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









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





Print version of this Talk (pdf)








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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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



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







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











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







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







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











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







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







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







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











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







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







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







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







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











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







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







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















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















Related
links








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



Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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





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




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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



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



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



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



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





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



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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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



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





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



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



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



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



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



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





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





Related links





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

Print version of this Talk (pdf)