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As much as COVID-19 is a health and economic crisis, at its core, it is also a governance crisis.

NDI President Derek Mitchell and new Director of Democratic Governance Kristen Sample delve into ways governments and the international community have risen (or not) to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Derek Mitchell: As we all continue to shelter in place and respond to the colossal health and economic crisis that is COVID-19, we must not forget that at its core, pandemics are as much a result of governance failure as any failure of healthcare or health system.
Since working to support democratic processes, institutions and governance around the world is what NDI does for a living, we thought it useful to delve into the role governance has played in the COVID-19 pandemic with NDI's experience in more than 50 countries around the world serving as a guide. Welcome to DemWorks. My name is Derek Mitchell, president of the National Democratic Institute.
To discuss all this with me in this podcast, I'm joined by NDI's new director of democratic governance, Kristen Sample.
Kristen Sample: Thank you so much Derek.
DM: Kristen just joined us on March 1. She brings more than 20 years of democratic governance experience with her to NBI having advised and evaluated programs at UN Women, UN Democracy Fund, the Open Society Foundation, Global Partners, Governance and International IDEA. Kristen is an expert on countering corruption, legislative strengthening in the nexus of gender and politics and she has led projects focused on the impact of democratic reform on economic development and citizen security. At a moment when the global crisis in governance is at the center of international conversation, at least before the pandemic push pause, we are thrilled to have Kristen aboard to look at that issue with fresh creativity here at NBI. So welcome Kristen to your very first DemWorks podcast.
KS: I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you today on such important issues.
DM: So we'll speak about the crisis of governance but also the pandemic factor as well. But I do want to start with this global governance crisis that has sort of preceded this. This is a broader overhang. We've seen all over the world popular demonstrations over the past year and more and everywhere from Moscow to Managua, to Hong Kong, to Khartoum, to Algeria, to Istanbul, to Paris. You can go on and on. And what it represents is a frustration with the quality of governance. Democracy somehow is not delivering for people. And I want to hear your thoughts on that. It's a moment of turmoil certainly. People will look at this and say, "Well, democracy is failing," but it's more than democracy that this is happening. It's a general quality of governance question that I think actually provides an opportunity. So let me just ask your thoughts on that first off, Kristen.
KS: Yeah. Thanks so much for that question, Derek. I think that NDI, since we have officers or programs spanning every region of the world basically in more than 50 countries, we're in a very good position to be able to take the pulse of what's happening in the different countries. In fact, we have been conducting surveys every two weeks of our country programs to get a sense of what's happening on the ground and we've received some very interesting signals that I'm really happy to be able to share with you today.
On the one side, we are saying that in many countries governments are responding very seriously, in very concerted ways to the health crisis. I mean in more than two thirds of the countries. The governments in the countries where we work are closing nonessential businesses in over 60%, they are communicating in ways, having very intensive communication campaigns that really are reaching all citizens. But when it comes to the democracy side, when it comes to implementing that response and pursuing a response that's consistent with democratic principles and norms and values and institutions, we are seeing some troubling developments at the same time.
For instance, the number of governments by our account, over 40% of the governments in the countries where we work are declaring emergency powers and it's clear that this is an extraordinary situation that requires extraordinary measures, but in many cases these emergency powers are inconsistent with democratic principles. They are not linked to the crisis. There is no provision for legislative oversight or in many cases, these have no sunset class, so there's no time limit and these are simply open-ended.
And link to that and linked in many cases to these emergency powers, emergency decrees, we're seeing an uptick also in threats to fundamental freedoms. For instance, nearly half of our countries are reporting that there are measures in place where governments are repressing non-state media who are critical of the government's response to the pandemic and that in some cases, again, almost 50% of our countries, there are measures in place where governments are limiting space for civil society to engage in political actions.
Another factor that I'd like to highlight too is while we're all distracted by the pandemic and while people are at home and perhaps with less access to information and less direct contact with government, there are also signals that many governments are using this as an opportunity to diminish anti-corruption controls. So that means that in some cases economic response packages or healthcare delivery is taking place with less transparency and less openness, which as you can imagine is a risk in terms of making sure that those resources are actually getting where they need to be.
And all of this, all of the stresses, the frustration and these concerns of course also have impacts when it comes to citizen trust, interpersonal trust citizen trust of the government and also we're seeing greater potential for civic unrest and a deteriorating security environment.
So all together, I hate to start with such a pessimistic view, but I think it is important again, through the networks that we have, the relationships that we have with political and civic actors on the ground, to convey the seriousness of the situation and to make sure that we're always communicating that well, this response requires really drastic measures. These measures need to be consonant of course, with the principles of democratic governance.
DM: Right. It fits into this broader competition of narratives that occurred even before the pandemic began, where China or Russia saying, "Look, authoritarian governments are more efficient in providing services. We do this stuff better. Democracy is messy." And they're able, as you say, to take advantage of this moment when people are looking for strong central control to make that case and to both do that rhetorically but also through provision of services.
And then it's not just those major countries. You'll have folks whether it's Hungary or Poland or you just go around the world, they're postponing elections. They are shutting down civil society, they're settling scores with adversaries. They're constraining public debate, saying that those things are luxuries during a time of crisis and that gives them an opportunity then as you said, for not just power grabs, but resource grabs and money grabs and they say, "Look, these are extraordinary times. They require extraordinary measures." And the concern is that these extraordinary measures will be permanent, that they'll say you need us to be surveilling people.
So this is a challenge for certainly those who do democracy work and for folks inside these countries. But I think the broader question of security, we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later, but it's interesting what we're seeing on the ground as you say.
You do a lot of work in the legislative sphere, you have a lot of background on that. How legislatures are particularly important. Civil society is too, but just focusing on legislature's role as a check and balance against executive overreach, can you talk about from the NDI experience or your other observation, how legislatures are being challenged, how they're dealing with this moment, how they're adapting to deal with the COVID-19 moment.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm so glad you brought this point up. The first challenge that I'd highlight is this risk that the legislative branch is getting sidelined. In a crisis like this, the executive branch is generally front and center. Their role is clearly understood by citizens. Head of state might be the one out there doing daily press briefings or a health minister communicating medical reports. And there's this sense of emergency that as I sort of alluding to before, it seems to empower the executive branch. And unfortunately that seems to be, in many cases, at the expense of the legislative power.
And additionally, another challenge and another reason that legislatures are perhaps getting crowded out or sidelined is simply that, the coronavirus, by it's dynamic, it's not socially compatible. And since parliaments are these multi-member bodies that have more diffuse operations, more diffuse leadership and that involve hundreds of different people, it's simply just a challenge to assemble a large group of people together, bring them together and keep them front and center in this crisis.
So if that first challenge is making sure that people just keep in mind that legislatures matter and the legislatures are able to exert their rights and their authority, I'd say that the second challenge of course is just how do parliaments, legislatures operate in a virtual world. Politicians are by nature, they like to shake hands, they like to get out on the street, they need to be in touch with their constituents. And there are so many challenge involved in this current world that we have where we should all be social distancing.
So looking across the world where we work, their parliaments are adopting different measures. Some of them are using social distancing restrictions like reducing the number of MPs in sessions. Others are moving to remote voting, remote deliberations. And then others are not meeting at all, which of course is quite terrible. And in those cases where legislatures have been dissolved or have been suspended for long periods of time.
We are working too, as you were saying, as NDI closely with parliaments in a number of countries to try to do those adaptations to the rules of procedures so that they're able to continue meeting in session and continue deliberating and continuing exercising oversight. For instance, we have connected parliamentarians in Colombia with parliamentarians in Ecuador. We have virtual sessions to learn from Ecuador's experience in adopting a regulation for the implementation of virtual session and teleworking.
So we are trying to connect parliamentarians across countries to understand how some parliaments have been moving forward in terms of remote procedures and how that's going for them. And two more challenges. One I'd highlight is that oversight role that we've been talking about. And from the same survey that we conducted with our country programs, we found that in 59% of the countries, checks and balances have been weakened, have deteriorated under the pandemic.
And this is happening at such an unfortunate time when there's so many policy measures that need to be approved and put in place. If we just take the issue of debt policy for instance, I saw a statistic from the Westminster Foundation that more than 80 countries have already requested emergency aid from the IMF. I mean these countries are struggling of course to meet different types of fiscal obligations and they are desperate for cash in order to ramp up health services and put in place economic measures.
And so these governments are taking on debt obligations, debt burns that are going to have far reaching impacts and long lasting impacts that should really be approved by the legislative branch and include monitoring and reporting. And that's not always the case in most of these instances.
DM: So you just say it's a very dangerous time and folks are adapting procedurally, but there are really implications to this longterm, including for security. And I think we'll get to that after the break.
For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with courageous and committed pro-democracy activists and leaders around the world to help countries develop the institutions, practices and skills necessary for democracy's success.
KS: Welcome back. Derek, I've heard you speak to the issue of authoritarian systems and how they're operating in this crisis and that the authoritarian nature in itself makes health crises more likely. And you've also said in some of your speeches and some of the conversations we've had that it's not a coincidence that the pandemic started in China and I'd really like to hear from your expertise, your deep background on China specifically. Can you explain to listeners why that is? Why there is that connection?
DM: Well, as I said at the top, this is not just a health crisis, it's a governance crisis. It's a factor of governance both in the prevention of the pandemic and the response to it. We talked so far mostly about the response, how we're responding to the pandemic, but the core of the pandemic is a failure of governance. The difference between a local health crisis that is contained and a pandemic lies in the ability of a political system to respond to that early challenge quickly and effectively. And that requires both government and civic action. And if you're going to deal with this crisis early, it requires both. To do that, you have to act swiftly. You have to have widespread testing and contact tracing. You need critical support from citizens. In order to do all that and to ensure that that happens, you have to have basic civic trust.
Closed societies routinely fail that test of having that civic trust and that rapid action for some very practical reasons. When a government suppresses a free flow of information, when it fails to empower independent civic institutions, when it's too insecure to convey bad news candidly, doesn't feel that it has a political legitimacy, therefore, it's insecure to convey bad news. When its data can't be trusted because it's opaque, when its officials are afraid to speak truth to power or communicate inconvenient truths to their superiors or act decisively, absent waiting for some strict orders from the very center and they can't move quickly, the result can be deadly.
It turns what is a local health issue into a pandemic so it crosses borders. It becomes not just a problem for one country but for all others. So democratic governance is very, very practical and once again in this regard, transparent, accountable, inclusive, responsive, open governments is essential to crisis response but it's also essential to prevent the crisis from emerging to begin with.
And it is a matter of national security. This highlights frankly what many of us have known all along, that this is not just nice but has very practical national security effects. And as we just talked earlier, the irony is that just as the world needs more open democratic societies to prevent future crises and deal with the current one, there are opportunistic politicians who are closing political and civic space. That I think is a very practical reason why that closed societies cause these pandemics.
KS: I think that all of those points that you've been raising in terms of the threats and the vulnerabilities are so important for us to keep front and center. At the same time, here in NDI, as you know, is we're very keen to make sure that there are also opportunities to elevate the many examples around the world where governments are acting democratically and effectively in response to the crisis and they're framing and working with citizens in ways that are absolutely consistent with democratic values and principles. And so I do want to showcase some of those.
I think it's received a lot of press around the world how New Zealand, for instance has reacted, and I read this week that New Zealand is perhaps one of the very first countries to have been able to successfully eliminate COVID. They have no new COVID cases. And it's a case that really stands out for the way that the prime minister has been able to deliver information in a very clear, compassionate, inclusive way, a way that's very grounded in science of course, and transparent.
And at the same time where the legislature has had an important role developing a parliamentary select committee that's providing scrutiny of the government's response. The government has also been very affirmative there I think, in terms of issues of freedom of information and media freedom and has said that they would not slow down, for instance, their commitment to responding to requests for information during the crisis. So there's certainly the case of New Zealand, which is so interesting and it's shown such early success, but there are other places around the world too where specific measures taken by the government I think have been so positive and far reaching.
Uruguay comes to mind for instance. We see so many cases where authoritarian leaders are using this crisis to be able to settle scores as you were saying, or to act in a very partisan fashion. But in Uruguay, the president convened all of the former presidential candidates to give a joint press conference to send a powerful message of unity and to show that across the party divide, they were working together to develop responses.
Taiwan also really stands out for its cross party coordination, the transparent communications they've had, the very creative efforts that the government has put in place there, I think they've called it humor, not rumor. A campaign to share facts in real time to counter disinformation, to manage fear. So there aren't many cases out there as I was saying, of governments that are responding effectively and in ways that are building that citizen trust that you were mentioning.
DM: Yes. And then a further one, another democracy that's a leading democracy, probably the first out of the gate is South Korea. They did exactly what was necessary. People are looking at that example, a democratic example. They didn't sacrifice rights at all. They obviously had very strong controls at times of the society, but it took very swift action. They did widespread testing, contact tracing and they worked with civil society and is shown over and over that civil society is probably one of the most important factors. It's not simply a government driven thing that makes a response success. Civil society serves as a very efficient force multiplier for government. We saw that in Katrina, hurricane Katrina. We see it's proved over and over that it really is effective in getting the word out and messaging.
Ensuring is like in Taiwan through their civic tech community, they're sort of hackers. They're young citizens, who themselves in a voluntary fashion, formed a community. They were viewed as allies and partners not alienated from the government. And that partnership has been a success in Taiwan, has been a success in South Korea and is essential for a success. And that means that governments need to be open, need to be transparent, they need to see society as partners. So this is absolutely critical.
KS: Yeah. And I just want to add on the South Korea example. I'm so glad you brought that up because South Korea held elections during the pandemic on April 15, they had national assembly lessons and they were actually able to organize those elections in a way that was seen as very transparent, that was very consistent with electoral integrity and they had higher levels of turnout than in previous elections, which is pretty amazing. And there's so many countries around the world that are facing elections in 2020. I think the way that South Korea was able to do it with a very intensive communication campaign as you were speaking again to their transparency of communication, they had expanded early voting measures in place. They had home voting, they had very comprehensive safeguards for people to be able to vote in person. So even organizing an election in a time that seems so difficult and so challenging, I think that as you were saying, democracies like South Korea are showing that there is a way forward.
DM: Right. And I think we can learn some lessons from that as well. There are groups, including NDI has been at the center of this, of putting together documents that say here are the election integrity guidelines for this moment, that democracy should not be sacrificed at the alter of crisis response, that elections need to move forward if they can be done in the right way and if they need to be postponed, it's postponed within a certain timeframe and only during a period of high crisis. So there are principles here where democracy can continue to move forward. It makes the society stronger, it builds that civic trust that's important for crisis response. But we need to... You can walk and chew gum at the same time at this moment. So I'm glad we were able to talk about some of these democratic examples.
KS: Absolutely. And I will be right back after this quick message.
You can hear more from other democracy heroes by listening to our DemWorks podcast available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
DM: Welcome back with Kristen Sample. Of course you're new to NDI, but you know NDI very well and it's a fundamental principle everywhere that nations will only succeed when societies are fully inclusive, where they don't leave anybody behind. They enable all to contribute equally. That means women, that means young people, that means traditionally marginalized groups, LGBT communities, et cetera. It's just plain logic that if you leave anybody behind, that you're not going to get the most out of your citizen when you're going to hold your country back, and yet we are witnessing negative impacts toward these populations during this COVID-19 moment. Kristen, can you speak to this, explain what's going on here and why it matters?
KS: Sure, absolutely. I mean obviously this crisis isn't occurring in a vacuum. It's occurring in a context where across the world, across all countries, there are already this array of existing intersecting inequalities where some people were coming into this crisis already in a disadvantaged place. And then the pandemic itself has differentiated impacts that affect women and other marginalized groups disproportionately. I'll just give a few examples.
I mean lockdown for women who are living in relationships of power imbalance and of abuse perhaps, lockdown for them means locked in, with an abusive partner. And for instance our survey of country offices that I was referring to previously, in 66% of our countries, there seems to be an increase in sexual and gender based violence since the pandemic. In 15% of those countries, it's a significant increase. Of course these women might be locked in in vulnerable situations and then at the same time have less access to government resources, government support. So that's one example.
Others, people with disabilities for instance, who have always struggled to access health services, transportation in an equitable fashion, you can imagine that that lack of access and the differentiated impact of the pandemic on them is life threatening in some cases.
There are digital divide concerns, people in rural areas or women, other marginalized groups who may have less access to information, to resources. There are real concerns also and cases around the world where this pandemic is being exploited by anti migrant hate groups for instance, who try to link movement and migration to the origin of the virus. Or in some cases, for instance in Africa and some of the countries where we work, media outlets are perpetuating stereotypes against people with albinism for instance, and placing the blame for the virus on them.
So there are so many challenges around making sure that people have access to resources, people are safe and that we are able to convey and support a message of social cohesion and solidarity instead of the divisions that we're seeing pop up around the world. I think that in our case, for instance in Indiana, what we're trying to do is reinforce the need for inclusive decision-making, making sure for instance, that women are involved in decision making and other marginalized groups are involved in decision making and representation and in these deliberation bodies, making sure that the policymaking is taking into account these vulnerabilities and these different differentiated needs. And also the government messaging is inclusive, getting to everybody and it's supporting the social cohesion messaging and solidarity messages.
DM: And again, this is critical for the crisis response, pandemic response. I mean COVID-19 doesn't discriminate. Whoever has it, whoever is vulnerable or subject will get it and it will spread to the society writ large. So if you're not inclusive, if you're excluding folks, if politicians then see that there is an opportunity here as some politicians will to divide and conquer, to play on fear. Or spoilers from the outside may see that there are opportunities if they're divided societies, to create tensions that then require or enable them to negotiate the deal that you want to make or promote corruption within the society.
There are all kinds of ways this makes societies less stable, less secure, and affects the development and certainly the response to crises. So this is not just a nice thing, it's not just a human rights thing. This is fundamentally important to national security, international security and to everything that we're seeking to achieve through democracy.
KS: Absolutely. And I think along the things I'd really like to hear from you too, Derek, in terms of how you see along the lines of this being an international crisis that includes the whole world, that joins us all although we are in very different places. How you see role NDI's role in supporting that cross border cooperation and solidarity and having the international community come together?
DM: Given that authoritarians are claiming their model is unique for this moment, we have to be out there making our case. But in terms of our specific adaptations that we are doing, we are working in places like Ethiopia to ensure that the public opinion surveys are necessary invents of their postponed elections or continue forward, but can be done virtually. That we can adapt legislative rules of procedure in places that need it to allow for remote voting and continue the legislative process to ensure that election integrity is maintained.
As I mentioned earlier, there are certain principles and established accepted international principles for when and how to postpone elections, how to hold them during moments of crisis. And we put together crisis response kits that can be used. It's called the practical toolkit for politicians during a pandemic that can help political parties figure out how to do crisis management or help the government put together crisis communication.
So a lot of things that can be done internally and done across different countries that ensure the solidarity is still there, the momentum for democracy is still there. The expectation that democratic norms are sustained in this moment so that the headlines are not simply roll back authoritarian opportunism, that massive surveillance, all the things that people may succumb to because of fear during crisis, that there is an alternative voice and it says it doesn't have to be like that. Or if it does have to be like that now, it doesn't have to continue to be like that indefinitely and that there are some standards by which these things are being imposed.
So that international norm setting at this moment, it's probably more important than ever to do and we are trying to do at national level. We're trying to do it across different countries to ensure that there is not a vacuum to which the authoritarian voice moves and has free open season for its own values. It goes across, I think, a lot of different countries. And Kristen, I'd be interested in your thoughts from your perspective of governance, how that's working.
KS: I think that there's a real role for the international community to play. And I wanted to highlight that too in what you're saying because these challenges are so vast that clearly we have to work together on people to people exchanges and supporting lesson sharing. And so I do think that there's an absolute role for the international community playing in terms of getting out the messages of that democracy is not a luxury, it's not something that could be put into a coma or put on hold while we're all sheltering, that it's something that has to be reaffirmed on a daily basis.
And so I do think that countries also have to, in addition to standing firm, standing on their own ground on democratic principles, they also have to be willing to promote and expand those democratic principles across borders, especially to counter those liberal influences that you were referring to earlier, that in some cases are, really transmitted and increased through disinformation campaigns or phony PR campaigns that need to be called out of course by all actors.
DM: Thanks again, Kristen for joining me in conversation about how democracies can best meet the challenges of COVID and how NDI with its global partners are meeting the moment.
KS: Thank you, Derek.
DM: I'd also like to say thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit our website at www.ndi.org. Thanks very much.


World map of Coronavirus (Covid-19)



19. Governance is Key During COVID-19? (w/ Kristen Sample) Posted 6 days ago

Democracy (General), COVID-19 Podcast NDI Listen democracy

John Dewey on the Horror of Making
his Poetry Public



This April's Fools interview is a preview for 'The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations' (ed. Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten & Hidemi Suganami), now available at Palgrave.









After
various rounds of experimentation, two youthful IR scholars (the editor-in chief of this venture and Christian Bueger) bend space-time and
access an alternate reality with the ambition to conduct an interview for Theory
Talks with John Dewey. Dewey (1859-1952) was an American thinker often associated
with a school of thought that has become known as American pragmatism. He is today
largely known for his contributions to education studies, philosophy of science,
and the theory of democracy. In this Talk, the young scholars sound out Dewey
on what thinking tools his original worldview would provide for IR—after
resolving a small embarrassment.







TT Dear Mr. Dewey. Thank you so much for your
willingness to participate in this Talk. Theory
Talks is an open-access journal that contributes to International Relations
debates by publishing interviews with cutting-edge theorists. It is not often
that Theory Talks is able to overcome
space-time limitations and conduct a Talk with a departed theorist.



I am sorry—I think I have to interrupt you there…



TT Well, all right?



Yes, yes, the fact of the matter is that I am not a
theorist and refuse to be associated with that label! To purify theory out of
experience as some distinct realm, sirs, is to contribute to a fallacy that I
have dedicated my life to combat! I am afraid that this venture of yours, of
involving me in this Theory Talks, is
stillborn.



TT Dear Professor Dewey—with all due respect, we are
running ahead of matters here a little. The reason why we invited you is exactly
for you to expound your ideas—and reservations—regarding theory, practice, and
international relations. Would you be willing to bracket your concern for a
minute? We promise to get back to it.



Well my dear sirs—it is that you insist on a
dialogue—that restless, participative and dramatic form of inquiry that leads
to so much more insight than books—and that you have travelled from far by
means that utterly fascinate me, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.



TT Thank you. And let us from the outset emphasize
that by interviewing you for Theory Talks, we don't necessarily want to reduce
your contribution to thought to the practice of theorizing. Isn't it also
correct you have written poetry?



Now I am baffled a second time! I have never publicly
attempted my hand at the noble art of the poetic!



TT It has to be said, Mr. Dewey, that the problem of
what is and isn't public has perhaps shifted a bit since your passing away. That's
something we'd like to discuss, too, but the fact of the matter is that what
you have consistently consigned to the trashcan of your office at Columbia
University has been just as meticulously recovered by 'a janitor with a long
view'.



Oh heavens! You tell me I have been uncovered as a
versifier? What of my terrible scribbling has been uncovered you say?



TT Well, perhaps you recognize the one that starts
like:



I hardly
think I heard you call

Since
betwixt us was the wall

Of sounds
within, buzzings i' the ear

Roarings
i' the vein so closely near…



… 'That I was captured in illusion/Of outward things
said clear…' I well remember—a piece particularly deserving of oblivion. I
wrote that in the privacy of lonely office hours, thinking the world would have
the mercy not to allow a soul to lay its eyes on it!



TT We are sorry to say that besides this one, a total
of 101 poems has been recovered, and published in print—and you know, given
some advances in technology, circulation of text is highly accelerated, meaning
that one could very well say your poetry is part of the public domain.



So there I am, well half a decade after my death,
subject to the indirect effects of advances in technology interacting with the
associations I myself carelessly established between roses, summer days, and
all too promiscuous waste bins! Sirs, in the little time we have conversed, I
see the afterlife hasn't brought me any good. Hades takes on a bleaker shade…



TT Well, in reality, the future has been good to you:
you are firmly canonised as one an authentic American intellectual, and stand firmly
on a pedestal in the galleries occupied by the notables of modern international
social thought. So why don't we explore a little bit why that is, within the
specific domain of political theory? Theory
Talks actually poses the same first three questions to every interviewee,
followed by a number of questions specific to your thought. The first question
we always pose is: What, according to you, is the biggest challenge or central
debate in International Relations and what is your position vis-à-vis that
challenge/debate?



I think that while it must have been noted by other
interviewees that in fact this question is two separate questions—one about
real-world challenges and another about theoretical debates—I would be the last
to do so, and I am happy you mix concerns of theory and practice. I have always
fought against establishing such a fictional separation between seemingly distinct
domains of thought and practice. It is a dangerous fiction on top of it. The
same goes for International Relations—while I have not dedicated myself to the
study of the international as a discrete field of action, I do think that this domain
does not escape some of the general observations I have made regarding society
and its politics.



I hold that "modern society is many societies more or
less loosely connected" by all kinds of associations. As I explain in The Public and its Problems, a
fundamental challenge of modern times is that the largely technically mediated associations
that constitute societies have outstretched the social mechanisms that we had
historically developed on the human scale of the village to mitigate their
indirect effects on others. During my life, I witnessed the proliferation of
railway, telegraph, radio, steam-driven shipping, and car and weapon
industries—thoroughly extending the web of association and affectedness within
and across borders. This means action constantly reaches further. People close
by and in far-off places are suddenly confronted with situations that they have
to relate to but which are out of their control. This automatically makes them
part of interested publics, with a stake in the way these mechanisations work. Now
this perhaps seems abstract but consider: the spread of a new technology—I see
you both looking on some small device with a black mirrored screen nervously
every 5 minutes—automatically involves users as a 'stakeholder'. Your actions
are mediated by them. You become affected by their design and
configuration—over which you have little control. In that regard, you are part
of a concerned public, but you have no way to influence the politics
constitutive of these technologies.



I would say the largest challenge is to amplify
participation and to institutionalize these fleeting publics. The proliferation
of technologies and institutions as conduits for international associations has
rendered publics around the globe more inchoate, while seemingly making it
easier than ever before to influence—for good or ill—large groups through the
manipulation of these global infrastructures of the public. We sowed
infrastructures, we reap fragilities and more diffusely affected publics: each
new technological expansion of the possibility to form associations leads to
concomitant insecurities.



TT How did you arrive where you currently are in your
thinking?



I have had the sheer luck or fortune to be engaged in
the occupation of thinking; and while I am quite regular at my meals, I think
that I may say that I would rather work, and perhaps even more, play, with
ideas and with thinking than eat. I was born in the wake of the Civil War, and
in times of a profound acceleration of technology as a vehicle of social,
economic, and political development. Perhaps, as in your own times, upheaval
and change was the status quo, stability a rare exception. My studies at Johns
Hopkins with people such as Peirce had tickled an intellectual curiosity as of
yet unsatisfied. I subsequently went to the University of Chicago for a decade
in which my commitment to pragmatist philosophy consolidated. Afterwards at
Columbia, and at the New School which I founded with people such as Charles A. Beard
and Thorsten Veblen, this approach translated into a number of books. In these I
applied my pragmatist convictions to such disparate issues as education, art,
faith, logic and indeed politics, the topic of your question. For me, these are
all interdependent aspects of society. This interdependence and inseparability
of the social fabric means that skewed economic or political interests will
reverberate throughout. But I am an optimist in that I also believe in the
fundamental possibility and promise of science and democracy to curb radical
change and reroute it into desirable directions for those affected. Good things
are also woven through the social and we should amplify those to lessen the
effects of negative associations.



TT What would a student require to become a specialist
in International Relations or to see the world in a global way?



A question dear to my heart. You might know that
throughout my entire life I have striven for transforming our understanding and
practice of education. Human progress is dependent on education, and as I have
learned during my travels to Russia, reform is not to be had by revolution but
by gradual education. Education is training in reflective thinking. The quality
of democracy depends on education.



Towards the end of my life I witnessed the creation of
the United Nations. This was a clear signal to me that "the relations between
nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call
for some measure of political organization". Having this forum implied that we
saw the end of the complete denial of political responsibility of how the
policies in one national unit affect another as we find in the doctrine of
sovereignty. That the end of this doctrine is within reach means that we
require global education which will ensure the rise of informed global publics
which can develop the tools required to respond to global challenges.



In a more substantive fashion, I would insist that
students hold on to the essential impossibility to separate out experience as
it unfolds over time. The divisions and preferences that have come to dominate
academic knowledge in its 20th century 'maturing' are for me a loss
of rooting of knowledge in experience.



TT We're sorry, but isn't the task of social sciences
to offer universal or at least objective analytical categories to make sense of
the muddle of real-world experience? What you seem to be proposing is the
opposite!



I align with Weber in lamenting the acceleration of
the differentiation of understanding in society. This has made it difficult for
your generations to address social, political and economic challenges head on
while avoiding getting lost in one of its details or facets. Isn't the economic
and the political, constantly encroaching on everyday life? In the end, this
perhaps explains my insistence on democracy and schooling as the pivots of good
society: democracy to reconstruct and defend publics, and schooling to defend
individuals against (mis)understanding the world in ways that cannot be reduced
to their own lived experience. If students could only hold on to this holistic
perspective and eschew isolating subject matters from their social contexts.



TT Throughout your 70 years of active scholarship you
have written over a thousand articles and books. One commentator of your work
suggested that your body of writing is an "elaborate spider's web, the
junctions and lineaments of which its engineer knows well and in and on which
he is able to move about with great facility. But for the outsider who seeks to
traverse or map that territory there is the constant danger of getting stuck."
Many find your work difficult to navigate—what advice would you give the
reader?



Sirs why would anyone want to engage in a quest of
mapping all of my writings? You have to understand that thought always proceeds
in relations. A web, perhaps, yes. A spider's web certainly not. A spider that
spins a web out of himself, produces a web that is orderly and elaborate, but
it is only a trap. That is the goal of pure reasoning, not mine. The scientific
method of inquiry is rather comparable to the operations of the bee who
collects material within and from the world, but attacks and modifies the
collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure. "Drop the
conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is a disclosure and
definition of the properties of fixed and antecedent reality; interpret the aim
and test of knowing by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific
inquiry". The occasion of thinking and writing is the experience of problems
and the need to clarify and resolve them. Everything depends on the problem,
the situations and the tools available. Inquiry does not rely on a priori
elements or fixed rules. I always attempted to start my work by understanding in
which problematic situations I aimed at intervening. Philosophy and academic,
but also public life, in my time was heading in wrong directions that called
upon me to initiate inquiry to resolve issues—in media res, as it were. When I
wrote Logic, I tried to rebut
dogmatic understandings. Now it appears that I am on the verge of becoming a
dogma myself. In a sense, the most tragic scenario would be if people develop a
"Deweyan" perspective or theory. Now I am curious, what problem brought you
actually to converse with me? 



TT Well, we are here today because we have been asked
to contribute to an effort to collect the views of a number of different
theorists, who, like you, live in different space-time. Now that we are here,
could we ask you to tell us how you use the term 'inquiry'? It is one of your core
concepts and in our conversation you already frequently referred to it. It is
often difficult to understand what you mean by this term and how it provides
direction and purpose for science…



It's a simple one, provided you have not been
indoctrinated by logical positivists. You, me, all of us, frequently engage in
inquiry. There is little distinction between solving problems of everyday life
and the reasoning of the scientist or philosopher. Most often habit and routine
will give you satisfaction. Yet when these fail or give you unpleasant
experience, then reasoning begins. Without inquiry, sirs, most likely you
wouldn't have been able to speak to me today! You will have to explain later
how you bended time and space and which technology allowed you to travel through
a black hole. But Albert was right, time travel is possible! Could we converse
today without Einstein's fabulous inquiry that led him to the realization of
space-time? Until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of
relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of
ultimate fixed and independent substances. Einstein questioned this on the
basis of experimentation and an investigation of the problem of simultaneity,
that is, that from different reference frames there can never be agreement on
the simultaneity of events.



Reflection implies that something is believed in (or
disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else
which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground
of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced without
any intermediary fact; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the
looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain because of the
condition of the air or the state of the barometer. The fact that inquiry intervenes
in ever-shifting contexts demands us to restrain from eternal truths or absolutistic
logic. Someone believing in a truth such as "individualism", has his program
determined for him in advance. It is then not a matter of finding out the
particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, and the
circumstances, of doing it. He knows in advance the sort of thing which must be
done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what
must happen, so that all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of
definitions and classifications.



When I say that thinking and beliefs should be
experimental, not absolutistic, I have in mind a certain logic of method. Such
a logic firstly implies that the concepts, general principles, theories and
dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge are
shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, policies and proposals for
social action have to be treated as working hypotheses. They have to be subject
to constant and well-equipped observations of the consequences they entail when
acted upon and subject to flexible revision. The social sciences are primarily
an apparatus for conducting such investigations.



TT Doesn't such a form of reasoning mean we'll just
muddle through without ever reaching certainty?



Absolutely correct! Arriving at one point is the
starting point of another. Life flowers and should be understood as such; experimental
reasoning is never complete. I can imagine the surprise you must feel at sudden
unforeseen events in international political relationships when you hold on to
fixed frames of how these relationships do and ought to look. That we will never
reach certainty does not imply to give up the quest of certainty, however. We
have to continuously improve on our tools of scientific inquiry…



TT Sorry to interrupt you here. Now it sounds as if
you have a sort of methods fetish. Do you imply that everything can be solved
by the right method and all that we have to do is to refine our methods? That's
something that our colleagues running statistics and thinking that the problems
of international can be solved by algorithms argue as well.



It might be that mathematical reasoning has well
advanced since my departure, and that the importance granted to the economy and
economic thinking as the sole conditioning factor of political organisation has
only increased, but you haven't fully grasped what I mean by 'tools'. Tell your
stubbornly calculating colleagues that inquiry is embedded in a situation,
hence there cannot be a single method which would fix all kinds of problems.
Second, while I admire the skill of mathematicians, what I mean by tools goes
well beyond that. A tool can be a concept, a term, a theory, a proposal, a
course of action, anything that might matter to settle a particular situation.
A tool is however not a solution per se. It is a proposal. It must be tested
against the problematic material. It matters only in so far as it is part of a
practical activity aimed at resolving a problematic situation.  



TT You emphasize that language is instrumental and reject
the idea of a private language. You also spent quite some energy to demolish
the "picture theory" of language. These arguments form the basis of
what we call today "constructivism", yet they are mainly subscribed to the Philosophical
Investigations of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.



Earhh, I am aware of this fellow. He is an analytical
philosopher, so develops his argument from a different background. I started to
work on the social and cultural aspects of language use from around 1916. I
don't know whether Wittgenstein actually read my work when he set out to write
Philosophical Investigations, but you are quite right, there are obvious
parallels. I think my own term of "conjoint activity" expresses pretty much the
same, perhaps less eloquently, what Wittgenstein termed language games. I am
pleased to hear, however, that the instrumental view on language, that objects
get their meanings within a language in and by conjoint community of functional
use, has become firmly established in academia. I'd have reservations about the
term, 'constructivism'. It might be useful since it reminds us of all the
construction work that the organization of politics and society entails. Indeed
I have frequently stressed that instrumentalist theory implies construction. If
constructivism doesn't mean post-mortem studies of how something has been
constructed, but is directed towards production of better futures, I might be
fine with the term. But perhaps I would prefer 'productivism'.



TT That is a plausible term, but we are afraid, the
history of science has settled on constructivism. And you are right, the tendencies
you warn us of are significantly present in our discipline.



Sirs, if you permit. I have to attend to other
obligations. I
wish you safe travels back. Make sure you pick up something from the gift shop
before you leave.

Mary Elizabeth King on Civil Action for Social Change,
the Transnational Women's Movement, and the Arab Awakening







Nonviolent resistance remains by and large a marginal
topic to IR. Yet it constitutes an influential idea among idealist social
movements and non-Western populations alike, one that has moved to the center
stage in recent events in the Middle East. In this Talk, Mary King—who has spent over 40 years promoting nonviolence—elaborates
on, amongst others, the women's movement, nonviolence, and civil action more
broadly.






Print version of this Talk (pdf)






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



The field of International Relations is different from
Peace and Conflict Studies; it has essentially to do with relationships between
states and developed after World War I. In the 1920s, the big debates concerned
whether international cooperation was possible, and the diplomatic elite were
very different from diplomats today. The roots of Peace and Conflict Studies go
back much further. By the late 1800s peace studies already existed in the
Scandinavian countries. Studies of industrial strikes in the United States were
added by the 1930s, and the field had spread to Europe by the 1940s. Peace and
Conflict Studies had firmly cohered by the 1980s, and soon encircled the globe.
Broad in spectrum and inherently multi-disciplinary, it is not possible to walk
through one portal to enter the field.



To me it is also important that Peace and Conflict
studies is not wary of asking the bigger hypothetical questions such as 'Can we
built a better world?' 'How do we do a better job at resolving conflicts before
they become destructive?' 'How do we create more peaceable societies?' If we do
not pose these questions, we are unlikely to find the answers. Some political scientists say that they do not wish to
privilege either violence or nonviolent action. I am not in that category,
trying not to privilege violence or
nonviolent action. The field of peace and conflict studies is value-laden in
its pursuit of more peaceable societies. We need more knowledge and study of
how conflicts can be addressed without
violence, including to the eventual benefit of all the parties and the larger
society. When in 1964 Martin Luther King Jr received
the Nobel Peace Prize, his remarks in Oslo that December tied the nonviolent
struggle in the United States to the whole planet's need for disarmament. He said
that the most exceptional characteristic of the civil rights movement was the
direct participation of masses of people in it. King's remarks in Oslo were also
his toughest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than
racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized
to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals
across the world were concerned about world peace:



I venture to suggest [above all] . . . that . . . nonviolence become
immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field
of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations . . . which
[ultimately] make war. . . .



In the half century since King made his address in
Oslo, nonviolent civil resistance has not been allocated even a tiny fraction
of the resources for study that have been dedicated to the fields of
democratization, development, the environment, human rights, and aspects of
national security. Many, many questions beg for research, including intensive
interrogation of failures. Among the new global developments with which to be
reckoned is the enlarging role of non-state, non-governmental organizations as
intermediaries, leading dialogue groups comprised of adversaries discussing
disputatious issues and working 'hands-on' to intervene directly in local
disputes. The role of the churches and laity in ending Mozambique's civil war
comes to mind. One challenge within IR is how to become more flexible in
viewing the world, in which the nation state cannot control social change, and
with the widening of civil space.





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



I
came from a family that was deeply engaged with social issues. My father was the
eighth Methodist minister in six generations from North Carolina and Virginia.
The Methodist church in both Britain and the United States has a history of
concern for social responsibility ― a topic of constant discussion in my home
as a child and young adult. When four African American students began the
southern student sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1,
1960, by sitting-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, I was still in college.
Although I am white, I began to think about how to join the young black people
who were intentionally violating the laws of racial segregation by conducting
sit-ins at lunch counters across the South. Soon more white people, very like
me, were joining them, and the sweep of student sit-ins had become truly
inter-racial. The sit-in movement is what provided the regional base for what
would become a mass U.S. civil rights movement, with tens of thousands of
participants, defined by the necessity for fierce nonviolent discipline. So,
coming from a home where social issues were regularly discussed it was almost
natural for me to become engaged in the civil rights movement. And I have
remained engaged with such issues for the rest of my life, while widening my
aperture. Today I work on a host of questions related to conflict, building
peace, gender, the combined field of gender and peace-building, and nonviolent
or civil resistance. At a very young age, I had started thinking as a citizen
of the world and watching what was happening worldwide, rather than merely in
the United States.



Martin Luther King (to whom I am
not related) would become one of history's most
influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive
social change without resorting to violence. He was the most significant exemplar
for what we simply called The Movement. Yet the movement had two southern
organizations: in 1957 after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott of
1955-56, he created, along with others, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC). The other organization was the one for which I worked for
four years: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pron. snick), which initially came into being literally to coordinate
among the leaders of the student sit-in campaigns. As the sit-ins spread across
the South, 70,000 black, and, increasingly, white, students participated. By
the end of 1960, 3,600 would have been jailed.



SCLC and SNCC worked together but
had different emphases: one of our emphases in SNCC was on eliciting leadership
representing the voices of those who had been ignored in the past. We
identified many women with remarkable leadership skills and sought to
strengthen them. We wanted to build institutions that would make it easier for
poor black southern communities to become independent and move out of the
'serfdom' in which they lived. Thus we put less prominence on large
demonstrations, which SCLC often emphasized. Rather, we stressed the building
of alternative (or parallel) institutions, including voter registration,
alternative political parties, cooperatives, and credit unions.





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



One requirement is a subject that
has virtually disappeared from the schools in the United States: the field of
geography. It used to be taught on every level starting in kindergarten, but
has now been melded into a mélange called 'social sciences'. You would be
surprised at how much ignorance exists and how it affects effectiveness. I
served for years on the board of directors of an esteemed international
non-profit private voluntary organization and recall a secretary who thought
that Africa was a country. This is not simplistic — if you don't know the names
of continents, countries, regions, and the basic political and economic
history, it's much harder to think critically about the world. Secondly,
students need to possess an attitude of reciprocity and mutuality. No perfect
country exists; there is no nirvana without intractable problems in our world.
No society, for example, has solved the serious problems of gender inequity
that impede all spheres of life. Every society has predicaments and problems
that need to be addressed, necessitating a constant process. So we each need to
stand on a platform in which every nation can improve the preservation of the
natural environment, the way it monitors and protects human rights, transitions
to democratic systems, the priority it places on the empowerment of women, and
so on. On this platform, concepts of inferior and superior are of little value.



You also co-authored an article in 1965 about the role of women and how working in a political movement for equality
(the civil rights movement) has affected your perceptions of the relationship
between men and women. Do you believe that the involvement of women in the
Civil Rights Movement brought more gender equality in the USA and do you think
involvement in Nonviolent Resistance movements in other places in the world
could start such a process?



From within the heart of the civil
rights movement I wrote an article with Casey Hayden, with whom I worked in
Atlanta in the main office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and in the
Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Casey
(Sandra Cason) and I were deeply engaged in a series of conversations involving
other women in SNCC about what we had been learning, the lessons from our work aiding
poor black people to organize, and asking ourselves whether our insights from
being part of SNCC could be applied to other forms of injustice, such as inequality
for women. The document reflected our growth and enlarging understanding of how
to mobilize communities, how to strategize, how to achieve lasting change, and
was a manifestation of this expanding awareness. The title was Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo. Caste is an ancient Hindu demarcation
that not only determines an individual's social standing on the basis of
the group into which one is born, but also differentiates and assigns
occupational and economic roles. It cannot be
changed. Casey and I thought of caste as comparable to the sex of one's birth.
Women endure many forms of prejudice, bias, discrimination, and cruelty merely
because they are female. For these reasons we chose the term caste. We sent our
memorandum to forty women working in local peace and civil rights movements of
the United States. The anecdotal evidence is strong that it inspired other
women, who started coming together collectively to work on their own
self-emancipation in 'consciousness raising groups.' It had appeared in Liberation magazine of the War Resisters
League in April 1966 and was a catalyst in spurring the U.S. women's movement; indeed, the consciousness-raising
groups fuelled the women's movement in the United States during the 1970s. Historians
reflect that the article provided tinder for what is now called 'second-wave
feminism', and the 1965 original is anthologized as one of the
generative documents of twentieth-century gender studies.



We
have to remember that women's organizations are nothing new, but have been
poorly documented in history and that much information has been lost. Women
have been prime actors for nonviolent social change in many parts of the world
for a long time. New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote, in
1893, after decades of organizing. Other countries followed: China, Iran, later
the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Japan would not vote until
1946. IR expert
Fred Halliday contends that one of the most remarkable transnational movements
of the modern age was the women's suffrage movement. The movement to enfranchise women may have been the biggest
transnational nonviolent movement of human history. It was a significant
historical phenomenon that throws light on how it is sometimes easier to bring
about social and political change now than in the past.





Nonviolent movements seem to be growing
around the world, and not only in dictatorships but also in democracies in
Europe and the USA. How do you explain this?



I think that the sharing of
knowledge is the answer to this question. Study in the field of nonviolent
action has accelerated since the 1970s, often done by people who are both
practitioners and scholars, as am I. Organizing nonviolently for social justice
is not new, but the knowledge that has consolidated during the last 40 years
has been major. The works of Gene Sharp
have been significant, widely translated, and are accessible through the Albert EinsteinInstitution. His first major work, The Politics of Nonviolent
Action, in three volumes, came out in 1973 (Boston: Porter Sargent
Publishers). It marked the development of a new understanding of how this form
of cooperative action works, the conditions under which it can be optimized,
and the ways in which one can improve effectiveness. Sharp's works have since been
translated into more than 40 languages. Also valuable are the works and
translations of dozens of other scholars, who often stand on his shoulders.
Today there may be 200 scholar-activists in this field worldwide, with a great
deal of work now underway in related fields. Knowledge is being shared not only
through translated works, but also through organizations and their training
programs, such as the War Resisters League International and the International
Fellowship of Reconciliation, each of which came into existence in Britain around
World War I. Both are still running seminars, training programs, and
distributing books. George Lakey's Training for Change and a new database at Swarthmore College that
he has developed are sharing knowledge. So is the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which has built
a dramatic record in a short time, having run more than 400 seminars and
workshops in more than 139 countries. The three major films that ICNC has
produced (for example, 'Bringing Down a Dictator'), have
been translated into 20 languages and been publicly broadcast to more than 20
million viewers.



After its
success, leaders from the Serbian
youth movement Otpor! (Resistance) that in 2000 disintegrated the Slobodan Milošević dictatorship formed a network
of activists, including experienced veterans from civil-resistance struggles in
South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine to share their
experiences with other movements. People can now more
easily find knowledge on the World Wide Web, often in their original language
or a second language, and they can find networks that share information about
their experiences, including their successes and failures.



I reject the Twitter explanation for
the increased use of nonviolent action or civil resistance, because all
nonviolent movements appropriate the most advanced technologies available. This
pattern is related to the importance of communications for their basic success.
Nonviolent mobilizations must be very shrewd in putting across their purpose,
their goals and objectives, preparing slogans, and conveying information on how
people can become involved. In order for people to join—bearing in mind that
numbers are important for success—it is critically important to make clear
what goal(s) you are seeking and why you have elected to work with civil
resistance. This decision is sometimes hard to understand for people who have
suffered great cruelty from their opponent, and who maintain 'but we are the
victims', making the sharing of the logic of the technique of civil resistance vital.





What would you say is the importance of
Nonviolent Resistance Studies in the field of International Relations and
Political Science? And how do you counter those who argue that some forms of
structural domination are only ended through violence?



In
this case we can look at the evidence and stay away from arguing beliefs or
ideology. Thanks to political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan,
who have produced a discerning work, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011), we now have
empirical evidence that removes this question from mystery. They studied 323
violent and nonviolent movements that occurred between 1900 and 2006 and found
that the nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent struggles in
achieving their goals, while incurring fewer costly fatalities and producing
much greater prospects for democratic outcomes after the end of the campaign.
They found only one area in which violent movements have been more successful,
and that is in secessions. So, we don't need to dwell in the realm of opinion,
but can read their findings. Other scholars have written about the same issues
using qualitative data ― by doing interviews, developing case studies, and analytical
descriptions ― but the work of Chenoweth and Stephan is quantitative, putting
it in a different category due to its research methods.





Reading 'Why Civil Resistance Works' it
caught my eye that nonviolent campaigns seem less successful in the Middle East
and Asia than in other regions. Did you see that also in your own work? And if
so, do you have an explanation for it? In addition, do you believe that the
'Arab Awakening' is a significant turn in history, or did the name arise too
quickly and will it remain a temporary popular phrase?



What
I encountered in working in the Middle East was an expectation, notion, or hope
among people that a great leader would save them and bring them out of darkness.
This belief seems often to have kept the populace in a state of passivity.
Sometimes such pervasive theories of leadership are deeply elitist: one must be
well educated to be a leader, one must be born into that role, one must be
male, or the first son, etc. Such concepts of leadership discourage the taking
of independent civil action.



I think that the Arab Awakening has
been significant for a number of reasons. As one example, there had been a
widespread (and patronizing) assumption in the United States and the West that
the Arabs were not interested in democracy. We have heard from various sources
including Israel for decades that Arabs are not attracted to democracy. As a
matter of fact, I think that all people want a voice. All human beings
wish to be listened to and to be able to express their hopes and aspirations.
This is a fundamental basis of democracy and widely applicable, although
democracy may take different forms. The Arab Awakening rebutted this arrogant
assumption. This does not mean that the course will be easy. One of my Egyptian
colleagues said to me, 'We have had dictatorship since 1952, but after Tahir
Square you expect us to build a perfect democracy in 52 weeks! It cannot
happen!'



Among the first concessions
sought by the 2011 Arab revolts was rejection of the right of a dictator's sons
to succeed him. The passing of power from father to son has been a
characteristic of patriarchal societies, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Anthropologist John Borneman notes, 'The public renunciation of the son's claim to inherit the
father's power definitively ends the specific Arab model of succession that has
been incorporated into state dictatorships among tribal authorities'. In Tunisia to Egypt, Libya,
Syria, and Yemen (not all of which are successes), such movements have sought
to end the presumption of father-son inheritance of rule.



I believe that we are seeing the start of a broad democratization process
in the Middle East, not its end. The learning and preparation that had been occurring
in Egypt prior to Tahrir Square was extensive. Workshops had been underway for
10 to 15 years before people filled Tahrir Square. Women bloggers had for years
been monitoring torture and sharing news from outside. One woman blogger
translated a comic book into Arabic about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr, from the 1960s, and had it distributed all over Cairo. Labor unions had
been very active. According
to historian Joel Beinin, from 1998 to 2010 some 3 million laborers took part
in 3,500 to 4,000 strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other actions,
realizing more than 600 collective labor actions per year in 2007 and 2008. In the years immediately before the revolution, these
actions became more coherent. Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, set
up a Facebook page and used Google technologies to share ideas and knowledge
about what ordinary people can do. The April 6 Youth Movement, set up in 2008, three years before Tahrir, sent one of
its members to Belgrade in 2009, to learn how Otpor! had galvanized the
bringing down of Milošević. He returned to Cairo with materials and films,
lessons from other nonviolent movements, and workshop materials. This all goes
back to the sharing of knowledge. Yet the Egyptians have now come to the point
where they must assume responsibility and accountability for the whole and make
difficult decisions for their society. It will be a long and difficult process.
And it raises the question of what kind of help from outside is essential.





Why do you raise this point; do you think
outside help is essential?



I know from having
studied a large number of nonviolent movements in different parts of the globe
that the sharing of lessons laterally among mobilizations and nonviolent
struggles is highly effective. African American leaders were traveling by
steamer ship from 1919 until the outbreak of World War II to the Indian
subcontinent, to learn from Gandhi and the Indian independence struggles. This
great interchange between black leaders in the United States and the Gandhian
activists, as the historian Sudarshan Kapur shows in Raising
Up A Prophet (1992), was critically significant in the
solidification of consensus in the U.S. black community on nonviolent means. I have written about how the knowledge moved from East
to West in my book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Scholarly exchanges and interchanges among activists
from other struggles are both potentiating and illuminating. Most
observers fail to see that nonviolent mobilizations often have very deep roots
involving the lateral sharing of experience and know-how.





You have written a book about the first
uprising, or 'intifada', in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 1987
and 1993. The second Palestinian uprising did not contain much nonviolent
tactics though. Do you foresee another uprising soon? If not, why? If yes, do
you think that Nonviolent Actions will play again an important role in that
uprising, or is it more likely to turn violent?



Intifada is linguistically a
nonviolent word: It means shaking off and has no violent implication
whatsoever. (This word is utterly inappropriate for what happened in the
so-called Second Intifada, although it started out as a nonviolent endeavor.)
In the 1987 intifada, virtually the entire Palestinian society living under
Israel's military occupation unified itself with remarkable cohesion on the use
of nonviolent tools. The first intifada (1987-1993, especially 1987-1990)
benefited from several forces at work in the 1970s and 1980s, about which I
write in A Quiet Revolution (2007), one of which came from Palestinian activist
intellectuals working with Israeli groups, who wanted to end occupation for
their own reasons. These Israeli peace activists thought the occupation
degraded them, made them less than
human, in addition to oppressing Palestinians. The second so-called intifada
was not a 'shaking off'. For the first time, it bade attacks against the
Israeli settlements, which had not occurred before.



Let me put it this way: in virtually every situation, there is some
potential for human beings to take upon themselves their own liberation through
nonviolent action. We may expect that such potential is dormant and waiting for
enactment. Disciplined nonviolent action is underway in a number of
village-based struggles against the separation barrier in the West Bank right
now, in which Israeli allies are among the action takers. As another example,
the Freedom Theatre in Jenin is using Freedom Rides, a concept
adopted from the U.S. southern Civil Rights Movement, riding buses to the South
Hebron Hills villages and along the way using drama, music, and giant puppets
as a way of stimulating debate about Israeli occupation. Bloggers and writers
share their experiences (see e.g. this post by Nathan Schneider). For
the first time, as we speak, the Freedom Bus will travel from the West Bank to
make two performances in historic pre-1948 Palestine (Israel), in Haifa and the
Golan, in June 2013. A Palestinian 'Empty Stomach' campaign, led by Palestinian
political prisoners in Israel, has had some success in using hunger strikes to
press Israeli officials for certain demands. With the purpose of prevailing
upon Israel to conform to international resolutions pertaining to the
Palestinians and to end its military occupation, Palestinian civic
organizations in 2005 launched a Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign,
drawing upon the notable example of third-party sanctions applied in the
anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The Palestinian Authority has called
for non-state observer status at the United Nations and supports the boycotting
of products from Israeli settlements resistance.



More and more Palestinians are now
saying, 'We must fight for our rights with nonviolent resistance'. Many
Israelis are also deeply concerned about the future of their country. I
recently got an email from an Israeli who was deeply affected by reading Quiet
Revolution and has started to reach out to
Palestinians and take actions to bring to light the injustices that he
perceives. Tremendous debate is underway about new techniques, novel processes,
and how to shift gears to more effective mutual action. The United States
government and its people continue to pay for Israel's occupation and
militarization, which has abetted the continuation of conflict, although it is
often done in the name of peace! The United States has not incentivized the
building of peace. It has done almost nothing to help the construction of
institutions that could assist coexistence.



Also,
it is very important for the entire world, including Israelis, to recognize
intentional nonviolent action when they see it. The Israeli government
persisted in denying that the 1987 Intifada was nonviolent, when the Palestinian
populace had been maintaining extraordinary nonviolent discipline for nearly
three years, despite harsh reprisals. Israeli officials continued to call it
'unending war' and 'the seventh war'. Indeed, it was not perfect nonviolent discipline,
but enough that was indicative of a change in political thinking among the
people in the Palestinian areas that could have been built upon. Although some
Israeli social scientists accurately perceived the sea change in Palestinian
political thought about what methods to use in seeking statehood and the
lifting of the military occupation, the government of Israel generally did not
seize upon such popularly enacted nonviolent discipline to push for progress.
My sources for Quiet Revolution
include interviews with Israelis, such as the former Chief Psychologist of the
Israel Defense Force and IDF spokesperson.





Your latest book is about the transitions
of the Eastern European countries from being under Soviet rule to independent
democracies. You chose to illustrate these transitions with New York Times
articles. Why did you chose this approach; do you think the NY Times was
important as a media agency in any way or is there another reason?



There
is another reason: The New York Times
and CQ Press approached me and asked if I would write a reference book on the
nonviolent revolutions of the Eastern bloc, using articles from the Times that I would choose upon which to
hang the garments of the story. The point of the work is to help particularly
young people learn that they can study history by studying newspapers. The book
gives life to the old adage that newspaper reporters write the first draft of
history. In the book's treatment of these nonviolent revolutions, I chose ten Times articles for
each of the major ten struggles that are addressed, adding my historical
analysis to complete the saga for each country. It had been difficult for Times reporters to get into Poland, for
example, in the late 1970s and the crucial year of 1980; they sometimes risked
their lives. Yet it's in the nature of journalism that their on-the-spot
reportage needed additional analysis; furthermore newspaper accounts often
stress description.



After
the 1968 Prague Spring, when the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops and tanks
from five Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia, crushing that revolt,
across Eastern Europe a tremendous amount of fervent work got underway by small
non-official committees, often below the radar of the communist party states.
This included samizdat (Russian for
'self published'), works not published by the state publishing machinery,
underground publications that were promoting new ways of thinking about how to
address their dilemma. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania were the most
active in the Eastern bloc with their major but covert samizdat. As it was
illegal in Czechoslovakia for a citizen to own a photocopy machine, 'books'
were published by using ten pieces of onion-skin paper interspersed with carbon
sheets, 'publishing' each page by typing it and its copies on a manual
typewriter.



The
entire phenomenon of micro-committees, flying universities, samizdat boutiques,
seminars, drama with hidden meanings, underground journals, and rock groups
transmitting messages eluded outside observers, who were not thinking about
what the people could do for themselves. The economists and Kremlinologists who
were observing the Eastern bloc did not discern what the playwrights, small
committees of activist intellectuals, local movements, labor unions,
academicians, and church groups were undertaking. They did not imagine the
scope or scale of what the people were doing for themselves with utmost
self-reliance. In essence, no one saw these nonviolent revolutions coming, with
the exception of the rare onlooker, such as the historian Timothy Garton Ash. Even today the
peaceful transitions to democracy of the Eastern bloc are sometimes explained
by saying 'Gorby did it', when Gorbachev did not come to power until 1985. Or by
attributing the alterations to Reagan's going to Berlin and telling Gorbachov
to tear down the Wall. 



By
December 1981, Poland was under martial law, which unleashed a high degree of
underground organizing, countless organizations of self-help, reimagining of
the society, and the publishing of samizdat. Still, even so, some people
believe that this sweeping political change was top-down.  It is indisputably true that nonviolent
action usually interacts with other forces and forms of power, but I would say
that we need this book for its accessible substantiation of historically
significant independent nonviolent citizen action as a critical element in the
collapse of the Soviet Union.





You also mention Al Jazeera as an
important media agency in your most recent blog post at 'Waging Nonviolence'.
You wrote that Al Jazeera has an important role in influencing global affairs.
Could you explain why? And more generally, how important is diversification of
media for international politics?



Al
Jazeera generally has not been taking the point of view of the official organs
of governments of Arab countries and has usually not reported news from
ministries of information. Additionally, it often carries reports from local
correspondents in the country at issue. If you are following a report from
Gaza, it is likely to be a Gazan journalist who is transmitting to Al Jazeera.
If it is a report from Egypt, it may well be an Egyptian correspondent. Al
Jazeera also has made a point of reporting news from Israel, and utilizing
reporters in Tel Aviv, which may be a significant development. Certainly in the
2010-2011 Arab Awakening, it made a huge difference that reports were coming
directly from the action takers rather than the official news outlets of Arab
governments.



President
George W. Bush did not want Al Jazeera to come to the United States, because he
considered it too anti-American. I remember reading at the time that the first
thing that Gen. Colin Powell said to Al Jazeera was 'can you tone it down a
little?' when asking why Al Jazeera couldn't be less anti-American in its news.
To me, either you support free speech or you do not; it's free or it's not: You
can't have a little bit of control and a little bit of freedom.



Until
recently, Al Jazeera was not easily available in the United States, except in
Brattleboro, Vermont; Washington, DC; and a few other places. It was difficult
to get it straight in the United States. I mounted a special satellite so that
I could get Al Jazeera more freely. This does not speak well for freedom of the
press in the United States. This may change with the advent of Al Jazeera
America, although we still do not know to what degree it will represent an
editorially free press.



News
agencies are important for civil-resistance movements for major reasons.
Popular mobilizations need good communications internally and externally!  People need to understand clearly what is the
purpose and strategy and to be part of the making of decisions. Learning also crucially
needs to take place inside the movement: activist intellectuals often act as
interpreters, framing issues anew, suggesting that an old grievance is now
actionable. No one expects the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker,
and everyone else in the movement to read history and theory.



When
news media are interested and following a popular movement of civil resistance,
they can enhance the spread of knowledge. In the U.S. civil rights movement,
the Southern white-owned newspapers considered the deaths of black persons or
atrocities against African Americans as not being newsworthy. There was
basically a 'black-out', if you want to call it that, with no pun. Yet dreadful
things were happening while we were trying to mobilize, organize, and get out the
word. So SNCC created its own media, and Julian Bond
and others and I set up nationwide alternative outlets. Eventually we had 12
photographers across the South. This is very much like what the people of the
Eastern bloc did with samizdat — sharing and disseminating papers, articles,
chapters, even whole books. The media can offer a tremendous boost, but
sometimes you have to create your own.





Last question. You combine scholarship
with activism. How do you reconcile the academic claim for 'neutrality' with
the emancipatory goals of activism?



To
be frank, I am not searching for neutrality in my research. Rather, I strive
for accuracy, careful transcription, and scrupulous gathering of evidence. I
believe that this is how we can become more effective in working for justice,
environmental protection, sustainable development, pursuing human rights, or
seeking gender equity as critical tools to build more peaceable societies.
Where possible I search for empirical data. So much has been ignored, for
example, with regards to the effects of gendered injustice. I do not seek
neutrality on this matter, but strong evidence. For example, since the 1970s, experts
have known that the education of women has profoundly beneficial and measurable
effects across entire societies, benefiting men, children, and women. Data from
Kerala, India; Sri Lanka; and elsewhere has shown that when you educate women
the entire society is uplifted and that all indicators shift positively. The
problem is that the data have for decades been ignored or trivialized. We need
much more than neutrality. We need to interpret evidence and data clearly to
make them compelling and harder to ignore. I think that we can do this with
methodologies that are uncompromisingly scrupulous.





Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the
UN-affiliated University for Peace and and is Scholar-in-Residence in the
School of International Service, at the American University in Washington, D.C.
She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the
University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Her most recent book is The
New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.:
Times Reference and CQ Press/Sage, 2009), chronicling the nonviolent
transitions that took place in Poland,  Hungary, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in the late
1980s and early 1990s. She is the author of the highly acclaimed A
Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New
York: Nation Books, 2007; London: Perseus Books, 2008), which examines crucial
aspects of the 1987 uprising overlooked or misunderstood by the media,
government officials, and academicians. 





Related links





King's personal page 
Read the book edited by
King on Peace Research for Africa
(UNU, 2007) here (pdf) 
Read the book by King Teaching Model: Nonviolent Transformation of
Conflict (UNU, 2006) here (pdf)










Print version of this Talk (pdf)





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














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














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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











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








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






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







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







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







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







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











Related links










Faculty Profile at U-London


Personal webpage


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


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


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


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









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Gabrielle Hecht on Nuclear Ontologies, De-provincializing the Cold War, and Postcolonial Technopolitics



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




Nuclear power has formed a centerpiece of Cold-War IR
theorizing. Yet besides the ways in which its destructive capacity invalidates
or alters the way we should understand questions of war and peace, there are
different powers at play in the roles the nuclear assumes in global politics.
Through careful investigations of alternative sites and spaces of nuclear
politics, Gabrielle Hecht has uncovered some of the unexpected ways in which
what one can call the 'nuclear condition' affects politics across the globe. In
this Talk, Hecht, amongst others,
explores what it means to 'be nuclear'; explains how we need to deprovincialize
the Cold War to fully grasp its significance in global politics; and challenges
us to explore technopolitics outside of the comfortable context of
OECD-countries.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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



I think one of the most important
challenges in global politics is the question of planetary boundaries. In the
1970s the Club of Rome published the report 'the Limits to Growth' (read PDF here), which addressed
the finite quality of the planet's resources. It exposed the problems that
the ideology (and practice) of endless economic
growth posed for these limits. The question of climate change today really is
all about planetary boundaries. We have already exceeded the CO2 level
that is safe for the planet to sustain human life: We have just passed 400
parts per million; the desirable level is rated at 350 parts per million; the
pre-industrial level of CO2 was 270 parts per million. So we have
already produced more CO2 than is sustainable. And that is just one
indicator. There are all kinds of other planetary boundaries at play—energy
supply being the most salient one in terms of climate change. How can we even
produce enough energy to maintain the lifestyles of the industrialized north? What
about the requirements of the so-called 'rest'?



Obviously this is a huge issue and
there are many parts to it. One part of this—the piece that I have studied the
most—is nuclear power. Many people are enthusiastic about nuclear power as a
solution to climate change. Some prominent environmentalists have been
converted, because they believe nuclear power offers a way to produce a large
amount of energy with a very small amount of matter, and because they see it as
carbon free. (That's pretty clearly not the case, by the way, though nuclear
power certainly produces less carbon than fossil fuels.) But are the human health
and environmental costs worth the savings in carbon? Do the resources poured
into nuclear power—some are predicting a thousand new reactors in the next
few decades—take away resources from other forms of energy production, forms
that could potentially address the emissions problems more rapidly and with lower
costs for the environment and for human health? Moreover, nuclear power in any
one location ends up becoming a global issue. So in that sense nuclear power in
China, in India or in Japan is inherently a global problem. And the industry everywhere
certainly needs global regulation—at the moment, there is none. The
International Atomic Energy Agency is not a regulator. These are serious questions
for international relations, and should be fodder for analysis.



One can obviously put this into
perspective by comparing the death toll from nuclear power with that related to
coal—would one then actually have to be against the use of coal? The numbers of
coal-related deaths are astonishing. But the first, most obvious point to make
is that being against coal doesn't require being in favor of nuclear power! It's
also extremely important to realize that death and morbidity figures for
nuclear power are highly contested. Take the figures concerning Chernobyl. The
IAEA and WHO put Chernobyl deaths at 4,000. A study published by National
Cancer Institute in the United States puts the deaths at something like 43,000.
A meta-analysis of 5,000 Slavic language scientific studies estimates the total
number of Chernobyl deaths (some of which are yet to come) at 900,000. These
discrepancies have a lot to do with controversies over the biological effects
of low-level radiation, and also with the technopolitics of measurement and counting.
Comparing the two energy technologies is much more complicated than merely
counting coal deaths vs. nuclear power deaths.





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



Actually, the real
question is how I came to study politics. I got my bachelor's degree in physics
from MIT in the 1980s. The two biggest political issues on campus at that time
were Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and Apartheid in South Africa
(specifically, a move to divest American corporate interests in South Africa,
the very corporations that were funding MIT research and for which MIT students
would work when they graduated). I got interested in both, and along the way I
came to realize that I was much more interested in the politics of science and
technology than I was in actually doing physics. So I took some courses in the
field of science and technology studies (STS), and decided to attend graduate
school in the history and sociology of science and technology.



I had also always had a
morbid fascination with nuclear weapons. I'd read a lot of post-apocalyptic
science fiction when I was a teenager. All of these things came together for me
in graduate school. I first hoped to study the history of Soviet nuclear
weapons but quickly realized that would be impossible for all kinds of reasons.
I ended up studying French nuclear power after I realized that nobody had researched
it in the ways that interested me. I had lived in France in the 1970s, when the
nuclear power program was undergoing rapid expansion. So it was a good fit. After
I was done with that project, I became interested in rethinking the so-called
nuclear age from a colonial and post-colonial perspective.





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



Travel, learn languages. Remain attentive to—and critical of—the
political work done by claims to 'global' purview. Learn history—you won't understand international relations in any depth at
all if you remain rooted in the present.



Then, for those want to
start exploring the global politics of science and technology, two books come
immediately to mind. Timothy Mitchell's (Theory Talk #59) Carbon Democracy, on the global technopolitics of fossil fuels. And Paul Edwards's A Vast Machine, on the relationship
between data and models in the production of knowledge about climate change. Both
are must-reads.







The world is permeated with technological
artifacts and systems—in what ways is this relevant for approaches to global
politics? Where is the conceptual place for technologies within IR?



First, I should make
clear that I am not an IR specialist.



That said, I think it
does not make sense to think about international relations (lower case) without
thinking about the technologies, systems, and infrastructures that make any
kind of global movement possible. The flows of people, of products, of culture,
political exchanges—these are all mediated through and practiced in the technological systems
that permeate our globe. So are the interruptions and absences in such 'flows'.
I draw attention to the specific political practices that are enacted through
technological systems with the notion of technopolitics. I initially used this
concept in my work on nuclear power in France to capture the ways in which
hybrid forms of power are enacted in technological artifacts, systems and
practices. There I used the term in a rather narrow sense to talk about the strategic practices of designing
technologies to enact political goals. My paramount example was that of the
French atomic weapons program. In the early 1950s, France's political leaders insisted
that France would never build atomic weapons. But engineers and other leaders in
the nascent nuclear program were designing reactors in a way that optimized the
production of weapons-grade plutonium rather than electricity. When politicians
finally signed on, the technology was ready to go. This example problematizes
the very notion of a 'political decision'. Instead of a single, discursive
decision, we see a complex process whereby political choices are inscribed into
technologies, which subsequently favor certain political outcomes over others.



In this example, both
engineers and politicians consciously
engaged in technopolitics. By contrast, Timothy Mitchell has used the
hyphenated term 'techno-politics' to emphasize the unpredictable and unintended
effects of technological assemblages. Over the last fifteen years, I have also
developed a broader notion of the term, particularly in its adjectival form, 'technopolitical'.
I find this to be a useful shorthand for describing both how politics can be
strategically enacted through technological systems, and also how technological
systems can be re-appropriated for political ends in ways that were unintended
by their designers.  The point, really,
is to highlight the myriad politics of materiality.





Do the particular characteristics of nuclear
technologies and related research programs make it impossible to apply the
lenses of 'high politics'?



I think a
high-politics approach to understanding nuclear weapons decision-making is
extremely impoverished. It's not that there aren't high politics, of course
there are. But they cannot offer a sufficient or straightforward explanation
for how or why any one particular country develops a nuclear program.  A focus on high politics implies a focus
decision makers and moments. But that's really misleading. In pretty much every
case, the apparent 'moment' of decision is in fact a long process involving a tremendous
amount of technopolitical, cultural, and institutional work, rife with
conflicts and contingencies of all kinds. I think a more productive approach is
to try to understand nuclear capacity-building.



Itty Abraham has done
some fantastic work on India's nuclear program, which helps us think about
other cases as well. For example, he analyzes the symbolic importance of the
nuclear test, noting that IR uses 'the test' as kind of 'aha!' moment, the moment in which one knows that a country
has nuclear weapons. Instead, Abraham sees the test as a process for the cultural
production of meaning: a process in which certain meanings get fixed, but by no
means the most important moment for understanding the actual technology and
politics behind the production of nuclear weapons.





Your book Entangled
Geographies (2011) explores a plethora of places, people, and technical networks that
sustained the US and Soviet empires. Here, as in Being Nuclear (2012), you insist on investigating the Cold War as
transnational history. What difference does this move make?



In Entangled Geographies, my colleagues and I build on the work of Odd
Arne Westad, whose book The Global Cold
War was an argument for understanding the non-superpower, non-European
dimensions of the Cold War. We give that a technopolitical spin, which offers a
de-provincializing of the Cold War that's complementary to Westad's. By
focusing on places like Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe, or Brazil, or South Africa,
we show how even the central struggles of the Cold War were intimately bound up
in 'northern' relationships to colonial and post-colonial worlds, and in the
imaginaries that characterized those relationships.



In Being Nuclear I focus on uranium from Africa—more specifically South Africa, Namibia,
Gabon, Madagascar, and Niger. Uranium from Africa has long been a major source
of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, but it has been almost completely absent from accounts of the
nuclear age, whether scholarly or popular. This changed in 2002, when the US
and British governments claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein 'sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa' (later specified as the infamous
'yellowcake from Niger'). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of
uranium. But that did not admit Niger, or any of Africa's other
uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states. Nor did
it mean that uranium itself counted as a nuclear thing. My book explores what
it means for something—a state, an
object, an industry, a workplace—to be 'nuclear'. I show that such questions lie at the heart of
today's global order and the relationships between 'developing nations' and 'nuclear
powers'.



Being Nuclear argues that 'nuclearity'
is not a straightforward scientific classification but a
contested technopolitical one. In the first part of the book, I
follow uranium's path out of Africa and analyze the invention of the global
uranium market. In the second part, I enter African nuclear worlds, focusing
on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation
exposure. In both parts, I show that nuclearity requires instruments and
data, technological systems and infrastructures, national agencies and
international organizations, experts and conferences, and journals and media
exposure. When (and where) nuclearity is densely distributed among these
elements, it can offer a means of claiming expertise, compensation, or
citizenship. It can serve as a framework for making sense of history,
experience, and memory. When (and where) network elements are absent, weak, or
poorly connected, nuclearity falters, fades, or disappears altogether, failing
to provide a resource for people claiming remediation or treatment. Nuclearity
in one register doesn't easily transpose to another: geopolitical nuclearity
doesn't automatically translate into occupational nuclearity. Yet these domains
remain connected. African uranium miners depend on the transnational movement
of nuclear things, but that movement also depends on African miners.
Ultimately, I conclude, nuclear security must be considered in tandem with
other forms of human security—food and health and environmental and political security. By placing
Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa, the book seeks to
remake our understanding of the nuclear age.



I should note that it's
not only uranium production that connects the colonial and postcolonial spaces
with nuclear things. (Also: African countries weren't the only such places
where uranium was produced. Much of the rest of the world's uranium came from the
Navajo nation in the United States, Aboriginal territories in Australia, First
Nation territories in Canada, colonized spaces in the Soviet Empire, etc.)  French nuclear weapons were tested in the Algerian
desert and French Polynesia; the United States tested its weapons on the Bikini
Islands; Britain tested its weapons in Maralinga, in Aboriginal Australia; the
Soviet Union tested its weapons on the planes of Kazakhstan. And so on.



So, understanding the
history of the Cold War—even its most
iconic technology, nuclear weapons—as a form of transnational history really calls attention to spaces that
have previously been considered marginal, even perhaps not fully nuclear. Ultimately,
it should provoke us to problematize 'the Cold War' as a frame for global or
transnational history (and social science).



Looking at those
colonized and semi-colonized spaces of mining, testing and monitoring infrastructures
gives us not necessarily an answer to the question of why the Cold War ended,
but it does enable you to ask different and possibly more interesting
questions. It can lead you, for example, to place the Cold War within the
framework of imperialism (rather than the other way around). A longer
historical view questions whether the Cold War really represents historical
rupture. What political work is done by such claims to rupture? How does that
work differ in different places?  What
are its material consequences?





Why are science and technology hardly ever studied in
the postcolonial world from a STS perspective?



I think there are a number
of reasons why STS has paid relatively little attention to the postcolonial
world. One is that in STS—like many
disciplines—the prestige of the subject
matter maps onto the prestige of the researcher. So STS researchers who study cutting-edge
science or large-scale technological systems seem somehow to be getting at 'harder'
topics, ones that that focus on active creation. Engineering and other acts of
creation appear more prestigious than acts of maintenance, or acts of
dismantling. Even studying small-scale creation seems to confer more prestige
than studying mundane practices. This brings us back to the theme of rupture
vs. continuity: studying or proclaiming rupture seems somehow sexier—and certainly more radical—than studying continuity.



Another, more trivial
answer is just that most STS researchers so far have come from Europe and North
America, and they tend not to be trained in area studies.





Does the constant ontological insecurity of nuclear
things mean that the 'nuclear' is purely a matter of social and political
construction?



No, definitely not. But
I think to explain what I mean by all this we should take a few steps back and
start with what I like to call nuclear
exceptionalism. This is a technopolitical claim—emerging immediately after the end of World
War II—that there was
something radically unique about nuclear things. From 1945 onward, both cold warriors
and their activist opponents cultivated this nuclear exceptionalism. Atomic
weapons were portrayed as fundamentally different from any other human
creation. The bomb was the ultimate geopolitical trump card, and it was imagined
as replacing empire in one fell swoop. You see nuclear scientists and engineers
gaining prestige, power, and funding far beyond their colleagues in
conventional research. In the meantime, anti-nuclear groups make their own claims
to exceptionalism by talking about the unprecedented dangers posed by nuclear
things. Everywhere you see nuclearity and morality intertwined. Nuclear things
either represent salvation or moral depravity… or the apocalyptic end of
mankind. But regardless of where you stood politically, this notion of nuclear
exceptionalism rested on the sense that the difference between nuclear and non-nuclear
things was transparent---ultimately a clear-cut, physical matter of
radioactivity.



The nuclear thus
emerges not just as a category, but also as a universal and universalizing
ontology, one that seems to apply in the same way all over the globe. And
frankly, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists
have reproduced that nuclear exceptionalism. (I did it myself in my first book,
The Radiance of France.)



All of which has made
it hard to see that what I call nuclearity—the process by which something comes
to count as a "nuclear" thing – has a history, a politics, and a geography. Things
that count as nuclear in one time and place might not count as nuclear at
another. Rendering something as nuclear and exceptional is a form of technopolitical
claims-making. It follows that insisting that certain things are not especially
nuclear, or that they are banal, is also a form of technopolitical claims-making.




You can see this in the
response of the nuclear industry to activist opponents. In the late 1960s and
over the course of the 1970s, the nuclear industry began to represent nuclear
power not as a life-saving technology for the human race, but as simply another
way to boil water. Radiation was just another industrial risk. Such
representations seek to banalize nuclear things.



Nuclearity could thus get
made, unmade and remade. My favorite example comes from a 1995 US government report
on nuclear proliferation. The appendix has a table that summarizes the nuclear
activities of 172 nations. Neither Gabon, nor Niger, nor Namibia are listed as
having any nuclear activities, despite the fact that those nations together, during
that very year, produced something like 25% of the world's uranium. So when does
uranium count as a nuclear thing? When does it lose its nuclearity? And what
does Africa have to do with it?



The argument is not that
radioactivity doesn't have to do anything with nuclearity, or that nuclearity
has nothing to do with the technologies and physical processes we typically
associate with the word. Rather, I argue that nuclearity is one thing, and radioactivity
and fission are another; sometimes they are co-terminus, but not always and not
necessarily. Understanding where (and why) they don't map onto each other is politically revealing.





Which kind of interdisciplinary
exchanges do we need between your discipline and IR to deepen our understanding
of global technopolitics?





Science
and technology studies (STS) is really good at exploring practice, and
especially at calling attention to the differences between principles and
practice—for example, between regulation on the one hand, and the actual
practices that regulations are meant to control (without ever entirely succeeding).
STS can bring to IR an understanding of how the intimate details of practice
matter politically—of how everyday technopolitical and techno-scientific exchanges can be
more important loci for politics than treaties, diplomacy, and other forms of
what you called high politics. 


I
can also answer this question wearing my historian's hat. The IR scholarship on
nuclear weapons that I'm familiar with (and again, I'm not an expert!) seems to
be quite focused on producing models—on using history to produce predictive models that
will in turn serve to shape international policy on nuclear weapons regulation.
But if history tells us one thing, it is that models are basically useless for
understanding how countries develop nuclear weapons. Instead, history and STS
both teach us about which questions to ask (in this instance, about nuclear
development). Identifying the important questions—rather than prescribing the applicable model—leaves open the list
of possible answers. It also leaves open solutions and policies, letting us be more
attentive to the specificities and uniqueness of individual cases.





Final question. Let's take the
example of Iran's nuclear program. What alternative question about the issue
would lenses of nuclear exceptionalism bring us?



Nuclear
technology has played an important role in shaping modern Iranian national
identity. This began in the 1970s under
the Shah, who – with the support of the US – developed a grandiose plan to
build a fleet of nuclear reactors. It took a different turn after the 1979
Iranian revolution. For a while, the new regime sidelined the nuclear program
as an unwelcome manifestation of western corruption. But after a few years
leaders reappropriated nuclear development and sought to invest it with
Iranian-ness. The dynamics of nuclear exceptionalism have operated in Iran much
the same way they did in France and in South Africa. Nuclear exceptionalism has
served to give material form to national identity. And materialized national
identity is most emphatically not
something that you can negotiate away in the P5+1 talks.

                                  

                                  



Gabrielle Hecht is Professor
of History at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Program in
Science, Technology, and Society and serves as associate director of the
African Studies Center. She recently published Being Nuclear: Africans and
the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012), which
has received awards from the American Historical Association and the American
Sociological Association, as well as the 2013 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities
Book Prize and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association's 2013
Herskovits Award. She is also the author of The Radiance of France: Nuclear
Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press 1998 & 2009)
and editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global
Cold War, editor (MIT Press, 2011). Hecht is embarking on a new book
project on technology and power in Africa, as well as new research on
transnational toxic trash. She has held visiting positions at universities in
Australia, France, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.





Related links





Hecht's faculty profile at the University of Michigan 
Read Hecht's Introduction to Entangled Geographies (MIT Press 2011) here (pdf)  
Read
Hecht's The Power of Nuclear Things (Technology
& Culture 2010) here (pdf) 
Read
Hecht's Nuclear Ontologies (Constellations
2006) here (pdf) 
Read
Hecht's Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age
(Social Studies of Science 2002) here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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





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







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




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





How did you arrive where
you currently work on?


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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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





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





Literature and Related
links:



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


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


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


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


http://www.leydesdorff.net/





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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Alexander Dugin on
Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of
Multipolarity







IR has long been regarded as an
Anglo-American social science. Recently, the discipline has started to look
beyond America and England, to China (Theory Talk
#51, Theory Talk
#45), India (Theory Talk
#63, Theory Talk
#42), Africa (Theory Talk #57, Theory Talk
#10) and elsewhere for non-Western
perspectives on international affairs and IR theory. However, IR theorists have
paid little attention to Russian perspectives on the discipline and practice of
international relations. We offer an exciting peek into Russian geopolitical
theory through an interview with the controversial Russian geopolitical thinker
Alexander Dugin, founder of the International
Eurasian Movement and allegedly an important
influence on Putin's foreign policy. In this Talk, Dugin—among others—discusses his Theory of a Multipolar
World, offers a staunch critique of western and liberal IR, and lays out
Russia's unique contribution to the landscape of IR theory.




Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version




What, according to you, is
the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your
position within this debate or towards that challenge?



The field of IR is extremely interesting and multidimensional.
In general, the discipline is much more promising than many think. I think that
there is a stereometry today in IR, in which we can distinguish a few axes
right away.



The first, most traditional axis is realism – the English school
– liberalism.



If the debates here are exhausted on an academic level, then on
the level of politicians, the media, and journalists, all the arguments and
methods appear new and unprecedented each time. Today, liberalism in IR
dominates mass consciousness, and realist arguments, already partially
forgotten on the level of mass discourse, could seem rather novel. On the other
hand, the nuanced English school, researched thoroughly in academic circles,
might look like a "revelation" to the general public. But for this to happen, a
broad illumination of the symmetry between liberals and realists is needed for
the English school to acquire significance and disclose its full potential.
This is impossible under the radical domination of liberalism in IR. For that
reason, I predict a new wave of realists and neorealists in this sphere, who,
being pretty much forgotten and almost marginalized, can full well make
themselves and their agenda known. This would, it seems to me, produce a
vitalizing effect and diversify the palette of mass and social debates, which
are today becoming monotone and auto-referential.



The second axis is bourgeois versions of IR (realism, the
English school, and liberalism all together) vs. Marxism in IR. In popular and
even academic discourse, this theme is entirely discarded, although the
popularity of Wallerstein (Theory
Talk #13) and other
versions of world-systems theory shows a degree of interest in this critical
version of classical, positivistic IR theories.



The third axis is post-positivism in all its varieties vs.
positivism in all its varieties (including Marxism). IR scholars might have
gotten the impression that postmodern attacks came to an end, having been
successfully repelled by 'critical realism', but in my opinion it is not at all
so. From moderate constructivism and normativism to extreme post-structuralism,
post-positivistic theories carry a colossal deconstructive and correspondingly
scientific potential, which has not yet even begun to be understood. It seemed
to some that postmodernism is a cheerful game. It isn't. It is a new
post-ontology, and it fundamentally affects the entire epistemological
structure of IR. In my opinion, this axis remains very important and
fundamental.



The fourth axis is the challenge of the sociology of international
relations, which we can call 'Hobson's challenge'. In my opinion, in his
critique of euro-centrism in IR, John M. Hobson laid the foundation for an
entirely new approach to the whole problematic by proposing to consider the
structural significance of the "euro-centric" factor as dominant and clarifying
its racist element. Once we make euro-centrism a variable and move away from
the universalistic racism of the West, on which all systems of IR are built,
including the majority of post-positivistic systems (after all, postmodernity
is an exclusively Western phenomenon!), we get, theoretically for now, an
entirely different discipline—and not just one, it seems. If we take into
account differences among cultures, there can be as many systems of IR as there
are cultures. I consider this axis extremely important.



The fifth axis, outlined in less detail than the previous one,
is the Theory of a Multipolar World vs. everything else. The Theory of a
Multipolar World was developed in Russia,
a country that no one ever took seriously during the entire establishment of IR
as a discipline—hence the fully explainable skepticism toward the Theory of a
Multipolar World.



The sixth axis is IR vs. geopolitics. Geopolitics is usually
regarded as secondary in the context of IR. But gradually, the epistemological
potential of geopolitics is becoming more and more obvious, despite or perhaps
partially because of the criticism against it. We have only to ask ourselves
about the structure of any geopolitical concept to discover the huge potential
contained in its methodology, which takes us to the very complex and
semantically saturated theme of the philosophy and ontology of space.



If we now superimpose these axes onto one another, we get an
extremely complex and highly interesting theoretical field. At the same time,
only one axis, the first one, is considered normative among the public, and
that with the almost total and uni-dimensional dominance of IR liberalism. All
the wealth, 'scientific democracy', and gnoseological pluralism of
the other axes are inaccessible to the broad public, robbing and partly
deceiving it. I call this domination of liberalism among the public the 'third
totalitarianism', but that is a separate issue.





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




I began with Eurasianism, from which I
came to geopolitics (the Eurasianist Petr Savitskii quoted the
British geopolitician Halford Mackinder) and remained for a long
time in that framework, developing the theme of the dualism of Land and Sea and
applying it to the actual situation That is how the Eurasian school of
geopolitics arose, which became not simply the dominant, but the only school in
contemporary Russia. As a professor at Moscow State University, for six years I
was head of the department of the Sociology of International Relations, which
forced me to become professionally familiar with the classical theories of IR,
the main authors, approaches, and schools. Because I have long been interested
in postmodernism in philosophy (I wrote the book Post-philosophy on the subject), I paid special attention to
post-positivism in IR. That is how I came to IR critical theory,
neo-Gramscianism, and the sociology of IR (John Hobson, Steve Hobden, etc.). I came
to the Theory of a Multipolar World, which I eventually developed myself,
precisely through superimposing geopolitical dualism, Carl Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and John Hobson's critique of
Western racism and the euro-centrism of IR.





In your opinion, what would
a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?



In
our interdisciplinary time, I think that what is most important is familiarity
with philosophy and sociology, led by a paradigmatic method: the analysis of
the types of societies, cultures, and structures of thought along the line
Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Post-Modernity. If one learns to trace semantic
shifts in these three epistemological and ontological domains, it will help one
to become familiar with any popular theories of IR today. Barry Buzan's (Theory
Talk #35)
theory of international systems is an example of such a generalizing and very
useful schematization. Today an IR specialist must certainly be familiar with
deconstruction and use it at least in its elementary form. Otherwise, there is
a great danger of overlooking what is most important.



Another very important competence is
history and political science. Political science provides generalizing,
simplifying material, and history puts schemas in their context. I would only
put competence in the domain of economics and political economy in third place,
although today no problem in IR can be considered without reference to the
economic significance of processes and interactions. Finally, I would earnestly
recommend to students of IR to become familiar, as a priority, with geopolitics
and its methods. These methods are much simpler than theories of IR, but their
significance is much deeper. At first, geopolitical simplifications produce an
instantaneous effect: complex and entangled processes of world politics are
rendered transparent and comprehensible in the blink of an eye. But to sort out
how this effect is achieved, a long and serious study of geopolitics is
required, exceeding by far the superficiality that limits critical geopolitics
(Ó Tuathail et. al.): they stand at the beginning of
the decipherment of geopolitics and its full-fledged deconstruction, but they
regard themselves as its champions. They do so prematurely.





What
does it entail to think of global power relations through a spatial lens ('Myslit prostranstvom')?  



This is the most important thing. The
entire philosophical theme of Modernity is built on the dominance of time. Kant
already puts time on the side of the subject (and space on the side of the
body, continuing the ideas of Descartes and even Plato), while Husserl and Heidegger
identify the subject with time altogether. Modernity thinks with time, with
becoming. But since the past and future are rejected as ontological entities,
thought of time is transformed into thought of the instant, of that which is
here and now. This is the basis for the ephemeral understanding of being. To
think spatially means to locate Being outside the present, to arrange it in
space, to give space an ontological status. Whatever was impressed in space is
preserved in it. Whatever will ripen in space is already contained in it. This
is the basis for the political geography of Friedrich Ratzel and subsequent geopoliticians. Wagner's Parsifal ends with the words of
Gurnemanz: 'now time has become space'. This is a proclamation of the triumph
of geopolitics. To think spatially means to think in an entirely different way
[topika]. I think that postmodernity has already partly arrived at this
perspective, but has stopped at the threshold, whereas to cross the line it is
necessary to break radically with the entire axiomatic of Modernity, to really
step over Modernity, and not to imitate this passage while remaining in
Modernity and its tempolatry. Russian people are spaces [Russkie lyudi prostranstva],
which is why we have so much of it. The secret of Russian identity is concealed
in space. To think spatially means to think 'Russian-ly', in Russian.





Geopolitics
is argued to be very popular in Russia nowadays. Is geopolitics a new thing,
from the post-Cold War period, or not? And if not, how does current
geopolitical thinking differ from earlier Soviet (or even pre-soviet)
geopolitics?



It is an entirely new form
of political thought. I introduced geopolitics to Russia at the end of the 80s,
and since then it has become extremely popular. I tried to find some traces of
geopolitics in Russian history, but besides Vandam, Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, and a few
short articles by Savitskii, there was nothing. In the USSR, any allusion to
geopolitics was punished in the harshest way (see the 'affair of the
geopoliticians' of the economic geographer Vladimir Eduardovich Den and his group).
At the start of the 90s, my efforts and the efforts of my followers and
associates in geopolitics (=Eurasianism) filled the worldview vacuum that
formed after the end of Soviet ideology. At first, this was adopted without
reserve by the military (The Military Academy of the General Staff
of the Armed Forces of Russia), especially under Igor Rodionov. Then,
geopolitics began to penetrate into all social strata. Today, this discipline
is taught in the majority of Russian universities. So, there was no Soviet or
pre-Soviet geopolitics. There is only the contemporary Eurasian school, which
took shape at the end of the 80s. Foundations
of Geopolitics was the first programmatic text of this school, although I had
published most of texts in that book earlier, and some of them were circulated
as texts in government circles. Recently, in 2012, I released two new
textbooks: Geopolitics and The Geopolitics of Russia, which
together with The War of Continents
are the results of work in this field, along four axes. 





In
your book International Relations, not
yet published in English, you set out your Theory of a Multipolar World as a
distinct IR theory. What are the basic components of the Theory of a Multipolar
World—and how is it different from classical realism?



In order to be understood
and not get into the details, I can say that the Theory of a Multipolar World
seriously and axiomatically adopts Samuel Huntington's thesis about the
plurality of civilizations. Russia has its own author, who claimed the same
thing more than a hundred years ago: Nikolay Danilevsky, and then the Eurasianists.
However, everything starts from precisely this point: civilization is not one,
but many. Western civilization's pretension to universalism is a form of the
will to domination and an authoritarian discourse. It can be taken into account
but not believed. It is nothing other than a strategy of suppression and
hegemony. The following point follows: we must move from thinking in terms of
one civilization (the racism of euro-centric versions of IR) to a pluralism of
subjects. However, unlike realists, who take as the subject of their theory
nation-states, which are themselves products of the European, bourgeois, modern
understanding of the Political, the Theory of a Multipolar World proposes to
take civilizations as subjects. Not states, but civilizations. I call them
'large politeiai', or civilizations, corresponding to Carl Schmitt's 'large
spaces'. As soon as we take these civilizations—'large politeiai'—as subjects,
we can then apply to them the full system of premises of realism: anarchy in
the international system, sovereignty, the rationality of egoistic behavior,
etc. But within these 'politeiai', by contrast, a principle more resembling
liberalism, with its pacifism and integration, operates, only with the
difference that here we are not talking about a 'planetary' or 'global' world,
but about an intra-civilizational one; not about global integration, but about
regional integration, strictly within the context of civilizational borders.
Post-positivism, in turn, helps here for the deconstruction of the
authoritarian discourse of the West, which masks its private interests by
'universal values', and also for the reconstruction of civilizational identity,
including with the help of technological means: civilizational elites,
civilizational media, civilizational economic algorithms and corporations, etc.
That is the general picture.





Your
theory of multipolarity is directed against the intellectual, political, and
social hegemony of the West. At the same time, while drawing on the tools of
neo-Marxist analysis and critical theory, it does not oppose Western hegemony
'from the left', as those approaches do, but on the basis of traditionalism (Rene
Guenon, Julius
Evola), cultural
anthropology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, or 'from the right'. Do you think
that such an approach can appeal to Anglo-American IR practitioners, or is it
designed to appeal mainly to non-Western theorists and practitioners? In short,
what can IR theorists in the West learn from the theory of multipolarity?



According to Hobson's
entirely correct analysis, the West is based on a fundamental sort of racism.
There is no difference between Lewis Morgan's evolutionistic racism
(with his model of savagery, barbarism, civilization) and Hitler's biological
racism. Today the same racism is asserted without a link to race, but on the
basis of the technological modes and degrees of modernization and progress of
societies (as always, the criterion "like in the West" is the general measure).
Western man is a complete racist down to his bones, generalizing his
ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions. Something tells me that he is
impossible to change. Even radical critiques of Western hegemony are themselves
deeply infected by the racist virus of universalism, as Edward Said showed with the
example of 'orientalism', proving that the anticolonial struggle is a form of
that very colonialism and euro-centrism. So the Theory of a Multipolar World
will hardly find adherents in the Western world, unless perhaps among those
scholars who are seriously able to carry out a deconstruction of Western
identity, and such deconstruction assumes the rejection of both Right
(nationalistic) and Left (universalistic and progressivist) clichés. The racism
of the West always acquires diverse forms. Today its main form is liberalism,
and anti-liberal theories (most on the Left) are plagued by the same
universalism, while Right anti-liberalisms have been discredited. That is why I
appeal not to the first political theory (liberalism), nor the second
(communism, socialism), nor to the third (fascism, Nazism), but to something I
call the Fourth Political Theory (or 4PT), based on a
radical deconstruction of the subject of Modernity and the application of
Martin Heidegger's existential analytic method.



Traditionalists are brought
in for the profound critique of Western Modernity, for establishing the
plurality of civilizations, and for rehabilitating non-Western (pre-modern)
cultures. In Russia and Asian countries, the Theory of a Multipolar World is
grasped easily and naturally; in the West, it encounters a fully understandable
and fully expected hostility, an unwillingness to study it carefully, and
coarse slander. But there are always exceptions.





What
is the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) and how is it related to the Theory of a
Multipolar World and to your criticism of the prevailing theoretical approaches
in the field of IR?



I spoke a little about this in the
response to the previous question. The Fourth Political Theory is important for
getting away from the strict dominance of modernity in the sphere of the
Political, for the relativization of the West and its re-regionalization. The
West measures the entire history of Modernity in terms of the struggle of three
political ideologies for supremacy (liberalism, socialism, and nationalism).
But since the West does not even for a moment call into question the fact that
it thinks for all humanity, it evaluates other cultures and civilizations in
the same way, without considering that in the best case the parallels to these
three ideologies are pure simulacra, while most often there simply are no
parallels. If liberalism won the competition of the three ideologies in the
West at the end of the 20th century, that does not yet mean that
this ideology is really universal on a world scale. It isn't at all. This
episode of the Western political history of modernity may be the fate of the
West, but not the fate of the world. So other principles of the political are
needed, beyond liberalism, which claims global domination (=the third
totalitarianism), and its failed alternatives (communism and fascism), which
are historically just as Western and modern as liberalism. This explains the
necessity of introducing a Fourth Political Theory as a political frame for the
correct basis of a Theory of a Multipolar World. The Fourth Political Theory is
the direct and necessary correlate of the Theory of a Multipolar World in the
domain of political theory.





Is
IR an American social science? Is Russian IR as an academic field a
reproduction of IR as an American academic field? If not, how is IR in Russia
specifically Russian?



IR is a Western scientific discipline,
and as such it has a prescriptive, normative vector. It not only studies the
West's dominance, it also produces, secures, defends, and propagandizes it. IR
is undoubtedly an imperious authoritarian discourse of Western civilization, in
relation to itself and all other areas of the planet. Today the US is the core
of the West, so naturally in the 20th century IR became more and
more American as the US moved toward that status (it began as an English
science). It is the same with geopolitics, which migrated from London to
Washington and New York together with the function of a global naval Empire. As
with all other sciences, IR is a form of imperious violence, embodying the will
to power in the will to knowledge (as Michel Foucault explained). IR in Russia remains purely
Western, with one detail: in the USSR, IR as such was not studied. Marxism in
IR did not correspond to Soviet reality, where after Stalin a practical form of
realism (not grounded theoretically and never acknowledged) played a big
role—only external observers, like the classical realist E.H. Carr, understood
the realist essence of Stalinism in IR. So IR was altogether blocked. The first
textbooks started to appear only in the 90s and in the fashion of the day they
were all liberal. That is how it has remained until now. The peculiarity of IR
in Russia today lies in the fact that there is no longer anything Russian
there; liberalism dominates entirely, a correct account of realism is lacking,
and post-positivism is almost entirely disregarded. The result is a truncated,
aggressively liberal and extremely antiquated version of IR as a discipline. I
try to fight that. I recently released an IR textbook with balanced (I hope)
proportions, but it is too early to judge the result.





Stephen
Walt argued in a September
article in Foreign Policy that Russia 'is nowhere near as threatening as the old Soviet
Union', in part because Russia 'no longer boasts an ideology that can rally
supporters worldwide'. Do you agree with Walt's assessment?



There is something to that. Today, Russia
thinks of itself as a nation-state. Putin is a realist; nothing more. Walt is
right about that. But the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political
Theory, as well as Eurasianism, are outlines of a much broader and large-scale
ideology, directed against Western hegemony and challenging liberalism,
globalization, and American strategic dominance. Of course, Russia as a
nation-state is no competition for the West. But as the bridgehead of the
Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, it changes its
significance. Russian policies in the post-Soviet space and Russia's courage in
forming non-Western alliances are indicators. For now, Putin is testing this
conceptual potential very gingerly. But the toughening of relations with the
West and most likely the internal crises of globalization will at some point
force a more careful and serious turn toward the creation of global alternative
alliances. Nevertheless, we already observe such unions: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Eurasian Union—and they require a new
ideology. Not one like Marxism, any universalism is excluded, but also not
simple realist maneuvers of regional hegemons. Liberalism is a global
challenge. The response to it should also be global. Does Putin understand
this? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes it seems he does, and sometimes it
seems he doesn't.





Vladimir
Putin recently characterized the contemporary world order as follows: 'We have entered a period of differing interpretations and
deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to
retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and
justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary
interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same
time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired
to portray white as black and black as white'. Do you agree with this
assessment? If so, what is required as a response to this international
situation?



These are true, but rather
naïve words. Putin is just indignant that the West establishes rules in its own
interests, changes them when necessary, and interprets allegedly 'universal
norms' in its own favor. But the issue is that this is the structure of the
will to power and the very organization of logo-phallo-phono-centric discourse.
Objectivity and justice are not possible so long as speech is a monologue. The
West does not know and does not recognize the other. But this means that
everything will continue until this other wins back the right to recognition.
And that is a long road. The point of the Theory of a Multipolar World is that
there are no rules established by some one player. Rules must be established by
centers of real power. The state today is too small for that; hence the
conclusion that civilizations should be these centers. Let there be an Atlantic
objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice
will counter them. And the Chinese world or Pax Sinica [world/peace: same word
in Russian] will look different than the Islamic one. Black and white are not
objective evaluations. They depend on the structure of the world order: what is
black and what is white is determined by one who has enough power to determine
it.





How
does your approach help us understand Russia's actions on the world stage
better than other IR approaches do? What are IR analyses of Russia missing that
do not operate with the conceptual apparatus of multipolarity?



Interesting question. Russia's behavior
internationally is determined today by the following factors:



First,
historical inertia, accumulating the power of precedents (the Theory of a
Multipolar World thinks that the past exists as a structure; consequently, this
factor is taken into account from many sides and in detail, while the
'tempocentrism' (Steve Hobden, John Hobson) of classical IR theories drops this
from sight. We have to pay attention to this especially taking into
consideration the fact that Russia is in many ways still a traditional society
and belongs to the 'imperial system' of IR.) There are, besides, Soviet inertia
and stable motives ('Stalinism in IR');



Second,
the projective logic of opposition to the West, stemming from the most practical,
pragmatic, and realist motivations (in the spirit of Caesarism, analyzed by
neo-Gramscians) will necessarily lead Russia (even despite the will of its
leaders) to a systemic confrontation with American hegemony and globalization,
and then the Theory of a Multipolar World will really be needed (classical IR
models, paying no attention to the Theory of a Multipolar World, drop from
sight the possible future; i.e., they rob themselves of predictive potential
because of purely ideological prejudices and self-imposed fears).



But if an opponent underestimates you,
you have more chances to land an unexpected blow. So I am not too disturbed by
the underestimation of the Theory of a Multipolar World among IR theorists.





In
the western world, the divide between academia and policy is often either
lamented ('ivory tower') or, in light of the ideal of academic independence,
deemed absent. This concerns a broader debate regarding the relations between
power, knowledge and geopolitics. How are academic-policy relations in Russia
with regards to IR and is this the ideal picture according to you?



I think that in our case both positions
have been taken to their extreme. On one hand, today's authorities in Russia do
not pay the slightest attention to scholars, dispatching them to an airless and
sterile space. On the other hand, Soviet habits became the basis for servility
and conformism, preserved in a situation when the authorities for the first
time demand nothing from intellectuals, except for one thing: that they not
meddle in socio-political processes. So the situation with science is both
comical and sorrowful. Conformist scholars follow the authorities, but the
authorities don't need this, since they do not so much go anywhere in
particular as react to facts that carry themselves out.





If
your IR theory isn't based on politically and philosophically liberal
principles, and if it criticizes those principles not from the left but from
the right, using the language of large spaces or Grossraum, is it a fascist theory of international relations? Are scholars who characterize your thought as 'neo-fascism',
like Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovstov, partially correct? If not, why is that characterization
misleading?



Accusations of fascism are simply a
figure of speech in the coarse political propaganda peculiar to contemporary
liberalism as the third totalitarianism. Karl Popper laid the basis for this in
his book The
Open Society and its Enemies, where he reduced the critique of
liberalism from the right to fascism, Hitler, and Auschwitz, and the criticism
of liberalism from the left to Stalin and the GULAG. The reality is somewhat
more complex, but George
Soros,
who finances Umland and Shekhovstov and is an ardent follower of Popper, is
content with reduced versions of politics. If I were a fascist, I would say so.
But I am a representative of Eurasianism and the author of the Fourth Political
Theory. At the same time, I am a consistent and radical anti-racist and
opponent of the nation-state project (i.e. an anti-nationalist). Eurasianism has
no relation to fascism. And the Fourth Political Theory emphasizes that while
it is anti-liberal, it is simultaneously anti-communist and anti-fascist. I
think it isn't possible to be clearer, but the propaganda army of the 'third
totalitarianism' disagrees and no arguments will convince it. 1984 should be
sought today not where many think: not in the USSR, not in the Third Reich, but
in the Soros Fund and the 'Brave New World'. Incidentally, Huxley proved to be
more correct than Orwell. I cannot forbid others from calling me a fascist,
although I am not one, though ultimately this reflects badly not so much on me
as on the accusers themselves: fighting an imaginary threat, the accuser misses
a real one. The more stupid, mendacious, and straightforward a liberal is, the
simpler it is to fight with him.





Does
technological change in warfare and in civil government challenge the
geopolitical premises of classical divisions between spaces (Mackinder's view
or Spykman's) heartland-rimland-offshore continents)? And, more broadly
perhaps, does history have a linear or a cyclical pattern, according to you?



Technological development does not at all
abolish the principles of classical geopolitics, simply because Land and Sea
are not substances, but concepts. Land is a centripetal model of order, with a
clearly expressed and constant axis. Sea is a field, without a hard center, of
processuality, atomism, and the possibility of numerous bifurcations. In a
certain sense, air (and hence also aviation) is aeronautics. And even the word
astronaut contains in itself the root 'nautos', from the Greek word for ship.
Water, air, outer space—these are all versions of increasingly diffused Sea.
Land in this situation remains unchanged. Sea strategy is diversified; land
strategy remains on the whole constant. It is possible that this is the reason
for the victory of Land over Sea in the last decade; after all, capitalism and
technical progress are typical attributes of Sea. But taking into consideration
the fundamental character of the balance between Leviathan and Behemoth, the
proportions can switch at any moment; the soaring Titan can be thrown down into
the abyss, like Atlantis, while the reason for the victory of thalassocracy becomes the source of its
downfall. Land remains unchanged as the geographic axis of history. There is
Land and Sea even on the internet and in the virtual world: they are axes and
algorithms of thematization, association and separation, groupings of resources
and protocols. The Chinese internet is terrestrial; the Western one, nautical.





You
have translated a great number of foreign philosophical and geopolitical works
into Russian. How important is knowledge transaction for the formation of your ideas?



I recently completed the
first release of my book Noomachy,
which is entirely devoted precisely to the Logoi of various civilizations, and
hence to the circulation of ideas. I am convinced that each civilization has
its own particular Logos. To grasp it and to find parallels, analogies, and
dissonances in one's own Logos is utterly fascinating and interesting. That is
why I am sincerely interested in the most varied cultures, from North American
to Australian, Arabic to Latin American, Polynesian to Scandinavian. All the
Logoi are different and it is not possible to establish a hierarchy among them.
So it remains for us only to become familiar with them. Henry Corbin, the French
philosopher and Protestant who studied Iranian Shiism his entire life, said of
himself 'We are Shiites'. He wasn't a Shiite in the religious sense, but
without feeling himself a Shiite, he would not be able to penetrate into the
depths of the Iranian Logos. That is how I felt, working on Noomachy or translating philosophical
texts or poetry from other languages: in particular, while learning Pierce and
James, Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Pound I experienced myself as 'we are
Americans'. And in the volume devoted to China and Japan, as 'we are
Buddhists'. That is the greatest wealth of the Logos of various cultures: both
those like ours and those entirely unlike ours. And these Logoi are at war;
hence, Noomachy, the war of the
intellect. It is not linear and not primitive. It is a great war. It creates
that which we call the 'human', the entire depth and complexity of which we
most often underestimate.





Final
question. You call yourself the 'last philosopher of empire'. What is
Eurasanism and how does it relate to the global pivot of power distributions?



Eurasianism is a developed worldview, to
which I dedicated a few books and a countless number of articles and
interviews. In principle, it lies at the basis of the Theory of a Multipolar
World and the Fourth Political Theory, combined with geopolitics, and it
resonates with Traditionalism. Eurasianism's main thought is plural
anthropology, the rejection of universalism. The meaning of Empire for me is
that there exists not one Empire, but at minimum two, and even more. In the
same way, civilization is never singular; there is always some other
civilization that determines its borders. Schmitt called this the Pluriverse
and considered it the main characteristic of the Political. The Eurasian Empire
is the political and strategic unification of Turan, a geographic axis of history
in opposition to the civilization of the Sea or the Atlanticist Empire. Today,
the USA is this Atlanticist Empire. Kenneth Waltz, in the context of neorealism
in IR, conceptualized the balance of two poles. The analysis is very accurate,
although he erred about the stability of a bipolar world and the duration of
the USSR. But on the whole he is right: there is a global balance of Empires in
the world, not nation-States, the majority of which cannot claim sovereignty,
which remains nominal (Stephen Krasner's (Theory
Talk #21) 'global hypocrisy'). For
precisely that reason, I am a philosopher of Empire, as is almost every
American intellectual, whether he knows it or not. The difference is only that
he thinks of himself as a philosopher of the only Empire, while I think of
myself as the philosopher of one of the Empires, the Eurasian one. I am more
humble and more democratic. That is the whole difference.





Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher,
the author of over thirty books on topics including the sociology of the
imagination, structural sociology, ethnosociology, geopolitical theory,
international relations theory, and political theory, including four books on
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His most recent books, only available
in Russian at the moment, are Ukraine: My
War and the multi-volume Noomachia:
Wars of the Intellect. Books translated into English include The Fourth Political Theory,
Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed
From the Right, and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of
Another Beginning.






Related links





Who is Alexander Dugin? Interview with Theory Talks editor Michael Millerman (YouTube)
TheFourth Political Theory website (English): 
Evrazia.tv
(Russian) 
Evrazia.tv
(English) 
Geopolitics.ru
(English version)
InternationalEurasian Movement (English version)
Centerfor Conservative Studies (Russian)

Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version