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Much of the public policy discourse on AUKUS, the security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US, has focused on nuclear-powered submarines (Pillar 1). Far less attention has been paid to Pillar 2, which ...

Another UniversalismSeyla Benhabib and the Future of Critical TheoryEd. by Stefan Eich, Anna Jurkevics, Nishin Nathwani & Nica Siegel(Columbia University Press, 2024)446 pagesFrom the introduction:"For Benhabib, any universalism today must emerge from the concrete struggles of individuals navigating the fractured lifeworlds of our global society. Embracing that idea, the essays in this volume cover a broad terrain of debates that are the forefront of critical theory today: the relationship between democracy and cosmopolitanism, the role of law in emancipatory struggles, the task of deprovincializing the European approach to critical theory, man's domination of nature, and the ever-elusive relationship between Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School. It is a testament to the range of Benhabib's oevre that all of these themes should emerge from engagements with her work." (Anna Jurkevics)ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: In Search of Another Universalism - Anna JurkevicsPart I: Critique, Norm, and Utopia1. Benhabib and Habermas on Discourse and Development - Thomas McCarthy2. Normativity and Reality: Toward a Critical and Realistic Theory of Politics - Rainer Forst3. Loss of World, Not Certainty - Carmen Lea Dege4. Nature as a Concrete Other - Umur Basdas5. "To Burst Open the Possibilities of the Present" [paper] - Bernard E. HarcourtPart II: Thinking With and Against Arendt6. "Thinking With and Against" as Feminist Political Theory - Patchen Markell7. Arendt and Truth - Gaye İlhan Demiryol8. Understanding Eichmann and Anwar - Sonali ChakravartiPart III: Democratic Iterations and Cosmopolitanism9. Democracy Without Shortcuts - Cristina Lafont10. Another Republicanism: Dissent, Institutions, and Renewal - Christian Volk11. Three Models of Communicative Cosmopolitanism - Peter J. Verovšek12. At the Borders of the Self - Paul Linden-RetekPart IV: Jurisgenerativity13. Back to the Future? Critical Theory and the Law - William E. Scheuerman14. The Unfinished Revolution - Eduardo Mendieta15. Genocide and Jurisgenesis - Max Pensky16. Jurisgenerativity in the Age of Big Data - Matthew LongoPart V: Deprovincializing Critical Theory17. Pachamama's Rights, Climate Crisis, and the Decolonial Cosmos - Angélica María Bernal18. What Is the Other in Seyla Benhabib's Another Cosmopolitanism? - Drucilla Cornell19. Border Deaths as Forced Disappearances [paper] - Ayten Gündoğdu20. Gender Trouble - Shatema Threadcraft & Brandon M. TerryPart VI: Philosophy and Friendship21. Fragments of an Intellectual Autobiography - Seyla Benhabib22. Swimming - Carolin Emcke

Reading HabermasStructural Transformation of the Public Sphereby Michael Hofmann(Lanham: Lexington Books, January 2023)306 pagesDescriptionReading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dissolves Habermas's monolithic stylization to precisely access his seminal distinction between the purely political "polis" of antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the "res publica", and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy. Deconstructing the uniform mold of Structural Transformation's narrative about a rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in modernity also allows to identify and understand the ideology-critical methodologies of Habermas's theory reconstruction of Kant's ideal of the liberal public in the context of the French Revolution.ContentsPreface [Preview]Introduction [Preview]1. Structural Transformation's Normative Theses about a Dissolution of Domination in the Bourgeois Public Sphere2. Habermas's Dialectical Use of Ideology Critique to Counterfactually Assert a Moment of Historical Credibility for the Bourgeois Ideal of the Public Sphere3. Structural Transformation's Cold War Origins: Habermas's Defense of Kantian Rationality, Human Rights, and the Enlightenment4. Participatory Democracy versus Political Manipulation: The Role of Habermas's "Celebrated Coffee Houses" (Todd Gitlin) in the Modern Public Sphere5. Understanding Habermas's Public Sphere Concept by Dissolving its Monolithic Stylization: Structural Transformation's Interpretation of a Sociological and Political Category with the Norms of Constitutional Theory and Intellectual History6. Structural Transformation's Tacit Model Case of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: The French Revolution, Kant's "Unofficial" Philosophy of History, Condorcet Absolute Rationalism, and Schiller's Expressive Subjectivism7. The Achilles' Heel of Schiller's Moral Stage and Structural Transformation's Moral Politics: A Dependency of Smith's Political Economy and Kant's Constitutional Law on Mandeville's Moral Paradox of Bourgeois Society8. Habermas's Unexplained Methodology: A Complex "Ideology-Critical Procedure"9. The Result of Structural Transformation's Dialectical Use of Schmitt's "Civil War Topos" and Koselleck's "Process of Criticism:" A Tension between Developmental History and Ideology-Critical ProcedureConclusion: Renewing the Human Rights Perspective in the Political Public SphereMichael Hofmann is Professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of "Habermas's Public Sphere: A Critique" (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017). See a preview here.

In Breaking the Silence of NGOs in Africa, members of the Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network explore the role that NGO discourse and participation has had on contemporary struggles for radical change. Zachary Patterson writes that this timely book offers insights into how NGOs play a critical role in stifling the development and independence of radical African movements. Activists must proceed cautiously to avoid the risk of falling into a trap of Western rights discourse and liberal movement dynamics.
The post Breaking the silence on NGOs in Africa – a review first appeared on ROAPE.
The post Breaking the silence on NGOs in Africa – a review appeared first on ROAPE.

Jürgen Habermas is awarded the 2024 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. He is honored for having "constantly reminded us, theoretically and empirically, that the very lifeblood of democracy depends on human capacity and willingness to respect others by means of communicative action and on that basis to engage in critical argumentation and discourse."Among the previous prize winners are: Robert Dahl, Elinor Claire Ostrom, Brian Barry, Hanna  Pitkin, Ronald F. Inglehart, Pippa Norris, Francis Fukuyama, Amartya Sen, Jane Mansbridge & Robert E. Goodin. The Skytte Prize, which includes a cash award of SEK 500,000 and a medal, will be presented to Habermas at a ceremony held at Uppsala University on September 14, 2024. 

We have a very special guest for this episode. Douglas Lain, of Zero Books. In the interview, we discuss a range of topics, but I think the focus of the interview is on how capitalist narcissism is playing out in leftist online culture.

Specifically we address:

How podcasting has enabled a new debate among the left, concerning the priority of identity;
The rise of the Alt-Left, and whether or how the term functions to smear those seeking to re-assert the priority of revolutionary values in leftist discourse;
We also address the critical reception of Angela Nagle's sensational new book, Kill All Normies, published by Zero Books … a book that is ostensibly about the emergence of the Alt-Right, but in this conversation, Doug and I focus mostly on the other main aspect of the book, which is Nagle's explanation of the rise of "call out culture" on the left.
Finally, with the #DSACon17 (the 2017 Democratic Socialists of America convention) starting this week, I ask Doug if he has any advice for delegates to the convention.

Erec Smith


There is no such thing as a panacea; few things are actual cure‐​alls in themselves, especially when it pertains to social issues. However, the closest thing to a panacea for contemporary social injustice—both actual and perceived—is the concept of individualism. It is the closest foil to what is, arguably, the most dangerous aspect of critical social justice activism: race fatalism, i.e., the idea that especially minoritized groups have no locus of control and are at the mercy of their hegemonic oppressors.
Unfortunately, too many social justice activists embrace this fatalism and, both implicitly and explicitly, demonize individualism as an inherently oppressive, white supremacist concept.
Race fatalism cannot exist without the idea that all people from a given race experience the world similarly (race essentialism), and that we are forever defined by our home environments (linked fate), concepts that could not be more opposed to individualism. Thus, to embrace individualism is to relinquish faith in the fundamentals of critical social justice.
Fortunately, when individualism destroys these fundamentals steeped in powerlessness, it gives birth to agency and freedom conducive to an empowered and fulfilled life.
The most egregious aspects of critical social justice activism—now wryly and/​or disdainfully referred to as "woke" activism—can be considered footnotes of fatalism: skin‐​color and or gender determine if you are a perpetual oppressor or a perpetual victim; racism will never go away and can only be managed; black kids can't learn math like other kids; all people who look the same or live in the same area are bound to a particular outlook and particular fate. All these suggest the "truth" of race essentialism, that racism is always already present, and that even words, if coming from an oppressor, are literal violence.
The power of this fatalism is weakened by the concept of methodological individualism, what can be understood as an embrace of free will with an acknowledgement that we live an interdependent existence, i.e., "no man is an island."
In recent essays, I describe such individualism as an antidote to race essentialism and linked fate. In "Individualism is a Social Justice Issue," I insist that the embrace of individualism can enhance racial justice through its implied refutation of linked fate and its conduciveness to defensive confidence.
Regarding linked fate, I write, "linked fate denotes the use of the social standing of a group as a proxy for one's individual identity, i.e., an individual's fate is inevitably and intricately linked to that of the group. Any individual that seems to escape this fate is considered an exception." Linked fate depends on the debunked stimulus‐​response theory in behavioral science: the idea that people who share the same race or culture experience the world the same way. Senator Tim Scott's passionate rebuttal of linked fate focuses on the idea that educational reform is the thing that can unlink fate most efficiently and instill a sense of agency in students, a sentiment elaborated upon by Ian Rowe.
Agency, or "agential fate," a concept of individual efficacy I support in "Ditching Our Discourses of Doom" (excerpted here), "can be construed as a confluence of pre‐​established circumstances—one's life experiences—combined with free will." This concept necessitates the belief "that each individual in a particular context may react to stimulus in different ways; that they each may have a different desired future state; and that their decisions and choices matter in relation to achieving those future states, we enter into a place of agency, possibility, and hope."
This agency, possibility, and hope imply the concept of defensive confidence I reference in a recent Discourse article. If people have defensive confidence—the confidence that one can successfully defend one's ideas in given situations—they are more likely to engage the world more courageously as individuals unbeholden to a group and is, ironically, more likely to have one's mind changed precisely because of this willingness to engage.
These concepts suggest the benefits individualism can have to a sense of social justice and, especially, in combatting the fatalism of social justice activism. Individuals can think independently, adapt to circumstances, and, therefore, more effectively exercise agential fate and defensive confidence, thus better ensuring an attempt to communicate across differences.
Sadly, the concept of individualism is almost anathema in critical social justice circles, in which group identity is favored and individualism is considered an oppressive concept. Race essentialism, which implies concepts like linked fate and group consciousness, is a foundational concept in critical social justice that is diametrically opposed to individualism.
Individualism is not only the best thing for curing the ills of social injustice; it is also, by nature, the downfall of critical social justice ideology. For this reason, maybe "panacea's" more colloquial synonym, "magic bullet" would be more apropos.

 Delighted my REVISED EDITION of THE GLOBAL JUSTICE READER is coming out in a few weeks!The original edition was published in 2008. The newly revised edition has updated contents, new sections and new readings in this popular anthology.I have also written a companion GLOBAL JUSTICE: AN INTRODUCTION that will be published shortly. The two books work together - and both are published by Wiley-Blackwell.The book's blurb:A unique compendium of foundational and contemporary writings in global justice, newly revised and expandedThe Global Justice Reader is the first resource of its kind to focus exclusively on this important topic in moral and political philosophy, providing an expertly curated selection of both classic and contemporary work in one comprehensive volume. Purpose-built for course work, this collection brings together the best in the field to help students appreciate the philosophical dimensions of critical global issues and chart the development of diverse concepts of justice and morality.Newly revised and expanded, the Reader presents key writings of the most influential writers on global justice, including Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Peter Singer. Thirty-nine chapters across eleven thematically organized sections explore sovereignty, rights to self-determination, human rights, nationalism and patriotism, cosmopolitanism, global poverty, women and global justice, climate change, and more.Features seminal works from the moral and political philosophers of the past as well as important writings from leading contemporary thinkersExplores critical topics in current discourses surrounding immigration and citizenship, global poverty, just war, terrorism, and international environmental justiceHighlights the need for shared philosophical resources to help address global problemsIncludes a brief introduction in each section setting out the issues of concern to global justice theoristsContains complete references in each chapter and a fully up-to-date, extended bibliography to supplement further readingsThe revised edition of The Global Justice Reader remains an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in global justice and human rights, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, environmental justice, and social justice and citizenship, and an excellent supplement for general courses in political philosophy, political science, social science, and law.

The next issue of "Constellations" (vol. 40, no. 4) features articles on The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) and the Frankfurt School:"The Institute for Social Research at 100: Continuity and Transformation"Eleven articles are now available online:* Axel Honneth - "The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former director's perspective"Excerpt: "There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skeptical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research."* Rainer Forst: "The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition"  [open access]Excerpt: "In my view, then, critical theory must be reconfigured as a critique of relations of justification. This calls, on the one hand, for a critical social scientific analysis of social and political relations of domination that includes cultural and, not least, economic structures and relationships. In this regard, two dimensions of domination must be distinguished: subjugation to unjustifiable norms and institutions, and subjugation to conditions that prevent practices of justification. Such critical analysis must be combined with a discourse-theoretical, genealogical critique of the justifications and justification narratives that confer legitimacy on unjustifiable relations. On the other hand, we must pose the constructive question of how a "basic structure of justification" can be conceived as a requirement of fundamental justice and be realized in social practice - not as an ideal or a model to be imposed on societies, but as a normative order to be developed autonomously. Essentially, a theory we call critical ought to be based on the principle of criticism itself. Its medium is reason striving for practices of autonomous justification among equals."* Alessandro Ferrara - "If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent"Excerpt: "It is undeniably among the aims of critical theory to envisage a society in which diversity can exist in the absence of oppression. Now, it's all too easy to merely invoke the ideal of equals living together with their diversity (ethnic, ethical, religious, cultural, or of gender, lifestyle, sexual preference) and without oppression. Deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists, and theorists of recognition often emphatically do so. However, when it comes to specifying concretely which institutions should form the basic structure of such a society, how they should relate to one other, what rights and liberties (and how limited and balanced) citizens should have, and what democratic legitimacy means, it is a whole different story.On the nuts and bolts of an oppression-free society the entire first generation had little to offer, to say nothing of the cauldron of the "verwaltete Welt" (Adorno). Habermas has quite a lot to say, in Between Facts and Norms and in his exchange with Rawls. Among the younger critical theorists who long for reviving the earlier program of the Frankfurt School, few even attempt to say anything. This is the problem, instead, on which [John Rawls's] Political Liberalism, not A Theory of Justice, offers an elaborate theory unmatched by any other to date (....) Critical theory can only gain from enlarging its tent to include also some of Rawls's concepts - reasonability, civility, reciprocity - and from launching empirical research on the conditions of the possibility for them to maintain traction in the challenging decades ahead of us."* Maeve Cooke - "Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today"Excerpt: "Since formalist models of politics abstain from critique of the prevailing deep-seated ethical-existential values and from recommendation of alternatives, they are conducive toward unquestioning acceptance of the ethical-existential values undergirding the established political procedures, facilitating the reproduction of the political status quo. Against this, I take the view that contemporary critical theory must engage with ethical-existential questions, not least if it is to meet the challenges posed by our disastrous ecological situation. This requires it, in turn, to engage with the question of ethical-existential validity. Given the challenge of value pluralism, therefore, a key task for contemporary critical theory is to elaborate a conception of ethical validity that is at once universalist and attentive to the plurality of ethical values and worldviews."* Samuel Moyn - "Critical theory's generational predicament" [Link]Excerpt: "(....) it seems clear that the principal cause of the lack of interest in critical theory for younger generations - the lack of zeal to perpetuate or even study it - is that the votaries of the tradition conformed unreflectively to "the end of history" in the 1990s. They had essentially nothing to say about American unipolarity and the militarism that has so clearly accompanied it. Worse, for one-time Marxists, they never formulated an analysis or critique of economic neoliberalism. Yet these are the causes at the center of the activism and theorizing of many who lived through the past decade and forging a critical perspective on their times."* Martin Saar - "Rethinking Critique and Theory" [open access]Excerpt: "Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation."* Frank I. Michelman - "Totality, morality, and social philosophy"Excerpt: "We thus see the Institute for Social Research, at a signal moment in its early history, posing for itself the dialectic of human individual agency and environing social totality - with neither element placed at the other's disposal - as a main topic for pursuit by social philosophy and its connected program of social research. It is by pursuit of that topic that the Institute's engagements over the decades of my own academic career have figured, importantly for me, in my work (not generally classified as "Frankfurt School") on liberal constitutional theory. Most pointedly it has done so in undertakings by Jürgen Habermas to explicate a moral point of view from which citizens in a political society encounter one another as each a free and equal person commanding full respect as such - but to explicate that morality, as I have sought to explain, not as a view "that philosophy independently discovers," but rather as one that lies embedded in a historically particular social totality."* Cristina Lafont - "The return of the critique of ideologies" [open access]Excerpt: "(....) I shall focus on just one issue: the recent revival in critiques of ideology. In my view, this type of critique is an important task of critical theory and remains one of its most significant legacies. Yet, if one focuses on the work of critical theorists over the past decades, this statement is far from obvious. In fact, the second generation of the Frankfurt school,most notably Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action, explicitly rejects ideology critique as obsolete in the context of contemporary societies. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, he had embraced the classicalMarxist approach to ideology critique, he ultimately rejected it. It was the explicit attempt to rebut objections that had plagued this approach that brought about the so-called "democratic turn" of critical theory characteristic of Habermas's work from the 1980s onward and in which the critique of ideologies no longer plays a role."* Christopher F. Zurn -  "We're not special: Congratulations!"Excerpt: "It is fine, then, to get right to work on current social movements - Occupy Wall Street and other Square movements, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise and Third Act movements, MeToo, the Arab Spring, or the Mahsa Amini protests - and on pressing contemporary social problems - climate change and human adaptation, deepening material inequality, the erosion of constitutional democracy, artificial intelligence and human de-skilling, global migration and refugee waves, the transformation of the Westphalian international order, the resilience and resurgence of patriarchy, and so on - without worrying how to fit these movements and problems into the architectonic of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Theory of Communicative Action. To be sure, we need not ignore the conceptual resources and insights of our tradition when they are relevant and enlightening. But we need to take interdisciplinarity seriously by looking to the much broader currents of critical thought on social formations and the changing horizons of human emancipation."* Peter E. Gordon - "The animating impulses of critical theory"Excerpt: "For some readers, this generational shift - between the first and second generations of critical theory - is overdramatized into a stark contrast between totalizing negativism and restorationist optimism, both of which seem to hover at too great an altitude above social reality. Needless to say, this contrast does an injustice to both parties. Adorno and Horkheimer are far more committed to reason's self-reflective possibilities, while Habermas remains far more attentive to reason's systemic distortion. They converge at a point of dialectical mediation, whereas neither pure negativism nor pure idealism would serve as a viable groundwork for critical theory. In what follows I wish to suggest that Horkheimer's original model of social philosophy, as animated by a rational but materialist ideal of emancipation, still has enduring merit."* William E. Scheuerman - "Horkheimer's unrealized vision"Excerpt: "Horkheimer's idea of a mutually constructive exchange between philosophy and critical social science has too often been rare and ephemeral. And this should worry us if you believe, as this author does, that Horkheimer was right to see such an exchange as indispensable to critical theory. (....) Only in 1962 did Habermas, in an appropriately interdisciplinary study that relied heavily on research from legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists, begin to revitalize Frankfurt critical theory. Not only did his landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere take the social sciences seriously, but its young author seems to have implicitly grasped that critical theory could only flourish on the basis of an authentically cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Horkheimer's original interdisciplinary vision clearly inspired the young Habermas. When properly reconstructed, it should inspire us today as well."

Philip Cunliffe, excorcizing the demons of Cosmopolitan Dystopia
Hello everyone! Welcome to Episode 25 of Fully Automated. This week we are joined by Dr Philip Cunliffe, Senior Lecturer in International Conflict at the University of Kent. Phil has been a guest on the show before actually. He joined us in Episode 16, for our "What the Brexit?" debate, at the 2019 ISA Convention, in Toronto. And listeners may also be familiar with his voice from the podcast Aufhebunbga Bunga, which he records with Alex Hochuli and George Hoare.



Today we are going to talk with Dr. Cunliffe about his new book, Cosmopolitan Dystopia (Manchester Press, 2020), which is a detailed study of the negative impact of human rights discourse on global politics since the end of the Cold War. Now, for many on the left, this will be a controversial point. As he notes in the book, many see human rights discourse as a cover for US imperial ambitions. Yet, says Cunliffe, we can't explain the popularity of global human rights discourse, or the extent to which it is invoked even by European powers, solely through the lens of American hegemony. You need a more nuanced account. And this is where Cunliffe brings in the idea of reading human rights discourse as a counter-utopian, or anti-political, symptom of the neoliberal era.



Cosmopolitan Dystopia
On the surface, this argument might appear paradoxical. How can human rights be anti-utopian? But I think any listeners who might have watched the Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalization will already have an insight into where Phil is taking this argument. As he notes, a key value at the heart of contemporary liberalism is an aversion to the so-called "fate of utopians." Human rights violations happen, according to this schematic, because people want to change the status quo.



In this interview, we cover a range of issues. For me though, one of the highlights is our discussion about the complete lack of critical self-awareness of people like Juergen Habermas and, more recently, Samantha Power. In their support for interventions in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, liberals invoked the idea of the 'just' liberal war, and paved the way for the liberal justification of future American wars, from Iraq to Libya and Syria. But this book is not just a critique of American wars — it also examines the bloody interventions of the British and the French, in Africa. The common element to all these cases is the fervent belief among cosmopolitan liberals that the world is better disposed to their ideals than it really is (which is not to say the world isn't oriented to cosmopolitan ideals — just that they might not be liberal cosmopolitan ideals!).



Now, I'll say that I don't know that I fully agree with all of Phil's positions here. On the one hand, I do think he makes a compelling case that there's been a substantive "restructuring" of world order going on, as a result of what he terms the "cumulative weight" of interventions since the Cold War. But I am just not sure I am as persuaded as he, that self-determination and sovereignty are necessarily the solution to the problems of contemporary capitalist order. I may be wrong about this, and certainly I think the left would be foolish not to try to leverage the power of the state as much as possible, to achieve its goals. But I think there's a risk of maybe fetishizing the benefits of what some call 'delinking' at the expense of engaging on the terrain of international and transnational institutions. For more on this, listeners might want to revisit Episode 14, where we talked about this a bit with Lee Jones.



Anyway, that all said, I think this is a magnificent and politically important book. And I think Phil has made a real contribution with it. It should be widely read, and discussed.

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)

The episode features a roundtable on Philip Cunliffe's latest book, The New Twenty Years' Crisis (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020). And, in a bit of a break with tradition, this episode also sees me jump out of the host's seat, and invite Shahar Hameiri (University of Queensland) to take over the reins.



Joining me in the panel to discuss the book is the author, Philip Cunliffe (making his third appearance on the show), and Patrick Porter (University of Birmingham). Tara McCormack (University of Leicester) was also scheduled to join us but had to withdraw at the last minute, due to illness.



It was great to have Phil back on the show, to discuss this important book. The last time he was on, we talked about his previous book, Cosmopolitan Dystopia, which was a survey of human rights discourse on global politics since the end of the Cold War. The new book takes the theme of liberal war-making from that book, and attempts to read it through the lens of E. H. Carr's classic 1939 text, The Twenty Years' Crisis.



On the eve of World War Two, Carr described the politics of his time as a kind of interregnum, or a time of passage between two regimes of world order. For Carr, the great tragedy of his time was that the normative commitments of the intellectuals of interbellum period — namely, to the power of public opinion, to sovereign self-determination, and to international law and institutions — were incongruent with the kinds of mass-mobilized politics that were rapidly sweeping away their world order, and undermining the very conditions of possibility for securing those commitments.



For Cunliffe, however, the lessons of Carr's study of the 1919-1939 period must today be applied in a kind of inverted manner. For where it was mass politics that ultimately frustrated and undid the political project of the utopian idealists, we do not today live in such a massified moment. To the contrary, as scholars like Peter Mair have described, we live in a demassified moment, where the agendas of college-educated neoliberal Brahmins dominate, unchecked. Worse, as Cunliffe explores, these new elites are kind of anti-utopians. They detest the values of the interbellum period, deriding public opinion and breaching sovereign self-determination in the name of so-called responsibility.



Cunliffe explores this argument through a number of fascinating case studies, taking us from the salons of International Relations conventions, which have been overtaken by 'critical' theorists (a group of scholars whose methods are singularly symptomatic of the "imaginary" of our unipolar moment), to the hallways of Brussels, capital of that grandest of examples of "de-massified," neoliberal democracy, the European Union. The overarching theme that emerges is one of a shocking lack of self-awareness on the part of our political and intellectual elites.



As you'll hear, the panelists are on the whole friendly to Phil's diagnosis, but they do push back on some of his normative suggestions. Despite these disagreements, however, I will say that I think this is one of the more important episodes we've done on this show. Diagnostically, Phil is one of the sharpest commentators around, on the contradictions of our postmodern moment. I want to thank Phil, Patrick, and Shahar for their time and effort in helping to make this conversation happen.

Kimberly Hutchings on Quiet as a Research
Strategy, the Essence of Critique, and the Narcissism of Minor Differences










As a job, International Relations requires carving out one's position by being vocal. Being vocal entails making
oneself heard, forwarding identifiable 'contributions'. But what if the biggest
contribution one might make would actually consist of quieting down? 

In a
provocative and wide-ranging Talk,
Kimberly Hutchings—amongst others—challenges us to take postcolonialism seriously
as an invitation to hush, and provides compelling suggestions as to what
critique means in a time of proliferating criticality.






Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



In my view, the
main challenge for IR right now is to deal with postcolonialism and
decoloniality, which would entail a kind of decentering of the standpoint of
judgment within the study of international politics. Essentially, we should move
away from the kind of common-sense starting points of Western theory, Western
history and all the rest of it. To be sure, this does not necessarily mean
disregarding them. Instead, we should avoid always seeing them as the
authoritative, and find a way to keep them at a distance in order to make space
for the inclusion of other voices. Practicing this inclusion, answering 'what
would you do about it', or 'where do you stand' I find more difficult; I have
discussed questions of decoloniality and postcolonialism with my colleagues and
we all find it very tough to do something different or to suggest alternatives.
Especially since we are—or at least I am—educated and structured within a
particular (eg. Western) realm of understanding. Because it is so difficult for
'us' to do so, our starting point should therefore exactly be to start from the
empirical and theoretical engagement of the political actors on the periphery.
By doing so we can begin to decenter our work and the debates. There is an enormous
amount of really brilliant decolonial and postcolonial work our there. Here, I
think the work of people like Arlene Tickner has been great in attempting to do
carve out this space. This goes to prove that scholars are suggesting alternative ways and that it can be done differently.



So perhaps
paradoxically, I would summarize my central contribution as a hush—scholars
like I have to dampen down our voices in order to allow other voices to be
heard. Keeping this is mind can prove to be a really important lesson for
theorists. At least I attempt to do so within my particular subfields of
theory.





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



During my route through
academia I have been inspired by a number of theorists, books and historical
events and I continue to be. However, there are two or three specific points of
inspiration that I can draw out; some more philosophical or theoretical ones and
others almost accidental to how my thinking has progressed.



Largely, I have
arrived at where I am today because I started my PhD on the philosophies of
Kant and Hegel. This has set up certain parameters for my way of thinking; for
thinking about ethics and about critique, and this has influenced my way of
thinking and ultimately my work ever since. Another factor was my time as a
young scholar working at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic where I met Steve Gill. He suggested I attended the BISA conference to
present a paper on war in relation to Kant and Hegel. He knew this was my field
of interest and in the end I accepted. The first panel I attended was okay,
though only two people participated. The second panel was far more interesting
and featured amongst others Rob Walker. Walker talked about bringing Foucault's insights and
ideas about critique to bear on thinking about international politics. This
made me realize that my purely philosophical way of thinking in relation to
Kantian critique and the problems of Kantian critique were already being worked
through within the domain of International Relations as a field of study. It
spurred my initial interest as I came to think of IR as a kind of case study of
applied political philosophy more generally. In some ways, you could say that
the questions I was asking from a political philosophy perspective were being
addressed more progressively in IR. Certainly, I caught on to IR when they were
being very consciously addressed. The timing and shift in IR spoke directly to
me and, in my view, pushed me to think about questions of judgment and argument
shifts. Here, one should attempt to genuinely relate to an international or
global frame of reference rather that simply taking for granted a kind of
methodological nationalism, which, I suspect, up till then had been. In this
sense IR pushed my thinking.



It is
interesting how it often is the texts you read early on that shape you as a
scholar. To me it was the texts I read in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when
critical IR was really getting off the ground, which were formative for me. Initially,
it has been Kant's political thought and Hegel's philosophy of rights. Additionally,
there has been a range of theorists within critical writing; retrospectively
the work of Hannah Arendt and The Origins
of Totalitarianism in particular. Moreover, Foucault has also been
essential to my work; particularly Discipline
and Punish and The History of
Sexuality have been really crucial in terms of me looking at a kind of 'fate
of critique', if you like, in Western thought in the 20th century. Within
IR Andrew Linklater's work is really important, especially his book on Men and Citizens, and afterwards his
postcolonial community book from the late 1990s. They are important as a sort
of interlocutors, which I in fact reacting against, because I saw them as carrying
through this very Habermasian line of thought, with which I did not agree. Obviously
also the work of feminists scholars amongst others Cynthia Enloe (TheoryTalk #48) and Christine Sylvester, whose books were very
important to me. Again, they enabled me to widen my scope and see how broader
themes of feminist philosophy were being addressed in IR.





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



In order to
become a specialist in IR a student's main qualities should be intellectual curiosity,
openness, and willingness to engage with ideas. However, it is importing not to
insist on 'you must know your Foucault backwards' or 'you must know your Hegel
backwards'. To me this is not essential; instead, the focus should be on one's
interests and curiosity, and to locate yourself in terms of where you are 'thinking
from'. In this way, you are able to relate your ideas and arguments to a
specific problematique—perhaps one concerning the political contexts you
derived from yourself, and maybe because of the particular intellectual
trajectory that you have taken.



Then again,
knowing your classic theorists as Foucault and Hegel is definitely beneficial
when engaging with IR. When I entered the field of IR, it meant I was already
loaded with a set of intellectual parameters, interests and political
commitments. Ultimately, this enabled my participation and outcome of conversations
with different trajectories within IR. Therefore, what are most important to me
are intellectual curiosity, openness, willingness to listen, and a sense of
where you are coming from to the conversation. Yet, the great thing about IR is
that you do not have to be trained in IR, in any straightforward way. In my
view IR is a cross-disciplinary field, where many disciplines and arguments
merge; students from law, political science, sociology, who all can have lots
to say to IR, and IR can in return have lots to say to you.



The key to
combining academia with your own starting point lies to me in education; if you
get a good education, there should be space for the individual engagement. Particularly
if you are interested in antiracism or in feminism, I would assume, an IR
scholar speaking to those areas would encourage you to make space for independent
thought. However, all academic work is at the same time a discipline, which at times can be painful to adjust to and actually
take on board. Academia is not for everyone; to some it ends up being a waste
of time and they long for something different, which is completely fine as
well. But in my view it is sign of a poor university education if it closes
things down to an extent where you cannot find the space to articulate your
views or relate them to the things that you are learning. And that is a fault
of the education, not of the student.





You fall squarely among
'critical' IR scholarship. What does it mean, for you, to be critical?



First of all, the term 'critical' is highly contested and in a way it
can become a useless label. In my view one of the problems with critical IR is
you tend to get into the sort of narcissism of minor differences, which also
involves getting into a kind of competition for philosophical antecedence, in
which scholars argue either through Marx, through Heidegger or through
Foucault. The second problem of critical IR, which I have discussed in my work
at various points, is the suspension of judgment forever. Since you can never
find the ground, the sort of desire to find the authority in some sense ends up
paralyzing judgments. I would argue that when there is a kind of risk that
comes with people's willingness to make claims that it can ultimately suspend
judgment. Yet, there is still dynamism, and the fact that your claim-making can
be precisely deconstructed as in fact a reinforcement of what you are trying to
undermine is part of the excitement and the interest of doing critique. The neverendingness
of it is challenging in itself. In a sense we would like to be sort of God and
in a sense we say 'well, I know that this is right and it just is'. Critique
stops you doing it. That is why it is healthy, even though it at the same time
can be quite frustrating.



My own personal understanding of what 'critique' and 'critical' means,
comes out of my engagement with ideas of Kantian critique. The Kantian critique
represent a foundational moment in the sense that both Marxist critique and
post-Marxist critique refer back to Kant. In this way, the Kantian critique
becomes a very rich starting point, as it has been able to branch out in all
kinds of directions, from the sort of Hegelian/Marxist direction to other very
different ones. The sort of typical critique is about questioning the
assumptions or the authoritative basis of any kinds of claims. In doing so,
critique is largely about disturbing the conditions or possibility of a claim
that is made, and this is basically what Kant's transcendental move is about.
This means that critique can go in lots of directions, some of them more
helpful than others. Critique can also end up as a claim to a new authority and
in my view, certain forms of post-Kantian critique have done that. I would also
argue that there are aspects of Kant's work, where he did the same; in
particular in how he moves from one possible ground to another to attempt to
underpin some kind of authority for his claims. This might be contentious, but
this is my reading of Kant, whereas others probably would argue he construes
the space of critique very openly. Put simply, my reading of Kant is in line
with Foucault's: critique is the admission that you are always in a tentative
position in which any claim to authority is going to be questionable. Within any
argument, you are always going to be holding something steady in order to
question other parts, which mean you cannot ever escape from having to claim
some sort of authority in the arguments you make. However, this does not mean
that arguments become an overweening or foundational kind of ground. In a sense
it is about keeping things moving, and I quite like the Foucauldian expression
of it being an ethos, an attitude, a way of being, rather than a set of
techniques or a claim to a moral high ground, which then enables you to show
how everybody else is wrong. That is how I think of the concept of 'critical'.





Classical theory plays a
big part in your work. If bygone thinkers spoke to the issues they saw in their
times, then what do the minds of bygone eras have to say to contemporary
issues?



I am never quite sure what the answer to that is. There is a tradition
of thinking about canonic thought in the UK, Quentin Skinner is one of them,
that is really dubious about talking about Kant or Heidegger in relation to
contemporary problems or trying to suggest you can have a philosophical
conversation across time and space. I have spent some time on this argument and
in my view they are to a great extent right, at least if you think of a conversation
with the 'real Hobbes' or someone else. However, there is a sense in which I
start from a position in which there is no 'real' whoever. Instead, it should
be viewed as a text with arguments and ideas, which you read and interpret in
the light both of your time and place, but also the course of a whole set of
secondary engagements with that. When reading such texts you are dealing with
two hundred years of interpretation of Kant and Hegel. In this sense one must
note that the voices of those philosophers as highly mediated in many different
ways. If you can still engage with them and find useful insights, then sort of
'why not' seems reasonable. A second argument in terms of philosophers as Kant
and Hegel is, the time they wrote in was obviously radically different.
Meanwhile, it also had features in terms of the shape the state were taking, the
beginnings of what we would now recognize as the modern capitalist market
state. They were there, they were before that, and they were looking at the
beginnings. They were around during the Napoleonic wars, mostly Hegel but also
Kant was at point when the European colonialism or imperialism took off in
particular ways. Here, a lot of the categories of race, culture etc. took shape
under their noses. In this sense we are still within a frame that they were a
part of, rather than excluded from. If you look at Machiavelli, he was speaking
in a radically different time and space. There is an argument there about
occupying a world that in some sense we still recognize or perhaps of Kant and
Hegel trying to construct ways of understanding and judging a world that still
has links to the world we inhabit today. That is another reason why they are
still useful today. We all get our ideas from somewhere; as long as we do no
argue that referring to Kant, Hegel, Foucault or Arendt makes it right. Instead,
use ideas as they come and mix and match them, it is reasonable to be eclectic,
depending on what kinds of claims you are making. If you attempt to do a solid
reading of Kant, then you must know both the texts and the context, but if you
wish to discuss critique in IR you can, in my view, take some elements of Kant
or the post-Kantian legacy and use them to illuminate a contemporary debate.





The encounter between the
West and the non-West is an important theme running through your work, and you
liberally engage with post-colonial theory. So how does that work in practice?



The problem to someone who is trying to critique Eurocentrism or get
away from it is that you cannot do it in an isolated way. One of the ways in which
people try to think about the inclusion of other voices was in terms of the
notion of dialogue. This was actually why I ended up writing about dialogue. My
problem here was that some of the ways of thinking about dialogue seemed to me
to simply confirm the centrality of the West and the position of the non-West
as other. The big question is then how do you articulate the non-West? In my
view the thing is that you simply do not; instead one must think constructively
about how you quiet down, how you moderate dominant voices and create spaces
for others. Sometimes it may just be a question of just being quiet, it may be
about encouraging other work, it may be about encouraging theoretical investment
in other places.



I am talking to you now, but in some sense what I am doing is enforcing
the position of the privileged white, Western, middle-class woman. In my
position talking about Eurocentrism and critique is merely by the fact of doing
it, I am reinforcing a certain privilege and a certain sense of it. And this is
not to say that you therefore you do not do it. Sometimes it is not useful to
have someone like me on a panel; it is a much better thing to have somebody
else, somebody younger or somebody from a different part of the world. To me
this is what you have to think about, and as a scholar you have think about how
you can contribute to creating spaces within which other voices can be included.
To be honest, I do not think I have done a very good job of doing that. To
quiet yourself down is really difficult; especially since there is so many
institutional and other incentives for you to try and occupy the center stage. In
my view it is something that maybe feminist scholarship has been better at.



In this sense it relates to a much bigger set of issues that social
science is about; social sciences were and are kind of an imperialist project
in their foundation. Whether or not you can ever make them to anything else, I
doubt. It might be that you cannot, in which case the move to aesthetics, for
example, which you see in some bits of IR, is understandable. It is difficult
in the sense that we cannot do what we want to do by staying within the vocabularies
of social science. We have to move to another kind of discourse in order to do
what we think we need to do.





So here we navigate the
space between scholarship and activism. I remember this picture of you
delivering a lecture on a road blocking an arms convoy.



Yes, my very minor piece of activism, except it was the people that
were being handcuffed on the road who were the real activists, not me. I think
it is really important to be clear that doing critical theory as an IR scholar
does not make you a political activist, and I think it is important, because it
can sometimes feel really good to make a gesture of whatever, you know, 'being
critical'. And that's all great, but actually it's all within an incredibly
privileged forum and you're not really making any difference to anything. So,
I'm a bit I think Hegelian in the sense that I think that philosophy or
academic work is about understanding more, trying to understand and to think,
and it may well generate frameworks and ideas that make it useful in various
ways, and it may well not, but if you want to have revolution, go out and start
organizing. You know, don't think that you can somehow do it by being on ISA
panels. Marx was a political activist, he didn't just sit around writing, he
was part of the movement, part of an organization, and that's the only way you
really can help bring fundamental change, and quite often it'll go wrong. Being
a political activist is much more scary and difficult than being a critical IR
thinker.



Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is a leading scholar in international relations theory. She has extensively researched and published on international political theory in respect to Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, international and global ethics, Feminist theory and philosophy, and politics and violence. Her work is influenced by the scholarly tradition that produced the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. She is the author of Kant, Critique and Politics, International Political Theory: rethinking ethics in a global era, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy and Time and World Politics: thinking the present. Her current focus is on the areas of global ethics, assumptions about time and history in theories of international relations, and the conceptual relationship between politics and violence in Western political thought.







Related links





Faculty Profile at Queen Mary's




Read Hutchings' Ethics, Feminism and International Affairs (2013) here (pdf)
Read Hutching's What is Orientation in Thinking? On the Question of Time and Timeliness
in Cosmopolitical Thought (2011) here (pdf)
Read Hutching's World Politics and the Question of Progress (2004) here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Three and a half years ago, the ASI published a position paper and draft law proposing a "UK Free Speech Act" which would, if enacted, forever remove the regulation of nonviolent political discussion from the remit of law enforcement in the United Kingdom.The censorship provisions of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 (the "Hate Crime Act"), entering into force this week, are deeply offensive to freedom of expression, and the only way to stop them is to implicitly repeal these new rules with UK-wide protection for freedom of speech.The Hate Crime Act contains three provisions in particular – "aggravation of offences by prejudice," "racially aggravated harassment" and "stirring up hatred" – which are, at least as-described, descriptions of the sort of speech that most members of polite society would rightly oppose as a personal, moral matter. However, if we look at the substance of the language employed by the new laws and its derivation from similar, viewpoint-neutral English rules – in the case of the stirring-up offence and the "racially aggravated harassment" offences,  the "alarm or distress" language from the English Public Order Act 1986, and in the case of the stirring-up offence only, the historic "threatening, abusive, or insulting" language from that same law – we know that these rules have proven capable of extremely overbroad application in England, and these new rules will prove just as terrible, if not more so, if allowed to stand in Scotland.The position, outlined in a 2020 paper for the ASI, and the applicable English legal rules, remains entirely unchanged. It suffices for present purposes to note that existing English laws, which are nowhere near as intrusive as the new Scottish ones, have already been used in England to, variously: ·      threaten a schoolboy with prosecution for nonviolently holding up a sign calling the Church of Scientology a dangerous cult;·      arrest republican protestors in the vicinity of King Charles' coronation for nonviolent picketing;·      convict a protestor for nonviolently saying David Cameron had "blood on his hands" for cutting disability benefit at an event where the then-PM was speaking;·      convict protestors against the war in Iraq for nonviolently expressing their points of view in front of soldiers of the British Army returning home from that war;·      arrest students for nonviolently saying "woof" to a dog;·      arrest a woman for nonviolently praying silently; and·      arrest a preacher for nonviolently reading from the Bible, in public, verbatim.The existing rules should have been repealed years ago, but few UK lawyers, being unaccustomed to an American perspective on free speech jurisprudence and thus unable to see that the frog was starting to boil, seemed to notice very much as the English judiciary lost its way after issuing its landmark, pro-free speech decision of Redmond-Bate [1999] EWHC Admin 733. In a few short years, the English courts went from protecting controversial speech to routinely acquiescing to the criminalization of what, pre-1999 at least, would have been entirely lawful, if somewhat controversial, expression (see: Norwood v DPP [2003] EWHC 1564, and Abdul v. DPP  [2011] EWHC 247). The provisions of Article 10 of the European Convention concerning freedom of expression, enshrined in domestic law by the UK Human Rights Act, are little better than window-dressing. They have been of no assistance whatsoever in protecting English speakers of controversial ideas since that law's enactment; indeed, the Human Rights Act may have harmed the cause of free speech in the country by formalising the broad derogations from that right permitted under Article 10(2) which have been abused, time and again, to stifle discourse. Put another way, our experience with the English rules, in particular the Public Order Act 1986 but also the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, is that their application, especially in the last 25 years, has been subjective, unpredictable, inconsistent, politically-motivated, sometimes capricious, and thoroughly chilling to speech.The Scottish law turbocharges all of these problems by abandoning viewpoint-neutrality and expressly targeting "culture war" issues around questions of identity within the four corners of the statute. This is particularly the case when we look at the "aggravation of offences by prejudice" law, which states that age, disability, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and transgender identity are all to be considered when sentencing people in Scotland for criminal offences. The problem with this, of course, is that merely talking about these issues and causing offence is already capable of constituting a public order offence, both in England and substantially equivalent legislation in Scotland, and these provisions were used in both England and Scotland to suppress speech even before the Hate Crime Act entered into force.Only last month transgender activists sought to have J.K. Rowling arrested there after English prosecutors declined to prosecute her for prior "gender critical" remarks. The Hate Crime Act now requires Scottish judges to take into account Rowling's motivations when judging her speech, which we think would be fairly described as emanating from the identitarian, and therefore definitionally "prejudicial," ideology known as second-wave feminism, and would require, in a public order or malicious communications-based prosecution for those feminist remarks, for a Scottish judge to consider a sentencing enhancement.It makes no sense to criminalise these conversations. Indeed it makes sense to expressly legalise them, given that national politics seems, increasingly, to cluster around identity issues and, in a democratic society, require their open discussion in order for these disputes around the proper ordering of society to be satisfactorily resolved. On the gender theory question, in particular, the debate seems to be between, on one side, critical theory-informed intersectional activists who seek to view all power relationships through the lens of what they call immutable characteristics, and on the other, we see a coalition of classical liberals and religiously-minded traditionalists from the usual suspects like the Catholic Church but also newly aggrieved groups such as traditionalist Muslim parents of schoolchildren. As the fact that the Prime Minister himself felt the need to chime in on these matters this week plainly evidences, identity issues, whether we like it or not, now sit squarely at the centre of contemporary UK political discourse. We take no view on the merits of either "side" here, because taking a viewpoint does not matter and, in any case, is inadvisable, to the extent anyone here at the Institute plans on ever setting foot in Scotland again. This is because it is now quite unsafe, legally speaking, to take a vigorously-defended public position on these questions in Scotland from any perspective, as long as there is a hearer who is offended enough to file a police report against the hearer's perceived political enemies, or calculating enough to pretend to be so offended. To see how the Hate Crime Act potentially cuts in all directions, we need look no further than criminal complaints which have already been made under the new law. See, for example, the fact that Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, the law's primary advocate and promoter, was immediately reported by the Indian Council of Scotland to the police for thoughtcrime contained in a speech he himself delivered in Scottish Parliament in 2023 as soon as the Hate Crime Act entered into force. Under the new regime, even the First Minister will need to take care not to express those same thoughts in the same manner again.There are not many reasonable people who wish to live in a country where the first response to any political disagreement is to call for a speaker's arrest. Nonviolent speech should never warrant a violent response. Yet, as was proven on day 1 of this new law, we already see that the Scottish law will be used, and is being used, to call down state-sanctioned violence, namely arrests and imprisonment, to suppress broad swathes of viewpoints from all political quarters. To the few back-benchers who are engaged by this pertinent issue: This is the hill to die on. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has said he opposes the Scottish law. Push the Prime Minister to back up that opposition with decisive action. Permanently abolish political censorship enforced at gunpoint. Enact the UK Free Speech Act.

A group of faculty at Penn have written A Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania at https://pennforward.com/.  They encourage signatures, even if you're not associated with Penn. I signed. Big picture: Universities stand at a crossroads. Do universities choose pursuit of knowledge, the robust open and uncomfortable debate that requires; excellence and meritocracy, even if as in the past that has meant admitting socially disfavored groups? Or do universities exist to advance, advocate for, and inculcate a particular political agenda? Choose.  Returning to the former will require structural changes, and founding documents are an important part of that rebuilding effort.  For example, Penn and Stanford are searching for new presidents. A joint statement by board and president that this document will guide rebuilding efforts could be quite useful in guiding that search and the new Presidents' house-cleaning. There is some danger in excerpting such a document, but here are a few tasty morsels: Principles:Penn's sole aim going forward will be to foster excellence in research and education.Specifics:Intellectual diversity and openness of thought.  The University of Pennsylvania's core mission is the pursuit, enhancement, and dissemination of knowledge and of the free exchange of ideas that is necessary to that goal.....Civil discourse.  The University of Pennsylvania ... acknowledges that no party possesses the moral authority to monopolize the truth or censor opponents and that incorrect hypotheses are rejected only by argument and persuasion, logic and evidence, not suppression or ad-hominen attacks. Political neutrality at the level of administration.  ... In their capacity as university representatives, administrators will abstain from commenting on societal and political events...The University must remain neutral to scientific investigation, respect the scientific method, and strive to include many and varied approaches in its research orientation.Admissions, hiring, promotion ... No factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered over merit in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level. Excellence in research, teaching, and service shall drive every appointment, advancement, reappointment, or hiring decision.no factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered in any decision related to student admission and aid. Faculty committed to academic excellence must have a supervisory role in the admission process of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Admission policies should prioritize the fair treatment of each individual applicant, and criteria must be objective, transparent, and clearly communicated to all community members. Faculty have outsourced admissions to bureaucrats. While the cats are away, the mice play. Faculty complain the students are dumb snowflakes. Well, read some files. And no more "bad personality" scores for asians. Education:A central goal of education is to train students to be critical thinkers, virtuous citizens, and ethical participants in free and open but civilized and respectful debate that produces, refines, and transmits knowledge. Competition:as Penn's competitors struggle to define their mission and lose their focus on this manner of excellence, Penn has a unique opportunity to emerge as a globally leading academic institution in an ever more competitive international landscape....An unconditional commitment to academic excellence will become Penn's key comparative advantage in the decades to come. As many other universities in Europe and the U.S. compromise their hiring decisions by including other non-academic criteria, Penn will be able to hire outstanding talent that otherwise would have been hard to attract. I have been puzzled that the self-immolation of (formerly) elite universities has not led to a dash for quality in the second ranks. There is a lot of great talent for sale cheap. But many second rank schools seem to have bought in to The Agenda even more strongly than the elite. I guess they used to copy the elite desire for research, and now they copy the elite desire for fashionable politics. Or perhaps donors government, alumni or whatever it is that universities compete for  also are more interested in the size of the DEI bureaucracy than the research accomplishments and teaching quality of the faculty or the competence of the students. Clearly, the writers of this document think in the long run competition will return to the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that universities that reform first will win.