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

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

Print version of this Talk (pdf)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

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Blogbeitrag#1320. November 2013

Theory Talk #60: Daniel Deudney

Blog: Theory Talks

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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace

This is the second 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

World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.

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?

The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.

A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')

My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.

In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.

Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.

The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.

Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.

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

Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.

My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.

Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.

Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.

My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.

Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.

In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.

As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.

Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.

I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.

When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.

I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.

One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.

I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.

This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.



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

I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.

Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.

The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.

Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?

Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.

The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.

This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.

The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.

Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?

Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).

This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.

But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.



Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).

For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.

What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.

You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?



The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.

While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.

By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort.  There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.

Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.

You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?

When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.

Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.

Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.

When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.

Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.

An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.

Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.

Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?

Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.

In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.

Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.

A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.

My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.

But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.



Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.

Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?

The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.

Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.

Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.

My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?

American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.

The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.

Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.

The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.

It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.

Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'

Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.

Related links

Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf)
Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf)
Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf)
Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf)
Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf)
Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)

Print version of this Talk (pdf)