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Detail of Rapture by Jon ReadSince it was published I have taught Kathi Weeks' book The Problem with Work in my Politics and Philosophy of work class. When I introduce the book, stressing that it is written by a political theorist and not, as in the case of many of our readings, by a philosopher, sociologist or historian, I ask the two questions that Weeks asks: namely, why should a political theory consider work? why does work seem to be outside of politics? What I am trying to provoke with these questions is a particular aporia in which work is for many people the central experience of power, authority, control and subjection, but because it is seen as private and natural it is seen as outside of politics, as apolitical. I remember very well a student responding to the second part of the question by saying that work was not political because "no one made you do it." At first I found this formulation strange given all of the ramifications and consequences of not working from homelessness to starvation, but the more I thought about his response the more it made its own particular sense. The compulsion to work, to sell one's labor power, was in some sense mute, unspoken, there was no particular agency or institution in society demanding it, and there was no particular institution or agency in society enforcing it--in part because it is diffuse spread throughout society. Since that day I have tried to think together two intersecting ideas. First, Marx's particular contribution to political thought is to think a new kind of compulsion, one that exceeds force or consent and ultimately the political institutions of society all together. The compulsions that define capitalism, not just in demanding that people go to work, to sell labor power, but the compulsions that dictate the rate and intensity of how that labor power will be put to work, are the structural conditions of capitalist accumulation. These compulsions go on behind the producers backs as Marx put it, are not decided on by anyone in particular. Moreover, while the state, law, and police are necessary conditions of capitalist accumulation, making possible the status of labor power as a commodity, these conditions exceed the state to be disseminated throughout political life. Which brings up the second point, this particular kind of compulsion is, for the most part, not experienced as compulsion but often as freedom, and to the extent that it appears as constraint, as necessity, it does so as a necessity that is not historical or instituted, but a fact of existence. Work, private property, competition, the market, etc. appear to not be institutions but, as Marx puts it, self-evident natural laws. Lastly, or to add a third idea, it is against this background of mute compulsion that the more overt compulsions or constraints of politics stand out. To give a contemporary example, one that I have been thinking about a lot, the short lived and inadequate measure of pandemic lockdown in the US, the few weeks of shutdowns, the few months of mask mandates, the sporadic vaccine requirements, etc., appear to be so intolerable because they were dictated and decided by specific people, but the far more pressing, and often deadly demand, to return to work, to discard unpopular mandates, and to go back to normal is all the more tolerable because it appears to come from no one and to be everywhere. Going back to work, going to stores to buy the things we need and want, is not a dictate or demand, but simply the way that things are. It is for this reason that I was very excited to read Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Mau takes up a position that is against the tendency in much of twentieth century Marxism which sought the basis for the reproduction of the relations of production in ideology or the state. As Mau says with respect to Althusser, there is a tendency to look for relations of power outside of economic relations, in the school or other various state apparatus. (I should say parenthetically that I am not convinced of this criticism of Althusser. It might describe his most famous essay, but Althusser also examined the way in which ideology was immanent to the relations of production, as for example in the wage relation and the labor contract). In place of this search for the reproduction of the relations of production in some external aspect, in the ideological state apparatuses, capitalist hegemony, or the culture industry, Mau examines the extent to which the capitalist social relations constitute their own conditions of reproduction. This reproduction stems in part from the unity in separation, to use Endnotes term, or as Mau puts it "In this mode of production, proletarians are temporarily connected to the conditions of their life through the very same social relations that ensure their permanent separation from them." Mau insists that he is not dispensing with ideology altogether. As he writes, "Since my aim is to say something about the economic power of capital, I will largely ignore the role played by ideology as well as violence in the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. I prevent any misunderstanding here, I want to emphasize that this does not mean that I consider these forms of power to be secondary or unimportant."Reading Mau's examination of this mute compulsion made me think of not only the central problem of Marx and capital that I outline above, but how long I had been trying to think about this problem. When one thinks about such a problem long enough one hopefully makes some progress, but that may or may not take place. What does happen, however, is that the world of thinking around you changes, the problems shift as does the world of references and texts. One of the thing that occurred to me is how, twenty years ago, I would have rejected the very turn to think the reproduction of capital from the relations of capital, with no reference to ideology as being "economism." The idea that reproduction of the relations of production necessarily passes through something like the supestructure, through ideology, and the state. To cite a long passage from The Micro-Politics of Capital:In Capital Marx argues that the reproduction of the labor force is a necessary aspect of the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production. "The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital" (CI 718/597). Althusser's own investigation into the connection between reproduction and ideology takes its bearings from this point. While both Marx and Althusser argue that any mode of production necessarily must reproduce its subjective and objective conditions, in Capital Marx primarily stresses the physical and biological dimension of the reproduction of subjectivity, the physical reproduction of the working class, and only marginally addresses the political and social dimension of reproduction. Before immediately rushing to conclude that Althusser's analysis is superior, since it includes in the "reproduction of the relations of production" the obedience and subjectification of the worker, it is necessary to pause over Marx's examination of the biological dimension of reproduction. Necessary, because as Althusser claims reproduction is always overdetermined, it encompasses the reproduction of the worker as a biological being, as a skilled and trained worker, and as a docile and obedient subject. The combination of these diverse practices, from the biological demand to consume sufficient food to the reproduction of ideological environments, under the same term would make the term seem hopelessly confused and monolithic, prompting many to reject it. Rather than reject the term "reproduction" almost in advance, it would seem to make more sense to construct its specific problematic from the diverse senses of the term, biological, technical, and political. From this reconstruction it is possible to expose the limits of the term, as well as its specific historicity. Marx argues that for the most part capital can leave reproduction to the "worker's drives for self-preservation and propagation." (CI 718/597) For Marx the reproduction of the biological existence of the worker is not examined as a process, but posited as a fact. It explains, poorly one might add, why the worker shows up for work. It does not answer the question as to why these same drives for self-preservation do not lead to revolt or insurrection. Moreover, Marx's treatment of reproduction, leaves the entire relation between reproductive labor, the work of care and housework, and productive labor, labor performed indirectly for capital, for the most part completely outside of Marx's analysis. Furthermore, by framing the biological reproduction of the working class as the brute confrontation of the worker's drive for self preservation and the capitalists drive for profits, it would appear that class struggle is an almost biological and a-historical struggle for survival. Thus, in considering the dynamic of capitalist reproduction, Marx lapses behind his critique of the supposed natural ground of need underlying classical political economy in the Grundrisse, and the recognition of the need and desire as a conflictual terrain, framed by the simultaneous demand of the capitalist mode of production to produce new needs and to reduce the cost of labor power in Capital. In these later points (covered in the previous chapters) Marx does not reduce history to the interaction of natural laws but recognizes that "nature" is thoroughly historical and "history" is thoroughly natural.This interrelation of nature and history as it relates to the reproduction of life is expounded in The German Ideology. The production of life, both of one's own in labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end…. Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is old as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a "history" independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may hold men together. In light of this assertion it becomes necessary to read against this biological ground of reproduction. Not in order to purge from Marx any reference to the biological dimension of reproduction, but to locate in this biological dimension not the simple and a-historical conflict of the needs of the working class versus the desires of the capitalist, but the historical transformation of biological existence—what we could call the "biopolitics of capitalism." Marx argues that one of the fundamental differences between the capitalist mode of production and pre-capitalist production is that in the former the conditions of reproduction are mediated by the commodity form and wage rather than directly provided. The capitalist does not feed or care for the worker, at least directly, as in the case of slavery, but provides the abstract conditions for reproduction in the form of a wage. Under formal subsumption, or generalized commodity production, one of the presuppositions of capitalist production is that the conditions for living can and ultimately must be bought in the form of commodities. Which is not to argue that there may not be some forms of pre-capitalist practices of reproduction (small gardens, homecooked meals, children cared for at home, etc.) but that the time constraints imposed by commodity production (the working day) as well as the availability of commodified substitutes work to diminish the role of these practices of reproduction in capital. The process of primitive accumulation "frees" the worker from any communal or hierarchical system that would provide for the conditions of existence, exposing him or her as "naked life" on the market. Of course this "freedom" is at best partial, if not wholly illusory. Since the wage makes possible a new hierarchy between wage work, male work, and the non-waged work of reproduction, female work. The wage and with it the commodity form become the general condition for life and existence. This means that the conditions of the reproduction of existence are subject to the economic constraints and demands imposed by the commodity form. Specifically, one of the ways to increase relative surplus is to make the costs of reproduction of labor, the basic necessities of life, cheaper, increasing the ratio of surplus labor to necessary labor. To be exposed to commodity production for the basic conditions of one's existence is to be ruthlessly exposed to the demand for cheaper commodities."That is a long citation, but like I said, I have been thinking about that book that I wrote twenty-years ago. Mau discusses the book briefly but mainly to criticize it for using the phrase "real subsumption of subjectivity by capital." I am not really interested in getting into that now. It was the early 2000s, Empire had just come out, subsumption was all the craze. It was a different time. I also used to listen to Radiohead and frequently wore a sweater vest over a t-shirt: the past is a foreign country. I am less attached to the idea of real subsumption as having explanatory power as a marker of periodization. It is a term that needs to be explained more than it explains. What I am more interested in is the way in which Marx presented his understanding of capitalism in terms of strict conceptual oppositions from what had come before it, contrasting personal and impersonal domination, unity versus separation, and the way that these conceptual distinctions are maintained and extended into the present in terms of inside and outside, ideology versus economy, and so on. It seems to me that those divisions, the divisions that Marx used to distinguish capital from pre-capitalism, and the divisions internal to Marxist theory increasingly fail us now in the current stage of "absolute capitalism" to use Balibar's phrase. Economic relations, such as selling labor power, are at once material, part of the capitalist relations of production, and ideological, part of its justification. Or, to perhaps repeat what I said above, mute compulsion is both a fact of existence and an ideological justification.
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Jeremy Gilbert and I sometimes joke about TOP, the Transindividual Oriented Philosophy. The reference is obviously to the phenomenon of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) in the early part of the millennium. As much as our joke has to do with sort of doctrinaire and polemical way the former arrived on the scene and our lack of interest in any such thing. (I should say in a parenthetical that is way too late, one of the things that always troubled me about OOO is that it emerged and thrived on blogs, but blogs with their intersection of the social and the technological seemed the last thing that the last thing that the crowd wanted to think about. Part of what makes me irredeemably a historical materialist is that I think the question of understanding where one is thinking from is paramount even if a bit quixotic--one can never see the ground that one speaks from). Despite this joke transindividuality, at least in terms of contemporary writers who use the concept, less a school of thought than a series of intersecting critiques and articulations. Or, if one wanted to be clever about it, the collection of writers who work on transindividuality are all part of a general orientation that is individuated differently in each of their specif philosophical articulations. I would say more about this but I feel like this is something that I tried to say with the examination of Balibar, Stiegler, and Virno in The Politics of Transindividuality.In that book I did not really discuss Bernard Aspe or Vittorio Morfino (at least at any length). However in the past month of so I have been reading a book by each of them that makes it clear how much they are part of the same metastable unity of philosophers. The books in question are Morfino's recently published Intersoggettività o Transindividualità: Materiali per un'alternativa (a book I was able to work through in Italian thanks to the generous help of Dave Messing who let me look at an early draft of the English translation) and Bernard Aspe's Les Fibres du Temps published in 2018. The two books are connected not just through their shared engagement with transindividuality, but in their use of the concept to overcome existing, perhaps even dominant, conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. However, both books do so in very distinct and different ways, with different methods and genealogies. Morfino book, like all of Morfino's work, is absolutely admirable in its scholarship and erudition. Or, more to the point, Morfino's talent is an ability to combine a radical provocation with scholarly erudition. Morfino has a remarkable ability for going deep into the philological connections of a text or problem, working out all of the intersections and implications. However these investigations never seem like purely scholarly pursuits; the tasks and problems of radical politics are always close to hand. The history of philosophy is examined for the ways in which it has led us to our particular historical moment, and what might be done if we thought and acted differently. As the title suggests Morfino's book on intersubjectivity or transindividuality deals with an opposition between two different ways of understanding social relations. However, this opposition is not a matter of simply picking a side. As Morfino argues, even as intersubjectivity has been the dominant way of conceiving of social relations it still has for the most part been an afterthought in a philosophical tradition that has started from the individual subject. The way that the individual subject has been figured, in terms of its interiority and subjectivity, has made it difficult to grasp its relations with others, or reduces it to the general problem of how the external world can be known. As Morfino points out, Descartes the philosopher who gave us the cogito, who claimed that he could know himself prior to knowing the world, is the same philosopher who wondered if the figures under hats and coats he saw out the window might be automatic machines. As Morfino reminds us Descartes can only resolve this problem through the same way that he resolves the problem of knowledge in general; how we know other people is no different than how we know the objects in the world. The development of interiority, which begins with Descartes, has as its corollary the creation of intersubjectivity as a perpetual problem. The subject's assertion of its own certainty posits other people and with them social relations as a perpetual afterthought. Morfino charts the emergence of the dominant history of interiority and intersubjectivity from Descartes through Leibniz and Hegel, while at the same time charting its alternative, transindividuality emerging through Spinoza, Marx, and Freud, to be developed further in Althusser, Goldmann, and Pêcheux. The first trajectory passes through the concepts of cogito, monad, and subject, creating a concept of identity, interiority, and teleology, while the second trajectory, that of transindividuality has a largely subterranean dimmension. Morfino's orientation with respect to all of these problems can be considered primarily Althusserian, not just because he is influenced by Althusser but because he takes on an Althusserian labor of reading. Just as Althusser saw his task as one of reading the Marxist philosophy between the lines of Marx's critique of political economy and the political interventions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, producing the concepts of overdetermination and structural causality, Morfino is able to excavate the concept or idea of transindividuality prior to its letter by consider the problem of relation in the history of philosophy.One of the more interesting interventions along these lines is his reading of the concept of Weschelwirking (interaction) in Marx and Engels. This concept is developed by Engels in his Anti-Dühring to complicate any linear or mechanical relation of cause and effect:....cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction [Weschelwirkung] in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.This understanding of the mutual intersection and interaction of effects and causes informs an understanding of the mode of production that is something other than the classical and mechanical action of a base on a superstructure. As Morfino cites a passage, which also appears in Althusser's "Contradiction and Overdetermination"The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction [Weschelwirkung] of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.As Morfino argues this concept of interaction is not often named as such by Marx, but in some sense it is at work in other names, or other concepts such as the interaction of production, distribution, and consumption that opens the 1857 introduction. Morfino's excavation of the concept culminates in his reading of Althusser's own articulation of the concept of transindividuality without the name. In Reading Capital Althusser posits that just as forces of production cannot be reduced to technology, relations of production cannot be reduced to intersubjectivity. As Althusser writes,"While the productive forces cannot be reduced to machines or quantifiable techniques, the relations of production cannot be reduced to relations between men alone, to human relations or intersubjectivity, as they are in the historicist ideology." Beyond this assertion Morfino traces as thought of transindividuality in the disagreement of Althusser and Lucien Goldmann. Goldmann did use the term transindividuality, but, as Morfino argues Goldmann in thinking the transindividual as the "relations of production" reduces it to a collective subject, to society as a subject, returning the concept to the subject and interiority it was meant to escape. Transindividual is not the genesis of the collective, but the interrelation, or interaction, of the constitution of the collective and the individual. As such, and this is the importance of the discussion of the concept of interaction in Engels and Marx, it is as much a rethinking of causality and of relations as it is a rethinking of subjectivity and individuality. Aspe's book is punctuated by discussion of films including ArrivalBut honestly this is here because I needed to break up the postBernard Aspe begins with the similar problem as Morfino's book, the priority of interiority over relation. For Aspe, however, this problem has less to do with a historical excavation than an assumed starting point. The orienting figures of our thought are that of an interiority accessible only to us, and the interiority of the other, unknown to us and only accessible indirectly. Any connection, any relation other than a kind of analogy, in which I know the other by comparing them to myself is excluded. It is precisely this excluded space that Aspe sets himself to explore, an examination of the space of subjectivation, "such a space is constituted by a play of interiorities and of relative exteriority, which do not correspond to the play of opposition between the interiority of the individual and the exteriority of the world of the other." Aspe's formulation of subjectivation is explicitly drawn from Simondon. (of the two books under consideration his book is more Simondonian in its concept of transindividuality while Morfino's is more Althusser/Balibarian). For Simondon the subject has to be thought as the relation between the individual and its preindividual relations that constitute the common. As Aspe puts it, "a collective is constituted by the laws that put in common the potentials carried by each, and thus, by the formation of new system..given its own proper energy." Or, to put it more directly "the group is capable of acting in the world because they already act on each other." The common space of our collective and individual individuation is time. Time, or a particular relation of temporality is both the constitution of individual and collectivity. This demands a discussion of the way in which time, temporality is both the site of our individuation, our specific memories, and our shared belonging. This is true even if we do not remember what constitutes our identity and cannot situate our place ourselves in what constitutes our commonality. As Aspe writes, "The fiber of time, it is the relation between an irreparable loss and a unlocalizable persistence. Common memory, itself without support, comes in the places of this absent space, where it inscribes memory."Aspe investigates common time by two different trajectories, first through a consideration of film. His book is punctuated by a series of inserts dedicated to films from Gaslight to Arrival. As he argues film gives us direct access to the common memory. Film is in some sense the object of a common memory, becoming part of shared references, it is also in some sense, for a limited time, a temporal object, in which the viewers experience the same images, ideas, and associations. Of course all of this is forgotten when people leave the theater (or shut their laptops), despite this loss film often documents the unlocalizable persistence of a historical moment. As Aspe writes, "The "new" American cinema (Aronofsky, Nolan, Anderson, but also for the intermediate generation, Cameron…) is not always convincing, but this is no doubt due to the bias that makes it special, according to which it is only by relying on déjà vu that we can produce new images. The situations that cinema takes for its point of view are willingly "archetypical."The archetypes can be found through a return to an American mythology (the heroic entrepreneur and radical individual of Anderson's There Will Be Blood), to the unconscious (the double as product of relation and the devouring other in Black Swan, another film of Aronofsky), to popular imaginary (super heroes)."Aside from the odd appellation of "new" American cinema, it is unclear if this diagnosis is as much about the individual aesthetics of the different directors than it is about a general trajectory in the production and marketing of film in which the past is seen as a reservoir of images to be mined for new films. One might say, following this remark, that the current stage of production in the age of intellectual property in which even the most forgettable movies, shows, and comic books from from the past are remade, (Watchmen, Night Court, Morbius), might not be some horrible deviation from our historical moment, but its most accurate reflection. We are living in a remake in which the conflicts of the past generations are relived and nostalgia for the immediate past has replaced hope for the future. Which brings us to the second consideration of common time, that of capital as the standardization of time. Aspe goes over the arguments of E.P. Thompson and Foucault on the standardization of time, adding to this discussion the point that all conflicts over labor take place within the standardization of time. Aside from Simondon, Aspe draws from an eclectic group of thinkers, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kierkegaard, but perhaps the most surprising is Mario Tronti who often figures in such formulations as this, in which the antagonism, the opposition, between worker and capital is understood to be central, and accepting standardized time as the terrain of conflict, fighting over more work or less, is to fight on the terrain of capital. Capital can be understood as a standardization of time, space, and culture, in order to constantly expand. However, Aspe also draws from ecological thinkers such as Jason Moore and Dipesh Chakrabarty to argue that capitals exploitation of cheap nature, its treatment of everything into an externality, means that this standardization takes place against a globe that becomes more and more chaotic. Our common time is one of both unprecedented standardization and chaos.Morfino and Aspe's books represent two fundamentally different approaches to the transindividual, one historical the other critical, one ontological and the other phenomenological. At some point it might be necessary to work out the divisions between these two ways of looking at things, team transindividual will individuate and oppose itself in terms of Balibar Transindividualists, Simondon Transindividualists, etc., However, given the predominance of individuality, interiority, and intersubjectivity over our thought and practice, I am more inclined to let a thousand flowers bloom, exploring just what happens when one tries to think outside the individual, to think social relations beyond intersubjectivity.
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Pınar Bilgin on Non-Western IR, Hybridity, and the One-Toothed Monster called Civilization
Questions of civilization underpin much of IR scholarship—whether explicitly (in terms of the construction of non-Western 'others') or implicitly (in the assumption that provincial institutions from Europe constitute a universal model of how we ought to relate to one another in international politics). While this topic surfaces frequently in debates about postcolonial international politics, few scholars are able to tackle this conundrum with the same sense of acuteness as Pınar Bilgin. In this Talk, she—amongst others—elaborates on not doing Turkish IR, what postsecular IR comprises, and discusses her own position in regards to that one-toothed monster called civilization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
What I think is the biggest challenge in current IR is not so much a debate, but the difficulty for students of IR to come up with ways of making sense of the world in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities and others' contributions and contestations. International Relations as we know it at the moment and as offered in the standard textbooks, portrays a world that they really don't recognize as the world that they live in. And I should point out that I am not just speaking of Non-Western experiences and sensibilities—there is in any case a growing body of literature on Non-Western IR, and you have spoken to Amitav Acharya (Theory Talk #42), Siba Grovogui (Theory Talk #57) and others—but I am also referring to all those perspectives in which international knowledge are presented and which the textbooks do not usually reflect, including feminist perspectives for instance (such as Ann Tickner, Theory Talk #54), or perspectives from the Global South some of which actually fall into the definition of 'the West'. So when I speak of ways of making sense of the world in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities, I am referring to the agenda of Critical Theory of IR. I do think we have come a long way since the early 1990s when I was a student of IR and Critical Theory was beginning to make its mark then, but we still have a long way to go. For instance, critical approaches to security have come a long way in terms of considering insecurities of specific social groups that mainstream approaches overlook, but it has a long way to go still in terms of actually incorporating insecurities as viewed by those people, instead of just explaining them away.
As for the principal debate in IR, the debate that goes on in my mind is how to study IR in a way that appreciates different experiences and sensibilities and acknowledges other contributions as well as contestations. This is not the principal debate in the field, but the field that comes closest is the one that I try and contribute to, and that is the field of non-Western approaches to IR. It is not exactly a debate, of course, in the sense that the very mainstream Western approaches that it targets are not paying any attention. So it's the critics themselves who have their disagreements, and on the one hand there are those who point to other ways of thinking about the international, Stephen Chan comes to mind as the producer of one of the early examples of that. I can think of Robbie Shilliam's more recent book on the subject, thinking about the international from non-Western perspectives. On the other hand are those who survey IR in different parts of the world, to see how it is done, what their concerns and debates are. Ole Waever, Arlene Tickner and David Blaney's three-volume series 'Worlding Beyond the West' contains materials from both these directions.
My own approach is slightly different in that while acknowledging the limits of our approaches to IR as any critical IR person would, I don't necessarily think that turning to others' 'authentic' perspectives to look for different ways of thinking about the international is the way forward for students of IR. That brings me to back the way I set up the challenge to IR today: it is about incorporating others' perspectives, as well as acknowledging their contributions and contestations. I think I would like to take a more historical approach to this. It's not just about contemporary differences—studies on these are very valuable and I learn a lot from them—but what I've also found very valuable are connections: how much give and take has already taken place over the years, how for instance the roots of human rights can be found in multiple places in our history and in different parts of the world, how the Human Rights Convention was penned by multiple actors, how human rights norms don't go deep enough and how calls for deepening them have in fact emerged from different parts of the world, not just the West. So these contributions can actually point to our history and to different perspectives across the globe, but these are often referred to as non-Western IR, whereas they're actually pointing to our conversations, our communication, the give and take between us. That is what I am mainly interested in at the moment: the multiple authorship of ideas, and pointing to them you actually face the biggest challenge. It builds on Edward Said's legacy, so it's a critical IR project, the way I see it: Said built on multiple beginnings and engaged in contrapuntal reading. I should add that when I am talking about 'sensibilities', I am not necessarily talking about it with reference to other parts of the world, although it may seem this way. The more reflexive approaches to IR have taught us that we are all shaped by and all respond to our contexts—in one way or another.
One interesting result of Arlene Tickner's and Ole Waever's book, International Relations Scholarship around the World, was that IR in different parts of the world is not in fact that different: it is still state-centric, it talks about security in the way that most mainstream textbooks would talk about it, and IR courses are structured in such a way that you would be able to recognize in most parts of the world. Such surveys, therefore, tell us that IR works quite similarly in other parts of the world. Hence the need to look for difference in alternative sources and the need to look beyond IR—towards anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc.—there is growing interest in conceptions of the international beyond what IR allows us. This is not confined to looking beyond the West, but is equally emerging in Western scholarship: there is now emerging literature on postsecularism and IR, and bringing religion back into the study of IR. However, I am not so much interested in studying differences (without underestimating the significance of such studies) but studying to our conversations, our communication, the give and take between us.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
My journey to this point has been through critical security studies. I studied international relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara and did a Master's Degree Bilkent University in Ankara where I currently work. I was not entirely comfortable with IR as an undergraduate student, thought I could not quite put my finger on the reason why—though I was able to make sense of during my later studies. At the undergraduate level, I received an interdisciplinary training, not so much by design but rather by accident: I picked courses on political theory, economic history and political anthropology, simply because our curriculum allowed such a design. I was lucky to have interesting people teaching interesting courses. And again by sheer coincidence we had a visiting professor who introduced me to philosophy of science and the work of Thomas Kuhn and I began to question the standard IR training I had been receiving. So then I went on to an MA degree at Bilkent University which became consequential for me in two ways: for one, that University has the best IR library in Turkey, so there are no limits to what you can learn even when you are left to your own devices, and secondly, Hollis and Smith's Explaining and Understanding International Relations (1991) was on our reading list. So when I began reading that against the background of Thomas Kuhn, I began to make sense of IR in a very different way. Mind you, I was still not able to see my future in IR at that time.
Then I began writing my MA dissertation and was also working at Turkey's then very powerful semi-military institution the MGK, the National Security Council, at the General Secretariat: I was hired as a junior researcher and lasted for about four-and-a-half months, and then I went abroad for further studies, but those months were what set me on my path to Critical Security Studies. Working there, I began to appreciate the need for reflexivity, and the difficult role of the researcher, and the relationship between theory and practice. At that point I received a Chevening scholarship from the British Council, and the condition attached was that I could not use it towards PhD studies but had to use it for a one-year degree. I decided to study something that I could not study at home, and came across Ken Booth's work ('Security and Emancipation,' 1991) and knew of course Barry Buzan's oeuvre (Theory Talk #35), and found that Aberystwyth University offered a one-year degree in Strategic Studies, which is what I decided to do. That happened to be the first year they offered an Master's degree in Critical Security Studies, and I became one of the first five students to take that course, taught jointly by Ken Booth, Richard Wyn Jones and Nicholas Wheeler. Together with Steve Smith, who was Head of Department at the time, they were committed to giving us an excellent education, so it was a great place to be and I stayed on to do my PhD there as well. It's a small Welsh town with only 13,000 people and the University has about the same number of students. During that time I read important examples of critical IR scholarship, as well as the newly emerging literature on Security Studies, and it was around that time that Michael Williams (Theory Talk #39) joined the Department and he was a great influence on my work, as was of course my dissertation advisor Ken Booth: I learned a lot from him in terms of substance and style.
After receiving my PhD in the year 2000 I joined the IR department at Bilkent University as the only critical theorist there. Bilkent was at the time one of the few universities in Turkey committed to excellence in research—now there are more—and that allowed me the academic freedom to pursue my research interests in Critical Security Studies: I was able to focus on my work without having to spread out into other fields. It helped that I became part of research networks as well: I've already mentioned Arlene Tickner's and Ole Waever's work, their project on geocultural epistemologies in IR and 'Worlding beyong the West'. Ole Waever invited me to join, thus opening up my second research agenda since my PhD, enriched by workshops and conversations with scholars in the group. It is not far removed from my core work, but it is an added dimension. And this helped me over time to overcome my earlier doubts about IR, for I began to see just how multidisciplinary it was. It was only through Critical IR that I learned how parallel perspectives in other disciplines, and alternative ideas could be brought to bear on IR—something you also find nowadays in international political sociology or different aspects of anthropology in constructivism.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
In terms of skills, I think that studying at different institutions if possible, different settings with different academic traditions helps a lot. Institutions vary widely in their emphasis—Bilkent for instance believes that the best teachers are those who do cutting-edge research. Others may disagree and say that small teaching colleges are the best, because they pass on what they specialise in. I think therefore that studying at different institutions is very good for students, whether it be within formal exchange frameworks or acquiring fellowships for study away, not to mention of course fieldwork, which offers new settings: every new environment is an important learning experience, even if the substance is not so useful and what you learn is not necessarily so significant. Secondly, some would suggest learning a different language is important, along with acquiring a foothold in area studies and comparative studies, and I agree with that. Thirdly, Stefano Guzzini talks about IR theory being what a student needs in terms of disposition and skills: he has this piece in the Journal of International Relations and Development (2001), where he makes the case specifically for would-be diplomats in Central and Eastern European countries that by learning theory, students would be equipped to communicate across cultural boundaries—it's like learning a new language. They would learn to watch out against ethnocentrism, he argues, and this is one of the pieces I use when I teach IR theory. In this spirit, I think it important to use theory as a new language, as one of the tools that every student should have in their toolkit. And finally, I think I'd follow Cynthia Enloe's (Theory Talk #48) recommendation that it's useful to have a foot both in IR theory and in comparative studies. I feel that one without the other is less rewarding, though one will not know what one is missing until one goes to explore.
In my PhD work I focused on the Middle East, since then I have looked more in depth at Europe's relationship with the Euro-Mediterranean relations and Turkey-EU relations as empirical points of reference. This has been enriching and has benefited my research. In sum, it is essential to read as broadly as possible, and I give the same advice to my M.A. and to my PhD students. You can't read everything, and it can happen that the more we read the more confused we get, but in this Theory Talks is doing a great job by allowing students to learn from the experience of others. Learning happens also at conferences: you may find subjects that are of no interest to you, but that is helpful also, and on the other hand new subjects will broaden horizons. The wealth of cultural references in each part of the world can be baffling and may make it difficult to delve deep. The only way we make sense of the unknown through what we know.
What regional or perhaps even global protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Turkey? Turkey is often perceived to bridge Europe and the Middle East, Europe and Asia, but we have the problem that Asia itself is a Western idea, then a 'bridge' is in danger of belonging to neither.
As I made clear in what I said above, I don't think of IR in terms of contributions emerging from this part of the world or that part of the world. And although I grew up in Turkey and began my academic career there, I don't consider my own work to be in any way a 'Turkish perspective' on IR. What can be said to be Turkish about my perspective is that I have to travel to Aberystwyth and Copenhagen and all those ISA conference locations to discover that I can have (and some say I should) have a Turkish perspective. My undergraduate education was about learning IR as a 'universally undisputed'. I now know the limitations of that universalism, but I cannot offer a specifically located perspective, for it is a complicated picture that emerges in front of us. I am not in favour of replacing one parochialism with another one, in terms of those who speak of X School of IR versus Y School of IR.
Having said that, I consider that my contribution as being comfortable with what Orhan Pamuk has called the 'in-between world', though I prefer to use the term 'hybridity', not in-between-ness. That Turkish policy-makers have always claimed a bridge status for their country, but these ideas are rooted in Turkey's hybridity and belonging to multiple worlds (as opposed to being in between multiple worlds). Policy-makers can talk about being a bridge between Europe and Asia, or Europe and the Middle East, because Turkey in fact belongs to all these worlds. So in some ways being at ease with this hybridity does allow me to have a particular perspective in IR that I may not have had if I had come from a different background. But then again, it's difficult to know. I have taken courses in political anthropology, learning about the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey as an imagined community, but all my introductions to geocultural studies and epistemology came from Critical IR settings, so looking for geographically or culturally specific roots simply doesn't work. As Said put it, it is 'beginnings' that we should be looking for, not 'origins.'
When Europeans and North Americans speak of 'state building' and 'development', Turkey is often taken as a model example of conversion to Western models—largely by its own choice. Should Turkey's path and modern reality be understood differently?
I am not comfortable with the word 'model', but 'example' may be a preferable term. So what is Turkey an example of? That has become a particular research question for me and I have written on this—Turkey's choice to locate itself in the West and what that means. Turkey is interesting for having decided to locate itself in the West, and this is where language and culture come in the picture. More often than not, the literature tends to assume that elites in places like Turkey would make the decision to adopt the 'Western model', and the rationale for adopting that model is not questioned, but instead taken to be 'obvious' from development theory and its teleological outlook: 'it just happened'. It is those that do not adopt the dominant model, those that decide against Westernization, that need explaining. Perhaps I would not have asked myself that question, had I not—and here my biography comes into the picture—been puzzled by references to 'civilization' in Turkish texts. If you look into Turkish literature or historical documents you will find references to 'civilization' everywhere—the national anthem refers to civilization as a 'one-toothed monster called civilization'. As a young student, I just couldn't make sense of this and wondered why is everyone talking about civilization and why is it a good and a difficult thing at the same time?
I began to make sense of this as I was researching Turkey's choices about secularism in the late 19th and early 20th century, and was looking at some of those documents once again, but this time with insights provided by postcolonial IR. The language commonly used was 'joining' the West, and secularisation was a part of the package, but it was not necessarily a question of mere emulation but search for security, being a part of the 'international society'. These were not easy decisions, so here I look at Turkey's choice to locate itself in the West within the security context. There was a notion of a 'standard of civilization' in Europe and the West more broadly which others were expected to 'live up to', and this gives you some sense of the ubiquity of the references to civilization in the discourses of Turkish policy makers at the time. I am not suggesting that this is the whole answer, and I do not reject distinct answers, but I do think it helps understand Turkey's decision to locate itself in the West in the early 20th century. So this is where my security aspects of my work and Critical IR together. My starting point is to identify the ubiquity of one notion and then locate that within critical IR theory. Turkey becomes an example of postcolonial insecurities. Though never having been colonized it nonetheless exhibits those 'postcolonial anxieties' in Sankaran Krishna's words.
I am keenly aware of the reality that even when we as academics are doing our most theoretical and abstract work, we are never removed from the roles of the 'real world', for we are teachers at the same time: by the time we put our ideas to paper we have already disseminated them through our teaching. Some of us are more committed to teaching than others, of course, but some critical theorists see the most important part of their job as being good educators and training the new generation, as opposed to being more public intellectuals and writing op-ed pieces and talking to bigger audiences. We are therefore never far removed from the world of practice and from disseminating our ideas about security and international relations, because we are teachers, and some of our students will go on to work in the real world institutions, like government or the media.
Beyond that, there is a growing vitality in the literature on the privatisation of security: on private armies and how security is being privatised and fielded out to professionals. The new literature that is emerging on this is more and more interesting, I am thinking for instance of Anna Leander's work here: she talks about privatization of security not only in terms of the involvement of private professionals going off to do what government or other actors tell them to do, but also in terms of the setting up of security agendas and shaping security, determining what threats are, and determining what risks are and quite literally how we should be leading our lives. In this sense theory and critical security studies have become very real for all of us, because no one group of people owns the definitions.
Currently I am working on a manuscript that brings together two of my research interests, conceptions of the international beyond the West and Critical Security Studies. I use the case of Turkey for purposes of illustration but also for insight. I am trying to think of ways of studying security that are attentive to the periphery's conceptions of the international as a source of (non-material) insecurity.
Pınar Bilgin is the author of Regional Security in the Middle East: a Critical Perspective (Routledge, 2005) and over 50 papers. She is an Associate Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. She received the Young Scientists Incentive Award of the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK) in 2009 and 'Young Scientist' (GEBIP) award of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA, 2008). She served as the President of Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA), and chair of International Political Sociology Section of ISA. She is a Member of the Steering Committee of Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) and an Associate Editor of International Political Sociology.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Bilkent University Read Bilgin's Thinking Past 'Western' IR? (2008) here (pdf) Read Bilgin's A Return to 'Civilisational Geopolitics' in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images of the European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era (2004) here (pdf) Read Bilgin's Whose 'Middle East'? Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security (2004) here (pdf) Read Bilgin's and A.D. Morton's Historicising representations of 'Failed States': beyong the cold-war annexation of the social sciences? (2002) here (pdf)
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I am not sure that the past month's headaches and insomnia are due to the challenges of thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I am going to use that as my intro to this effort to think through this stuff.Usual caveats apply: I am not a political theorist or moral philosopher, I am not an expert on the conflict itself. Oh, and I was raised Jewish and the education I got at Hebrew school did not adequately present the realities of the past. I did take one Mideast politics course in college, and I did spend one week on an amazing and amazingly depressing tour of Israel and Palestine with a bunch of other academics four years ago.One of the conversations that disturbed me most this past week was when a rabbi I met on that trip responded to my criticisms of Israel's attack upon the hospital. He asked what is the right way to attack a group using a hospital as a shield (and as a trap), and my answer was simplistic: don't. I get that he and some of my relatives feel as if there are unfair standards being applied to Israel. And I absolutely get that anti-semitism is on the rise in the US, Canada, and Europe, although I wonder how much of this pro-Palestinian and how much of this opportunist far right folks using this moment (something to discuss another day). But Israel is fucking up in a major way here, and I want to think through why I think that, and why it is legitimate to criticize Israel at this moment of crisis. Oh, and one more caveat: Hamas is more evil. It is bad to target the civilians of the adversary, but it is even worse to deliberately endanger one's own civilians. Netanyahu has indirectly engaged Israelis by empowering Hamas and by diverting troops to protect expansionist (irredentist!) settlers, leaving communities close to Gaza essentially unguarded. So, even as I criticize Israel, I am not apologizing for or supporting Hamas. I want Hamas to be defeated, but in the right way. More on that below.So, I am starting with first principles:Everyone is deserving of self-determination: Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Taiwanese (oops), Quebecois, etc. Violence is bad, so it should only be used proportionately.Just because someone did something in the past, such as mass bombing of cities, does not legitimate folks using the same strategy today. The bible speaks of laws of war that we generally find abhorrent--there has been progress in our moral stances and also in our strategic understanding. The best way to provide people with self-determination is democracy. It is better, in my humble opinion, that infinite secession where every group has its own state, because the act of secession or partition will probably increase the grievances of some groups that are left behind. Quebec's separatism had a very small burst of violence largely because Quebecois could and did exert power via voting to get damn near everything they wanted. Not everything, but all the stuff that might have been worth fighting for.One state from sea to river with all Palestinians and all Jews sharing one state with heaps of religious and other rights .... would be cool, but, well, Jews want a Jewish state since bad things have happened in democracies where other groups have more votes. Alternatively, a single state where Jews have rights and Palestinians don't is inherently problematic and wrong--the apartheid label feels icky but when you run a massive open-air prison with no end in sight, it is hard to think of it in any other way. I have believed for quite some time that Israeli Jews faced a choice--Israel could remain a theocratic state or it remain a democracy, but not both. Some of my relatives have said that the Arab countries should welcome the Palestinians. The thing is: the Palestinians think they are a people, the Arab countries think the Palestinians are a people, and since nationalism is intersubjective, Jews can't wish away Palestinian identity. However, Netanyahu can use the Israeli military to destroy many symbols that resonate with Palestinian identity, and that gets us to the g word.Threatening a second nabka, which would expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories would be ethnic cleansing. If the Palestinians were to win and push the Jews out, that too would be ethnic cleansing. And it would not be legitimate even if one considers all Jews to be settlers-colonizers. We can't unwind history with heaps of bloodshed and call it justice. Anyhow, I try to avoid using the word genocide because it is very fraught. In the past, did Canadians practice genocide against its Indigenous peoples. Yeah. Now? I'd say no, as state policies are not aimed at reducing or eliminating these peoples, even if bad policies continue and are harmful. But I can see why some folks may argue this and I probably need more info to take a clearer stance.Is Israel engaged in genocide right now? It is using lots of violence to reduce the population of Palestinians in Gaza. It is not proportionate, and it is not well aimed at achieving military objectives, two of the requirements for the just use of force. Israel is making Gaza uninhabitable. While Israel has not been all that strategic/deliberate--this is mostly about revenge since 10/7--the way force has been used is suggestive--to solve the Gaza problem by getting rid of the residents. That has some echoes, doesn't it?So, the hospital: Hamas had some stuff based at the hospital? Does that make it either a legitimate (morally speaking) or sound (strategically speaking) target? No. Most of the folks at the hospital had limited agency--they neither voted for Hamas nor had power to remove Hamas, nor much ability to leave. So, one should not target many vulnerable civilians if the aim is to kill a few Palestinian leaders. With that specific campaign over, we are learning that the Israelis never had the best intelligence about the threat posed by those in the hospital, which is now a trend--Israeli intelligence failure. Would it be legitimate and smart to hit the hospital if it had a ticking weapon of mass destruction? Sure. Anything short of that? Not so much. The Hamas use of human shields is ... a TRAP! And the Israelis walked right into it. War is, as they say, politics by other means, and so the Israelis lost big time on the world stage by attacking a hospital Their strategic communications about all of this has been awful. International support matters for both sides, and Israel surrendered whatever moral authority and international support it gained on October 7th, much like the US gave up all of the goodwill from 9/11 by attacking Iraq. Jews are upset because Hamas is not getting as much criticism, and that is for a few reasons. One is that countries are siding with the Arab world due to strategy or convenience or cheap oil or whatever. Another is that Hamas being evil is baked in. It has been held to a lower standard because it is a terrorist group. Palestinians in Europe and North America support Hamas and cheer on Israeli defeats, including, alas, the attacks on kids. Jews in Israel and elsewhere are cheering on violence against Palestinians. Both are wrong--both because the people of both sides deserve human dignity and because the attacks are not going to achieve anything. We hold Israel to a higher standard because it is a democracy and it is the more powerful side, which means, yes, it has more responsibility.One of the ingredients of just war is whether an attack is actually going to accomplish something. If you repeatedly use violence with little expectation of changing the situation, that is morally problematic--revenge, for instance, is not a legitimate justification for the use of violence. If some violence can avert more violence and end a conflict, then it is more just (and more sound from a tactical or strategic standpoint). Ukraine has a morally superior position for continuing the war because Russia has abused those who have been on their side of the lines. Violence, targeted at Russian troops and Russian military assets, is legitimate and also strategically sound. Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals and other civilian locations is not. And no, I am not saying Russia and Israel are morally equivalent... but I am saying that Israel's actions are positioning Israel closer to Russia. And who would want that? During the insurgencies of the 2000's, scholars and American military folks came to the same conclusion, more or less: that the best way to win (or at least not lose) a counter-insurgency effort is to minimize civilian casualties. These casualties would undermine the war effort--not just by creating more insurgents--the family and friends of those killed-but also by undermining the legitimacy of the Irag and Afghan governments. So, a policy of "courageous restraint" was enunciated, although I am not sure how well it was observed. The basic idea is that if you want to attack a certain military leader or target, and there are a bunch of kids or other non-combatants present, you wait for a better time. Indeed, our rules of engagement for air attacks often lead to hitting targets at night when buildings are not as occupied.The point here is that there are ways to deal with a hospital that may have some "bad guys" in it. Leveling it is not one of them. Which leads to the question of a cease-fire. I don't always support cease-fires (I am clearly not a pacifist), as it make give one side a big advantage. In the case of Russia-Ukraine, a ceasefire with Russia on Ukrainian land would be bad because it would allow Russian to continue to abuse the Ukrainians and it would potentially create a semi-frozen conflict that limits Ukraine's ability to free its territory and enable Russia to fuck with Ukraine in a variety of ways. In this case? I think with so many civilians in harm's way, and with a cease-fire perhaps giving time for Israelis to think about what they are doing (like following Netanyahu), it might lead to a better, more humane outcome. Would Hamas benefit from a cease-fire? Probably, but so would Israel. This all has avoided the big questions: what should Israel's objectives be? Because you can't have a strategy unless you know what the goal is. If the objective is a one-state Israel with the occupied territories full of folks having no rights and no access to power, then buckle up for unending conflict. Eradicating Hamas should not be an end to itself because removing one organization from the territories will not change the fundamental challenge of two peoples living in this area between river and sea. Removing the Palestinians from Gaza might be the objective now, and, if so, that is horrifying.Until October 7th, Israel focused on tactics to perpetuate the status quo: deterrence by punishment. Or to put in pop culture terms, the strategy that Sean Connery told Kevin Costner in the Untouchables: they came with a knife, you come with a gun. They send your guy to the hospital, you send their guy to the morgue. I will always remember a conversation I had with a retired Israeli special ops general while our group was at the Golan Heights. He was being critical of Obama for not hitting harder than the US got hit by various attacks. That Israel's tactic was always to escalate a bit, to hit harder than have been hit. And I basically asked: how has that worked to end the threat to Israel and stop the violence. Maybe it was kind of working for Israel, but that ended on October 7th, when Hamas decided it was not just willing to take Israel's punishment for an attack that was far more aggressive and damaging to Israelis than previous ones, but actually eager for that punishment. Deterrence only works if the costs of punishment are both credible and greater than the costs of the status quo. To Hamas, they apparently felt the Abraham Accords and other moves were more threatening than getting shellacked by Israel. Maybe their own domestic political game needed as much distraction as Netanyahu did/has. Anyhow, it was a limited strategy since it was mostly kicking the can down the road and had episodes of violence priced in. It may still be working with Hezbollah, but mostly because Hezbollah is in no shape to get into a war with Israel with Lebanon being such a mess (I am guessing here). But the days of deterring Hamas are gone, so what now?Eradicating Hamas? Not so easy. Israel should be doing cost/benefit calculations of the various ways to attack Hamas, which would, yes, mean not attacking hospitals. I think Israel's old strategy was and is the best option: after the Munich Olympics, Israel went out and targeted each person responsible for that attack and, as far as I recall, killed most of them. Israel can do the same here with Hamas's leadership--they might miss a few, but better to miss a few awful Hamas leaders than to kill a lot of civilians. This, of course, requires patience, which Netanyahu does not and cannot have, given the precarity of his political position.And this gets to the one of the key problems: Israelis have voted for various far right parties that have trapped Israel into more and more dangerous paths. Making Israel more theocratic may be good for the Orthodox, but it is bad for the economy and for the political system. Destroying the possibility of a two-state solution not only angers Palestinians but reduces bargaining options and exit strategies. Putting corrupt, awful Netanyahu back into power again and again undermines Israel's democracy, its legitimacy, its military, and its security. And ultimately its future.I am so angry and frustrated not because this is a hard situation, but because it didn't have to be this bad, it didn't have to be this way. Netanyahu and the parties backing him have made things worse. My anger towards Hamas is baked in--never democratic, always autocratic, always determined to wipe Israel from the map. I never had any hope for that organization. I had some hope for the Palestinian Authority until I visited Israel and got a better understanding of its limits. But I had some hope that Israel would see the trap so visibly set in front of it and not hop into it so enthusiastically. It is hard to kill one's way through a counter-insurgency, it is both wrong and counter-productive to kill so many civilians along the way. As a scholar who used to study ethnic conflict, I understand that it is hard to end these kinds of disputes. But I also understand that conflicts end, that violence is not inevitable--that it is a choice. And as a scholar of civil-military relations, I am so glad I never studied Israel.I am not sure if any of this is coherent, but I am just trying to think through this situation. Do I feel any better now that I have spewed my thoughts here? Not really.
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Kimberly Hutchings on Quiet as a Research Strategy, the Essence of Critique, and the Narcissism of Minor Differences
As a job, International Relations requires carving out one's position by being vocal. Being vocal entails making oneself heard, forwarding identifiable 'contributions'. But what if the biggest contribution one might make would actually consist of quieting down?
In a provocative and wide-ranging Talk, Kimberly Hutchings—amongst others—challenges us to take postcolonialism seriously as an invitation to hush, and provides compelling suggestions as to what critique means in a time of proliferating criticality.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
In my view, the main challenge for IR right now is to deal with postcolonialism and decoloniality, which would entail a kind of decentering of the standpoint of judgment within the study of international politics. Essentially, we should move away from the kind of common-sense starting points of Western theory, Western history and all the rest of it. To be sure, this does not necessarily mean disregarding them. Instead, we should avoid always seeing them as the authoritative, and find a way to keep them at a distance in order to make space for the inclusion of other voices. Practicing this inclusion, answering 'what would you do about it', or 'where do you stand' I find more difficult; I have discussed questions of decoloniality and postcolonialism with my colleagues and we all find it very tough to do something different or to suggest alternatives. Especially since we are—or at least I am—educated and structured within a particular (eg. Western) realm of understanding. Because it is so difficult for 'us' to do so, our starting point should therefore exactly be to start from the empirical and theoretical engagement of the political actors on the periphery. By doing so we can begin to decenter our work and the debates. There is an enormous amount of really brilliant decolonial and postcolonial work our there. Here, I think the work of people like Arlene Tickner has been great in attempting to do carve out this space. This goes to prove that scholars are suggesting alternative ways and that it can be done differently.
So perhaps paradoxically, I would summarize my central contribution as a hush—scholars like I have to dampen down our voices in order to allow other voices to be heard. Keeping this is mind can prove to be a really important lesson for theorists. At least I attempt to do so within my particular subfields of theory.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
During my route through academia I have been inspired by a number of theorists, books and historical events and I continue to be. However, there are two or three specific points of inspiration that I can draw out; some more philosophical or theoretical ones and others almost accidental to how my thinking has progressed.
Largely, I have arrived at where I am today because I started my PhD on the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. This has set up certain parameters for my way of thinking; for thinking about ethics and about critique, and this has influenced my way of thinking and ultimately my work ever since. Another factor was my time as a young scholar working at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic where I met Steve Gill. He suggested I attended the BISA conference to present a paper on war in relation to Kant and Hegel. He knew this was my field of interest and in the end I accepted. The first panel I attended was okay, though only two people participated. The second panel was far more interesting and featured amongst others Rob Walker. Walker talked about bringing Foucault's insights and ideas about critique to bear on thinking about international politics. This made me realize that my purely philosophical way of thinking in relation to Kantian critique and the problems of Kantian critique were already being worked through within the domain of International Relations as a field of study. It spurred my initial interest as I came to think of IR as a kind of case study of applied political philosophy more generally. In some ways, you could say that the questions I was asking from a political philosophy perspective were being addressed more progressively in IR. Certainly, I caught on to IR when they were being very consciously addressed. The timing and shift in IR spoke directly to me and, in my view, pushed me to think about questions of judgment and argument shifts. Here, one should attempt to genuinely relate to an international or global frame of reference rather that simply taking for granted a kind of methodological nationalism, which, I suspect, up till then had been. In this sense IR pushed my thinking.
It is interesting how it often is the texts you read early on that shape you as a scholar. To me it was the texts I read in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when critical IR was really getting off the ground, which were formative for me. Initially, it has been Kant's political thought and Hegel's philosophy of rights. Additionally, there has been a range of theorists within critical writing; retrospectively the work of Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism in particular. Moreover, Foucault has also been essential to my work; particularly Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality have been really crucial in terms of me looking at a kind of 'fate of critique', if you like, in Western thought in the 20th century. Within IR Andrew Linklater's work is really important, especially his book on Men and Citizens, and afterwards his postcolonial community book from the late 1990s. They are important as a sort of interlocutors, which I in fact reacting against, because I saw them as carrying through this very Habermasian line of thought, with which I did not agree. Obviously also the work of feminists scholars amongst others Cynthia Enloe (TheoryTalk #48) and Christine Sylvester, whose books were very important to me. Again, they enabled me to widen my scope and see how broader themes of feminist philosophy were being addressed in IR.
What would a student need to become a specialist in International Relations or understand the world in a global way?
In order to become a specialist in IR a student's main qualities should be intellectual curiosity, openness, and willingness to engage with ideas. However, it is importing not to insist on 'you must know your Foucault backwards' or 'you must know your Hegel backwards'. To me this is not essential; instead, the focus should be on one's interests and curiosity, and to locate yourself in terms of where you are 'thinking from'. In this way, you are able to relate your ideas and arguments to a specific problematique—perhaps one concerning the political contexts you derived from yourself, and maybe because of the particular intellectual trajectory that you have taken.
Then again, knowing your classic theorists as Foucault and Hegel is definitely beneficial when engaging with IR. When I entered the field of IR, it meant I was already loaded with a set of intellectual parameters, interests and political commitments. Ultimately, this enabled my participation and outcome of conversations with different trajectories within IR. Therefore, what are most important to me are intellectual curiosity, openness, willingness to listen, and a sense of where you are coming from to the conversation. Yet, the great thing about IR is that you do not have to be trained in IR, in any straightforward way. In my view IR is a cross-disciplinary field, where many disciplines and arguments merge; students from law, political science, sociology, who all can have lots to say to IR, and IR can in return have lots to say to you.
The key to combining academia with your own starting point lies to me in education; if you get a good education, there should be space for the individual engagement. Particularly if you are interested in antiracism or in feminism, I would assume, an IR scholar speaking to those areas would encourage you to make space for independent thought. However, all academic work is at the same time a discipline, which at times can be painful to adjust to and actually take on board. Academia is not for everyone; to some it ends up being a waste of time and they long for something different, which is completely fine as well. But in my view it is sign of a poor university education if it closes things down to an extent where you cannot find the space to articulate your views or relate them to the things that you are learning. And that is a fault of the education, not of the student.
You fall squarely among 'critical' IR scholarship. What does it mean, for you, to be critical?
First of all, the term 'critical' is highly contested and in a way it can become a useless label. In my view one of the problems with critical IR is you tend to get into the sort of narcissism of minor differences, which also involves getting into a kind of competition for philosophical antecedence, in which scholars argue either through Marx, through Heidegger or through Foucault. The second problem of critical IR, which I have discussed in my work at various points, is the suspension of judgment forever. Since you can never find the ground, the sort of desire to find the authority in some sense ends up paralyzing judgments. I would argue that when there is a kind of risk that comes with people's willingness to make claims that it can ultimately suspend judgment. Yet, there is still dynamism, and the fact that your claim-making can be precisely deconstructed as in fact a reinforcement of what you are trying to undermine is part of the excitement and the interest of doing critique. The neverendingness of it is challenging in itself. In a sense we would like to be sort of God and in a sense we say 'well, I know that this is right and it just is'. Critique stops you doing it. That is why it is healthy, even though it at the same time can be quite frustrating.
My own personal understanding of what 'critique' and 'critical' means, comes out of my engagement with ideas of Kantian critique. The Kantian critique represent a foundational moment in the sense that both Marxist critique and post-Marxist critique refer back to Kant. In this way, the Kantian critique becomes a very rich starting point, as it has been able to branch out in all kinds of directions, from the sort of Hegelian/Marxist direction to other very different ones. The sort of typical critique is about questioning the assumptions or the authoritative basis of any kinds of claims. In doing so, critique is largely about disturbing the conditions or possibility of a claim that is made, and this is basically what Kant's transcendental move is about. This means that critique can go in lots of directions, some of them more helpful than others. Critique can also end up as a claim to a new authority and in my view, certain forms of post-Kantian critique have done that. I would also argue that there are aspects of Kant's work, where he did the same; in particular in how he moves from one possible ground to another to attempt to underpin some kind of authority for his claims. This might be contentious, but this is my reading of Kant, whereas others probably would argue he construes the space of critique very openly. Put simply, my reading of Kant is in line with Foucault's: critique is the admission that you are always in a tentative position in which any claim to authority is going to be questionable. Within any argument, you are always going to be holding something steady in order to question other parts, which mean you cannot ever escape from having to claim some sort of authority in the arguments you make. However, this does not mean that arguments become an overweening or foundational kind of ground. In a sense it is about keeping things moving, and I quite like the Foucauldian expression of it being an ethos, an attitude, a way of being, rather than a set of techniques or a claim to a moral high ground, which then enables you to show how everybody else is wrong. That is how I think of the concept of 'critical'.
Classical theory plays a big part in your work. If bygone thinkers spoke to the issues they saw in their times, then what do the minds of bygone eras have to say to contemporary issues?
I am never quite sure what the answer to that is. There is a tradition of thinking about canonic thought in the UK, Quentin Skinner is one of them, that is really dubious about talking about Kant or Heidegger in relation to contemporary problems or trying to suggest you can have a philosophical conversation across time and space. I have spent some time on this argument and in my view they are to a great extent right, at least if you think of a conversation with the 'real Hobbes' or someone else. However, there is a sense in which I start from a position in which there is no 'real' whoever. Instead, it should be viewed as a text with arguments and ideas, which you read and interpret in the light both of your time and place, but also the course of a whole set of secondary engagements with that. When reading such texts you are dealing with two hundred years of interpretation of Kant and Hegel. In this sense one must note that the voices of those philosophers as highly mediated in many different ways. If you can still engage with them and find useful insights, then sort of 'why not' seems reasonable. A second argument in terms of philosophers as Kant and Hegel is, the time they wrote in was obviously radically different. Meanwhile, it also had features in terms of the shape the state were taking, the beginnings of what we would now recognize as the modern capitalist market state. They were there, they were before that, and they were looking at the beginnings. They were around during the Napoleonic wars, mostly Hegel but also Kant was at point when the European colonialism or imperialism took off in particular ways. Here, a lot of the categories of race, culture etc. took shape under their noses. In this sense we are still within a frame that they were a part of, rather than excluded from. If you look at Machiavelli, he was speaking in a radically different time and space. There is an argument there about occupying a world that in some sense we still recognize or perhaps of Kant and Hegel trying to construct ways of understanding and judging a world that still has links to the world we inhabit today. That is another reason why they are still useful today. We all get our ideas from somewhere; as long as we do no argue that referring to Kant, Hegel, Foucault or Arendt makes it right. Instead, use ideas as they come and mix and match them, it is reasonable to be eclectic, depending on what kinds of claims you are making. If you attempt to do a solid reading of Kant, then you must know both the texts and the context, but if you wish to discuss critique in IR you can, in my view, take some elements of Kant or the post-Kantian legacy and use them to illuminate a contemporary debate.
The encounter between the West and the non-West is an important theme running through your work, and you liberally engage with post-colonial theory. So how does that work in practice?
The problem to someone who is trying to critique Eurocentrism or get away from it is that you cannot do it in an isolated way. One of the ways in which people try to think about the inclusion of other voices was in terms of the notion of dialogue. This was actually why I ended up writing about dialogue. My problem here was that some of the ways of thinking about dialogue seemed to me to simply confirm the centrality of the West and the position of the non-West as other. The big question is then how do you articulate the non-West? In my view the thing is that you simply do not; instead one must think constructively about how you quiet down, how you moderate dominant voices and create spaces for others. Sometimes it may just be a question of just being quiet, it may be about encouraging other work, it may be about encouraging theoretical investment in other places.
I am talking to you now, but in some sense what I am doing is enforcing the position of the privileged white, Western, middle-class woman. In my position talking about Eurocentrism and critique is merely by the fact of doing it, I am reinforcing a certain privilege and a certain sense of it. And this is not to say that you therefore you do not do it. Sometimes it is not useful to have someone like me on a panel; it is a much better thing to have somebody else, somebody younger or somebody from a different part of the world. To me this is what you have to think about, and as a scholar you have think about how you can contribute to creating spaces within which other voices can be included. To be honest, I do not think I have done a very good job of doing that. To quiet yourself down is really difficult; especially since there is so many institutional and other incentives for you to try and occupy the center stage. In my view it is something that maybe feminist scholarship has been better at.
In this sense it relates to a much bigger set of issues that social science is about; social sciences were and are kind of an imperialist project in their foundation. Whether or not you can ever make them to anything else, I doubt. It might be that you cannot, in which case the move to aesthetics, for example, which you see in some bits of IR, is understandable. It is difficult in the sense that we cannot do what we want to do by staying within the vocabularies of social science. We have to move to another kind of discourse in order to do what we think we need to do.
So here we navigate the space between scholarship and activism. I remember this picture of you delivering a lecture on a road blocking an arms convoy.
Yes, my very minor piece of activism, except it was the people that were being handcuffed on the road who were the real activists, not me. I think it is really important to be clear that doing critical theory as an IR scholar does not make you a political activist, and I think it is important, because it can sometimes feel really good to make a gesture of whatever, you know, 'being critical'. And that's all great, but actually it's all within an incredibly privileged forum and you're not really making any difference to anything. So, I'm a bit I think Hegelian in the sense that I think that philosophy or academic work is about understanding more, trying to understand and to think, and it may well generate frameworks and ideas that make it useful in various ways, and it may well not, but if you want to have revolution, go out and start organizing. You know, don't think that you can somehow do it by being on ISA panels. Marx was a political activist, he didn't just sit around writing, he was part of the movement, part of an organization, and that's the only way you really can help bring fundamental change, and quite often it'll go wrong. Being a political activist is much more scary and difficult than being a critical IR thinker.
Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is a leading scholar in international relations theory. She has extensively researched and published on international political theory in respect to Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, international and global ethics, Feminist theory and philosophy, and politics and violence. Her work is influenced by the scholarly tradition that produced the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. She is the author of Kant, Critique and Politics, International Political Theory: rethinking ethics in a global era, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy and Time and World Politics: thinking the present. Her current focus is on the areas of global ethics, assumptions about time and history in theories of international relations, and the conceptual relationship between politics and violence in Western political thought.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Queen Mary's
Read Hutchings' Ethics, Feminism and International Affairs (2013) here (pdf) Read Hutching's What is Orientation in Thinking? On the Question of Time and Timeliness in Cosmopolitical Thought (2011) here (pdf) Read Hutching's World Politics and the Question of Progress (2004) here (pdf)
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Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution
The global economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth accounts of insiders. In this Talk, Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
If we'd reframe your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.
This has happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is 'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.
I live in the UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.
The persistence of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60 percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster, and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union, namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run, and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.
Yet, one knows that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income distribution.
Let me explain. The share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by using the market against itself, so to speak.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
I suppose the starting point was really this; my father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex and got enrolled for a PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific.
When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did: a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake, because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms of state agencies and then the state as a whole.
Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not, because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the case. They had never actually talked to people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the introduction here) is not well received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.
So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix, and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and that is really not my interest.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know how to think, how to make arguments, they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality, but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.
Point number two is that I think that there is a huge premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries, but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies: to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in, experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to buy into it.
The relations between states are settled either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to understand IR?
Because economics—such as for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my constituency.
So, in a way, the way you framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men, concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International Relations.
Pikkety recently published Capital in the 21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality between people matter for IR?
Let me comment by invoking a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade ago I looked at the figures and if you took the average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move pretty quickly across these planes.
So all one has to do—and this might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.
You've done anthropological fieldwork inside the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank is?
First of all, let me say that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work. But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them), they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have a very strong influence.
Just to illustrate what the Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted with David Lipton.
Just to take another example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration, or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.
So the US wants to keep the presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is, resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons, who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look, the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people, whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way, way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.
One response of the big developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change. In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World we have today.
You engage thoroughly with economics and economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it wrong. Where do you stand in this?
If you take the example of how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large, and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics. So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?
This leads us to one fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working, revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the gas. So why did they make that analogy?
The point of likening of individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?' And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics, professional economists work.
Haven't specific fields, like development economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these weaknesses in economic theory?
Let me root my answer again in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production, upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to open the rest of the world to their markets.
In the 80s there were a lot of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work, promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to reroute the global system of economic governance.
So after the 1980s, the Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory, but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality, because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.
But then the most recent turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of the growth of developing countries.
Last question. Adam Smith seems to be constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?
I kind of engage in a critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will tell you the significance of them. He said:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.'
So I am struck by how today many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.
Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000. Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank 1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988, 1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.
Related links
Faculty profile at LSE Read Wade's The Piketty phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review) here (pdf) Read Wade's Capitalism and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) Read Wade's Rethinking Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here (pdf) Read Wade's Bringing the State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) Read Wade's Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development) here (pdf) Read Wade's Creating Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf)
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Timothy Mitchell on Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil
This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
The unrest in the Arab world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic, political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social sciences. In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates, the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in any field: it is laid out as a serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.
However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics. Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up. In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.
But I think, moving from International Relations as a field to 'globally oriented studies', to use your phrase, one of the biggest challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local. Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term 'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.
Now this relates back to the second part of your question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I was writing Carbon Democracy there was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?
Well, I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines, which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.
I think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships, that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped me as a scholar.
So traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.
In sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes and things and materials.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
A couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously important.
The other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East, around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again following the Arab Spring.
Against that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo, one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing this sort of work.
In which discipline or field would you situate yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?
I like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline, while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.
Yet doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything else!
What role does expertise, which is kind of a central term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the historical unfolding of modern government?
That is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy, climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others, that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed, even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.
But I think there is another relationship between modes of government and expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power works.
More recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.
If you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages; instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European path after the war, this object outside of government with its own experts was created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that precisely represent what is not the state, or the sphere of government.
Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend. Can you give an example of how that works?
Let me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil. I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization; therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have changed and made them democratic or something.
That story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the 20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku, which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different understanding of the politics of oil.
This leads to my next question, which is how do you speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do you get these accusations sometimes?
Yes, I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast: talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only interested in the oil once it had already become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how oil becomes money and how you put together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences. It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance, there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical determinism.
The other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself, there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences. The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in understanding expertise and modes of power.
How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about.
I think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on the colonial era, including my first book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it, representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature, material on the other.
Second, what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines, studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only just discovered.
Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is an important theme in your work?
I have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam, constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind of this large-scale work in Europe at the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved, because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development. And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this desperate attempt by a series of European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period and now they suddenly were being deprived of.
Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant.
May be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam. It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they function.
The other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to raise tax revenues—but around property taxes. And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement. This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in Egypt.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory. Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.
Related links:
Faculty Profile at Colombia University Read Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum 2008) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science Review 1991) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S. Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The World as Exhibition (Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf)