 'Worlding Beyond the West' contains materials from both these directions. 



My own approach is slightly different in that while acknowledging the limits of our approaches to IR as any critical IR person would, I don't necessarily think that turning to others' 'authentic' perspectives to look for different ways of thinking about the international is the way forward for students of IR. That brings me to back the way I set up the challenge to IR today: it is about incorporating others' perspectives, as well as acknowledging their contributions and contestations. I think I would like to take a more historical approach to this. It's not just about contemporary differences—studies on these are very valuable and I learn a lot from them—but what I've also found very valuable are connections: how much give and take has already taken place over the years, how for instance the roots of human rights can be found in multiple places in our history and in different parts of the world, how the Human Rights Convention was penned by multiple actors, how human rights norms don't go deep enough and how calls for deepening them have in fact emerged from different parts of the world, not just the West. So these contributions can actually point to our history and to different perspectives across the globe, but these are often referred to as non-Western IR, whereas they're actually pointing to our conversations, our communication, the give and take between us. That is what I am mainly interested in at the moment: the multiple authorship of ideas, and pointing to them you actually face the biggest challenge. It builds on Edward Said's legacy, so it's a critical IR project, the way I see it: Said built on multiple beginnings and engaged in contrapuntal reading. I should add that when I am talking about 'sensibilities', I am not necessarily talking about it with reference to other parts of the world, although it may seem this way. The more reflexive approaches to IR have taught us that we are all shaped by and all respond to our contexts—in one way or another.



One interesting result of Arlene Tickner's and Ole Waever's book, International Relations Scholarship around the World, was that IR in different parts of the world is not in fact that different: it is still state-centric, it talks about security in the way that most mainstream textbooks would talk about it, and IR courses are structured in such a way that you would be able to recognize in most parts of the world. Such surveys, therefore, tell us that IR works quite similarly in other parts of the world. Hence the need to look for difference in alternative sources and the need to look beyond IR—towards anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc.—there is growing interest in conceptions of the international beyond what IR allows us. This is not confined to looking beyond the West, but is equally emerging in Western scholarship: there is now emerging literature on postsecularism and IR, and bringing religion back into the study of IR. However, I am not so much interested in studying differences (without underestimating the significance of such studies) but studying to our conversations, our communication, the give and take between us.





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



My journey to this point has been through critical security studies. I studied international relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara and did a Master's Degree Bilkent University in Ankara where I currently work. I was not entirely comfortable with IR as an undergraduate student, thought I could not quite put my finger on the reason why—though I was able to make sense of during my later studies. At the undergraduate level, I received an interdisciplinary training, not so much by design but rather by accident: I picked courses on political theory, economic history and political anthropology, simply because our curriculum allowed such a design. I was lucky to have interesting people teaching interesting courses. And again by sheer coincidence we had a visiting professor who introduced me to philosophy of science and the work of Thomas Kuhn and I began to question the standard IR training I had been receiving. So then I went on to an MA degree at Bilkent University which became consequential for me in two ways: for one, that University has the best IR library in Turkey, so there are no limits to what you can learn even when you are left to your own devices, and secondly, Hollis and Smith's Explaining and Understanding International Relations (1991) was on our reading list. So when I began reading that against the background of Thomas Kuhn, I began to make sense of IR in a very different way. Mind you, I was still not able to see my future in IR at that time. 



Then I began writing my MA dissertation and was also working at Turkey's then very powerful semi-military institution the MGK, the National Security Council, at the General Secretariat: I was hired as a junior researcher and lasted for about four-and-a-half months, and then I went abroad for further studies, but those months were what set me on my path to Critical Security Studies. Working there, I began to appreciate the need for reflexivity, and the difficult role of the researcher, and the relationship between theory and practice. At that point I received a Chevening scholarship from the British Council, and the condition attached was that I could not use it towards PhD studies but had to use it for a one-year degree. I decided to study something that I could not study at home, and came across Ken Booth's work ('Security and Emancipation,' 1991) and knew of course Barry Buzan's oeuvre (Theory Talk #35), and found that Aberystwyth University offered a one-year degree in Strategic Studies, which is what I decided to do. That happened to be the first year they offered an Master's degree in Critical Security Studies, and I became one of the first five students to take that course, taught jointly by Ken Booth, Richard Wyn Jones and Nicholas Wheeler. Together with Steve Smith, who was Head of Department at the time, they were committed to giving us an excellent education, so it was a great place to be and I stayed on to do my PhD there as well. It's a small Welsh town with only 13,000 people and the University has about the same number of students. During that time I read important examples of critical IR scholarship, as well as the newly emerging literature on Security Studies, and it was around that time that Michael Williams (Theory Talk #39) joined the Department and he was a great influence on my work, as was of course my dissertation advisor Ken Booth: I learned a lot from him in terms of substance and style. 



After receiving my PhD in the year 2000 I joined the IR department at Bilkent University as the only critical theorist there. Bilkent was at the time one of the few universities in Turkey committed to excellence in research—now there are more—and that allowed me the academic freedom to pursue my research interests in Critical Security Studies: I was able to focus on my work without having to spread out into other fields. It helped that I became part of research networks as well: I've already mentioned Arlene Tickner's and Ole Waever's work, their project on geocultural epistemologies in IR and 'Worlding beyong the West'. Ole Waever invited me to join, thus opening up my second research agenda since my PhD, enriched by workshops and conversations with scholars in the group. It is not far removed from my core work, but it is an added dimension. And this helped me over time to overcome my earlier doubts about IR, for I began to see just how multidisciplinary it was. It was only through Critical IR that I learned how parallel perspectives in other disciplines, and alternative ideas could be brought to bear on IR—something you also find nowadays in international political sociology or different aspects of anthropology in constructivism. 





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



In terms of skills, I think that studying at different institutions if possible, different settings with different academic traditions helps a lot. Institutions vary widely in their emphasis—Bilkent for instance believes that the best teachers are those who do cutting-edge research. Others may disagree and say that small teaching colleges are the best, because they pass on what they specialise in. I think therefore that studying at different institutions is very good for students, whether it be within formal exchange frameworks or acquiring fellowships for study away, not to mention of course fieldwork, which offers new settings: every new environment is an important learning experience, even if the substance is not so useful and what you learn is not necessarily so significant. Secondly, some would suggest learning a different language is important, along with acquiring a foothold in area studies and comparative studies, and I agree with that. Thirdly, Stefano Guzzini talks about IR theory being what a student needs in terms of disposition and skills: he has this piece in the Journal of International Relations and Development (2001), where he makes the case specifically for would-be diplomats in Central and Eastern European countries that by learning theory, students would be equipped to communicate across cultural boundaries—it's like learning a new language. They would learn to watch out against ethnocentrism, he argues, and this is one of the pieces I use when I teach IR theory. In this spirit, I think it important to use theory as a new language, as one of the tools that every student should have in their toolkit. And finally, I think I'd follow Cynthia Enloe's (Theory Talk #48) recommendation that it's useful to have a foot both in IR theory and in comparative studies. I feel that one without the other is less rewarding, though one will not know what one is missing until one goes to explore. 



In my PhD work I focused on the Middle East, since then I have looked more in depth at Europe's relationship with the Euro-Mediterranean relations and Turkey-EU relations as empirical points of reference. This has been enriching and has benefited my research. In sum, it is essential to read as broadly as possible, and I give the same advice to my M.A. and to my PhD students. You can't read everything, and it can happen that the more we read the more confused we get, but in this Theory Talks is doing a great job by allowing students to learn from the experience of others. Learning happens also at conferences: you may find subjects that are of no interest to you, but that is helpful also, and on the other hand new subjects will broaden horizons. The wealth of cultural references in each part of the world can be baffling and may make it difficult to delve deep. The only way we make sense of the unknown through what we know. 





What regional or perhaps even global protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Turkey? Turkey is often perceived to bridge Europe and the Middle East, Europe and Asia, but we have the problem that Asia itself is a Western idea, then a 'bridge' is in danger of belonging to neither.



As I made clear in what I said above, I don't think of IR in terms of contributions emerging from this part of the world or that part of the world. And although I grew up in Turkey and began my academic career there, I don't consider my own work to be in any way a 'Turkish perspective' on IR. What can be said to be Turkish about my perspective is that I have to travel to Aberystwyth and Copenhagen and all those ISA conference locations to discover that I can have (and some say I should) have a Turkish perspective. My undergraduate education was about learning IR as a 'universally undisputed'. I now know the limitations of that universalism, but I cannot offer a specifically located perspective, for it is a complicated picture that emerges in front of us. I am not in favour of replacing one parochialism with another one, in terms of those who speak of X School of IR versus Y School of IR. 



Having said that, I consider that my contribution as being comfortable with what Orhan Pamuk has called the 'in-between world', though I prefer to use the term 'hybridity', not in-between-ness. That Turkish policy-makers have always claimed a bridge status for their country, but these ideas are rooted in Turkey's hybridity and belonging to multiple worlds (as opposed to being in between multiple worlds). Policy-makers can talk about being a bridge between Europe and Asia, or Europe and the Middle East, because Turkey in fact belongs to all these worlds. So in some ways being at ease with this hybridity does allow me to have a particular perspective in IR that I may not have had if I had come from a different background. But then again, it's difficult to know. I have taken courses in political anthropology, learning about the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey as an imagined community, but all my introductions to geocultural studies and epistemology came from Critical IR settings, so looking for geographically or culturally specific roots simply doesn't work. As Said put it, it is 'beginnings' that we should be looking for, not 'origins.' 





When Europeans and North Americans speak of 'state building' and 'development', Turkey is often taken as a model example of conversion to Western models—largely by its own choice. Should Turkey's path and modern reality be understood differently?



I am not comfortable with the word 'model', but 'example' may be a preferable term. So what is Turkey an example of? That has become a particular research question for me and I have written on this—Turkey's choice to locate itself in the West and what that means. Turkey is interesting for having decided to locate itself in the West, and this is where language and culture come in the picture. More often than not, the literature tends to assume that elites in places like Turkey would make the decision to adopt the 'Western model', and the rationale for adopting that model is not questioned, but instead taken to be 'obvious' from development theory and its teleological outlook: 'it just happened'. It is those that do not adopt the dominant model, those that decide against Westernization, that need explaining. Perhaps I would not have asked myself that question, had I not—and here my biography comes into the picture—been puzzled by references to 'civilization' in Turkish texts. If you look into Turkish literature or historical documents you will find references to 'civilization' everywhere—the national anthem refers to civilization as a 'one-toothed monster called civilization'. As a young student, I just couldn't make sense of this and wondered why is everyone talking about civilization and why is it a good and a difficult thing at the same time? 



I began to make sense of this as I was researching Turkey's choices about secularism in the late 19th and early 20th century, and was looking at some of those documents once again, but this time with insights provided by postcolonial IR. The language commonly used was 'joining' the West, and secularisation was a part of the package, but it was not necessarily a question of mere emulation but search for security, being a part of the 'international society'. These were not easy decisions, so here I look at Turkey's choice to locate itself in the West within the security context. There was a notion of a 'standard of civilization' in Europe and the West more broadly which others were expected to 'live up to', and this gives you some sense of the ubiquity of the references to civilization in the discourses of Turkish policy makers at the time. I am not suggesting that this is the whole answer, and I do not reject distinct answers, but I do think it helps understand Turkey's decision to locate itself in the West in the early 20th century. So this is where my security aspects of my work and Critical IR together. My starting point is to identify the ubiquity of one notion and then locate that within critical IR theory. Turkey becomes an example of postcolonial insecurities. Though never having been colonized it nonetheless exhibits those 'postcolonial anxieties' in Sankaran Krishna's words.  



I am keenly aware of the reality that even when we as academics are doing our most theoretical and abstract work, we are never removed from the roles of the 'real world', for we are teachers at the same time: by the time we put our ideas to paper we have already disseminated them through our teaching. Some of us are more committed to teaching than others, of course, but some critical theorists see the most important part of their job as being good educators and training the new generation, as opposed to being more public intellectuals and writing op-ed pieces and talking to bigger audiences. We are therefore never far removed from the world of practice and from disseminating our ideas about security and international relations, because we are teachers, and some of our students will go on to work in the real world institutions, like government or the media. 



Beyond that, there is a growing vitality in the literature on the privatisation of security: on private armies and how security is being privatised and fielded out to professionals. The new literature that is emerging on this is more and more interesting, I am thinking for instance of Anna Leander's work here: she talks about privatization of security not only in terms of the involvement of private professionals going off to do what government or other actors tell them to do, but also in terms of the setting up of security agendas and shaping security, determining what threats are, and determining what risks are and quite literally how we should be leading our lives. In this sense theory and critical security studies have become very real for all of us, because no one group of people owns the definitions.



Currently I am working on a manuscript that brings together two of my research interests, conceptions of the international beyond the West and Critical Security Studies. I use the case of Turkey for purposes of illustration but also for insight. I am trying to think of ways of studying security that are attentive to the periphery's conceptions of the international as a source of (non-material) insecurity. 





Pınar Bilgin is the author of Regional Security in the Middle East: a Critical Perspective (Routledge, 2005) and over 50 papers. She is an Associate Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. She received the Young Scientists Incentive Award of the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK) in 2009 and 'Young Scientist' (GEBIP) award of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA, 2008). She served as the President of Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA), and chair of International Political Sociology Section of ISA. She is a Member of the Steering Committee of Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) and an Associate Editor of International Political Sociology. 





Related links





Faculty Profile at Bilkent University
Read Bilgin's Thinking Past 'Western' IR? (2008) here (pdf)
Read Bilgin's A Return to 'Civilisational Geopolitics' in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era (2004) here (pdf)
Read Bilgin's Whose 'Middle East'? Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security (2004) here (pdf)
Read Bilgin's and A.D. Morton's Historicising representations of 'Failed States': beyong the cold-war annexation of the social sciences? (2002) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Keith Hart on the
Informal Economy, the Great Transformation, and the Humanity of Corporations














International Relations
has long focused on the formal relations between states; in the same way,
economists have long focused exclusively on formal economic activities. If by
now that sounds outdated, it is only because of the work of Keith Hart. Famous
for coining the distinction between the formal and the informal economy in the
1970s, Hart is a critical scholar who engages head-on with some of the world's
central political-economic challenges. In this Talk, he, amongst others, discusses the value of the distinction 40
years after; how we need to rethink The
Great Transformation nearly a century later; and how we need to undo the
legal equivalence of corporations to humans, instituted nearly 150 years back.














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according to you, the
central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is
your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?







I think it is the lack of fit between politics, which
is principally national, and the world economy, which is global. In particular,
the system of money has escaped from its national controls, but politics, public
rhetoric aside, has not evolved to the point where adequate responses to our
common economic problems can be posed. At this point, the greatest challenge is
to extend our grasp of the problems we face beyond the existing national
discussions and debates. Most of the problems we see today in the world—and the
economic crisis is only one example—are not confined to a single country.







For me, the question is how we can extend our research
from the local to the global. Let the conservatives restrict themselves to
their national borders. This is not to say I believe that political solutions
to the economic problems the world faces are readily available.  Indeed, it is possible that we are entering
another period of war and revolution, similar to 1776-1815 or 1914-1945. Only
after prolonged conflict and much loss might the world reach something like the
settlement that followed 1945. This was not only a settlement of wartime
politics, but also a framework for the economic politics of the peace,
responding to problems that arose most acutely between the wars.  It sounds tragic, but my point in raising the
possibility now is to remind people that there may be even more catastrophic
consequences at stake that they realize already. We need to confront these and
mobilize against them. When I go back in history, I am pessimistic about
resolving the world's economic problems soon, since the people who got us into
this situation are still in power and are still pursuing broadly the same
policies without any sign of them being changed. I believe that they will bring
us all into a much more drastic situation than we are currently facing. Yet in
some way we will be accountable if we ignore the obvious signs all around us.











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







My original work in West Africa arose out of a view that
the post-colonial regimes offered political recipes that could have more
general relevance for the world. I actually believed that the new states were
in a position to provide solutions, if you like, to the corrupt and decadent
political structures that we had in the West. That's why, when we were demonstrating
outside the American embassies in the '60s, we chanted the names of the great
Third World emancipation leaders—Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, and so
on.







So for me, the question has always been whether
Africans, in seeking emancipation from a long history of slavery, colonialism, apartheid
and postcolonial failure, might be able to change the world. I still think it
could be and I'm quite a bit more optimistic about the outcome now than I have
been for most of the last fifty years. We live in a racialized world order
where Africa acts as the most striking symbol of inequality. The drive for a
more equal world society will necessarily entail a shift in the relationship
between Africa and the rest of the world. I have been pursuing this question
for the last thirty years or more. What interests me at the moment is the
politics of African development in the coming decades.







Africa began the twentieth century as the least populated
and urbanized continent. It's gone through a demographic and urban explosion
since then, doubling its share
of world population in a century. In 2050, the UN predicts that 24% of the world
population will be in Africa, and in 2100, 35% (read the report here, pdf)! This is because Africa is growing
at 2.5% a year while the rest of the world is ageing fast. Additionally, 7 out
of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are now African—Asian
manufacturers already know that Africa holds the key to the future of the world
economy.







But, besides Africa as a place, if you will, a number
of anti-colonial intellectuals have played a big role in influencing me. The
most important event in the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution.
Peoples forced into world society by Western Imperialism fought to establish
their own independent relationship to it. The leading figures of that struggle
are, to my mind, still the most generative thinkers when we come to consider
our own plight and direction. My mentor was the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, with whom I spent a
number of years toward the end of his life. I am by temperament a classicist; I
like to read the individuals who made a big difference to the way we think now.
The anti-colonial intellectuals were the most important thinkers of the 20th
century, by which I mean Gandhi, Fanon and James.







But I've also pursued a very classical, Western
trajectory in seeking to form my own thinking. When I was an undergraduate, I
liked Durkheim and as a graduate student Weber. When I was a young lecturer, I
became a Marxist; later, when I went to the Carribbean, I discovered Hegel,
Kant and Rousseau; and by the time I wrote my book on money, The Memory Bank,
the person I cited more than anyone else was John Locke. By then I realized I
had been moving backwards through the greats of Western philosophy and social
theory, starting with the Durkheim school of sociology. Now I see them as a set
of possible references that I can draw on eclectically. Marx is still probably
the most important influence, although Keynes, Simmel and Polanyi have also shaped my
recent work. I suppose my absolute favorite of all those people is Jean-Jacques
Rousseau for his Discourse on Inequality and his inventive
approach to writing about how to get from actual to possible worlds.











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







In your 20s and 30s, your greatest commitment should
be to experience the world in the broadest way possible, which means learning
languages, traveling, and being open to new experiences. I think the kind of
vision that I had developed over the years was not one that I had originally
and the greatest influence on it was the time I spent in Ghana doing my
doctoral fieldwork; indeed, I have not had an experience that so genuinely
transformed me since!







Even so, I found it very difficult to write a book
based on that fieldwork. I moved from my ethnographic investigations into a
literature review of the political economy of West African agriculture, and it
turns out that I am actually not an ethnographer, and am more interested in
surveying literature concerning the questions that interest me. I am still an
acute observer of everyday life; but I don't base my 'research' on it. Young people
should both extend their comparative reach in a practical way and dig very
deeply into circumstances that they encounter, wherever that may be. Above all,
they should retain a sense of the uniqueness of their own life trajectory as
the only basis for doing something new. This matters more than any professional
training.











Now we see spectacular
growth rates in African countries, as you mentioned, one of which is the DRC.
How can we make sense of these formal growth rates: are they representative of
the whole economies of these countries, or do they only refer to certain
economic tendencies?







The whole question of measuring economic growth is a
technical one, and it's flawed, and I only use it in the vaguest sense as a
general indicator. For example, I think it's more important that Kenya, for
example, is the world leader in mobile phone banking, and also a leader in
recycling old computers for sale cheaply to poor people.







The political dispensation in Africa—the combination
of fragmented states and powerful foreign interests and the predatory actions
of the leaders of these states on their people -- especially the restrictions
they impose on the movements of people and goods and money and so on – is still
a tremendous problem. I think that the political fragmentation of Africa is the
main obstacle to achieving economic growth.







But at the same time, as someone who has lived in
Africa for many years, it's very clear that in some countries, certainly not
all, the economies are very significantly on the move. It's not--in principle—that
this will lead to durable economic growth, but it is the case that the cities
are expanding fast, Africans are increasing their disposable income and it's the
only part of the world where the people are growing so significantly. Africa is
about to enter what's called the demographic dividend that comes when the
active labor force exceeds the number of dependents. India has just gone
through a similar phase.







The Chinese and others are heavily committed to taking
part in this, obviously hoping to direct Africa's economic growth in their own
interest. This is partly because the global economy is over the period of
growth generated by the Chinese manufacturing exports and the entailed infrastructure
and construction boom, which was itself an effect of the greatest shift from the countryside to the city in history. Now, the Chinese
realize, the next such boom will be—can only take place—in Africa.







I'm actually not really interested in technical
questions of how to measure economic growth. In my own writing about African
development, I prefer anecdotes. Like for example, Nollywood—the Nigerian film industry—which has just past
Bollywood as the second largest in the world! You mention the Congo which I
believe holds the key to Africa's future. The region was full of economic
dynamism before King Leopold took it over and its people have shown great
resilience since Mobutu was overthrown and Rwandan and Ugandan generals took
over the minerals-rich Eastern Congo. Understanding this history is much more
important than measuring GDP, but statistics of this kind have their uses if
approached with care.











Is it possible to
understand the contemporary economic predicament that we are seeing, which in
the Western world is referred to as the "crisis", without attributing it to
vague agencies or mechanisms such as neoliberalism?







I have written at great length about the world
economic crisis paying special attention to the problems of the Eurozone. My belief
is that it is not simply a financial crisis or a debt crisis. We are actually
witnessing the collapse of the dominant economic form of the last century and a
half, which I call national capitalism—the attempt to control markets, money
and accumulation through central bureaucracies in the interests of a presumed
cultural community of national citizens.







The term neoliberalism is not particularly useful, but
I try to lay out the history of modern money and why and how national
currencies are in fact being replaced. That, to my mind, is a more precise way
of describing the crisis than calling it neoliberal. On the other hand, neoliberalism does refer to
the systematic privatization of public interests which has become normal over
the last three or four hundred years. The bourgeois revolution claimed to have
separated public and private interests, but I don't think it ever did so. For
example, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, and the Federal Reserve are
all private institutions that function behind a smokescreen of being public
agencies.







It's always been the case that private interests
corrupted public institutions and worked to deprive citizens of the ability to
act purposefully under an ideological veil of liberty. But in the past, they
tried to hide it. The public wasn't supposed to know what actually went on
behind the scenes and indeed modern social science was invented to ensure that
they never knew. What makes neoliberalism new is that they now boast about it
and even claim that it's in everyone's interest to diminish public goods and
use whatever is left for private ends—that's what neoliberalism is.







It's a naked grab for public resources and it's also a
shift in the fundamental dynamic of capitalism from production for profit
through sales tow varieties of rent-seeking. In fact, Western capitalism is now
a system for extracting rents, rather than producing profits. Rents are income
secured by political privilege such as the dividends of patents granted to Big
Pharma or the right to control distribution of recycled movies. This has got
nothing to do with competitive or free markets and much opposition to where we
are now is confused as a result. Sometimes I think western capitalism has
reverted to the Old Regime that it once replaced—from King George and the East
India Company to George W and Halliburton. If so, we need another liberal
revolution, but it won't take place in the North Atlantic societies.











In your recent work,
you refer to The Great Transformation, which invokes Karl Polanyi's famous
analysis of the
growth of 19th century capitalism and industrialization. How can Polanyi
help us to make sense of contemporary global economy, and where does this
inspiring work need to be complemented? In other words, what is today's Great Transformation
in light of Polanyi?







First of all, the
Great Transformation is a brilliant book. I have never known anyone who
didn't love it from the first reading. The great message of Polanyi's work is
the spirit in which he wrote that book, regardless of the components of his
theory. He had a passionate desire to explain the mess that world society had
reached by the middle of the 20th century, and he provided an
explanation. It's always been a source of inspiration for me.







A central idea of Polanyi's is that the economy was
always embedded in society and Victorian capitalism disembedded it. One problem
is that it is not clear whether the economy ever was actually disembedded (for
example capitalism is embedded in state institutions and the private social
networks mentioned just now) or whether the separation occurs at the level of
ideology, as in free market economics. Polanyi was not against markets as such,
but rather against market fundamentalism of the kind that swept Victorian
England and has us in its grip today. The political question is whether politics
can serve to protect society from the excesses produced by this disembedding;
or whether it lends itself to further separation of the economy from society.







And I would say that Polanyi's biggest failure was to
claim that what happened in the 19th century was the rise of "market
society". This concept misses entirely the bureaucratic revolution that was
introduced from the 1860s onwards based on a new alliance between capitalists
and landlords which led to a new synthesis of states and corporations aiming to
develop mass production and consumption. Polanyi could not anticipate what
actually happened after he wrote his book in 1944. An American empire of free
trade was built on a tremendous bureaucratic revolution. This drew on
techniques and theories of control developed while fighting a war on all
fronts. The same war was the source of the technologies that culminated late in
the digital revolution. Karl Polanyi's interpretation of capitalism as a market
economy doesn't help us much to understand that. In fact, he seems to have
thought that bureaucracy and planning were an antidote to capitalist market
economy.







If you ask me what is today's great transformation, I
would prefer to treat the last 200 years as a single event, that is, a period
in which the world population increased from one billion to seven billion, when
the proportion of people living in cities grew from under 3% to around half,
and where energy production increased on average 3% a year. The Great Transformation
is this leap of mankind from reliance on the land into living in cities. It has
been organized by a variety of institutions, including cities, capitalist
markets, nation-states, empires, regional federations, machine industry, telecommunications
networks, financial structures, and so on. I'm prepared to say that in the
twentieth century national capitalism was the dominant economic form, but by no
means all you need to know about if you want to make a better world.







I prefer to look at the economy as being organized by
a plural set of institutions, including various political forms. The Great Transformation
in Polanyi's sense was not really the same Great Transformation that Marx and
Engels observed in Victorian England—the idea that a new economic system was
growing up there that would transform the world. And it did! Polanyi and Marx
had different views (as well as some common ideas), but both missed what
actually happened, which is the kind of capitalism whose collapse is constitutes
the Great Transformation for us today. The last thirty years of financial
imperialism are similar to the three decades before the First World War. After
that phase collapsed, thirty years of world war and economic depression were
the result. I believe the same will happen to us! Maybe we can do something
about it, but only if our awareness is historically informed in a
contemporarily relevant way.











The distinction between
states and markets really underpins much of what we understand about the workings
of world economy and politics. Even when we just say "oh, that's not economic"
or "that's not rational", we invoke a separation. How can we deal with this
separation?







This state-market division comes back to the bourgeois
revolution, which was an attempt to win freedom from political interference for
private economic actors. I've been arguing that states and markets were always
in bed together right from the beginning thousands of years ago, and they still
are! The revolution of the mid 19th century involved a shift from
capitalists representing workers against the landed aristocracy to a new
alliance between them and the traditional enforcers to control the industrial
and criminal classes flocking into the cities. A series of linked revolutions
in all the main industrial countries during the 1860s and early 70s—from the
American civil war to the French Third Republic via the Meiji Restoration and
German unification—brought this alliance to power.







Modernity was thus a compromise between traditional
enforcers and industrial capitalists and this dualism is reflected in the
principal social form, the nation-state. This uneasy partnership has marked the
relationship between governments and corporations ever since. I think that we
are now witnessing a bid of the corporations for independence, for home rule,
if you like. Perhaps, having won control of the political process, they feel
than can go ahead to the next stage without relying on governments.  The whole discourse of 'corporate social responsibility'
implies that they could take on legal and administrative functions that had
been previously 'insourced' to states. It is part of a trend whereby the
corporations seek to make a world society in which they are the only citizens
and they no longer depend on national governments except for local police
functions. I think that it is a big deal—and this is happening under our noses!







Both politicians and economic theorists (OliverWilliamson got a Nobel prize for
developing Coase's theory of the form along these lines)
are proposing that we need to think again about what functions should be
internal to the firm and what should be outside. Perhaps it was a mistake to
outsource political control to states and war could be carried out by private
security firms. The ground for all of this was laid in the late 19th
century when the distinction in law between real and artificial persons was
collapsed for business enterprises so that the US Supreme Court can protect
corporate political spending in the name of preserving their human rights!
Corporations have greater wealth, power and longevity than individual citizens.
Until we can restore their legal separateness from the rest of humanity and
find the political means of restricting their inexorable rise, resistance will
be futile. There is a lot of intellectual and political work still to be done
and, as I have said, a lot of pain to come before more people confront the
reality of their situation.











What role do
technological innovations play in your understanding and promoting of shifts in
the way that we organize societies? Is it a passive thing or a driver of
change?







I wrote a book, the
Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World
(read it here, with the introduction
here), which centered on a
very basic question: what would future generations consider is interesting
about us? In the late '90s, the dot com boom was the main game in town. It
seemed obvious that the rise of the internet was the most important thing and
that our responses to it would have significant consequences for future
generations.







When I started writing it, I was interested in the
democratic potential of the new media; but most of my friends saw them as a new
source of inequality – digital exclusion, dominance of the big players and so
on. I was accused of being optimistic, but I had absorbed from CLR James a
response to such claims. It is not a question of being optimistic or
pessimistic, but of identifying what the sides are in the struggle to define
society's trajectory. In this case the sides are bureaucracy and the people. Of
course the former wish to confine our lives within narrow limits that they
control in a process that culminates as totalitarianism. But the rest of us
want to increase the scope for self-expression in our daily lives; we want
democracy and the force of the peoples of world is growing, not least in Africa
which for so long has been excluded from the benefits of modern civilization.
Of course there are those who wish to control the potential of the internet
from the top; but everywhere people are making space for themselves in this
revolution. When I see how Africans have moved in the mobile phone phase of
this revolution, I am convinced that there is much to play for in this
struggle. What matters is to do your best for your side, not to predict which
side will win. Speaking personally, Web 2.0 has been an
unmitigated boon for me in networking and dissemination, although I am aware
that some think that corporate capital is killing off the internet. A lot depends
on your perspective. I grew up learning Latin and Greek grammar. The
developments of the last 2-3 decades seem like a miracle to me. I guess that
gives me some buoyancy if not optimism as such.







It's obvious enough to me that any democratic response
to the dilemmas we face must harness the potential of the new universal media.
That's the biggest challenge. But equally, it's not clear which side is going
to win. I'm not saying that our side, the democratic side, is going to beat the
bureaucratic side. I just know which side I'm on! And I'm going to do my best
for our side. Our side is the side that would harness the democratic potential
of the new media. In the decade or more since I wrote my book on money and the
internet, I have become more focused on the threat posed by the corporations
and more accepting of the role of governments. But that could change too. And I
am mindful of the role the positive role that some capitalists played in the
classical liberal revolutions of the United States, France and Italy.











Final Question. I would
like to ask you about the distinction between formal and informal economy which
you are famous for having coined. How did you arrive at the distinction? Does the
term, the dichotomy, still with have the same analytical value for you today?








Around 1970, there was a universal consensus that only states could organize economies for development. You were either a Marxist or a Keynesian, but there were no liberal economists with any influence at that time. In my first publication on the topic (Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana, read it here, pdf)—which got picked up by academics and the International Labor Organization—I was reacting against that; the idea promoted by a highly formal economics and bureaucratic practice that the state as an idea as the only actor. In fact, people in Third World cities engaged in all kinds of economic activities, which just weren't recognized as such. So my impulse was really empiricist—to use my ethnographic observations to show that people were doing a lot more than they were supposed to be doing, as recorded in official statistics or discussed by politicians and economists.






Essentially, I made a distinction between those things
which were defined by formal regulation and those that lay outside it. I posed
the question how does it affect our understanding in the development process to
know more what people are doing outside the formal framework of the economy.
And remember, this came up in West Africa, which did not have as strong a colonial
tradition as in many other parts of Africa. African cities there were built and
provisioned by Africans. There were not enough white people there to build
these cities or to provide food and transport, housing, clothing and the rest
of it.







In my book on African agriculture, I went further and
argued that the cities were not the kind of engines of change that many people
imagined that they were, but were in fact an extension of rural civilizations
that had effectively not been displaced by colonialism, at least in that
region. Now if you ask me how useful I think it is today, what happened since
then of course is neoliberal globalization, for want of a better term, which of
course hinges on deregulation. So, as a result of neoliberal deregulation, vast
areas of the economy are no longer shaped by law, and these include many of the
activities of finance, including offshore banking, hedge funds, shadow banking,
tax havens, and so on. It also includes the criminal activities of the
corporations themselves. I've written a paper on my blog called "How the
informal economy took over the world" which argues that we are witnessing the
collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus that sought to manage the economy in
the public interest through law and in other ways that have been dismantled; so,
it's a free-for-all. In some sense, the whole world is now an informal economy,
which means, of course, that the term is not as valuable analytically as it
once was. If it's everything, then we need some new words.







The mistake I made with other people who followed me was
to identify the informal economy with poor slum dwellers. I argued that even
for them, they were not only in the informal economy, which was not a separate
place, but that all of them combined the formal and informal in some way. But
what I didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the so-called formal
economy was also the commanding heights of the informal economy—that the
politicians and the civil servants were in fact the largest informal operators.
I realize that any economy must be informal to some degree, but it is also
impossible for an economy to be entirely informal. There always have to be
rules, even if they take a form that we don't acknowledge as being
bureaucratically normal like, for example, kinship or religion or criminal
gangs. So that's another reason why it seems to me that the distinction has
lost its power.







At the time, it was a valuable service to point to the
fact that many people were doing things that were escaping notice. But once
what they were doing had been noticed, then the usefulness of the distinction
really came into question. I suppose in retrospect that the idea of an informal
economy was a gesture towards realism, to respect what people really do in the
spirit of ethnography. I have taken that idea to another level recently in mywork on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Here, in addition to
privileging the actors' point of view and their everyday lives, we wish to
address the human predicament at more inclusive levels than the local or even
the national. Accordingly, our interdisciplinary research program (involving a
dozen postdocs from around the world, including Africa, and 8 African doctoral
students) seeks ways of extending our conceptual and empirical reach to take in
world society and humanity as a whole. This is easier said than done, of
course.







Keith
Hart is Extraordinary Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of
Scholarship and Co-Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of
Pretoria, South Africa. He is also centennial professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE.











Related links










Faculty Profile at U-London


Personal webpage


Read Hart's Notes towards an Anthropology of the Internet (2004, Horizontes Antropológicos) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of a Whole (2007, Comparative Studies in Society and History) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Between Democracy and the People: A Political History of Informality (2008 DIIS working paper) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Why the Eurocrisis Matters to Us All (Scapegoat Journal) here (pdf)









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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





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







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




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





How did you arrive where
you currently work on?


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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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





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





Literature and Related
links:



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


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


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


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


http://www.leydesdorff.net/





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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Ned
Lebow on Drivers of War, Cultural Theory, and IR of Foxes and Hedgehogs









Drawing
on classical political theories, International Relations is dominated by
theories that presuppose interests or fear as dominant drivers for foreign
policy. Richard Ned Lebow looks further back into the history of ideas to conjure up a
more varied set of drives that underpin political action. In this Talk, Lebow, among others, elaborates on
the underpinnings of political action, discusses how war drives innovations in
IR theorizing in the 20th century, and likens himself to a fox,
rather than a hedgehog.





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?







Well, the big challenge in international politics is always
how do we keep from destroying one another and that's the negative question.
But it is mirrored by a positive question which is, how do we build community
and tolerance and peace? And that's not exactly the flip side, but that's
always been the big question in IR. And part of that, I think, is how we learn
to manage threatening change. Because in my perspective, that's the driving
force of conflict: ultimately, both World Wars can be attributed to
modernization and its destabilizing consequences. That is also the reason why
it is a falsehood to base theory on that little select slice of history during
the World Wars, extrapolate it, and try to think its universal. Yet that is
what IR theory does: so many theorists, and so many of the people you recently
interviewed, are guilty of doing that. So that's the big question and
certainly, that's what drove me to study IR in the hope that I could make some
small contribution to figuring out some of the answers or partial answers to
these questions.







If we turn to what the central debate should be in
International Theory, well, I would frame this in two parts: the first should
be 'what are the different ways in which we can conceive of international
theory and how, by all of us pursuing it the way we feel comfortable with, we
can enrich the field without throwing bric-a-brac at each other and find ways
of learning from each other?'







A few years ago, I edited a book with Mark Lichbach (Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics
and International Relations) as a rejoinder to King, Keohane and Verba's
book, which we found deeply offensive. It has the narrowest framework and then
they base their understanding on the Vienna school yet they seem to have forgotten
that Hempel and Popper would disavow the positions that King, Keohane and Verba
(KKV) are anchoring themselves in as epistemologically primitive. And the very
examples they give to illustrate 'good science'—Alvarez and his groupaddressing the problem of dinosaur extinction—they fail to see that what
these people did was in fact code on the dependent variable, which is the big
no-no for KKV! And the reason why Alvarez et al were taken seriously, was not because they went through the order
of research that KKV promoted, but rather because they came up with an
explanation for a phenomenon that people have long known about—yet explanations
don't figure at all in KKV's take; they had no interest in mechanisms, it was
all narrow correlations. It's absurd! So we edited the book, and we invited
people who represented different perspectives, but all of whom had evidence and
struggled to make sense of the evidence, to talk to one another and to look at
the problems they themselves find in their positions and how one could learn
broadly from considering this. That's the kind of debate that seems to me is a
useful one. Not who is right or wrong, but how can we learn collectively. And
secondly, I think maybe we need fewer debates, and more good research.











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







I suppose it's a combination of people, books, and events, and
being a dog that constantly gnaws on bones and works it through. Very clearly the
Second World War and the Cold War were what brought me to the study of IR. I'm sure
in their absence, considering the counterfactual, I would have gone into Astrophysics,
which was the other field that really interested me.







I think the first concrete influence was as an undergraduate
and then as a graduate, being struck by certain individuals whose minds seemed
to sparkle; and I admired them for that and they became role models. And I
would make myself, intellectually, a little Hans Morgenthau, a little Karl
Deutsch; see the world through their eyes, and play with it. I never really wanted
to make myself into them, but rather to benefit by seeing what the world was
like when seen through their eyes. So in this sense, let me go back and draw on
Boswell, Hughes, and Mill for my answer. They all conceived of identity as
something that's a process of self-fashioning in which we mix and match the
characteristics that we observe in other people. And the purpose of society is
to throw up these role models and provide interaction with them so that we can
constantly be engaging in self-fashioning. And ultimately, we create something
that's novel that other people want to emulate or reject, as the case may be.
And I think that mixing and matching, and ultimately creating a synthesis of my
own, I developed my own approach to things.







The second element of this is to pick problems that engage
me, and stick with them. My first book in IR was about international crises and
I worked on this, it must have been 8, possibly even 9 years. I started out initially
convinced that deterrence theory made sense but wouldn't fit the historical evidence. Then one day, while
playing around, I realized the theory was wrong and by reversing it, I could
understand why it didn't work and see there were very different dynamics at
play. So working on a problem constantly and going back and forth between
theory and empirical findings, you gradually develop your own sense of the
field.







It also helps, over the course of an intellectual lifetime, to
work on different kinds of problems: I've just finished a book on the politics
and ethics of identity; I finished a manuscript up for review on the nature of
causation and different takes on cause; and the previous two books were on
counterfactuals and the origins of war. And I learned something theoretically
and methodologically by throwing myself into these problems and also, in some
cases, by going beyond what one would normally consider the domain of IR to look
for answers. I've often done philosophy and literature in the identity book. I
also go to musical texts: I have a reading of the Mozart Da Ponte Operas as a deliberate
thought experiment to test out ancient regime
and enlightenment identities under varying circumstances to expose what's wrong
with them and to work toward a better approach of Così fantutte. And I
read the music, not only the libretti,
to get at an answer. Of course, when you've been doing it a long time, it keeps
you alive and alert when you look at something new. I'm just finishing my 46th
year of University teaching. It's a long time!







Thirdly, there were a few pivotal books. I read George
Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in the early 50s. Both
of those were very powerful books. I also read in about 1950 - Life Magazine
produced a large volume on WWII and it had fabulous photographs and of course
Life was famous, Robert Capa's photographs, and
the text by John Dos Passos. A big big book that I read and re-read and that
was a powerful influence on me. I'd say the Diary of Anne Frank, when it came
out, which was not all that dissimilar but had a different ending from my own
war experience, and then in high school I read, or struggled to read—I don't
think I understood it—Ideology and Utopia
(full text here) by Karl
Mannheim, and then I read Politics among
Nations and the Twenty Year's Crisis.
And both those books made enormous sense to me at the time. But I think the
book that over the course of my lifetime has had the most influence on me of
anything is Thucydides' The History of
the Peloponnesian War (read full text here).











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







I am tempted to give you a flippant answer that an expert is
somebody from out of town; what used to be with slides would now be with a PowerPoint
presentation. I think frankly you need to do two things: you need to be
analytically sophisticated and original on the one hand, but to do it well, you
have to have an empirical base. There has to be some problem or set of problems
that you've rolled up your sleeves, looked at the data, talk to the people who
are on the ground doing these things, and you need to go back and forth between
that empirical knowledge and conceptual one. That's success as a social scientist. 







And traditionally, there's
always been another key. You must have one foot in society in which you belong
and another foot outside so you can do it as an outsider as well as an insider.
That's terribly important. I think, in this sense, that Americans are more
parochial than other people. They are good insiders but they are not very good
outsiders and they just don't understand the rest of the world and when you
read what they write about the rest of the world, you wonder what planet they
are living on. If you don't see the rest of the world, you can't look at the
America from another perspective. It's like people who take hegemony seriously;
it's like believing in Santa Claus, except Santa Claus is benign. To gain a
deep experience of the world in itself is a pre-requisite. Do a year abroad in
some other culture. Learn a language. Have a relationship with someone from a
different culture—you begin to learn the languages and all the rest will come.
That's the way to start.











You are
most famous to most people for your Cultural
Theory of International Relations (2008). What does it comprise and can you
say something about its classical roots?







I return to classical theory of conflict and cooperation
because I find that in modern theory, all drives of human action have been
reduced to appetite, and reason to mere instrumentality. The Greeks, by
contrast, believed there were several fundamental drives—drives that affected
politics—and while these included appetite, they weren't just appetite. Reason was more than instrumentality; it also had
the goal of understanding what led to a happy life; then, next to reason and
appetite, the third drive was spirit or self-esteem (the Greek thumos), which is very different and
often opposed to appetite. It is about winning the approbation of others to
feel good about ourselves. The difference between honor and standing—two
variants of self-esteem—is that honor is status achieved within a fixed set of
rules, while standing is whenever you achieve status by whatever means.







Now most existing IR theories are either only built on
appetites—as liberalism and Marxism—or fear. And for the Greeks fear is not a
human drive but a powerful emotion which can become a motive. And when reason
loses control over either appetite or spirit, people begin to worry about their
own ability to satisfy their appetites, their spirit, or even protect
themselves physically. That's when fear becomes a powerful motive. Realism is
of course the paradigm developed around fear. I differ in that my theory
recognizes multiple motives, that are active to varying degrees at different
times. They don't blend the way a solution does in chemistry, but they retain
their own characteristics, even if jumbled together. So my theory expects to
see quite diverse and often conflicting behavior, whereas other theories only
pay attention to state behavior that seems to support their theory, and feel
the need to explain away other behavior inconsistent with their theory. I revel
in these variations. Second, I vary in describing what derives from these
motives as (Weberian) ideal types—which means, something you don't encounter in
the real world, but rather, an abstraction, a fictional or analytical
description, that helps to make sense of the real world but never maps onto it
exactly. So, a fear-based world gives you a very nice description of a
foundation of anarchy. But of course this is an ideal-type world. Fear is only
one motive. You have go to a place where civil order has broken down, like
Somalia or the trenches in WWII, to see fear-based models compete.







Starting from these three motives and the emotion of fear, I
argue that each of these generates a very different logic of cooperation,
conflict and risk-taking; and each is associated with a different kind of
hierarchy. And all of them except fear rely on a different principle of
justice. Just to give an example: for actors—whether individuals or
states—driven by self-esteem, they tend to be risk prone (because honor has to
be won by successfully overcoming ordeals and challenges); it leads to a
conflictual logic because you are competing with others for honor; and it can
be rule-based (although the rules can brake down and move into fear); and the
principle is one of fairness, in contrast to interest or appetite which has a
principle of equality. The hierarchy is one of clientelism, where people honor
those at the top, which, in return, provides practical benefits for those on
the bottom. The Greeks called this hegemonia;
the Chinese had a similar system.







But because any actual system is not an ideal type, we have
to figure out what that mixture is and we can begin to understand foreign
policies. And I try to give numerous examples in the book. And the big turning
point, I argue, is modernity, where it becomes more difficult to untangle the
motives and their discourses. Because in modernity both Rousseau and Adam Smith
try to understand why we want material things, so the two become connected. You
could argue that even in Egyptian times they were connected, in the pyramids,
which are nothing if not erections of self-esteem. But it becomes more
difficult and so, rather than saying, using literary texts, artistic works and
political speeches as a way of determining the relationship, I approached the
problem differently with the examples of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the
Anglo-American Invasion of Iraq. I said let's run a test of seeing how
carefully we can explain the origins and the dynamics of these conflicts on the
basis of interest, on the basis of fear, on the basis of self-esteem. And I
think that's methodologically defensible.



Now the interesting point is that the honor or self-esteem
explanation is gone completely from modern IR explanations but does at least
just a good a job—if not better—at explaining these conflicts I mention above. There is an important sense—and this is my latest book—in which going to war was the dominant way to get recognized as a great power, and I feel that the example of the war in Iraq illustrates that that principle is on the retreat.







I obviously use Greek thinking as a source here of—again, I
wouldn't use the word knowledge—but as a source of insight into human nature
and the recurring problems regardless of society. Some of the great writers and
thinkers cannot be surpassed as sources of knowledge that we as social
scientists are shadows on the cave by comparison. And I find the Greeks
particularly interesting for several reasons. One, they had a richer
understanding of the psyche that moderns who have adduced everything to appetite
and reason to a mere instrumentality, this is, to me, an incredibly narrow,
crude way of thinking of the human mind. And, for whatever reason, they were
gifted with tragedians who pierced to the core of things. So I find them as a
source of inspiration but it's by no way limited to the Greeks. You can pick
great authors from any culture, in any century, and read them and learn a lot.











How
should we understand your cultural theory of international relations in
relation to the 'big' paradigms?







My theory is constructivist, at every level. I can go even further and claim that my theory is
the only constructivist theory.
Alexander Wendt is not a constructivist. If anything, he's a structural
liberal. It did have preexisting identities and has a teleology as he believes
a Kantian world is inevitable— that's quite a statement to make! And I hope
he's right. On the other hand, I define constructivists in a broader way. Most
constructivists start with identities and identities are certainly an important
feature of my work, but my theory rests on a different premise, and that is the
notion of there being certain core values which are germane to politics, and
they vary in relative importance from society to society, and they find
expression in different ways. So it is constructivist, I think, in the Weberian
sense: we have to understand from within the culture what makes things
meaningful. And, in that sense, you could bring in the notion of
inter-subjective reality, but I go beyond it, because other values are always
present in this mix and therefore there's behavior that appears contradictory
that is often misunderstood if you apply the wrong lens to it. So there's a
lack of interdisciplinary understanding as well: you have to look at both to
see how the world works. So cultural theory is constructivist and it allows us
to reframe and expand what constructivism means.







If I apply this constructivist thinking to one of the core
principles in our approach to world politics: what is a cause? I start by
asking, what does 'cause' mean, in physics? Why physics? Because physics is
always the field that political scientists look at, we have 'physics envy', so
to speak. And interestingly, in physics, there is no consensus about what cause
means. Some physicists think that very notion of cause is unhelpful to what
they do. Others are happy with regularities and subscribe to causal thinking. Still
others thing that you need to have mechanisms to explain anything. Still others,
and here statistical mechanics can be taken as a case in point, invoke Kantian
understandings of cause. Within physics there's no argument between people
adhering to these different understandings of 'cause', because you should do
what works! They don't criticize one another. So if they have this diversity,
why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we develop understandings of cause that are
most appropriate to what we do? So I develop an understanding I call 'inefficient
causation' (download full paper here),
sort of playing off of Aristotle. And it is a constructivist understanding, but
it also incorporates elements that are distinctively non-constructivist. And
identities are only a small piece of the puzzle.











Is
there any sense to make of the way IR has evolved over the 20th
century?







I think if you look at some of the central figures, it's
quite easy. There are 2 great cohorts of International Relations theorists.
Those born in the early years of the 20th century comprise Hans
Morgenthau, John Hertz, E.H. Carr, Harold Lasswell, Nicholas Spykman, Frederick Schuman, and Karl Deutsch—who was
on my dissertation committee together with Isaiah Berlin and John Hertz. The
second cohort is born between about 1939 and 1945, and it comprises Robert
Jervis (Theory Talk #12), Joseph Nye
(Theory Talk #7), Robert Keohane (Theory Talk #9), Oren Young, Peter
Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15), Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk#21), Janice Steinberg… And I'll tell you what I think the reasons are for
these groups to emerge at these particular moments: the first cohort lived
through World War I. And did so, fortunately, in at an age where they were too
young to be combatants for the most part, but they certainly had to deal
intellectually and personally with its consequences and then watch the horrors
unfold of the 1930s.







And the second, my own, cohort was born at the outset of the
Second World War. I think, in that group, I may be the only one of them born in
Europe (France). The rest of them were born in the US. And we came of age
during the most acute crisis of the cohort. So I was either in university or
graduate school during the Berlin crisis, during the Cuba crisis, and certainly
had an interest first in the consequences of WWII and how something like this
could happen, and then living through the horrors of the Cold War, not knowing
if indeed one would live through
them. And that created a very strong incentive and focus for our group of
people. Now a surprising number of this second group did their graduate studies
at Yale: Janice Stein, I, Oren Young, Bruce Russet, Krasner, later all at Yale
with Karl Deutsch. The rest, Jervis, Keohane and Krasner at Harvard with Samuel
Huntington. I think you have the odd person who's born somewhere in between –
so, Ken Waltz (Theory Talk #40), for
instance, is younger. He must be a 1920 person, almost exactly in between these
two, just as Ernst Haas.







And I wouldn't be surprised now if there is another cohort
emerging, the people of around the age of Stefano Guzinni, Jens Bartelson,
Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44).
What ties this third cohort together is that they all watched the end of the
Cold War and are coping with its aftermath. So I believe that it's probably two
things: the external environment and the extent to which you're in an
intellectually nurturing institution. And of course for our cohort, it
certainly helped that there were jobs. That was not true of the earlier cohort.
Almost all of them, except E.H. Carr, ended up in the US as refugees. Did you
know Morgenthau started as an elevator boy in New York? Then he got a job
teaching part-time at Brooklyn College because someone fell ill. His wife
cleaned other people's apartments to supplement their income. Then he got a job
at the University of Kansas City, which was a hellhole, and finally Harold
Lasswell got called to Washington for some war work and got Chicago to hire
Morgenthau to replace him.











What is
the issue with the discipline today if, as you noted before, we fail to ask the
most interesting questions and instead focus on method?







Well, it of course depends on which side of the pond you
sit. On the American side of the pond, positivist or game-theoretical
behaviorist or rationalist modeling approaches dominate the literature; it's
just silly, from my perspective. It's based on assumptions which bear no
relationship to the real world. People like it because it's intellectually
elegant: they don't have to learn any languages, they don't have to read any
history, and they can pretend they're scientists discussing universals.
Intellectually, it's ridiculous. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (Theory Talk #31) is a classic case in point. He's made a huge
reputation for himself with The War Trap (1981).
That book and the corresponding theory are based on a simple assumption,
namely, that there's a war trap compelling states into war, because initiators
win wars. But just look at the empirical record from 1945 to the present—initiators
lose between 80-90% of the wars they start. And that really depends on the
definition of victory. If you use the real definition, the Clausewitzian one,
you have to ask: do they achieve their political goals through violence? Then
the answer is, even fewer "victories". Well, let's cut them some slack, use a
more relaxed definition: did they beat the other side militarily? Initiators
still lose 78 or 82%—I forget exactly which percentage of their wars. And the
profession right now is so ignorant of history that nobody said 'Wait a
minute!' the day the book came out. Instead IR scholars all focus on this model
and fine-tuning it—it's ridiculous! And well, I don't want to go on with a
critique, but this is a serious problem, for it concerns a huge
misunderstanding regarding one of the most important problems out there.







But what happens now is this kind of thinking metastasizes
throughout the discipline because what students in International Relations or
Political Science more generally are taught are calculus, statistics—and I'm
not against this, one should learn them; I use them myself when I wear my
psychologist hat and do quantitative research and statistical analysis—but they
don't learn languages, they don't learn history, they don't learn philosophy.
They are so narrow! Much of this of course has to do with the reward structure
in the United States. It's clear that the statistical scientists are at the top
of the hill. So, economists transform themselves into scientists; but the
social scientists copy them because there are clear institutional rewards. If
you look at our salaries in comparison to the salaries of anthropologists,
historians—then if you sit at the edge of your chair and look over the abyss
you might see the humanists down there in terms of what they get. So very
clearly, there are strong institutional rewards. Once the positivist crowd got
a lock on various foundations and journals, if you want a job, if you want to
rise up through the profession, students tell me you have to do this stuff. IR
graduate students are bricklayers that get turned out of these universities.
That's the tragedy! It's no longer a serious intellectual enterprise. It's not
connected to anything terribly meaningful.







And mind you, I must say, while on the other, European, side
of the pond there is more diversity (one of the reasons I feel more comfortable
here), at the same time there is a strong tendency to go for a certain
heavy-handed brand of post-modernism. If you don't start an article with a
genuflection to Foucault or De Saussure or Derrida, you don't get published.
And by not looking beyond these 20th century thinkers, people in
Europe are often given credit for inventing things which were common knowledge
for hundreds and hundreds of years. Utterly ridiculous. But in between, there
are of course people who are trying to make sense of the world, including many
people in the positivist tradition who are doing good quantitative research and
trying to address serious problems in the world. The difficulty is that these
two extremes are often people who approach IR as a religion and they think that
their way of doing research is the only way
and they have no respect for others. And that's a kind of arrogance to which,
to me, is a violation of what the university is all about.







Ultimately, what is good theory? One approach would be to
say that a good theory is one that appears to order a domain in a way that is
conceptually rigorous - to the extent that that's even possible - that is
original and that raises a series of interesting questions which haven't been
asked before, but which are amenable to empirical research and finally it
should have normative implications. This is what Hans Morgenthau meant when he
said that the purpose of IR theory is not to justify what policymakers did, but
to educate them to act in ways that would lead to a better and more peaceful
world. And that, I think, is the ultimate goal of IR theory that we should not
lose sight of.











You
indicated that Isaiah Berlin was on your dissertation committee. He famously
tries to explain Tolstoy's philosophy of history (in War and Peace) through the parable of the hedgehog and the fox. If
theorists constraining themselves to one drive underpinning policy choices
would be hedgehogs, how would you see yourself? A fox or a hedgehog?







I am clearly a fox! I do different things. Whether I do them
well is debatable. But I certainly think that I'm a man of many tricks. Of
course the distinction also implies not believing in an overarching truth, and
indeed, I try hard not to think about truth because I don't think you can get
very far when you do. Epistemologically and eclectically, I'm a great believer
that we can never really establish a cause, truth, and knowledge. One of the
great problems here goes back to Plato who was shocked that craftsmen equated
technical ability to produce things with knowledge—Sofia, which is wisdom. And
today you have the problem one step up, so another category of knowledge for
the Greeks was episteme. Aristotle
would describe it as 'conceptual knowledge' or that which might even be
represented mathematically. And the people who would be 'expert' in episteme
think they have sofia and their claim
to being a hedgehog is the same kind of conceit, a form of hubris. Berlin's
distinction between hedgehogs and foxes is a very useful and nice concept to
play around with.







Yet it's a bit much to reduce Tolstoy to that tension. You
could do it as a game but it doesn't do much justice because there is so much
else in Tolstoy. He's tilting against the French historians of the 19th
century who have erected Napoleon into this strategic genius. And he does a
very convincing job of showing that what goes on on the battlefield has nothing
whatsoever to do with what Napoleon or anyone else who is wearing a general's
ebullience or theorists hat says. And also, and in this sense, one could see
him as the beginning of subaltern history of social science, he's telling the
story—admittedly about aristocrats, not commoners—but he's telling the story of
ordinary people on the battlefield, not the people making the decisions. So the
war is in a way a background to the lives of the people, focusing our attention
a very humanist way, on people. This, too, is revolutionary for his time.















Professor
Richard Ned Lebow Professor of International Political Theory at the Department
of War Studies, King's College London and James O. Freedman Presidential
Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He is also a Bye-Fellow of
Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has taught strategy and the
National and Naval War Colleges and served as a scholar-in-residence in the
Central Intelligence Agency during the Carter administration. He has
authored and edited 28 books and nearly 200 peer reviewed articles.















Related
links








Read the
first chapter of Lebow's The Tragic
Vision of Politics (2003) here (pdf) 
Read
Lebow & Kelly's Thucydides and
Hegemony: Athens and the United States (Review of International Studies
2001), here (pdf) 
Read
Lebow's Deterrence and Reassurance:
Lessons from the Cold War (Global Dialogue 2001) here (pdf) 
Read
Lebow's The Long Peace, the End of the
Cold War, and the Failure of Realism (International Organization, 1994)
here (pdf) 
Read
Lebow's The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading
the Lessons Correctly (Political Science Quarterly 1983) here (pdf) 



Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Jordan Branch on Google
Maps, State Formation, and the International Politics of Cartography







The territorial
underpinnings of international politics are as familiar as they are contested
within the discipline of International Relations. While the presumed 'territorial
trap' of the discipline has been attacked from many sides (see, for instance, Theory Talk #4),
Jordan Branch is more interested in turning the question around. 

His work has
carefully addressed the historical constitutive effects of mapping practices
and technologies on the subsequent transformation of practices of, and ideas about,
rule and the international system. In this fascinating Talk, Branch,
amongst others, discusses the significance of cartography for international
politics, explores the effects that contemporary digital mapping might have on political
spaces, and illustrates how innovations in mapping impacted on rule with the historical
example of France.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is according to your view the most
important challenge facing global politics and what is/should be the central
debate in the discipline of International Relations (IR)?



While
there are many different debates going on at the same time within the discipline,
the one that has interested me most is the relationship between ideas and
practical or material factors. There is a very simplistic version of this
dichotomy that has been debated to death in the constructivist versus
rationalists debates, particularly in the American field of IR—an over-drawn
distinction, as many have pointed out. I am more interested in actual
explanations for the process, outcome, or phenomenon we're looking at. Rather
than separating them out, I am interested in how the ideational and material
relate to one another, how they fit together.



This
relationship poses questions for my specific interest in technological change. We
are experiencing fast-paced technological changes—for example, the information
technology revolution—which can yield a natural yet incorrect assumption, namely,
that this change will inevitably have some kind of major effect on, or
interaction with, politics and, specifically, with international relations.
This may be true, but it is too often assumed. Indeed, this raises another
problem. Even if there is such an effect, is it something we'll be able to
observe, let alone predict or explain, as it is happening? From my historical
work on the role of maps in state formation, for example, it is quite evident that
for people at the time, there was no way to see the impact maps had on the
political/spatial/ideational constitution of the state.



The information
technology (IT) revolution is the most obvious current example of dramatic technological
change. Although it has been playing out for the last 20 or 30 years, it only
continues to accelerate. Over the past couple of years, a lot of discussion has
focused on 'big data' and what it implies for business, financial analysis, and
the like. Of course, it also presents possibilities as a new tool for social
science. But there is a danger here. There is a tendency of seeing new
technological phenomena only in their material contexts, specifically focusing
on possibilities for measurement, for example, thereby neglecting to think
about the ideational. How do ideas about collecting and using data actually
play into the collection and analysis itself? So while they are in practice
always entangled, analytically, I find the distinction between the ideational
and the material a very fruitful one, not so much as a debate between opposing
fields, but as way to think about technological change.





How
did you arrive where you currently are in your thinking about these issues?



It is
funny—people often ask this sort of question, and I did not necessarily see a
natural trajectory for my thinking or work until I began to look and think
back. This interest in connecting technological and political change goes as
far back as my undergraduate time at Stanford University, where I initially
majored in mechanical engineering, and later switched to International
Relations. While technology remained an important preoccupation, I became more
interested in politics, history, and theory. So the interest formed into
questions about the political implications of phenomena like technology. But
this didn't happen instantly. Just before beginning my PhD at the University of
California, Berkeley, I was planning to do comparative work on regime change
and democratization. Then my older brother (Adam Branch), who is also a
political scientist, gave me a copy of Hendrik Spruyt's The Sovereign State and its Competitors (1994), and he said: 'Hey
you might like this!' So, I literally read that on a beach the summer before
starting grad school—which may sound funny, but I sat down, read it, and found
it fascinating. Yet I didn't immediately start thinking about these questions
then. It took a year or two, when I started really thinking about what I wanted
to work on. I came back to this work and realised these were the kind of
questions I was interested in: the origins of the territorial state and its
characteristics.



The
interest in the state as a concept had been with me for slightly longer. As an
undergrad my first introductory course to IR was taught by Stephen Krasner (Theory Talk #21).
Krasner has strong views, and the class was very rigorous. A lot of his work
focuses on the state and I think his framings influenced me early on. I don't entirely
agree with some of Krasner's arguments about sovereignty, but these
disagreements are more about the specifics of salient time periods or cases.
Other work which influenced me early on was that of John Ruggie on
territoriality. Indeed his approach became central as I was developing these
questions myself. I also discovered a host of literature in political geography
that turned out to be very interesting and useful. 



So,
one could say that my trajectory was really more focused on understanding the
historical outcome of the territorial state than on what role technology,
specifically maps, played in this process. The focus on technology, while
existent from my engineering days, really began to materialize as a link missing
from existing explanations of state formation. I was thinking about how we might
be able to find some additional traction on these questions by including
technology more prominently. It has certainly been part of some scholarship on
state formation, as in Charles Tilly's work or William McNeill's on
technological change and warfare. Surely, technology has always been in there,
but the discussion has been centered on war fighting technology and maybe on
transport, and only to a lesser degree on communication technology in the
broader sense.



Another
piece of work which triggered my focus on the relationship between the
ideational and the material was Ron Deibert's book Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia (1997, read the 1995 PhD thesis
that became the book here, pdf). He talks about internet
communication technology but also about the printing press and the impact it
has on the global distribution of power. Yet, only when I read this book for
the second or third time just as I was finishing up my dissertation did I realize
how much his framing had shaped how I formulated my thesis. He does touch on
the role of mapping, but it is his elaboration on the way in which media
informs how people think about the world which was spot on for me. For me, maps
as a medium very importantly framed how people thought about and imagined the
world in the past—but of course these questions about technology and its role
in constituting the international political system, states, territorial
boundaries, and so on are still relevant today.





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



I
think it is important to be really excited and interested in your topic and
what you want to do. The key thing is to enter a grad program that fits you in
terms of your interests and to be willing to do whatever methodological training
ends up being needed for your research project.



I
think there's a tendency to look for a 'one size fits all' graduate training
model, which does make sense at the initial level. Everyone should get a
certain amount of background in a variety of methods, whether they'll end up
using those or not. For example, I have not used quantitative methods in my own
research, but I'm glad that I had to take classes on those methods in grad school.
They give you the ability to understand work which may connect to your own but
comes at it from a different angle. And you should always be open to a variety
of methods. The key is to be able to understand a broad array of approaches, otherwise
you won't be able to engage in broad conversations.



I
also feel I gained a lot from exploring, and reading widely, from other
disciplines such as history and sociology. I already mentioned political
geography, which is really not too distant but, nonetheless, in the U.S. it
sits in a different department. You might think that some work is 'on the other
side of the fence' but it is important to be able to bring that work into your
thinking.



The
final thing is to be open and ready to change your mind, whether it is about
the answer you're expecting to get to your question, or even changing the
question itself. Obviously there is a certain point when you're almost done
with a project where that might not be a good idea…. but if it is early on and
it works and you can do it logistically, I think it is important to be willing
to do that. Five years later you're going to be a lot better off.





So far, your work has been mainly
historical. Can you explain the importance of 'looking back' for understanding
contemporary international relations?



I
think it is extraordinarily important and useful. A lot of us in this and other
fields do see strong connections between today's politics and past events,
institutions, and ideas. There is an important notion that we cannot engage
meaningfully with the present if we do not understand its genealogy. That is
certainly a driver for me in thinking about the origins of the state and
territorial boundaries. It may help us to observe patterns we might see
replicated or appear in some kind of altered yet recognizable form today.
Indeed, it can help us think about where were might be headed.



Although
I also hesitate here slightly: always looking to the past for the answers can
be problematic. History can help us to observe patterns, dynamics, and maybe
relationships that might tell us something about other periods or about contemporary
international relations. But we should never do so thinking that the patterns
are definitely going to be the same or are deterministic. I think one can look
for patterns or relationships without automatically assuming that they have to
apply everywhere.



Historical
analysis can be problematic in its own right, because there is no way to
discover or absorb the past 'as it really was.' All history is some kind of
construction, whether it is based on contemporary or historical sources. Additionally,
in the social sciences we often have to rely on secondary sources. That is not
inherently a problem; this fact just introduces more variables to think about.
Pure narrative purporting to capture 'what really happened' can be very
problematic.



Given these disclaimers, it is useful to consider
the past. I think what should be emphasized is that, specifically at the grad
school level, students should be encouraged to dig a little deeper
historically. They shouldn't hesitate to do that excavation work.





IR, it has been argued, rests firmly on
a spatial or territorial understanding of politics. What constitutive role does
territorial space play in IR and is that role based on historical fact or is it
myth?



I
like that question. I think it is actually both—sort of a myth and sort of a
fact.  In one sense, territory informs at
least the state ideal (i.e., states as we think of them): it informs what the
state is, the interests of states, and of course how we distinguish one state
from another. And yet, while this is all inherently territorial, we also know
that this is far from an accurate description of a lot of regions and places in
the world. There are many different spatial ideas, practices, and organizations
with political agency that are non-state or non-territorial.



But
regarding the myth of state territoriality: I think it is important to point
out there is a lot of detail in the 'conventional narrative' of the state, such
as timing of when territoriality came about as pinpointed in Westphalia, that
has been quite effectively debunked by a number of scholars in the last 10 or
20 years (scholars like Andreas Osiander or Benno Teschke, from different
theoretical perspectives). This is a strongly supported finding. But it really
hasn't penetrated the mainstream narrative very well. While we can gradually see
a little more nuanced discussion in IR textbooks in the U.S., they more often
than not will still start with 1648 and Westphalia.



We
can now confidently say that states—states as we think of them now—did not
appear in 1648, let alone earlier. This is especially true if we look at the
specifically territorial or spatial aspects of statehood, which again are so
central to how we think about the state internationally. The focus on defending
cleanly demarcated linear boundaries and the idea of asserting absolute
sovereign authority within those lines; this is really not consolidated until at
least the 19th century. So, part of the myth is the timing and the
how and why we have states.



But
there still is a factual quality to territoriality in this story we tell
ourselves about the foundation of the international system and the supposed
creation of sovereign states. In a certain setting and for a certain period I
think this describes the ideas and practices of international politics quite
well. The most obvious example of this is 19th century Europe. While
there are still ways in which it diverges from the ideals of the typical state system,
in a lot of ways it actually did fit that. This happened at the same time as
the development of modern Western historiography, and it was the setting for some
of the traditional foundation of political science and IR. So we can see how
one shaped the other: history-making and state-making. The singular territorial
ideal of statehood from the 19th century has subsequently been
applied to other issues, actors, and areas. Even if it does not fit exactly, it
is applied today still and it is made to fit retrospectively much earlier
periods, where it applied less well.



Ultimately,
it is a powerful myth which has informed how we think about international
relations to such a degree that we shouldn't just throw it out. Instead, we
should think about exactly how it actually informs the way that international
relations is understood and practiced.
Practitioners and officials don't exactly read IR journals and base their
decision-making on our knowledge production, but the basic ideas of states, boundaries,
and territory which inform the practice of international relations—as well as
the study of it—should be our concern.





You have looked specifically at how
mapping has contributed to imagining and formation of the modern state system. Could
you elaborate more on how something as technical as cartography matters for
international politics?



I've
argued in my recent work that early modern mapping technologies were really
essential to the consolidation of the territorial state, particularly the
specific territorial features of states today. Maps, which have been a popular
medium over the past few centuries, really do shape how people understand the
world and their place in it. This gets us back to the connection between the
material and the ideational.



In early
modern Europe a revolution took place, first in mapmaking technologies and,
slightly later, in the ideas and practices of political rule, especially as it
relates to territory. I argue this was really not a coincidence. How rulers and
subjects conceived of rule and how rulers conceived of their realms was really
altered as they increasingly used maps that depicted the world in this one
particular way. The key characteristics of modern statehood – at least of the
ideal of modern statehood – such as linear boundaries between homogenous territorial
claims, really appeared first in maps and only subsequently in political practices
on the ground. Of course, there were existing authority structures, but these were
not particularly spatial or were not spatial in this linear demarcated way. Subsequently,
however, these authority structures were ignored or sometimes even actively
renounced in favor of the kind of authority which could be literally shown and
drawn on a map.



It is
interesting because initially, maps were not predominantly produced by rulers, states,
or officials. They were certainly involved in sponsoring some mapping projects,
buying maps, and using them, but mapmaking was more of a commercial private
scientific enterprise, if we can apply the label 'scientific' in the 16th
and 17th centuries. These map-makers certainly didn't have any articulated
goal of changing politics, at least not on this broad level. They were really
concerned with making money, maybe creating art, and advancing what they
thought was a growing science of cartography.



We
can however see that the map, as a technological artifact—maps as actual things—had
an impact on the practices of rule both between rulers and between rulers and
their subjects. I argue that this process occurred quite broadly across the
European development of the international system at that time. And you can see
this sequence really clearly in a case like France.



Let
me illustrate that. Here are three maps of 'France' ranging from the 1400s to
the 1700s—the quotation marks are necessary because the notion of there being
one entity called France across this whole period is more a matter of us labeling
it as such rather than it being one recognizable entity.









The
first map is from a 15th century manuscript about royal and noble
genealogy in France. The image is purported to represent 'all the realm of
France' and shows the country as a collection of what I would call places
rather than a single linearly demarcated space. You do have the notion of spatial
boundaries here, in terms of rivers as means for demarcation. Yet, very
clearly, the visual language of this map focuses on towns. And this is how rule
was practiced and operationalized as well: negotiations would be over places, or
maybe collections of people based on identity, jurisdiction, or where they were
allowed to reside, but not in term of linear demarcations between claims.









Now
look at the second map, which is just from about 150 years later, from the
1590s. It is from an atlas by a follower of Mercator, and its label Gallia is
the Roman designation for France. From our modern perspective we can recognize
something that looks a lot like a modern map of France. Maybe even a state, although
the boundaries are not exactly like we would expect them to be. But this is the
visual language of mapping that we are familiar with: longitude, latitude,
spatial expanses colored in, homogenous territorial claims—there is something
about the space depicted that argues that it is all the same, that is all
France.



And
despite this familiarity, it was actually far from an accurate depiction of
French rule. Not just in the actual placement of the boundaries, which are
contestable, but in the discrete nature of the boundaries themselves. Along
these frontiers, so clearly demarcated on this image, the claims of the French
king were often unclear and overlapped with those of other rulers. This was
even true for the interior of France during this period.









The
third map is another 150 years later, from the 1740s. This is from a map
showing the triangulation of the realm, undertaken by a group of geographers, known
as the Cassini survey, as several generations of the Cassini family headed up
this effort. The realm is being mapped explicitly using geometric tools with
the important emphasis that the image is actually meant to represent reality.
It is understood that way: it's supposed to measure reality, in order to enable
the French king to better understand what he rules. Moreover, this mapping took
place at the same time that rule was being implemented in practice on the
ground in terms of spatial expanses as we think of them, in the form of
demarcating boundaries with neighbors which had previously been unclear,
overlapping jurisdictions.



Although
maps of the second generation (i.e., the map from the 1590s) were 'inaccurate,'
they were extremely influential. They were widely distributed and purchased by
the elite, both inside and outside of government. Using these maps provided
rulers with this particularly new territorial meaning to their centralizing and
bureaucratizing efforts. As a consequence, the use of these maps as material
tools of governing and negotiation really changed the language of rule. Rule becomes
cartographic, at least in part. When two opposing sides come to the negotiation
table, for example, they at the very least have already agreed, implicitly, that
the division should be a linear boundary—it is just a question of where.



By
the time the third map is produced, the government is much more directly
involved in map production using accurate geometrical measurement. Yet the very
desire for this mapping was shaped by the earlier use of those commercial maps
that built up the visual grammar of geometric space. The French case is useful
because it is very well documented, but we do see the same sort of process
repeated either simultaneously or later throughout Europe and also elsewhere. In
fact, there is a lot of interesting scholarship on the introduction of mapping
and modern geographic thinking into regions outside the West. Siam Mapped (1994), a book by Thongchai Winichakul,
is a fantastic study that I found really useful for my thinking about Europe,
even though it deals with Siam (Thailand) in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.



This
is my story about mapping and territory, but I think there is a broader frame
to your question: do we want to bring in these sort of technical factors into explanations
in International Relations? And while we don't want to be technologically
determinist, there is some useful thinking around technology and its effects we
should consider. The impact of maps has been so strong, and yet they are such
common artifacts that they are largely conceived of as 'unremarkable' outside
of geographic-oriented disciplines.





So can we juxtapose this insight that mapping practices precede the
practice of rule and state formation to the anthropological present, that is,
what do the contemporary, some say radical, shifts in mapping techniques entail
for international politics?



Absolutely.
When I initially present my work, there is often an assumption that I use GIS
in my study. Instead, my work focuses on analyzing mapping itself—maps as
historical artifacts, their effects and their interaction with political
identities, interests, and organizations. But I think the ways in which methodology
and the subject of study overlap on subjects like technology could potentially
contribute to stretching the boundaries of IR. The big data question is both a
question of studying what big data means for politics but also how we can use
big data to study politics. The way in which new technologies can simultaneously
play into our methods and into our answers or questions is a pressing and
fascinating issue.



For
instance, there has been a lot of back and forth on the question of whether
more open-access mapping techniques entail some sort of democratization. While
I think we have seen that more participatory forms of mapping are possible, we
shouldn't think that this type of mapping is completely open, as no
technological system is completely open to anyone and everyone at all times.
But, indeed, there is a democratization of mapping under way. Authorship in a
whole host of domains, including mapping, is opening up where there used to be
a single authoritative voice or at least a single type of authoritative voice. So
maps are an example of this opening up and collective authorship. At the same
time, accommodating more voices also means that a lot of information is being
shared without authority or attribution or what we think of as a legitimate
source… When you open a map from Rand McNally or National Geographic, you know
that specific cartographers thought this was accurate and you can blame or
praise them. But when you open up a layer of Google Earth that has been
crowd-sourced you don't know who put that pin there, and you don't know why.



It's
really interesting to explore a bit further how this is different from the
recent past. In the 19th and first half of the 20th
century, mapmaking was essentially state-led. The U.S. geological survey, the
Ordnance Survey in Britain, or large mapmaking geographical institutions such
as National Geographic represented the owners and producers. Mapping was so
technical, so obviously technical that the everyday person would not be able to
make a map to Rand McNally's standards. This has changed, and quite importantly
so. Not only do we have the technology to do this, people are aware that they
can use it as easily as opening a smartphone app, thereby incorporating more
points of view. This is not necessarily good or bad. Politically, it does open
up new possibilities. Maps have always been political, both implicitly and
explicitly. It certainly opens up the possibility of some kind of broader shift
in ideas about territory. Let me illustrate with an example. I haven't
necessarily come across specific maps that present some completely novel visual
grammar potentially reshaping the way we think about the world. But, an
interesting example I like to bring to my students: there was a September 2011blog post on Google's Lat-Long blog (which is the company's blog about Google Maps and Google Earth). Its headline
read: 'South Sudan is now official on Google Maps,' and it displayed a
screenshot of the new boundary. 







They changed their base layer by adding a boundary between South Sudan and
Sudan. This of course followed the referendum and the UN's recognition, and all
the traditional precursors to official statehood. South
Sudan became a recognizable entity on that blog. Google Earth, a
non-governmental actor, indeed a huge corporate actor—and thus not necessarily
democratizing—becomes part of the discourse of declaring South Sudan's official
existence.



This
is an example of how things might be going. Interestingly, the whole enterprise
of mapping today actually resembles more closely that of the 16th
and early 17th centuries then that of the 19th or early
20th century, not technologically but organizationally. The
state-centric view of the world was enforced by the state-authored mappings of
the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, by contrast, there is a
kind of shared or unclear authorship, there is crowdsourcing, there are multiple
sources of conflicting and quite openly unreliable or uncertain information.
This environment of rapidly increasing distribution and use also describes the
creation of the early atlases in the late 16th century and early 17th
centuries, which involved the collation of all kinds of information from multiple
sources.



And
of course it was in the 16th and 17th century when this
sort of non-state-controlled mapping presented innovative images of the world—those
images that ended up shaping and consolidating the state form of territory. And
so it was these new tools for understanding and acting on the world which gave
the state its territorial shape. As key information-producing activities are
being opened up, some forms of power are being redistributed. This certainly
means that we need to widen our scope in terms of whom we consider to be a
stakeholder or what sort of actors we want to study. We know that the dichotomy
of state versus non-state is not sufficient. We need to be subtler in our
inquiries. In IR, of course, the stereotypical over-emphasis on states is being
questioned, and this is really just one more sign that a piece of the power of
the state, in this case map-production and distribution, is shifting elsewhere.




I
recently had a conversation with students in my undergrad seminar on technology
and international politics. I went into it saying: 'Hey, all this mobile
mapping and GPS and Google Earth is totally revolutionary. This may change how
we think about the world.' And they were all completely unconvinced, since they
use these technologies all the time—to a bunch of twenty-year-olds these tools seem
unremarkable. And maybe that is actually a more accurate analysis. But it is
interesting how it is such a different analysis from that of my generation and anyone
older, all of us who have spent a lot of time, for example, driving around
without GPS. It is partly this perception and the 'unthinking usage' which make
the relationship between technologies and social and political outcomes so difficult
to observe. Our ideas may be changed, and especially the ideas of younger
generations may be changed, without anyone particularly noticing how dramatic
the changes might be. This also means that the connections, because they are
'unthinking,' can be quite foundational to people's ideas of social identities
or political practices. They are tacit and embodied. That makes it both hard to
observe but also an interesting puzzle. But it is worthwhile mentioning that
the images presented by Google Maps and other digital mapping tools,
particularly satellite imagery, might carry a greater legitimacy in terms of
depicting 'the truth'. It looks like a picture of the world and therefore
whatever is on it, even layered on data (like a new international boundary),
must be true. It represents another apex of the scientific trajectory of
mapping.





If it is just about adding a data layer on a base map that remains the
same, does that then mean that ontologically this kind of mapping technology
actually doesn't challenge territoriality?



That
gets to an interesting point, which entangles with a lot of the more careful
discussions of globalization and the state. One version of that is that the
state is not dying, is not being destroyed. It is just that other things are
being layered on top of it, and the state and its boundaries still remain and
still matter for certain things. In this case, maps are perfectly capable of
showing state boundaries—they look very fixed, very strong—but one can layer on
top other types of information, maybe transactional flows or particular places
that are connected in different ways.



I
think that could be an interesting argument: these new mapping tools can really
show so much, and it is matter of selecting what you want to show and
unselecting things you don't want to show. Thus they don't do anything to
undermine one particular view of the world. Now that is not necessarily a good
or bad thing. If we look at the history of mapping and the origins of state
territoriality, a key part of that was that it was really hard to depict
medieval jurisdictional and personal notions of rule on early modern maps. Printing
technology and mapping tools prescribed depiction in a certain way—drawing
lines and coloring in spaces. Maps made it harder to show and thus think about
the other forms of rule. If digital maps are still perfectly capable of showing
states and their boundaries, they may do very little to undermine that notion
of territory.





Finally, if we are interested in the politics of maps, to what extent do
we need to study not only the maps as political artifacts but the mapmakers as
political actors as well?



I
think it is extremely useful to do both, and obviously if we study mapping
today, we can do both. In terms of
historical work, we can only rely on very limited sources, such as what mapmakers
themselves wrote about what they were doing. We don't know a lot about their
goals or ideas about politics. I would have loved to have been able to read
exhaustive memoirs by mapmakers such as Ortelius and Mercator. Of course, they might
not have said anything about the questions we are interested in. On the other
hand, a lot of map-makers today are involved in mapping for explicit political
reasons: for example, Ushahidi-type collaborative mapping (www.ushahidi.com), or humanitarian and
relief mapping. Here we can dig into the question of how the maps produced relate
to specific objectives. That is a great way to get more analytical leverage on
a lot of these questions.



Jordan Branch joined the Political Science
department at Brown as an Assistant Professor in summer 2012. He received his
PhD in Political Science at UC-Berkeley in 2011, and spent 2011-2012 as the
Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Studies at
the University of Southern California. His interests include international
relations theory, the history of the sovereign state system, contemporary
challenges to statehood, and the intersection of technological and political
change. In 2014, Cambridge University Press published his book, The
Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty. His
research has also appeared in International Organization and
the European Journal of International Relations.







Related links





Faculty profile at Brown University
Read
Branch's Mapping the Sovereign State:
Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change (International Organization 2011) here (pdf) 
Read
Branch's Colonial Reflection' and
Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood (European Journal of International Relations,
2012) here (pdf) 








Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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












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




Print version of this Talk (pdf)






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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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




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





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





Related links

Faculty Profile



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


Print version of this Talk (pdf)