International Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Palgrave Studies in International Relations)

Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series General Editors: Knud Erik Jørgensen, Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark Audie Klotz, Department of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University, USA Palgrave Studies in International Relations, produced in association with the ECPR Standing Group for International Relations, will provide students and scholars with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. Edited by Knud Erik Jørgensen and Audie Klotz, this new book series will comprise cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. Titles include: Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle and Sami Moisio (editors) INTERNATIONAL STUDIES Interdisciplinary Approaches Mathias Albert, Lars-Erik Cederman and Alexander Wendt (editors) NEW SYSTEMS THEORIES OF WORLD POLITICS Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (editors) INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY AND THE MIDDLE EAST English School Theory at the Regional Level Geir Hønneland BORDERLAND RUSSIANS Identity, Narrative and International Relations Oliver Kessler, Rodney Bruce Hall, Cecelia Lynch and Nicholas G. Onuf (editors) ON RULES, POLITICS AND KNOWLEDGE Friedrich Kratochwil, International Relations, and Domestic Affairs Pierre P. Lizee A WHOLE NEW WORLD Reinventing International Studies for the Post-Western World Cornelia Navari (editor) THEORISING INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY English School Methods Dirk Peters CONSTRAINED BALANCING: THE EU’S SECURITY POLICY Simon F. Reich GLOBAL NORMS, AMERICAN SPONSORSHIP AND THE EMERGING PATTERNS OF WORLD POLITICS Robbie Shilliam GERMAN THOUGHT AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project

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Daniel C. Thomas (editor) MAKING EU FOREIGN POLICY National Preferences, European Norms and Common Policies Rens van Munster SECURITIZING IMMIGRATION The Politics of Risk in the EU

Palgrave Studies In International Relations Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0230–20063–0 (hardback) 978–0230–24115–2 (paperback) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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International Studies Interdisciplinary Approaches

Edited by

Pami Aalto Jean Monnet Professor, University of Tampere, Finland

Vilho Harle Professor (emeritus) of International Relations, University of Tampere, Finland

Sami Moisio Professor of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland

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Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle and Sami Moisio 2011 Individual chapters © contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978–0–230–28234–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

viii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

List of Contributors

xi

Part I General Perspectives 1 Introduction Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

3

2 Interdisciplinarity and the Study of International Relations David Long

31

3 Organizing Interdisciplinary International Studies: From Puzzlement to Research Programmes Pami Aalto

66

4 Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes in International Studies: The Frankfurt School, the English School and Peace Research as Models Vilho Harle

Part II

92

Levels of Analysis

5 Geographies of the International System: Globalization, Empire and the Anthropocene Simon Dalby

125

6 Beyond the Domestic–International Divide: State Spatial Transformation as Neo-liberal Geopolitics Sami Moisio

149

v

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vi

Contents

7 The Human Subject in International Studies: An Outline for Interdisciplinary Research Programmes Pami Aalto

Part III

178

Concepts

8 Power in International Relations: An Interdisciplinary Perspective Tuomas Forsberg

207

9 War: From Disciplinarity to Multidisciplinarity and Further to Transdisciplinarity Petr Drulák

228

Part IV End Comment 10 End Comment: The Practices of Interdisciplinarity Iver B. Neumann

257

Index

271

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Tables 6.1 From Keynesian to neoliberal geopolitics of state space

161

7.1 Research programmes and directions for studying the human subject

198

9.1 Differences between theory and history

231

9.2 Metaphors of war in theory

241

9.3 Metaphors of war in the arts (I)

245

9.4 Metaphors of war in the arts (II)

246

9.5 Metaphors of war in the arts (III)

247

10.1 Ideal–typical styles of reasoning in anthropology and political science

265

vii

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Figures 1.1

IR, IS, IP, world politics and interdisciplinarity

23

3.1

Heuristic model: positive heuristics in moving towards interdisciplinary IS

79

Heuristic model: from IR paradigms towards interdisciplinary IS programmes

83

Relationship between theory, history and art

234

3.2 9.1

viii

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Abbreviations APSA

American Political Science Association

CEO

Chief Executive Officer

CT

Critical theory

EIPE

Everyday International Political Economy

ES

English school

EU

European Union

FS

Frankfurt school

IP

International politics

IPE

International Political Economy

IR

International relations (as a discipline)

IS

International studies

ISA

International Studies Association

ISC

International Studies Conference

ISQ

International Studies Quarterly

LSE

London School of Economics and Political Science

NGO

Nongovernmental organization

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

PR

Peace research

RIPE

Review of International Political Economy

TAPRI

Tampere Peace Research Institute

UK

United Kingdom

UN

United Nations

US

United States

ZfS

Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

ix

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Acknowledgements This book is part of ‘Interdisciplinarity in International Studies’, a project conducted since 2007 in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Tampere (since January 2011, the department’s activities continue as part of the University’s new School of Management). The first event organized by the project took place at the University of Tampere, 10 May 2007, on ‘Multidisciplinarity in International Relations’, as an honorary seminar on the 60th birthday of Professor Vilho Harle in recognition of his long career in interdisciplinary international studies. The seminar helped to kick off two book projects, with the present volume as the first. Of the seminar participants we would specifically like to acknowledge Simon Dalby, who kindly gave the keynote speech, and for those not involved in the present book, special thanks are due to Mika Aaltola, Harto Hakovirta, Jorma Kalela, Pekka Korhonen, Jyrki Käkönen, Unto Vesa and Raimo Väyrynen. The second event was a panel in the International Studies Association (ISA) annual conference in New York, 11–12 February, 2009, in which Stefano Guzzini provided valuable feedback by acting as our discussant. The third event was a book workshop in Hämeenlinna Castle, Hämeenlinna, Finland, 11–12 September 2009. Our thanks will especially go to Sanjay Chaturvedi, Fred Chernoff, Anni Kangas, Dicle Korkmaz, Paul-Erik Korvela, Raymond Miller, Tim Shaw and Saara Särmä. For funding that event and some subsequent editorial work we would like to acknowledge the Rector of the University of Tampere at the time, Krista Varantola. The University of Tampere offered commendable working facilities for Pami Aalto and Vilho Harle, as did the Department of Geography at the University of Oulu and the Department of Geography at the University College London for Sami Moisio, during 2008–9. Moisio’s work for this book has also been supported by the Academy of Finland project ‘The Transformation of Finnish Regional Policies’ (No. 131392), and Aalto’s by the Academy of Finland project ‘Energy Policy in European Integration’ (no. 139686). On a more personal note, the editors would like to thank warmly those closest to them, especially Freja and Hugo (Aalto), and Anni and Liisi (Moisio). Without them, work on interdisciplinarity, even with its inherent richness, would be a lonely undertaking. x

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Contributors Pami Aalto is Jean Monnet Professor in the School of Management, and Director of the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence, University of Tampere, Finland. He received his PhD training in the University of Bradford, UK, and has worked at the interface of IR, political geography, psychology and sociology, and in interdisciplinary fields, such as energy research, European studies and post-Soviet studies. He is editor of The EU – Russian Energy Dialogue: Europe’s Future Energy Security (2007), and author of European Union and the Making of a Wider Northern Europe (2006) and Constructing Post-Soviet Geopolitics in Estonia (2003). Simon Dalby is Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy at Carleton University, Ottawa. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, University of Victoria, Canada and holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada. His research work concerns critical geopolitics, environmental security and political ecology, empire, the war on terror and metropolitan insecurity. He is co-editor of Rethinking Geopolitics (1998), The Geopolitics Reader (1998, 2006), of the journal, Geopolitics; he is author of Creating the Second Cold War (1990), Environmental Security (2002) and Security and Environmental Change (2009). Petr Drulák is Director of the Institute of International Relations in Prague, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Charles University, Prague and associate editor of the Journal of International Relations and Development. His work has linked theories of international relations and European integration with linguistic and other approaches in the wider social sciences. He is the author of the first Czech textbook on theory of international relations (2003) and research methodology (2008), and editor of a series of books on Czech national interest (2010), as well as author of articles in European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy, Geopolitics, Journal of International Relations and Development and Osteuropa. Tuomas Forsberg received his PhD at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1998. He is Professor of International Politics at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has also worked at the University of xi

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Contributors

Helsinki, at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, and at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. His research has dealt with the interface of IR and geography, including territoriality and border conflicts; and with European security, focusing on the EU, Germany, Russia and Northern Europe. His most recent (co-authored) book is Divided West: European Security and the Transatlantic Relationship (2006). Vilho Harle is Professor (emeritus) of International Relations in the School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests vary from international theory to critical geopolitics, peace research and Finnish foreign policy; also, he has edited collections on identity politics, the political economy of food and nuclear weapons. His main publications include Ideas of Social Order in the Ancient World (1998) and The Enemy with a Thousand Faces (2000). David Long was educated at Keele University, Staffordshire, UK, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a professor in the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, Ottawa. His research has examined IR as a distinct discipline with interdisciplinary connections to various cognate subjects across the social sciences and humanities. His publications include (with Brian Schmidt) Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (2005); and (with Luke Ashworth) New Perspectives on International Functionalism (1999). Sami Moisio has a doctorate in geography and is a postgraduate in IR. He has held positions in IR and geography, and is now Professor of Geography at University of Oulu, Finland, having spent the 2008–9 academic year at University College London. He works on the interface between geography and political science and has written on issues of political geography, political economy, European integration and state transformation. His work has been published in Geopolitics, Political Geography, Eurasian Geography and Economics, World Political Science Review, National Identities and Cooperation and Conflict. Iver B. Neumann holds doctorates in politics (Oxford, 1992) and social anthropology (Oslo, 2009) and is Director of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His latest book, with Ole Jacob Sending, is Governing the Global Polity (2010). He is currently completing an ethnography of diplomats.

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Part I General Perspectives

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1 Introduction Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

From international relations to international studies In this book we will propose new directions for the academic study of international relations (IR). We will refer to these new directions with the term International Studies (IS). This is an interdisciplinary field of studies that is wider and more plural than IR, and which combines elements of past and present scholarship. The term international studies has its roots in the scholarship conducted in several disciplines from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Contemporary IR has a lot to learn from that scholarship. Simultaneously, there is a need to assess that scholarship critically and further develop its important heritage, and to acknowledge how today ‘international studies’ appears in the titles of countless study programmes, just as several key publications carry the same name. However, the meaning of IS and the research agendas it opens up are rarely spelled out. Many of us seem to think IS is somehow different from IR, and may have some intellectual potential. Yet, until now we have not seriously asked ourselves what this potential precisely is. We want to assert that IS – as a wider field of studies than IR – must necessarily be more interdisciplinary than IR ever was during its golden era from the 1950s onwards. Our objective is to lay the foundations for IS to emerge as a self-consciously interdisciplinary field of research and to recast and open up some of the contemporary theoretical debates in IR. Although launching the interdisciplinary field of IS implies taking a critical attitude towards contemporary IR, the latter’s disciplinary record and analytical capability need not be rejected entirely. We agree that the traditional theories and approaches of IR remain useful for problem-solving in certain contexts (cf., Ferguson and Mansbach, 3

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2007, p. 529). The task of IS, for its part, is to offer solutions for those theoretical and practical problems when IR falls short or no longer suffices. This wider agenda of IS is addressed not only to the various IR scholars who are unsatisfied with the analytical power and self-referential nature of the current IR. It is also aimed at engaging those working on ‘international’, ‘foreign’, ‘global’, ‘interregional’ or ‘transnational’ issues in other disciplines and fields of research. Today, such work is conducted for example in social philosophy and social theory, sociology, anthropology, political psychology, international law, international and global history and political geography. International political economy (IPE), peace research, strategic studies, as well as some currents in political science, and some theoretically developed fields of area studies such as European integration studies are parts of this wider field. Why, then, do we wish to offer yet another addition to the many reform calls put forth among the various groupings of IR scholars who are unsatisfied with the state of their home discipline? Here we can recall Kalevi Holsti’s image from the 1980s of IR being fragmented into several mutually competing theoretical and methodological orientations together accounting for a ‘dividing discipline’ (Holsti, 1985). Revisiting his famous thesis in the new millennium, Holsti went on to dismiss the status of IR as a discipline due to its lack of unique theory or methodology, an unfortunate consequence of the flawed application of natural scientific models of enquiry into IR during the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, present-day IR scholars in fact ‘cannot even define under a single rubric the phenomena to be described and explained!’ (Jones, interviewing Holsti in 2002, pp. 621–2). Today, many IR scholars, when setting similarly demanding criteria for the disciplinary status of IR, continue to have similar concerns. The lack of agreement on theories, methods and research objects does not of course imply the absence of synthesizing efforts. Indeed, it is easy to spot these efforts within the scope of each of the main theoretical orientations of IR. Synthesizing efforts or new ‘middle-ground’ positions have been proposed within the ‘neo-neo’ debate between neo-realism and neo-liberalism; within constructivism; and within the revived English school of IR.1 At the more critical edges of IR, similar moves can be found. Marxism, critical realism and some currents of work drawing upon the social and political theory of Michel Foucault suggest an approach applicable across a wide range of international issues. Further, some have suggested that the study of IR and its main theories

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Introduction 5

converge around analytical themes such as security. In traditional IR this was about war among states, and today the security agenda is wider (Lawson, 2003, pp. 5–9). This is not the place to dwell on the relative merits of each synthesizing effort. It suffices to note how none of them have been universally accepted within the discipline, and how they are unlikely to emerge as such. If in social sciences, in general, theories and methods are not universally accepted, why should they be in IR? In the social sciences the accumulation of knowledge is not as straightforward as it is in some disciplines and research programmes in the natural sciences. There is no equivalent of a ‘human genome map’ project for IR in which findings would be logically related to one another and the next crucial tasks would be agreed among specialists. Yet, IR theories do speak to each other. The fact that scholars are able to read, discuss and understand a large share of their colleagues’ work – even if in practice some of them might not engage much beyond their own ‘camp’ (see Sylvester, 2007) – means that plurality is not an insurmountable obstacle for learning and examining international issues. Any radical incommensurability thesis can also be questioned at the more philosophical level (Patomäki and Wight, 2000). Our point here is that great syntheses can in principle aggregate a lot under their wings, but are unlikely to assume hegemonic position. When aggressively pursued, they are more likely to be harmful than useful. They may also be of limited interest to non-IR scholars. To put it briefly: it is inevitable that theoretical and methodological pluralism will continue in IR. And, that is not a bad thing – indeed quite the opposite can be argued. The fragmentation and plurality of approaches, reflected in some of the new directions for IR that we propose herein, do not mean that IR will dissolve into an ‘amorphous collection of issues under the general heading of “international studies” ’ (Lawson, 2003, pp. 13–14). Pluralism is a strength to be cultivated and systematically developed. The subject matter of the ‘international’ is just as complex as the various terms used to refer to its various aspects – the ‘foreign’, ‘global’, ‘interregional’, ‘transnational’ and so on. Our solution is to make the diversity an asset. As will be shown, interdisciplinary approaches can help us to build open-ended research programmes, and enquire into new sets of puzzles that can also sharpen the various meanings of the ‘international’. In that way, we wish to start a systematic debate on what ‘international studies’ is and what it can become.

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The ‘international’ in international studies To develop IS as an interdisciplinary field, it is logical to start with the origins and meanings of the term ‘international’, which provide a shared point of gravity in the absence of agreement on theories and methods. An interest in the ‘international’ represents a joint rubric called for by Holsti, around which much research revolves, both within IR and beyond. In other words, the term ‘international’ connotes the central subject matter of IR, while it also has considerable interdisciplinary potential. Although a conceptual history or genealogy of the term ‘international’ will not be pursued here, a brief excursion into its historical emergence will be helpful. The origin of the term ‘international’ is often traced to the British utilitarian political and legal theorist, Jeremy Bentham, and his work in 1780. Bentham was criticizing the English phrase ‘Law of Nations’ – an imprecise misnomer used to refer to the law on the relations between sovereign states. He was interested in those aspects of law that did not fall under the internal jurisdiction of states, and proposed that in those instances speaking of the ‘international’ would be more appropriate than of legal governance between ‘nations’. In doing so, Bentham reserved the term international for relations between sovereigns. Relations including private individuals, either between each other or between a state and a private individual from another state, were concerns of internal jurisprudence (Suganami, 1978, pp. 230–1). Since Bentham’s time, the idea of the ‘international’ has for example been criticized as conflating sovereign states – which was Bentham’s concern, and remains a chief concern for current IR – and nations, which for its part is a crucial concern for historians and for cultural studies (see Lawson, 2003, p. 15). For his contemporary Law of Nations theorists, like Emmerich de Vattel, these two seemed to be the same: ‘A nation or a state is . . . [a] body politic, or a society of men united together for the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by their combined strength’ (Vattel, 2005 [1758]). In present-day usage, nation refers to ‘a people’ and state, to a legal-institutional unit. However, their mutual match, or lack thereof either theoretically or practically, has been subject to much debate in IR and political theory (Lawson, 2003, p. 15). These debates that are springing from the Law of Nations tradition are difficult to settle for good. What is clear vis-à-vis international studies is that it must refer both to inter-state relations and to relations among nations, and without prior bias for either one. And in addition

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Introduction 7

to these two core areas, it must also take into account inter-human ties as a natural part of its agenda (see Chapter 7). Approaching the ‘international’ in this manner becomes a matter of making theoretical and methodological choices. The ‘international’ can be defined in different ways, as can concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘nation’, and ‘agency’ and ‘actor’. With this we mean how frequently appearing concepts such as international system, hegemony, international society, empire and global governance are all predicated upon different assumptions of what the ‘international’ is, and which actors populate that domain. Hence, for practical reasons it will be helpful to keep open the links between the ‘international’ and state. In place of essentialist definitions, the state needs to be conceptualized as a historical process with no fixed finalities. In this way we can overcome the methodological problems built into concept of the international system as an anarchical setting wherein supposedly similar states operate, and which is qualitatively distinct from the supposedly more ordered domestic sphere. Such a narrow understanding of ‘international relations’ as ‘inter-state’, ‘interterritorial’ and ‘inter-sovereign’ relations constrains the research efforts chiefly to the political and military interactions between states. This is unwarranted in a situation in which states, themselves, have become ‘internationalized’ alongside the ‘national’ and ‘local’, as argued in new interdisciplinary literatures (see Chapter 6). The multifarious nature of the ‘international’ becomes evident upon examining the interface between the ‘international’ and ‘foreign’. Foreign affairs are today conducted using corporate concepts derived from transnational business language. As both the local and national levels become internationalized and opened for the movement of people, goods and capital – on the basis of almost universally accepted rules of the marketplace – the ‘transnational’ domain of business and other flows becomes built into the conduct of inter-state relations. At the same time, huge political efforts are invested in ‘nationalizing the international’ when we habitually speak of ‘our national interests’ and of the ‘foreign affairs’ of concern to us. In short, the term international is best understood as a dynamic social and political process (see also Millennium, 2007). It has deep historical origins and today remains politically contested, appearing in political campaigns with different epithets and meanings. Think, for instance, of the contemporary use of the concept of ‘international community’. During the past twenty years, this term has been actively exploited in political processes to justify a range of actions: for example, in the context of the North Korean nuclear programme, the military

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operations in Afghanistan and most recently combating the financial turmoil that started in Greece in the winter of 2010. The political use of such terms would easily constitute a fruitful research programme of its own, but naturally there are various other research agendas under the joint reference point of the ‘international’ that deserve serious study. Interdisciplinarity, we argue, is a natural part of these efforts, and should be brought into the centre of the field.

Interdisciplinarity in international studies Interdisciplinarity is a much more central part of the intellectual tradition of IR than we often tend to recognize. First it will be useful to take a look at that interdisciplinarity so that we can assess to what further interdisciplinary directions we should extend the wider agenda of IS (Moran, 2002, p. 2). The historiography of IR is often told from the perspective of ‘great debates’ (e.g., Wæver, 2007). Even if this image can be contested (Schmidt, 2002, pp. 10–11) we continue to act as if the debates have actually taken place. The so-called ‘first debate’ of IR was conducted in the 1930s and 1940s. Within it realists, who borrowed from the history of diplomacy and political philosophy, were pitted against liberals borrowing, in turn, from rival strands of political philosophy alongside international law. In the second debate since the 1950s, what by then were counted as ‘traditionalist’ realists encountered ‘scientific’ behaviouralists who were drawing upon positivist methods in behavioural and natural sciences that were expected to improve IR as a science. In the third so-called ‘inter-paradigm’ debate in the 1970s, realists faced liberals who by now were revamped as transnationalists, as well as Marxists and structuralists. These challengers drew upon diverse literatures in economics and political economy. To the extent that a fourth debate has existed since the late 1980s, we witness a cacophony of various types of more or less ‘scientific’ positivists taking on post-positivists. Some of the latter wish to relate IR to the other social sciences and the humanities, including questions of philosophy, especially of epistemological and normative type. The knowledge traffic from other disciplines to IR seems perpetually recurring. As for IR’s main theoretical orientations influential today, the neoclassical variants of realism maintain at least a weak association with the history of diplomacy and political philosophy, even if realism is ‘the IR theory’, especially if seen by representatives of other disciplines. Liberalism borrows from economics and, to a lesser extent, psychology; constructivism from sociology and analogies taken from cognitive

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Introduction 9

science; and the English school from international history, international law and political theory. IPE is an internally diverse, explicitly interdisciplinary field of research with links to economics, on one hand, and philosophy of science on the other, with historical institutionalist perspectives falling between those two. Although each debate and theoretical orientation contains interdisciplinary influences, it is possible to detect some aggregate trends of interdisciplinary movement. From the 1930s to the 1950s we witnessed a wave of interdisciplinary reflection, as we will discuss below. In the 1970s came another. And a new phase of interdisciplinarity is currently building. These are instances of disciplinary crises wherein scholars are resorting to other disciplines and fields when existing IR tools are failing them. However, one disturbing feature is that IR scholars have neither supported interdisciplinarity at the programmatic level, nor carefully considered what interdisciplinarity might be, and mean, for IR. The major works on interdisciplinarity in IR are from the 1950s! By now it should be evident that we do not side with those who lament the fact that IR has borrowed heavily from other disciplines during the process of its institutional consolidation; how it has failed to feed much back to them, and that this has meant that prominent IR scholars are virtually unknown in other fields (see Buzan and Little, 2001). While the claim of major IR figures being peripheral to other disciplines is largely true, even if possibly a little overblown,2 the concern for us is to develop approaches with which IR scholars could fruitfully study aspects of the ‘international’ together with representatives from other fields. From this perspective the great debates of IR are puzzling. On the one hand they are interdisciplinary; on the other, they have assumed introverted, IR-specific features. As a result scholars within each theoretical coterie engage with ever more narrow topics, writing more and more about less and less. The ‘international’ is, in short, a more varied problem than any individual IR debate or theory can have it be. For us, it is an interdisciplinary problem. Interdisciplinarity is again re-emerging as a fashionable catchword for social and other sciences, as well as for research funding agencies. It is often expected to hold great promise for problem-solving (Klein, 1990). The interdisciplinary problems we deal with in this book are mainly theoretical and conceptual; they concern exchanging theories, models and concepts from various disciplines in order to study international issues; examination of various synthesizing schools or theoretical aggregates such as realism, Marxism or the English school from an interdisciplinary perspective; and disaggregation and rebuilding of key concepts

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in international studies with the help of interdisciplinary approaches. Importantly, we attach no intrinsic or abstract value to interdisciplinarity, and therefore do not see sharing and merging disciplinary practices as valuable, per se. By contrast, sharing questions, ideas on how to start responding to them and conceptualizations are pivotal. Even an agenda that we, in this book, delimit mostly to theoretical and conceptual questions, is too grand to be realized in a single text. But it can at least be signposted. For practical reasons we also leave out the wider empirical task of applying interdisciplinary approaches to issue-specific, case level research on the complex problems and dilemmas of the contemporary policy agenda, as is mostly called for by the literatures on globalization and ‘post-international politics’ (e.g., Hobbs, 2000; Ferguson and Mansbach, 2007; Krishna-Hensel, 2000). That practical agenda is addressed in a related title (Aalto, Harle and Moisio, 2011). Clearly, IS cannot remain one more esoteric body of writing by pure theorists if it is to realize its full potential. But it will have to proceed first from interdisciplinary theoretical criticism and conceptualizations. To that end, this book: (1) revisits the interdisciplinary origins of the study of ‘international’ issues, and assesses the contemporary applicability of some of these approaches to the multifaceted communication between IR and related disciplines and fields of study; (2) discusses what types of interdisciplinary approaches are available for IS; (3) elaborates how some of them can be developed into well defined and systematic joint endeavours, ranging from accommodative and open-ended research programmes, to various smaller puzzle-sets linking scholars from different fields; and (4) demonstrates how conventional levels of analysis and central concepts of IR are redefined and new, expanded research agendas opened up with the help of interdisciplinary approaches. We will next briefly look at the interdisciplinary origins of IR before returning to its subsequent enclosure in a more disciplinary direction. From there we move to a critical examination of the recent (if still imperfectly structured and coordinated) reopenings in IR, and offer interdisciplinary IS as a more accommodative option for studying a multitude of international problems and ‘international’, itself. In the final section of this introduction the interdisciplinary approaches we offer are summarized.

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Introduction 11

The interdisciplinary origins of international studies The origins of the study of IR can on some level be traced as far back in time as ancient political philosophy. In a more instrumental manner, a starting point is often related to the founding of a chair in international politics in 1919 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. What we wish to pick from this contested historiography is how from there onward, until the Second World War, there were few programmes dedicated to the training of ‘IR scholars’. The study of diplomatic history, international law and organization, as well as political philosophy, geography and economics offered the basis for examining ‘international’ matters. IR as a discipline did not exist in the form we know it today. The field consisted of the joint interdisciplinary interests and undertakings of diverse pockets of scholars. Some of them did use the term IR, but their joint activity is better summed up as international studies. This foundational era lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s. From this era it is possible to find several examples of interdisciplinarity in practice and theory. Of these we will pick three to demonstrate the importance of taking lessons from past interdisciplinary efforts (cf., Jacobs and Frickel, 2009, p. 48; see Chapter 4 in this volume). The plural interdisciplinarity of the International Studies Conference An influential early attempt to organize the burgeoning field of IR took place under the auspices of the League of Nations International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. Through the 1930s this body held several International Studies Conferences (ISC) that involved scholars from a number of different countries and disciplines. The work of the ISC had a decisive effect on how interdisciplinarity was to be later on conceived of and discussed in IR. The initial aim was simply to enhance the international exchange between academics studying international issues, with a view to improving knowledge of international politics and of the League’s agenda within it in particular. As the various meetings grew in size through the 1930s, it became clear that a more coherent programme of work was required. The ISC’s work culminated before the Second World War in the volume, edited by Alfred Zimmern, University Teaching of International Relations (Zimmern, 1939; Long, 2006). Zimmern’s views on the academic study of international relations are indicative of the challenge of interdisciplinarity. According to Zimmern,

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‘the study of international relations extends from the natural sciences at one end to moral philosophy, or even further, at the other’ (ibid., p. 7): So regarded, the study of international relations would be practically identical with the study of Sociology in its widest extent. The only difference would be one of emphasis. Sociology lays the stress on the unity of human society, whereas International Relations lay it upon the diversity of various human groups and the necessity for studying their interaction. It would also be practically identical with the study of history, if History is regarded . . . as the record of the rise and fall, growth, development and interaction of civilizations. (ibid., pp. 7–8) And so he concludes that International Relations . . . is clearly not a subject in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not provide a single coherent body of teaching material. It is impossible to compress its elements within a textbook or within the limits of an examination syllabus. It is not a single subject but a bundle of subjects. . . . Of what is this bundle composed? Of law, economics, political science, geography, and so on – but not the whole range of each of these subjects. (ibid., p. 9) Since then dozens of scholars have resisted Zimmern’s advice not to try to compress IR into a single textbook. Those textbooks are widely used to teach IR. In the North American market, while they cover IR theory in some detail, some restrict themselves to an overview of major theories and some concentrate on the history or phenomena of international politics (Smith, 2003, pp. 421–4). The textbooks in the European market tend to structure the complex field by reproducing the disciplinary image of great debates among theories. As for Zimmern’s idea of a bundle of subjects comprising IR, the challenge now is to take that multiplicity seriously. Since its founding in 1959, the North American based International Studies Association (ISA) has pledged to do precisely this. The mission statement of the ISA, as it appears on the cover of International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) begins: The International Studies Association is a multidisciplinary organization that promotes collaboration among specialists whose interests are focused on international, cross-national, or transnational phenomena. It promotes interdisciplinary approaches to problems that cannot fruitfully be examined within the confines of a single discipline.

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Introduction 13

Rhetorically, at least, the ISA was founded as an academic association reflecting the diverse multiplicity of international studies, a meeting point for specialists from various academic backgrounds. However, it is clear that it has been dominated by political scientists, only some of whom regard themselves distinctly and foremost as IR scholars. In a study of the articles published in three leading North American IR journals, one of which was the ISQ, ISA’s flagship publication, 89 per cent of the first listed authors were affiliated with a political science department and 4 per cent with an IR department (Breuning et al,. 2005, pp. 456–7).3 In a 2004 survey in the US, 93 per cent of political science department staff members held a degree in politics or IR (Jacobs and Frickel, 2009, p. 59). In short, these raw examples suffice to demonstrate the strong association of IR scholars with the political science discipline, especially in the US. Of the main sites of IR, practically only in the UK are there specialized IR departments. In the US, key IR scholars regularly attend the American Political Science Association (APSA) conference and associate themselves with political science. For example, for a good deal of its existence, the programme of the ISA conference was planned at a special meeting at the APSA conference (Miller, 2010). The key point here is that, of the plural interdisciplinarity of the International Studies Conference and the founding rhetoric of the ISA, only little remains today. The bi- or subdisciplinarity of ‘political science IR’ falls well short of the original intentions. Quincy Wright’s discipline-centred, yet synthetic, interdisciplinarity Some years before the founding of the ISA, Quincy Wright, a scholar in peace research, IR, political science and international law, and who had been involved in the ISC, published his lengthy volume, The Study of International Relations (1955). Although the book’s title refers to ‘international relations’, it actually focuses on the relationship of some twenty different disciplines or fields of research largely drawn from the interwar study of international issues. Wright initially counts eight disciplines contributing to IR – international law, diplomatic history, military science, international politics, international organization, international trade, colonial government and the conduct of foreign relations (ibid., p. 33; see chapter 5). But he then adds disciplines with a ‘world’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ point of view. These include world history, world geography, pacifism, the psychology and sociology of international relations, humanistic, social and

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biological disciplines, regional studies, operational research and group dynamics (ibid., p. 45; see chapter 6). Wright’s interdisciplinary approach is built around a method of classification of the disciplines along various criteria. Nonetheless, he ultimately keeps disciplines in the centre of everything. His first classification redivides the listed subjects into four broad approaches – history (the empirical record), the arts (practice), philosophy (normative analysis), and science (positive analysis). Cross-cutting these approaches, he finds the dimension of practical versus theoretical analyses.4 To maintain coherence into this multiplicity of approaches, Wright argues in favour of synthesizing the contributions of all these different disciplines, ultimately seeking the unity of all knowledge (ibid., pp. 59; 481). A similar idea was implicated in behaviouralism and later became taken to extremes in Edward Wilson’s Consilience: the Unity of All Knowledge (1998). For Wright, approaches to synthesis can be empirical or they can be conceptual, beginning with a key concept or concepts (ibid., chapter 31). The empirical approach leads him to re-classify the disciplines one more time, this time into abstract and deductive versus concrete and descriptive (ibid., p. 502). He then reconsiders how to apply all this to IR and puts geography and psychology as the focus because ‘International relations has to do with man and the physical world’ (ibid., p. 504).5 Wright’s ambition for mastering the field, his capacity to cover very diverse literatures coupled with his efforts to synthesize, are breathtaking and look impossible to repeat from the perspective of the further fragmentation and exponential growth of IR scholarship since his time. Today, one experienced researcher cannot normally expect to master more than a handful of sub-fields of IR. For the purposes of an individual research project or programme, the end result of Wright’s work may well appear a confusing mess of subjects. However, for him the synthetic interdisciplinarity was only a toolkit containing tools relevant for tackling different aspects of international relations. No individual researcher would be expected to master them all. Wright wrote his book on the basis of decades of teaching international relations; however, it ended up having little or no impact on the teaching of international relations either in the US or elsewhere. If we were to follow Wright, it seems that IS would end up, as Stanley Hoffman suggests in a different context, like ‘an overcrowded shopping center, much like political science in the days when departments of government were characterized by an accumulation of unrelated courses’ (Hoffmann, 1960, v).6 We are well aware of how the number of interdisciplinary directions one already then could opt for was very large. Today,

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Introduction 15

it is no smaller. Therefore, rather than trying to list them all, we will concentrate on outlining some of the theoretical, conceptual and programmatic means by which such encounters can be usefully conducted. C.A.W. Manning’s hierarchic interdisciplinarity C.A.W. Manning’s approach to IR involved a disciplinary tone critical of Wright’s work and of Zimmern’s notion that international relations was nothing more than a bundle of studies. Manning was more closely associated with the ISC than was Wright (see Manning 1954), and he stressed interdisciplinary links and orientation, especially for the teaching of IR. In a fashion now familiar as the English school, Manning was interested in the prospects and reality of international society among states (Manning, 1962, pp. 9–10). In its wider manifestation, IR is interdisciplinary since it touches on the subject matter of many other disciplines and, as a consequence, must draw on aspects of those disciplines. But this does not mean IR is simply a synthesis as suggested by Wright. Manning’s understanding of IR generates a hierarchy of studies within and outside the discipline: The field of studies which I am concerned to recommend can be represented by three concentric circles. In the innermost circle we have the subject International Relations, including several distinct ‘approaches.’ One of these is the geographic and strategic approach; another is the psychological and socio-psychological approach; another is the approach through the study of international institutions; and there may be several more. That is the innermost circle. Then, in the next circle, come the closely associated ‘international studies,’ of which so much has been said: International History, International Economics, International Law – and it is possible one could think of some more. Then, in the outermost circle, come the ‘underpinning disciplines.’ (Goodwin, 1951, pp. 70–1) As a result, IR is ‘a subject to be studied concurrently with other subjects’. It is interesting that Manning leaves political science out of this description. His second circle includes the international dimensions of social sciences that have their own distinct methodologies. The setting of these disciplines seems to have as much to do with methodology as their substantive focus putting them outside the study of IR proper. Finally, the outer circle is an indication of how seriously Manning believed that a student of international relations required broader academic training than simply in IR, with one or more underpinning

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disciplines that would include geography, political science, economics, history, law and so on. With the problematization of interdisciplinary training, Manning makes an important opening. Most study programmes in the US bearing the name ‘international studies’ address the interdisciplinary challenge by merely assembling staff from various disciplines to teach, without much effort at theoretical integration of knowledge (Brown et al., 2006, p. 281). And although Manning’s first circle includes IR orientations drawing upon external influences, it is also important to note that, for him, interdisciplinary training is not necessarily required for working with some questions in the remit of traditional IR. We have, above, adopted the same view and refused to label interdisciplinary knowledge inherently superior to disciplinary knowledge (Jacobs and Frickel, 2009, pp. 46; 60). However, traditional IR simply is not usually enough for working with very complex questions. In those instances functionality suggests importing approaches from Manning’s second and third circles – for example when dealing with difficult concepts or with issues such as economic globalization, new technologies and identity politics (Whitehall and Brickner, 2009, p. 217). In sum, both disciplinary (IR) and interdisciplinary (IS) modes of scholarship are needed but for different ends. Our concern is to develop the latter. Today, disciplinary IR is saturated with mainstream disciplinarily narrow treatises and textbooks. We will next outline how we got to this point, and specifically the nature of the disciplining mode of IR since the 1950s before considering the more recent emergence of new challenges to it.

The disciplinary turn in IR scholarship In the 1950s, the interdisciplinary approaches of the ISC, Wright and Manning faced two powerful rivals with a more disciplinary orientation. These were the politically and practically oriented study of foreign policy, and the behaviouristic, or quantitative study of international politics (for a combination of these two, see Holsti, 1967). Both of these North American approaches reduced the study of IR into that of international politics (IP). This, for its part, linked the thusly formed IR + IP approach with political science, just short of making IR its subdiscipline. This disciplinary turn, and the broad following it attracted everywhere mainstream IR was taught, is often narrated in the historiography of IR, but it has not been very well explained. To arrive at a better explanation of why IR turned into the more disciplinary mode we must first recognize the different origins of IR and IP.

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Introduction 17

Modern IR rose in the aftermath of the First World War, and then again after the Second World War, as an academic response to the problem of war and peace, with the aim of moving towards a more peaceful world (Holsti, 1985, p. 11). By contrast, IP emerged as a more practical and narrow study of the political wisdom needed by the sovereign in order to promote the interests and survival of his state (nation) in the midst of power struggles. This approach is often related to Hans Morgenthau’s work. Morgenthau was at the forefront of a group of political scientists whose concern was to secure a (sub)disciplinary status for IP by means of restricting it mostly to the study of political power. For Morgenthau, the core of international relations cohered not around a wider idea of the international, but around power and the struggle for power among individuals and collectivities, including the state. The study of the ‘international’ for Morgenthau, hence, referred to the struggle for political power as an inter-state phenomenon (Morgenthau, 1952, p. 655). This narrowing of the international to politics among states can, somewhat surprisingly, be explained by looking at Morgenthau’s interdisciplinary intellectual development. His doctoral thesis was in international law (1929), a discipline in which legal regulation was weak and subject to politics. In addition, he had a keen interest in several other disciplines. For example, Herman Oncken, professor of political history, stimulated Morgenthau’s interest in Germany’s unifier, Bismarck, and his Realpolitik that gave foreign policy priority over domestic politics in the context of the nineteenth-century European system of states (Primat der Aussenpolitik). From Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenthau further took the idea of actors struggling for power to accomplish their aims against the wills of others, and the idea of will to power. From these influences Morgenthau assumed his mission: to educate wise leaders in the conduct of foreign policy (Korhonen, 1983; see also Neumann and Sending, 2007, pp. 678–83). Remarkably, Morgenthau’s means to realizing his mission were interdisciplinary – combining political theory with history, international law, psychology and other fields – but his idea of the international was state-centric. In the 1930s, Morgenthau first put his mission into practice when he taught international law in Madrid to future diplomats of Franco’s government. After arriving in the US in 1937, Morgenthau became an ‘instructor in Government’ at Brooklyn College, and later a professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago. Also, from 1951, he was the director of the Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy in the University of Chicago. But much more than a classical advisor to the prince, Morgenthau was an educator speaking truth to power (Morgenthau, 1970, esp. pp. 13–28). He criticized American

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policy in Vietnam and became quickly sidelined from any direct policy influence. His best known work was to be the comprehensive textbook Politics among Nations (1955 [1948]), in which he summarized and translated his European production on international relations, international law and political theory, inspired by the political work of Bismarck. However, Morgenthau was not the first or only scholar advocating a narrow American model of IP. For example, already in 1947 Grayson Kirk had suggested that IR was at essence international politics. And international politics was power politics for Kirk (see Kirk, 1947, p. 12). Other European-originated realists – like John Herz, Arnold Wolfers and Henry Kissinger – made essentially the same point (Griffiths et al. 1999, pp. 16–20; 25–31). But Morgenthau’s work was of a more general nature compared to the fairly specific nature of the other works of the same genre. It was persuasive to conclude from his work that, while international relations is interdisciplinary, comprehensive knowledge of it can only be fragmentary owing to the multifaceted and multilayered nature of the political practice and its study. The only reasonable approach, then, is to select the most important subdisciplinary component as the core: international relations is international politics, which for its part is power politics among states. This simplified reading of Morgenthau’s otherwise nuanced message of political wisdom and promotion of national interests in power struggles was part of the cold war context where it (alongside many other works) was used to justify facets of American power politics (see also Harle, 2000, pp. 79; 88–90). Behaviouralist social science and the quantitative revolution in IR shared, somewhat surprisingly, the same logic of serving national foreign policies. This is easier to understand if we recall how that revolution had already started during the Second World War. Systematic, quantitative studies of social and political behaviour were required for planning American foreign policy and military operations. Many leading social scientists were ready to assist in defeating Hitler (e.g., Wiggerhaus, 1994). The behaviourists were critical of aspects of Morgenthau’s work. Nevertheless they accepted his premises of political realism (see Vasquez, 1983), while simultaneously envisioning IR as a clear-cut discipline in the sense of some theoretically advanced social sciences, like economics and psychology. This latter project relied on the idea of a shared research object of power politics among states, just as economics is the study of the economy and psychology is the study of psychological disorders. Morgenthau’s IP, and the behavioural study of foreign policy and IR, paved the way for development towards a narrow, monodisciplinary

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Introduction 19

field of IP. The political economy of this movement was such that both strove to become politically relevant in order to obtain financial resources from the state and other sources supporting the American effort in the cold war. Interdisciplinary models of IR were far less successful in selling themselves within the university and to relevant interest groups. This all supports Ole Wæver’s extrapolation of Foucault’s (1969) thesis on how disciplines do not mirror a pre-given domain – they constitute, or are constituted together with, these domains. There is a demand for people competent on a given domain; hence, we need people with a PhD, for example, in IR. Study fields seek status and recognition within the university system, and an obvious way is to establish their own discipline. Funding poured into those aims sustains the movement, and securing the career prospects of graduates requires disciplines to be maintained. A self-reinforcing disciplinary development is created in this way, and as a consequence disciplines do not die away easily (Wæver, 2007, pp. 290–2). The disciplinary turn in IR has made it an attractive subject for graduates. Today, career diplomats also are produced in political science departments, in their IR programmes in particular. This complements the traditional entry route through studies in international law and history. But the relative successes of IR have come at a price of ‘disciplinary narrowing’ to mostly American theories and concepts (Wæver and Tickner 2009, p. 5; Tickner and Wæver, 2009, p. 335; Biersteker, 2009, p. 320). The non-American successes have included the high rankings of Britishbased book series, such as the Cambridge Studies in International Relations (under the auspices of the British International Studies Association), the establishment of an English school section into the ISA, the founding of the World International Studies Committee (WISC) and the volumes introducing and promoting distinctly European and further global contributions to IR theory (Friedrichs, 2004; Jørgensen and Knudsen, 2006; Wæver and Tickner, 2009). The major point here is, however, that none of these reform movements has really striven to rid IR from its disciplinary status that originates in the intellectual heritage of the 1950s.

The re-emergence of interdisciplinarity From our perspective, in the disciplining projects since the 1950s, IR’s autonomy was bought at too high a price. IR was cut off from currents in other disciplines. It was partly self-marginalized in the splendid isolation of its own great debates, and partly became a subfield of political science. These moves towards introverted disciplinarity coupled with

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asymmetrical bi- or subdisciplinarity of ‘political science IR’ have, however, been recently subjected to critical scrutiny from several angles. Most efforts for reopening IR have so far been limited to exploring the territory between IR and a related single discipline. Examples include the (re-)established linkages between contemporary IR and philosophy (Beardsworth, 2005), international relations and world history (Buzan and Little, 2001); IR and technology (Herrera, 2003) and IR and religion (Rengger, 2003). There is also strong interest in IR and economics through IPE (Strange, 1994) and a renewed interest in linkages between international law and IR (e.g., Koskenniemi, 2002). Some works develop interdisciplinary middle-range approaches to the study of problems such as democratic peace (Mousseau, 2003), globalization (Krishna-Hensel, 2000) or energy policy (Aalto, 2011). As for training, there is a renewed interest in study programmes bearing the term ‘international studies’ in their name. One study surveyed 140 programmes mostly with an IS major – in some cases ‘Global Studies’ or ‘Global and International studies’ – in 38 American states. Slightly less than half of them required an interdisciplinary introductory course specifically designed for IS majors, wherein the extra IR components usually included political science, economics and history (each more than half); anthropology and/or geography figured in around one third. A larger share of programmes prefers to offer an introductory course in one of the subdisciplines. Political science is nearly always offered, and the next popular ones are again economics, history, anthropology and geography (Brown et al., 2006, pp. 267–71). However, these programmes usually represent a relatively weak sense of interdisciplinarity in which multiple perspectives on a particular topic are drawn from different disciplines in order to fully account for that topic, without aiming for epistemic integration (see below and Chapter 2). The textbook industry has largely failed to support these programmes. A lone example is International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues (Anderson et al., 2007). This book introduces the standard set of perspectives from political science, history, geography, economics and anthropology; it surveys various topics of area studies and some of the current global issues such as terrorism and violence. Its title notwithstanding, it does not discuss the various meanings and uses of interdisciplinarity in any detail. Nor does it address IR and its successes and failures as a discipline of the ‘international’. By contrast, Stephanie Lawson’s International Relations does engage in a brief discussion of what the ‘international’ is, and notes that IS as an interdisciplinary area of study which has ‘much relevance for contemporary IR but, many would

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Introduction 21

argue, do[es] not necessarily lie at the core of its concerns, which must retain a focus on the international or world political concerns’ (Lawson, 2003, p. 14). She concludes by saying: For the student of IR, although the focus will remain on the political, thereby retaining an identity that is distinct from the more diffuse interdisciplinary field of international studies, an appreciation of what other fields of study have to offer and an ability to incorporate their insights is essential (ibid., p. 140). Lawson does not attempt to specify the role and import of IS at the theoretical or conceptual level, but hints that it could lie in clarifying the empirical substance by cultivating links with area studies (p. 14). Her stress for IR to be centred on the ‘political’ sphere does not refer explicitly to Morgenthau’s or anyone else’s conception of politics. But at the terminological level, it is interestingly linked to the loosely emerging literature on world politics – to which we wish to offer a wider and more accommodative alternative, while also reconnecting with the interdisciplinary roots of IR. World politics is a term often used without much programmatic intent.7 At its most primitive, it connotes a vague idea of ‘geopolitics’, or a great power struggle on a global scale. The journal World Politics situates itself close to the political science subfield of comparative politics. In Lawson’s usage, world politics is deployed in a fairly typical way to refer to the political relations among a wider continuum of actors than is allowed for in the state-centric view of IR (ibid.). For R.B.J. Walker (1993), world politics involves ‘a claim to historical and structural transformation that throw historically derived concepts and disciplinary divisions into rather serious doubt’ (p. 103). He is critical of the distinction between domestic and international politics, or ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the state as he puts it. His perspective is, from the outset, pluralist in respecting the import of structural realist theories, analyses of interdependence, regimes and institutions, while also commending a more historically sensitive stance. Nevertheless, he ends up accentuating the centrality of questioning our fundamental assumptions in the study of these problems through philosophical analysis of ontology and epistemology, while relying heavily on political theory. He explicitly agrees with Robert Keohane in that ‘contemporary world politics is . . . a matter of wealth and poverty, life and death’. Yet he goes on to insist that these questions ‘should only be understood in relation to the possibility of thinking about political life at all in the late

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twentieth century’ (p. 101). One is left doubtful as to whether this programme ultimately is at all intended to examine the issues mentioned by Keohane on the empirical level. Overall, Walker’s account of world politics is better suited for purposes of deconstruction than reconstruction. It shows a programmatic intent of relating, if not anchoring, IR to political theory and, thereby, to some currents in political science. But it does not specify the precise building blocks of its programme, let alone the working methods. Yet it has been eye-opening for many scholars who started their careers at the turn of the cold war and after. However, only a few of them have ended up holding a chair in world politics. These seem to concentrate on the Nordic region, which has been a site for alternative and experimental interdisciplinary theorizing for a long time (Friedrichs, 2004, p. 82). For example, Pekka Korhonen (2011) has offered world politics as a rhetorical perspective that draws upon political theory and examines the whole world as a site for political communication and struggles among various types of subjects. Heikki Patomäki’s (2002) variant of world politics adopts a critical realist philosophy of science to understand and explain world scale transformations, with the ultimate objective of bettering the world and promoting our emancipation. The various proposals on world politics speak for a wider intellectual movement at the critical edges of IR and globalization studies in particular. These proposals do not necessarily appear fundamentally incompatible with interdisciplinary IS. Yet they each draw attention to a particular direction – either towards political science (for example, Lawson); or as its special aspect, political theory in its Continental form (Walker, Korhonen); or towards a normative social science that would draw more rigour upon currents in the philosophy of science (Patomäki). In summary, the cited research agendas of world politics remain much more narrow than those afforded by interdisciplinary IS, which builds on the interdisciplinary origins of IR and attempts to re-establish its linkages with several other fields interested in studying the various images of the ‘international’ – be they classical ‘inter-state’, ‘foreign’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’, or ‘world’ points of view, or others. Interdisciplinary IS has no one discipline from which to draw its inspiration; no favoured theory or method, nor one undisputed normative goal. It is an effort to systematically expand IR research towards a large number of disciplines and fields of study while building on past interdisciplinary approaches and accepting the coterminous presence of disciplinary IR (Figure 1.1).

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Introduction 23 Philosophy? World politics

Geography?

The humanities? Political theory

Sociology?

Political science

History? IS

IR

Theology?

IP

Social psychology? Linguistics? Psychology?

Organization theory

Economics? Law? Figure 1.1 IR, IS, IP, world politics and interdisciplinarity.

Our interdisciplinary approaches In this book we address some of the linkages between IR and philosophy, peace research, aspects of history, political and environmental geography, globalization studies, IPE, political psychology, sociology and social theory, linguistics, strategic or war studies and anthropology. Chapter 2 by David Long discusses in more detail what can be meant by the idea of discipline and what is the status of IR and IS on this plane. IR is found to be a mixed-status discipline, depending on whether loose or tight criteria of disciplinarity are adopted. IS, by contrast, is offered as a more open-ended field. In order to grasp its nature and connections to other domains of knowledge, it is taken as an essentially interdisciplinary field. To comprehend what this umbrella concept of interdisciplinarity means, a distinction is made among multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neodisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity refers to the variety of disciplines through which the ‘international’ can be studied, but makes little effort at theoretical integration. Transdisciplinarity involves the application of theories and methods across disciplines or, ultimately, supersession of disciplinary practices. Neodisciplinarity tries to institutionalize a certain practice,

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profession or dimension of social life in order to produce interdisciplinary knowledge that is not easily acquired in traditional disciplinary contexts. The chapter concludes by arguing that IS has the best prospect of producing theoretically insightful and useful knowledge by understanding itself as a novel interdiscipline or neodiscipline. This means that it should not merely try to combine existing disciplines, or transgress them, but come to grips with its connections to various other fields of research. Chapter 3 by Pami Aalto enquires how interdisciplinary engagement can be better organized in the wide field of international studies by considering the import of the philosophy of science, primarily in light of the work of Thomas Kuhn on puzzles and ‘paradigms’, Imre Lakatos on ‘research programmes’ and Larry Laudan’s commentary on their work. In particular, the focus is on how Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes can be adapted for the purpose of organizing interdisciplinary IS. Lakatos’s idea of ‘positive heuristics’ is taken as a useful analogy for expanding research outwards from the confines of IR. Research programmes can open up towards related disciplines without losing their ‘core’, so doing in order to maintain their vitality and ultimately help us to explain, understand and envision more phenomena, problems, as well as to formulate and solve more puzzles. Paradigmatic, empirical and conceptual types of research programmes are discerned. In each case the impetus for interdisciplinary research springs from open-ended and open-minded ‘puzzlement’ when disciplinary means fail to help us solving our problems. The programmes are then developed as methodological means by which to organize research into sets of better defined puzzles. With such methodological solutions, interdisciplinary IS would be built around a series of open-ended interdisciplinary research programmes. Chapter 4 by Vilho Harle examines the import of the Frankfurt school, the English school of IR, and peace research as models for producing interdisciplinary research programmes in IS. The interdisciplinary materialism of the Frankfurt school of the 1930s represents a core-discipline oriented multidisciplinary mode in which the task of social philosophy was to draw together knowledge compiled in separate disciplines. The English school, for its part, in its classical format is a programme coloured by theoretical and methodological pluralism. It covers all forms of interdisciplinarity and, in analogous thinking, represents a progressive research programme that can study all aspects and levels of the ‘international’ through its open-ended and overlapping concepts of international system, international society and world

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society; and its idea of informal and formal international institutions. In peace research, as suggested by Galtung and practised in the Nordic states in particular, is found a problem-oriented study organized mostly along the neodisciplinary model. However, it has left existing disciplines and their deficiencies untouched. Chapters 5 to 7 examine the traditional levels of analysis of IR from various interdisciplinary perspectives and expand them in new directions. In Chapter 5 Simon Dalby recasts the traditional core concept of IR, the international system, by using critical geopolitics approaches that draw upon political geography, poststructuralist philosophy and critical theory. The concepts of geopolitics, globalization and empire are introduced to expose the weaknesses of traditional IR conceptualizations of the international system. Instead, the notion of Anthropocene is suggested as a wider spatial category through which we should instead understand our current and future existence on the planet – an existence human activities have rendered endangered. Among those human activities have been preoccupations encouraged by traditional IR thinking and acting. In Chapter 6 Sami Moisio examines the transformation of statehood under neoliberalism; he utilizes literatures on geography, geopolitics, historical materialism and other critical IPE, as well as on governmentality. The challenges of globalization, internationalization and transnationalization prompt states to strengthen their competitiveness and erode the domestic/international divide. These transdisciplinary literatures together with a case study on Finland exemplify the theoretical and empirical challenges to our traditional understanding of states and their mutual relations as a pivotal level of analysis in IR. In Chapter 7 Aalto introduces three different types of research programmes through which the study of the human subject in IR can be expanded in order to uncover a wider range of roles (wider than IR is capable of providing) that human beings perform in the international domain. The first programme extends, to the humanities, research on states–peoples’ roles, doing so by linking some elements of Morgenthau’s classical realist IR theory with the study of diplomatic history. The second programme reaches towards the (natural) sciences by starting from James Rosenau’s liberal IR theory, and extending to political psychology, cognitive science and the economic-formal modelling of our choices (as has been done in prospect theory). The third programme connects Barry Buzan’s English school theory with the active resistance of bottom-up actors as examined in everyday international political economy (EIPE), building a wider social scientific programme. Finally,

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while ‘reflectivist’ studies drawing upon, for example, post-colonialism and feminism, represent less close-knit literatures, they offer further research options for covering in more detail the disadvantaged and marginalized faces of human subjects in international studies. Chapters 8 and 9 examine some of the main concepts in IR from an interdisciplinary perspective. In Chapter 8 Tuomas Forsberg widens the study of power in IR towards philosophical, linguistic, conceptual and sociological or social theoretical directions. He argues that the taxonomies of power in IR and other disciplines are currently not sufficiently connected. Therefore, too much is currently assumed about power and its various forms in IR when those assumptions could also be studied empirically. Other disciplines, for their part, do not discuss what might be specific about power in international relations. Interdisciplinary taxonomies of power should include ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, as well as sector-based approaches, and elaborate on the different facets of power, such as power as symbolic power and other forms of ‘capital’; relational power; power through communication and rationalities, and linguistic or discursive power. In Chapter 9 Petr Drulák moves beyond traditional conceptualizations of war in realist IR and strategic studies. He takes stock of the study of war in what he calls theoretical disciplines, including IR in particular; history; and the arts, in particular artistic representations of war. In order to overcome the theoretical problems ensuing from this diversity of approaches, Drulák argues that they all represent abstract concepts of war. Because they are not normally part of our immediate experience, we understand them through metaphors such as combat, game, production, accident, law or storm. Therefore the study of the metaphors of war offers us a common ground or metalanguage that facilitates their mutual comparisons, helping us to identify conceptual overlaps and establish genuine differences. Eventually this amounts to a transdisciplinary approach. Chapter 10 is a closing commentary, which the editors invited Iver Neumann to write, on how to move on in light of the theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues discussed in this book. In Neumann’s perspective, the field of international studies emerging out of this book and related literatures is held together by powers of fusion and common subject matter, or the problem posed by the term international. As for a further cohesive force, he proposes a focus on social theory. From this, he moves on to outline one direction afforded by social theory – that is the practice turn in the social sciences to study what actually happens as a result of interdisciplinary interaction. Illustrating one such

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transition by means of personal experience, he demonstrates how his switch from the political sciences and IR to social anthropology was coloured by differences in focus on outcomes versus processes, and different writing styles. Neumann’s closing commentary represents one possible response to the wide agenda of international studies we have sketched and reintroduced in this book. We hope there will be many other such responses, as we are under no illusion of having exhausted the rich possibilities of interdisciplinary IS. We see its evolvement as a long and dialogical process, but one that is urgently needed in both the theoretical and the practical senses.

Notes 1. In the ‘neo-neo’ debate, both theories borrow heavily from economic rational choice models. This apparent synthesis between them, however, ultimately fails to include a wider consensus on the basic question of what best explains state behaviour in the international arena – whether states are driven by ‘relative’ or ‘absolute’ gains (see e.g., Wæver, 2007, p. 303). Among the constructivist camp, Alexander Wendt and many others have sought for a ‘middle-ground’ position which would be able to appeal to realists and liberals (e.g., Adler, 1997; Wendt, 1995). The most recent effort is Barry Buzan’s offer of the revived ‘English school’ of IR as capable of immersing into itself many of the central concerns of realism, liberalism and more radical traditions of international theory (Buzan, 2001). 2. The Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 went to Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science, who works on environmental governance issues that could also be related to the IR discipline. The political scientist Robert Putnam, whose work is frequently used in IR, is reportedly well cited in a number of fields in the social sciences and humanities, thus on a par with the historical sociology of Charles Tilly, or the philosophical and social theory work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida (Jacobs and Frickel, 2009, p. 51). 3. The other two were International Organization and World Politics. 4. The practical analyses include international politics, art of war, art of diplomacy, conduct of foreign relations, colonial government, international organization, international law, international economics, international communication and international education; and the theoretical analyses include political geography, political demography, and the technology, sociology and psychology of IR, as well as international ethics. 5. Wright’s view of geography is narrow from the contemporary perspective, especially in contrast to the burgeoning literature on human, cultural and political geography since then. 6. At the same time Hoffmann cites Wright approvingly (p. 1). 7. The same concerns the term ‘global politics’. A recent textbook (Edkins and Zehfuss, 2009) on that subject adopts the compelling format of presenting a

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Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio set of questions ‘that puzzle all of us’ (p. 1), such as: Why is the world divided up territorially? Or: Can we move beyond conflict?. For each of the some twenty questions posed, illustrative examples are outlined and the assumptions necessary for comprehending those questions critically are analysed. Apart from loose commitment to some philosophical thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, the book quite self-consciously declines to define its agenda or elaborate the notion of global politics itself.

References Aalto, P. (ed.) (2011) Russia’s Energy Policy: National, Interregional and Global Dimensions (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Aalto, P., V. Harle and S. Moisio (eds) (2011) Global and Regional Problems: Towards Interdisciplinary Study (Aldershot: Ashgate). Adler, E. (1997) ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 3(3): 319–63. Anderson, S., J.A.K. Hey, M.A. Peterson and S.W. Toops (eds) (2007) International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues (Boulder: Westview Press). Beardsworth, R. (2005) ‘The Future of Critical Philosophy and World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(1): 201–35. Biersteker, T.J. (2009) ‘The Parochialism of Hegemony: Challenges for “American” International Relations’ in A. Tickner and O. Wæver (eds) International Relations Scholarship around the World: Worlding beyond the West (London: Routledge). Breuning, M., J. Bredehoft and E. Walton (2005) ‘Promise and Performance: An Evaluation of Journals in International Relations’, International Studies Perspectives, 6: 447–61. Brown, J.N., S. Pegg and J.W. Shively (2006) ‘Consensus and Divergence in International Studies: Survey Evidence from 140 International Studies Curriculum Programs’, International Studies Perspectives, 7: 267–86. Buzan, B. (2001) ‘The English School: An Underexploited Resource in IR’, Review of International Studies, 27(3): 471–88. Buzan, B. and R. Little (2001) ‘Why International Relations Has Failed as An Intellectual Project and What to Do about It’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(1): 19–39. Edkins, J. and M. Zehfuss (eds) (2009) Global Politics: A New Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge). Ferguson, Y.H. and R.W. Mansbach (2007) ‘Post-internationalism and IR Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(3): 529–49. Friedrichs, J. (2004) European Approaches to International Relations Theory: A House with Many Mansions (London: Routledge). Goodwin, G. (ed.) (1951) The University Teaching of International Relations (Oxford: Blackwell). Griffiths, M., S.C. Roach and M.S. Solomon (1999) Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations (London: Routledge). Harle, V. (2000) The Enemy with a Thousand Faces (Westport, CT: Praeger).

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Introduction 29 Herrera, G.L. (2003) ‘Technology and International Systems’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32(3): 559–93. Hobbs, H.H. (ed.) (2000) Pondering Post-Internationalism: A Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century? (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). Hoffmann, S. (1960) Contemporary Theory in International Relations (New Jersey, NY: Prentice-Hall). Holsti, K.J. (1967) International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (New Jersey, NY: Prentice-Hall). Holsti, K.J. (1985) The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (London: Routledge). Jacobs, J.A. and S. Frickel (2009) ‘Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Assessment’, Annual Review of Sociology, 35: 43–65. Jones, A. (2002) ‘Interview with Kal Holsti’, Review of International Studies, 28(3): 619–33. Jørgensen, K.E. and T.B. Knudsen (2006) International Relations in Europe (London: Frank Cass). Kirk, G. (1947) The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities (New York: Council on Foreign Relations). Klein, J.T. (1990) Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press). Korhonen, P. (1983) Hans Morgenthau – intellektuaalinen historia (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä). Korhonen, P. (2011) ‘International Studies as Political Linguistics’ in P. Aalto, V. Harle and S. Moisio (eds) Global and Regional Problems: Towards Interdisciplinary Study (Aldershot: Ashgate). Koskenniemi, M. (2002) The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Krishna-Hensel, S.F. (ed.) (2000) The New Millennium: Challenges and Strategies for a Globalizing World (Aldershot: Ashgate). Lawson, S. (2003) International Relations (Cambridge: Polity Press). Long, D. (2006) ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference?’, Review of International Studies, 32(4): 603–22. Manning, C.A.W. (1954) The University Teaching of the Social Sciences: International Relations (Paris: UNESCO). Manning, C.A.W. (1962) The Nature of International Society (London: Bell). Miller, R. (2010) ‘Interdisciplinarity: Its Meanings and Consequences’ in R. Denemark (ed.) The International Studies Encyclopedia (London: Blackwell). Moran, J. (2002) Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge). Morgenthau, H.J. (1929) Die internationale Rechtspflege, ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen (Leipzig: Frankfurter Abhandlungen zum Kiegsverhütungsrecht, Heft 12). Morgenthau, H.J. (1952) ‘Area Studies and the Study of International Relations’, International Social Science Bulletin, 4(4): 647–55. Morgenthau, H.J. (1955 [1948]) Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Boston: McGraw Hill). Morgenthau, H.J. (1970) Truth and Power (London: Pall Mall Press). Mousseau, Michael (2003) ‘The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and Evidence’, International Studies Quarterly, 47: 483–510.

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Neumann, I.B. and O.J. Sending (2007) ‘ “The International” as Governmentality’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(3): 677–701. Patomäki, H. (2002) After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re) Construction of World Politics (London: Routledge). Patomäki, H. and C. Wight (2000) ‘The Promises of Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44(2): 213–37. Rengger, N. (2003) ‘Eternal Return? Modes of Encountering Religion in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32(2): 327–36. Schmidt, B.C. (2002) ‘On the History and Historiography of International Relations’ in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations (London: SAGE). Smith, C.B. (2003) ‘How Do Textbooks Represent the Field of International Studies?’, International Studies Review, 5: 421–41. Strange, S. (1994) States and Markets (London: Pinter). Suganami, H. (1978) ‘A Note on the Origin of the Word “International” ’, British Journal of International Studies, 4(3): 226–32. Sylvester, C. (2007) ‘Whither the International at the End of IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(3): 551–73. Tickner, A. and O. Wæver (2009) ‘Conclusion: Worlding Where the West Once Was’, in A. Tickner and O. Wæver (eds) International Relations Scholarship around the World: Worlding beyond the West (London: Routledge). Vasquez, J.A. (1983) The Power of Power Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Vattel, E. de (2005 [1758]) The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, , date accessed 25 November 2010. Walker, R.B.J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wendt, A. (1995) ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security, 20(1): 71–81. Whitehall, G. and R.K. Brickner (2009) ‘Opening Global Politics: A New Introduction?’, International Studies Perspectives, 10(2): 216–23. Wiggerhaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School, transl. by M. Robertson (Cambridge: Polity Press). Wilson, E. (1998) Consilience: The Unity of all Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Wright, Q. (1955) The Study of International Relations (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts). Wæver, O. (2007) ‘Still a Discipline after All These Debates?’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wæver, O. and A. Tickner (2009) ‘Introduction: Geocultural Epistemologies’ in O. Wæver and A. Tickner (eds) International Relations Scholarship Around the World: Worlding beyond the West (London: Routledge). Zimmern, A. (1939) University Teaching of International Relations (Geneva: League of Nations).

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2 Interdisciplinarity and the Study of International Relations David Long

Introduction1 In this chapter I argue that the study of international relations (IR) is interdisciplinary in three distinct ways, corresponding to three variants of interdisciplinarity that I call multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neodisciplinarity. Identifying the ways in which IR is interdisciplinary highlights the broad and diverse character of our subject, helps to identify and specify the oft-neglected contrast between international relations and international politics, and relocates the academic study of international relations within a wider milieu of international studies (IS). There is now a long list of interdisciplinary scholarship and interventions in international relations spanning the decades of its existence as an academic study, such as Susan Strange’s call for an end to the mutual neglect of international politics and international economics as well as her collaborative work with business studies, the proposal for collaboration with international lawyers under the rubric of the legalization of world politics, historical sociologists’ analyses of the international system, and those working on the social and political psychology of foreign policy decision-making or conflict resolution, to name just a few (Strange, 1970; Stopford and Strange, 1991; Goldstein et al., 2000; Hobson, 1998; 2002; Hudson, 2005; Fischer, 2007). However, interdisciplinary academic practice and discourse has rarely engaged the theory and concept of interdisciplinarity (cf., Ashworth, 2009). There have been, and continue to be, ritualistic nods towards the notion that the study of international relations is in some way interdisciplinary. Yet, there have been few attempts to think through what that might mean. Instead, along with a recent 31

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rise in the awareness of interdisciplinarity in international relations has come an unease with the term itself and a proliferation of neologisms, like antidisciplinary and supradisciplinary (Rosow, 2002; Beier and Arnold, 2005). There is also understandable scepticism of the value of meta-theoretical discussions of such things as disciplines and interdisciplinarity. The concept of discipline can appear to be of little use to most researchers because it is too general, too abstract and – as it concerns the sociology of knowledge – too remote from interests in the real world of international relations. This has prompted the retort that IR scholars should instead ‘get on with empirical research’ (Moravscik, 2003). The under-theorization of interdisciplinarity in international relations has itself been the product of mutual neglect. Research into the meaning and practice of interdisciplinarity has tended to focus on the humanities, in areas such as education, women’s studies and English. But even when the focus is on the social sciences, interdisciplinarity has been a marginal activity, often portrayed as a subaltern or selfconsciously critical endeavour and, partly as a consequence of this, discussion has barely affected IR at all.2 For example, Julie Thompson Klein’s Crossing Boundaries (1996) deploys the metaphor of geopolitics to describe the relations of disciplines and interdisciplinarity, yet the reading, which reduces geopolitics to war and territory, is simplistic and without very much consideration of IR scholarship.3 Yet, the conception and construction of (inter)disciplinarity matters very much to knowledge production and academic organization in IR as elsewhere because it is the unstated premise upon which research is conducted, the standards upon which it is judged and to evaluate who is considered qualified to conduct it and to teach it to the next generation of scholars. The discourse of interdisciplinarity is sometimes deliberately deployed as a denial of disciplinary status, marginalizing ways of knowing and fields of expertise. At the same time, it is also often used a rationale for wider academic cooperation – and particularly interdepartmental cooperation. Despite the occasional bad rap intimating eclecticism, incoherence and/or redundancy, interdisciplinarity continues to be encouraged: by universities to develop academic teaching programmes and by government and private foundations to further innovative research.4 While the implications will be abundantly clear to anyone who has recently applied for a job or for a grant, or submitted an article to a journal, whether an academic study such as international relations is conceived in disciplinary or interdisciplinary terms

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has significant implications for the way that it is viewed, how theory is developed, and the direction that theory takes. Individual scholars may not always apprehend or appreciate the constructions and constraints of disciplinary codes, but nonetheless they are there, persistently, in the background (and sometimes foreground). This chapter attempts a conceptualization of interdisciplinarity to sort through its manifold manifestations in international relations scholarship. I begin with a discussion of disciplines and interdisciplinarity, and then briefly consider the disciplinary status of international relations today. It has been observed that interdisciplinarity is paradoxical, in that it conceptually derives from that which at the outset it seeks to transcend (Klein, 1990; Moran, 2002). The reliance on disciplinarity means that any understanding of interdisciplinarity must engage with the notion of academic discipline. In the three sections that follow, I outline the modes of interdisciplinarity – multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neodisciplinarity – and examine the way that each appears in, and shapes, the study of international relations. Two points need to be made by way of a preface to these sections. First, in this chapter, interdisciplinar(it)y becomes an umbrella concept, a descriptor of a variety of academic moves that cross, add to, or otherwise challenge the field of study, the appropriate concepts, methods and theories, and the institutionalization of previously secure disciplinary boundaries. Each of the modes is both interdisciplinary yet, at the same time, only a partial representation of interdisciplinary discourse and practice. Second, in subdividing interdisciplinarity and using different labels, I am partaking of a now well-trodden course of stipulating new terms. As Klein (1990) has noted, there has been a proliferation, indeed maybe even a surfeit, of new words to redescribe, redefine or subdivide interdisciplinarity. Both multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are terms in widespread use today, though their meaning is not stable or generally agreed upon. My definition of multidisciplinarity is uncontroversial. By contrast, my interpretation of transdisciplinarity is particular and I argue for my definition below. On the other hand, neodisciplinary and neodisciplinarity are neologisms entirely of my own creation.5 They are needed because, as with some other academic subjects, the interdisciplinarity of international relations is not captured by multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary modes. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for the academic organization of IR and international studies.

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Social science disciplines and the study of international relations According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word discipline has for hundreds of years related to the instruction of disciples, to a branch of education, or to chastisement with the purpose of training. It is the second of these related notions that interests us here, but what constitutes a discipline in the social sciences is not without controversy. For William Robson (1972) discipline ‘suggests a rigorous mode of thought, a specialized language, and a common set of assumptions shared by those claiming to understand or exercise the discipline’. Morton Kaplan (1971, p. 6) presents three criteria that must be met: a discipline implies ‘a set of techniques; a body of theory and propositions; and a subject matter’. For the purposes of this chapter I consider a discipline any distinct, organized body of learning with an agreed core-set of knowledge and involving a programme of teaching/learning and research: in other words, systematic training in a coherent set of theories, concepts and methods, and their application. As such, a discipline involves three things: a discrete field of study; an agreed approach or set of approaches to method and to explanation; and a measure of institutionalization, in terms of university departments, academic associations, teaching and research programmes, journals and books reflecting the first two elements. The definition of the word discipline is more demanding and precise than that of academic field, subject or study, as it adds technique and institutionalization. Yet, it has a certain unreality about it and hardly seems to reflect the character of actual, existing social science disciplines. The definition seems to assume that, to qualify as a discipline, there must be an agreed body of concepts, theory and method in the form of a single coherent paradigm. In fact, actually existing disciplines are less cohesive, less unitary and less similar than the attempts at definition suggest. Disciplines differ: some are effectively unitary, hierarchical and paradigmatic; others are more plural in terms of the range of accepted methods and theories. Conceptual, methodological or theoretical consensus within disciplines can be anything from a single model to a widely divergent set of approaches. For many established academic departments, administrative and bureaucratic power as well as social and economic forces beyond the walls of academia, have been key factors in disciplinary consolidation. Furthermore, the definition also seems to suggest that those disciplines that are not unitary should become, or are becoming, so. It

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does not take into account disciplinary history, the process of formation and decline of disciplines, disciplinary development, consolidation and crisis. Instead, the attempts at definition tend to contribute to the mythological histories of disciplines that emphasize and highlight coherence and unity, histories in which disciplines emerge as distinct specialisms serving an intellectual, as well as a wider, social purpose. These myths present an atomistic, ahistorical view of disciplinarity, a view in which disciplines are separate, functionally homogeneous, specialized (that is, largely internally focused in terms of theory development), and essentially unchanging in the demarcation of one from the other. In this view, the social sciences can be divided into discrete packets of knowledge. These mythical understandings and their unstated assumptions of coherence and distinctness among the traditional social science disciplines have not gone unchallenged. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explain the evolution, specialization and demarcation of disciplines, and the particular division among them that has unfolded.6 For our purposes, though, the definition of discipline (unrealistic as it might appear) has had important ramifications for the conceptualization of interdisciplinarity and, more particularly, for the status of international relations. The unrealistic nature of the definition of discipline immediately poses a problem for the study of international relations. International relations has a distinct subject matter: the social, political, economic and other relations, forces and structures reaching beyond the national state.7 It has a set of techniques, methods and theories, although it is a very wide-ranging list; and there has been discord over which are legitimate as well as a good deal of mutual incomprehension, largely as a result (Hermann, 1998). While international relations is all too rarely taught and studied in dedicated departments of international relations, there are journals, associations and other indicators of institutional establishment and distinctness. It would seem, then, that as long as consensus on methods and theories is relatively open-ended and permissive, IR would certainly qualify as a discipline, and it resembles plural disciplines like geography, political science and sociology. On the other hand, a definition of discipline that entails a single coherent paradigm and consequent hierarchical organization suggests IR is not a discipline, though the same could be said of plural disciplines like political science. (Warleigh-Lack and Cini, 2009; cf., Guzzini, 1998) If we focus on institutionalization rather than technique as the key element of the definition, however, we get a sense of the real problem

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with the disciplinary status of international relations. The growth of the academic study of international relations has been conditioned by wider developments in the social sciences. The established disciplines today are those academic subjects that have subdivided social science since roughly the turn of the twentieth century, but more particularly since the Second World War. While there is no consensus on a definitive listing, these disciplines generally include psychology, sociology, economics and political science (and, depending on the definition of social science, geography, anthropology, history and/or law).8 International relations is not on this list, and whatever else one might say about the nature of academic IR, it is obvious that it does not have the disciplinary status that these social sciences do – in terms of university departments, academic associations, the organization of government funding for teaching and research, library categorization and so on. Though this should not conclusively mean that IR is not a discipline, it certainly indicates that it is generally not considered to be a discipline like economics, psychology, sociology or political science.9 In practice, the definition and configuration of social science disciplines has meant that IR either has to be a discipline like the others or it is not a discipline at all. Though the mythical history of the academic study of international relations has been challenged of late (Schmidt, 1998), one odd aspect of the disciplinary history of IR is generally neglected. It is commonly assumed to be a relatively new subject, even though, in institutional terms, in most countries of the world it is barely newer than most other social sciences (Ashworth, 2009; Hoffmann, 1977). Indeed, institutionally one might better describe it as stunted. There was an early development of chairs and institutes after the First World War, and then rapid growth after the Second World War. However, this post-war growth of academic IR was almost entirely within political science departments – and thus the institutional distinctiveness of international relations was subsumed within what was thought to be a wider, yet still coherent, discipline. We live with this history today. The prevalent and widely accepted usage of international relations is as the conventional name for a subdiscipline, or subfield, within political science, one that would more accurately be titled ‘international politics’. The consequences of this labelling are serious because the discourse of discipline and interdisciplinarity figure prominently in the categorization of what counts as ‘academic international relations’ and what does not. In what Jordan et al. (2009, p. 3) call a survey of international relations faculty in ten countries, the authors include not only those who self-identified as IR

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scholars – most of whom were political scientists to begin with – but also ‘any scholar who taught or did research on trans-border issues as they relate to some aspect of politics’, including political scientists, specializing in American politics, who study trade and immigration, and specialists of comparative politics ‘who happen to teach IR courses’. Apparently all sorts of political scientists count as international relations scholars, while the potentially relevant contributions of scholars from any other discipline can be ignored. The discourse of interdisciplinarity persists and recurs because the subject of international relations is, in fact, much more than just international politics. Of course, to begin with, the international is studied in various ways in other disciplines such as law, economics and history. But even within political science itself there is resistance to the subdisciplinary discourse, which is a result of the perceived need to consider more than international politics, that is, to consider areas covered by other disciplines – international law, international economics, international history – but without adherence to their respective disciplinary conceptions, theories and methods. An intradisciplinary agenda like this invariably bursts its disciplinary bounds, as it becomes clear that political science is not the only disciplinary lens through which to view international relations: there are other international studies that have a contribution to make in terms of concepts, methods and theories. Even at this point, however, the discourse of disciplinarity channels the alternatives. Allowing that international relations are studied in numerous academic locations, a dichotomy is imposed: to be disciplinary, IR must be encompassed by one of the established disciplines – for example, political science. Then, the multiple sites together encompass the interdisciplinary domain of international studies. The problem in the latter context is incoherence and lack of focus (a.k.a. lack of disciplinarity), which itself engenders consideration of the need for a disciplinary core to the interdisciplinary realm (Morgenthau, 1952). But this only rehearses the dichotomy, producing a tension between collapsing to the narrower subdiscipline versus expanding with the inevitably centrifugal forces of interdisciplinarity. In point of fact, interdisciplinarity in the study of international relations is not nearly so clear-cut. Interdisciplinarity is not simply the polar opposite of disciplinarity, but rather is something much more complex and amorphous. Interestingly, the conceptual problems affecting interdisciplinarity are akin to those afflicting the term international. As with international, the ‘inter’ in interdisciplinarity manifests division and multitude, yet at the same time it expresses the imperative to join

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together and (re)unite. Like international relations, the subject matter linked to the prefix is itself contested: national or state, discipline or department? And as a result, like international, the interdisciplinary is subject to various interpretations.10 Interdisciplinarity can represent a challenge to any of the three aspects of disciplinarity noted above: subject matter; concepts, methods and theories; or institutionalization. As a consequence, there is not one single interdisciplinarity, but rather three variants: multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neodisciplinarity. These terms indicate ideal types, and as such they overlap in the practice of scholarship. They are analytically distinct, however, responding to different disciplinary deficiencies. Identifying a distinct field or area of study, multidisciplinarity suggests that more than one discipline is needed to understand some topics, research problems or subject matter. Contrary to the disciplinary view, the division of knowledge into subject matters by discipline is imperfectly aligned; there are both overlaps and gaps. Where there is an issue or problem of common concern or interest to a number of disciplines, multidisciplinarity means that each in parallel applies its concepts, methods and theories to their particular dimension with regard to the subject matter. By contrast, transdisciplinarity rejects the parallelism of established disciplinary methods, theories and paradigms, and calls instead for an alternative or novel approach at odds with one or more of the established disciplines. Finally, neodisciplinarity argues for new and differently conceived disciplinary demarcation because certain persistent and prevalent social practices do not fit within disciplinary fields, and coherent explanation demands specialist institutionalization. As we will see, each of these modes of interdisciplinarity has appeared in the study of international relations, but with rather different results and potential for future teaching and research.

The multidisciplinarity of international studies The multidisciplinary challenge emerges because disciplinary subject matters are in fact not clearly separate and distinct; there are overlapping issues or new concerns, patterns of behaviour, configurations of power. Multidisciplinarity does not challenge disciplinary paradigms, dominant theories and methods, but simply adds them to one another. Thus, it involves parallel study or studies: for example, inter alia, the political analysis of politics, the economic analysis of economics, legal analysis of the law, of a subject, field or topic. A multidisciplinary

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examination of, or project on, an issue in public health, for instance, would involve not only experts in human physiology and medicine but also psychologists, sociologists, economists, lawyers and so on (Kelly, 2009). In multidisciplinarity there is no attempt at integrated analysis, nor is there a sense that there is anything enduring or specific to the object of study that would require more than aggregated analyses of various disciplines. Recognizing the analytical power of multiple specialist perspectives, multidisciplinary research involves coordination and ranking of those perspectives rather than integration into a single, coherent approach. In terms of academic organization, multidisciplinarity is often indicated by the name ‘studies’ as in the case of aboriginal studies, conflict and peace studies, development studies, environmental studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, urban studies, cultural studies, diplomatic studies, European studies, policy studies, refugee studies, strategic studies, security studies, legal studies, political studies and, of course, international studies. The plural ‘studies’ suggests the multiple and disparate sites of disciplinary knowledge, though the collective aggregation and coordination may indicate a more cohesive development, as I will show in the section below on neodisciplinarity. The plural, international studies, invites us to consider that there is more than one way to study international relations. IS is ordinarily associated with a particular selection of disciplinary fragments, such as international economics, international law, international (or diplomatic) history, but also includes area or regional studies, comparative cultural studies and languages.11 So comprehended, international studies does not so much constitute a discipline, as a variety of subjects with a common theme. Multidisciplinary international studies approaches international relations from a number of disciplinary perspectives to give a more complete picture, or comprehensive outlook. Because international relations as a subject matter comprises international political relations, international economic relations, international legal relations, international cultural relations and so on, various disciplines might be able to comprehend their respective aspects of the international – economics can address the international economy, for example – but to understand international relations as a whole requires a multiangular combination of studies (including international economics). The study conventionally called international relations (that is, international politics or the political science of international relations) is just one of these many studies. In order to understand international relations, a multidisciplinary

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approach counsels an expansion beyond the theories and methods of political science, and beyond the field of international politics, to consider a range of studies including, inter alia, legal perspectives on international law, economic analysis of the global economy, sociological examination of world society and so on through various international studies. Multidisciplinarity has the advantage of breadth of interest, flexibility, and plurality of approaches. It is favoured by academic bureaucracies and foundations, for whom interdisciplinarity means combining scholars from different departments, and for whom academic cooperation is a good in itself. For example, under the heading ‘Contribution to Interdisciplinarity’, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (2009, p. 3) claims of its ‘Rising Powers, Global Challenges and Social Change’ project that ‘contributions can be expected from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to: economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, development studies, management, demography and area studies.’12 Similarly, in the call for papers for its 2010 conference, the Council for European Studies claims that it ‘fosters and recognizes outstanding, multidisciplinary research in European studies’, and that they ‘encourage proposals in the widest range of disciplines; in particular, we welcome panels that combine disciplines, nationalities, and generations.’ The Council’s hope is that this multidisciplinary configuration will be the basis for what it calls interdisciplinary exchange.

Transdisciplinary studies of international relations If multidisciplinarity is the preferred mode of interdisciplinarity for academic bureaucrats, for academic researchers transdisciplinarity is the most salient mode. Transdisciplinary scholarship involves, among other things, borrowing concepts and theories from other disciplines and the creation of ‘invisible colleges’ of like-minded scholars from a variety of disciplines ‘straddling the world, where ideas are tossed around through new conferences and seminars and, above all, through new communications’ (RIPE, 1994, p. 1). It moves beyond the addition, aggregation or coordination of disciplinary knowledge to cross-fertilization and possibly transformation of disciplinary paradigms. In contrast to the parallelism and relativism of multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinary approaches seek to transcend methods and theories in the established disciplines. According to some advocates of transdisciplinarity, disciplines reflect congealed practices of specialization generating knowledge that is uselessly narrow and baroque. Such specialized knowledge may once have

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been useful but it is no longer. At best, disciplines are too narrow, out of date or of limited utility. At their worst, specialized disciplines are bastions and reflections of ideological privilege and bureaucratic power. In some corners of the literature on interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity has been given a specific meaning, associating it with a critical, transformative undertaking undermining all academic hierarchies and the established disciplinary configuration. For the advocates of this understanding of transdisciplinarity, it entails a significant transformation that challenges the order of knowledge produced and reproduced by the dominant disciplinary theories and approaches. The order of knowledge reflected within and among disciplines, it is argued, manifest dominant forms of knowledge that, broadly stated, reflect the positivist approach to social science, marginalizing other (usually non- or post-positivist) approaches, theories and methods within some or many of the disciplines (Klein, 2001). In upending the social science disciplines, this transdisciplinarity explicitly brings to the fore those previously marginalized approaches, such as neo-Marxism, postmodernism, variants of systems theory or some complex assortment of these. There are, however, a number of problems with this particular definition of transdisciplinarity. As an approach, it is rather better understood as a call to resistance against disciplinary oppression than as a conception of interdisciplinarity. Its ambitious objective hides a narrow focus. In stipulating transdisciplinarity as entailing the overthrow of established disciplines, indeed of the very bases of scientific and social scientific knowledge, it obfuscates a more general notion of transdisciplinary exchange as any engagement prompted by the perceived overlap of a limited number of disciplines. Transdisciplinary cross-fertilization simply involves the merging of disciplinary approaches and/or the development of novel approaches within a specific domain, generally at the margins of the discipline, which overlap with others (Dogan and Pahre, 1990). It is a partial transformation, with a wide range of potential implications for the adjacent established disciplines, sometimes leaving them relatively unaffected, sometimes being a good deal more subversive. Such transdisciplinary projects are readily identified in the combination of the names of disciplines, such as social psychology, political economy and historical sociology. The radical conception of transdisciplinarity is but one extreme variant of this notion, encompassing all disciplines entirely. In both these definitions of transdisciplinarity, however, the concepts, methods and theories of the discipline(s) that are being transformed are either rejected outright or are unseated from their disciplinary hierarchy

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and contextualized among a wider set of approaches. As a result, from the perspective of a paradigmatic discipline and its understanding of the unity of disciplinary knowledge, this transformation will be received, not so much as the incorporation of innovative approaches, but as an antidisciplinary assault on academic standards and agreed procedures. This suggests yet more problems with the radical interpretation of transdisciplinarity with regard to the newness of the approaches and also to their counter-hegemonic character. The newness of theories and approaches seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder. That is, while the hope is for new theory, in most instances transdisciplinary exchange involves the application of theory from one discipline onto the field of another, or the borrowing of concepts from one by another. So, the theories and methods may be new in what might be described as the receiving discipline, but are likely well known and established in the other discipline. Similarly, the methods and concepts may challenge the disciplinary hierarchy of the receiving discipline but be a part of the recognized mix of approaches of the other. Transdisciplinarity is better understood, then, as a spectrum of possible interdisciplinary interventions. The form it takes will depend significantly on the character of the disciplines themselves, whether paradigmatic or plural, and on the relationship between them. As a result, the form can range from a radical transformation to a more marginal cross-fertilization of disciplinary approaches, from a critical assault on dominant paradigms to an imperial takeover by a dominant approach, from the creation of genuinely novel approaches and concepts to the application of old disciplinary knowledge to new interdisciplinary domains. In IR, the radical transdisciplinary agenda is exemplified by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, p. 11), who in describing his approach to the study of modern world system argues that, ‘When one studies a social system, the classical lines of division within the social sciences are meaningless. Anthropology, economics, political science, sociology – and history – are divisions of the discipline anchored in a liberal conception of the state and its relation to functional and geographical sectors of the social order. . . . I am not calling for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of social systems, but for a unidisciplinary approach’. Wallerstein’s call for a single overarching approach to supersede separate, narrow and ideologically biased disciplinary paradigms, is an example of the transdisciplinary impulse to integrate, to cross disciplinary bridges, which impulse when taken to an extreme seeks to end the division and plurality of disciplines entirely.

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Apparently, at the other end of the transdisciplinary spectrum lies disciplinary imperialism, which has sometimes been more neutrally called crossdisciplinarity. This is the application of paradigmatic methods and theories of one discipline on the field of another, such as the application of neoclassical economic models to explain a variety of social behaviour and outcomes very far from the typical concerns with the economy, or in the case of historical sociology, in which sociology provides the methods and theories and history, is the data set/subject matter. With the direct transfer of concepts or methods from one discipline to another, disciplinary imperialism seems the antithesis of methodological and theoretical pluralism. This may be a good thing – after all, commensurability is valuable and, ultimately, there are some who hope for a unity of all science, and in disciplinary imperialism we may be seeing the steps towards this in the social sciences. But from the point of view of interdisciplinarity, there is obviously a problem. The assertion of superior methodology and theory means that the only question for the imperial discipline is its scope – economics no longer is only concerned with markets and firms, but can explain everything from international conflict to marital relationships. Postmodernism becomes a superordinate critical study of everything from the local to the global. By contrast, invaded disciplines provide little more than data sets, issue areas, or context – the empirical domain, the field, on which the theoretical paradigm operates. There is little or no sense of sharing of disciplinary insights or approaches – rather a connotation of epistemological warfare and conquest. Though disciplinary imperialism is usually associated with the application of paradigmatic disciplinary approaches beyond their traditional disciplinary bounds, insofar as critical transdisciplinarity is founded on a particular theoretical tradition, such as neo-Marxism or post-colonialism, the pretensions to being a marginalized discourse, or intimations of the pluralism of perspectives from multiple disciplines, seem more apparent than real; the purported critical and counter-hegemonic move seems very much like disciplinary imperialism. Any form of transdisciplinarity will appear as being heterodox within traditional disciplines, however, and so they can expect to be the subject of rigorous critique from proponents of orthodox methods and theories. In the end, the (inter)disciplinary character of disciplinary imperialism, and indeed of transdisciplinarity more generally, depends on the outcome of the exchange between disciplines. If it tends towards the ascendance or reinforcement of a paradigmatic disciplinary hierarchy, it is hard to see this as legitimately interdisciplinary. If, on the other

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hand, the result is more plural (or multidisciplinary), then it is more akin to interdisciplinarity: in short, if there are new theories, methods, and concepts, not simply the application of already established disciplinary approaches, or if there is a tolerance of a variety of approaches within a domain as a result of transdisciplinary exchange. The emergence of feminist economics illustrates some of the travails of transdisciplinarity, even in the context of a more limited agenda. In institutional terms, feminist economics is the encounter of multidisciplinary gender studies with economics, and which has pretensions to being a paradigmatic discipline. In economics departments, feminist research has been accused of not being economics. This is because, methodologically, feminist economics challenges the dominant neoclassical approach and does not rely solely on mathematical models and/or statistical testing, but also involves the use of the qualitative research and case methods. In addition, feminist economics poses conceptual, even ontological, challenges to the discipline. In mainstream neoclassical economics, when it is considered at all, gender is conceived as a dichotomous variable of individual physiological identity and the household is commonly ‘black-boxed’ (Woolley, 1993). Adherents to the paradigm of individual choice subject to material constraints have a difficult time comprehending gender as a social structure or as a social relation of inequality, and they have little time for theorizing about this key concept, let alone considering the notion that its meaning might be contested. Unsurprisingly, transdisciplinarity is rather easier to incorporate within plural disciplines, as they are more flexibly constituted and more open to new approaches or new uses for established theories. Disciplines like sociology or political science have been more accommodating to feminist economics, not only because the forms of knowledge of each are not at odds with it (as appears to be the case with neoclassical economics), but also because there are already multiple paradigms and competing perspectives within them rather than a single dominant hierarchy. The resistance of the disciplinary paradigm of neoclassical economics to the feminist challenge and its acceptance in sociology and political science has had an unfortunate consequence. While feminist economics began as an intradisciplinary challenge to dominant approaches and concerns within economics which drew upon other disciplines for innovative concepts and methods, it has come to be dominated by sociologists, political scientists, and scholars from other disciplines addressing political economy (Woolley, 2005). This not only has institutional

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implications – feminist economics is associated with departments of sociology and political science and institutes of political economy or gender studies, not economics – but it has also affected the nature of the study. The methods and theories of economics have progressively been excluded as feminist economics has shifted to feminist political economy. As a result the challenge is effectively marginalized in economics and is channelled into the same limited range of approaches in political science and sociology. A similar pattern can be discerned in international relations and international studies – resistance to transdisciplinarity in paradigmatic disciplines, acceptance in plural ones, with the same unfortunate methodological and theoretical limitations as a consequence. It is clear that transdisciplinarity is implicated not only in the question of what and whose approaches, but also in who uses them. Disciplinary imperialism is the application by economists of economic models to the domains of other disciplines. By contrast, Klein (1990, p. 85) and many others have applauded interdisciplinary borrowing, the use of concepts from other disciplines to help explain one’s own discipline’s research questions, as we see with the original purposes of feminist economics in which concepts of gender and sociological methods are used by economists to explain economic outcomes and some economic phenomena commonly neglected in the mainstream of the discipline.13 A number of IR scholars have borrowed concepts from disciplines other than their own (usually political science), for example, in their different ways, Robert Keohane (1984), Stephen Hobden (1998), and Alexander Wendt (1992). A conceptual, methodological and/or theoretical tolerance and openness are the keys to transdisciplinarity as opposed to (cross)disciplinary imperialism. At the same time we need to look beyond the individual researcher or research group to the departmental and wider academic context. The origin of each of these IR scholars in political science is not insignificant, nor without implications for this mode of interdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary projects in which all the participants derive their training from one discipline should make us extremely wary, because the theoretical agenda is being set by that discipline, and no amount of borrowing will undo the disciplinary imposition this implies. There have been many transdisciplinary interventions in international relations. Here I consider one example, international political economy (IPE).14 The exact nature of the transdisciplinary study of political economy is far from settled, and this lack of consensus is reflected in IR. Despite its historiographical origins as the forerunner

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of economics,15 political economy today often has a connotation of being a critical, radical and perhaps even subversive approach in economics and political science, as well as in sociology, geography and public policy. This radical interpretation is explicit in the neo-Marxian and critical approaches advanced in Studies in Political Economy, a journal that bills itself as ‘an interdisciplinary journal committed to the publication of original work in the various traditions of socialist political economy. Researchers and analysts within these traditions seek to understand how political, economic and cultural processes and struggles interact to shape and reshape the conditions of people’s lives.’ This transdisciplinary political economy is not tied to economic analysis of the economy and political analysis of politics and polities, or some sort of merger of the two, because disciplinary paradigms fail to account for the interpenetrated and intrinsically interconnected political economy. Instead, a new synthesis, or rather a newly prominent set of approaches, is required, overtly seeking the overthrow of traditional disciplinary paradigms. For economists, however, contemporary political economy is something else completely, as it commonly conveys to them the application of economic models, theories and methods to politics and other domains of the social sciences besides economics. According to Eichengreen (1998, p. 353), ‘Economists are notorious for their intellectual imperialism, feeling no compulsion about applying their kit of tools to everything from dental hygiene to nuclear war’. In Hodgson’s (1994) admittedly critical view, ‘ “economic imperialism” implies that the core assumptions of neoclassical economics can and should be applied to a wide variety of fields of study, including politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and even biology, as well as economics itself. It is based on the belief that the idea of “rational economic man” is appropriate to social science as a whole.’ Examples include economic models of democracy and applications of rational choice as explanations of social and political behaviour (Downs, 1957), Krugman’s assertion of the importance of economic modelling in economic geography (Fujita, Krugman and Venables, 1999), and the best-selling book, Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, 2005), an exemplar of the Chicago School approach that applies economic methods and theory to explain a wide range of social phenomena. The editors of Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) (1994, p. 1) acknowledge that outside international relations, political economy has a number of meanings, and they note the contributions to political economy from institutionalist economics, development economics and

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neo-Marxist political economy (1994, pp. 5–11). Yet, they identify IPE as initially an offshoot of and response to the narrowness of the political science of international relations, a challenge to the narrow disciplinary focus on high political and diplomatic concerns, particularly the use of military force and the influence or otherwise of various intergovernmental organizations. IPE begins, in this view, as an intradisciplinary undertaking looking to borrow concepts from other disciplines to improve explanation in academic international relations. In a classic early statement of the mainstream American political science conception of IPE, Robert Gilpin (1987, p. 3) suggests that ‘an understanding of trade, monetary affairs, and economic development requires the integration of the theoretical insights of the disciplines of economics and political science. Too often policy issues are analyzed as if the realms of economics and politics can be isolated from one another. . . . ’ While recognizing the importance of specialization, he argues for ‘a larger and integrated theoretical framework of political economy. . . . ’ (Gilpin, 1987, p. 5) because ‘[t]ransformations in the real world have made economics and politics more relevant to one another than in the past and have forced the recognition that our theoretical understanding of their interactions has always been inadequate, oversimplified, and arbitrarily limited by disciplinary boundaries’ (1987, p. 3). This transdisciplinary agenda starts from the perspective of the disciplines, allows them their special place insofar as their theory works, identifies an area of overlap (primarily in policy), and suggests an integration based to some degree on each discipline.16 In applying their models and theories, by contrast, economists not only manifest a sense of theoretical and methodological superiority but also express a frustration with, or dismiss, theory and methods from other disciplines. Barry Eichengreen (1999, p. 354) summarizes this nicely when he argues that ‘the strength of economics is the complementary and mutually-supporting character of theoretical and empirical work. The . . . assumptions and models that have survived and become part of this common theoretical core are those which deliver testable propositions that find systematic support in the data. . . . [Whereas in IR, t]heory-based propositions do not lend themselves comfortably to empirical verification and refutation. . . . As a consequence, research in international relations has not converged on a core of common theoretical assumptions and an arsenal of commonly-accepted empirical techniques’. Among the many examples of economists’ work in international relations are those by Todd Sandler (1980; 2001), such as Enders and Sandler (2006), The Political Economy of Terrorism, and Sandler and

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Hartley, (1999) The Political Economy of NATO, by Barry Eichengreen (1996; 1997) on international political economy and economic history; and that of Paul Collier on a variety of topics concerning development, conflict and issues in the political economy of international relations (Bannon and Collier, 2003; Collier and Sambanis, 2005). Rational choice is not, however, the only example of the transdisciplinary use of economic concepts in international relations. In developing the idea of global public goods, Kaul and her colleagues (1999, p. xxiv) apply a concept from public economics to policy questions in global governance, on the way drawing on insights from political science and development studies. The transdisciplinary aspect of their undertaking is the borrowing of concepts and theories, not simply bilaterally, so to speak, among politics and economics, but multilaterally, across a number of disciplines. ‘Without all of these different literatures . . . ’, they write, ‘it would not have been possible to undertake the multidisciplinary and multilevel analysis we are attempting here. We are seeking to combine these literatures because the different issues they address have begun to intersect. Today’s global challenges cannot be adequately understood by relying on any one strand of literature’. In sum, IPE reflects the diverse and even contradictory aspects of transdisciplinarity. It includes everything from academic imperialist – and effectively disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary discourses – to the more open and plural model advanced by those who combine transdisciplinary exchange with multidisciplinary context. In all the examples, transdisciplinarity is coloured by the nature of the disciplines, whether paradigmatic or plural, and by the substance of the fields. The aspiration to new theory and the replacement of disciplinary paradigms is often embraced in plural disciplines and resisted in paradigmatic ones. Where it is accepted in paradigmatic disciplines, it generally takes the form of the application of disciplinary concepts, methods and theory onto other fields, as is the case of applications of rational choice. We should nevertheless be cautious regarding claims to transdisciplinary novelty or critique, since newness and subaltern character are hardly reflected in the disciplinary origin of most of this work. Even the plural model advocated by RIPE appears to omit (or deliberately exclude) economic analysis, a fact abundantly clear not only in RIPE but other political economy journals with the notable exception of the Journal of Political Economy, a disciplinary economics journal in which paradigmatic dominance is evident. RIPE is to be ‘a point of convergence for political economists, international relations scholars, geographers,

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and sociologists’. That is, for political scientists, geographers, historians, and sociologists, political economy means the use of any theory or disciplinary approach other than the traditional neoclassical economic paradigm for explanation of economic outcomes, as well as the deployment of heterodox economic theory. When it entails the application of knowledge/theories from many disciplines other than the established discipline, this transdisciplinarity is of course deliberately counterhegemonic (Gill and Law, 1988). Yet, excluding certain disciplines is far from innocent, being instead tantamount to what might be called antidisciplinarity, the conceptual twin of disciplinary imperialism, the notion that any approach other than disciplinarily dominant ones are valid. All too often, the rhetoric of inclusiveness and integration can mask the exclusion or marginalization of paradigmatic disciplinary knowledge. For the journal Global Society, the ‘multitude of disciplines’ includes ‘international relations, political science, political philosophy, international political economy, international law, international conflict analysis and sociology’, while seemingly excluding economics and history, among other subjects. In this light, multidisciplinarity, for all its relativism, is more tolerant, accommodating and, ultimately, more interdisciplinary. Once we shift our focus from the individual researcher, research project or group, and concentrate on the disciplinary contexts, it is evident that a multiple and genuinely inclusive character is vital for transdisciplinary exchange. Thus, though transdisciplinarity typically begins as an intradisciplinary problematic that draws upon other disciplines, to be transdisciplinary entails not only theoretical and methodological pluralism of the research but of the researchers. Ultimately, a project entirely populated by, say, political scientists is purportedly interdisciplinary because no amount of disciplinary boundary crossing constitutes interdisciplinarity when all participants start from the same disciplinary beginnings (Warleigh-Lack and Cini, 2009). Borrowing concepts and theories may be good for individual researchers and research projects. In institutional terms, if one discipline predominates, the agenda of that discipline will lead, whether that discipline is itself paradigmatic or plural (though it is more likely to be plural since, as observed earlier, paradigmatic disciplines tend to be resistant to borrowing). For instance, Merelman (1979) argues that political psychology has been hampered by its lack of integration and institutionalization, in good part because its agenda is framed by political science. While

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rather underestimating the influence of its own relatively paradigmatic disciplinary context on the limited engagement by psychologists, he observes the political science driven theoretical problematic ‘has discouraged us from employing certain methodologies (experimentation, participant observation, psychophysiological research, clinical investigation, family therapy) which apparently lack political “payoff” ’. He suggests that ‘political psychology will come of age only when we ask of political science as much as political science has asked of us, and what we must ask is that political science recognize the full range of psychological life as a legitimate object of investigation by political scientists’ (Merelman, 1979, pp. 107–8). Despite its more plural character, the disciplinary limits of political science render this a rather unlikely prospect (Ross, 2009). Invariably, transdisciplinarity in IR has been dominated and led by scholars from one discipline. Indeed, even the trends in IR toward either disciplinarity or interdisciplinarity, the issues raised and suggestions for what needs to change – whether it be dealing with the overly narrow concerns of core scholarship, paradigmatic hierarchies, or the uncivil and oft-times mistranslated bickering among disputing factions – have reflected norms and debates within political science since IR was effectively subsumed within it in the 1940s and 1950s (for example, see Caporaso, 1997). As a result, many of the so-called interdisciplinary initiatives are either entirely intradisciplinary, that is, in fact simply collaborations of political scientists, or are serial and largely disconnected calls for closer bilateral relations between political science and another established discipline, be it history, law or economics. Global Society is again a good example of the first: it bills itself as an interdisciplinary journal of international relations, yet all the editors are political scientists; numerous purportedly interdisciplinary special issues of IR journals reflect the latter, such as the special issue of International Organization on the legalization of world politics, that is, how international law has become more relevant for the latter. Transdisciplinarity is ultimately a methodological and theoretical move based on challenges to established disciplines. As a consequence, within IR transdisciplinary scholarship tends to be oriented to academic disciplinary concerns. Applied to the wider context of academic IR, however, it problematizes the relationship among the various studies of international relations and challenges the traditional disciplinary selection. International studies need not, and probably should not, be founded simply on learning about law, economics, political science, sociology and their respective approaches applied to IR, but rather may,

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and probably should, draw on political economy, historical sociology, or social psychology, among others. But though it promises different transdisciplinary combinations and novel methodological or theoretical approaches, the agenda is still shaped by the current academic administrative structures, as we see in IR with the continued dominance of political science and political scientists. In the social sciences, this has been manifested in the reassertion of disciplinarity, as transdisciplinary projects are reincorporated into one or both of the component disciplines, to a large part the fate of social psychology. This is not so much the consequence of a persistent reliance on adjacent disciplines as it is a result of the lack of focus, or uncertainty, in terms of a field. The same is true in IR: international relations is not the theoretical focus or problem of transdisciplinary projects, and because of this, transdisciplinarity cannot take us to the heart of what IR is or to the relationship of international relations and international studies. The limits of transdisciplinarity in IR are the reason that the proposal made by Margaret Hermann (1998) must perforce fail. Hermann’s careful diagnosis of international relations considers the wide range of approaches, schools of thought and disciplinary outlooks in international studies. She is concerned that the cacophony and mutual incomprehension are inimical to the development of theory and the advance of policy-relevant and effective analysis. She hopes, instead, to build dialogue among the various schools of thought in international relations through a transdisciplinary focus on specific problems in IR. With a background in political psychology, it is not surprising that her focus is on decision-making and the basis of cooperation. Her proposal cannot resolve the difficulties that she identifies, however, since it does not address what international relations is and how it relates to the wider constellation of subjects making up international studies. According to the editors of RIPE, IPE should have multidisciplinary scope, be moved by an interdisciplinary spirit and use transdisciplinary methodologies. This could be a template for interdisciplinary international relations as well. But what is interdisciplinary spirit? The stimulus to interdisciplinary exchange and borrowing is a sense that there are problems with the current ordering and structuring of the social sciences. Multidisciplinary international studies together add specific perspectives on international relations but provide no integrated picture. Transdisciplinary approaches challenge the content of international studies but, in integrating and transforming disciplines, these approaches fail to address international relations as such.

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These two variants of interdisciplinarity appear to be not only different from each other, but at odds: one accepts established disciplines and their boundaries, the other rejects them; one embraces methodological pluralism, the other either modifies or rejects disciplines of established disciplines. Yet, both multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity begin with established disciplines rather than with international relations; they are academic responses and, thus, institutionally constrained. As a result, neither provides a basis for understanding international relations, nor for understanding the relationship of international relations and international studies. What is missing from both is a sense that interdisciplinarity is not simply the opposite of disciplinarity, but that interdisciplinarity changes disciplinarity. What is needed is to collapse the (inter)disciplinary dichotomy and embrace the dynamic of learning and change.

International relations as a (failed?) neodiscipline A neodiscipline appears when there is a coherent field of study, but it crosses traditional disciplinary lines and, so, does not fit comfortably within an established discipline. Unlike multidisciplinarity, a study is neodisciplinary inasmuch as: it adds a new discipline to those already established; it represents a new conception of discipline; and it challenges the demarcation of disciplines and interdisciplinary studies. While multidisciplinarity helps us understand the character of international studies, and transdisciplinarity addresses the need for novel theory and methods, neodisciplinarity goes to the heart of the study of international relations. It is implicated in the debates as to whether IR exists as a discipline at all, to what extent it is autonomous with regard to other social science disciplines, what constitutes its subject matter, and whether there is a core to international studies. There are two sources of neodisciplinarity. Neodisciplinarity is first of all the product of practice. It is a response to the imperative to systematization, routinization and professionalization of a particular and arguably distinct social practice. Insofar as there is a perceived need for more specialized investigation or for training in a field of study, neodisciplinary research and teaching programs have emerged. Because the study of the practice overlaps established academic divisions, a neodiscipline takes the institutional form of a discipline nested within a series of multidisciplinary satellites. For example, business, with (neo)disciplinary studies in accounting, auditing, and management, also involves studies such as finance, industrial organization, and marketing, which

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are related to economics, sociology, and communications and media studies, respectively. Other examples in the social sciences could be argued to include journalism and media studies, criminology and legal studies and, as we will see, IR and international studies, as well as any number of professional programs. Neodisciplinarity, secondly, derives from a realization that there are enduring and persistent aspects of social life that are not adequately addressed in the traditional disciplines, but rather fall between the gaps among them. Because it crosses a number of them, transdisciplinarity is insufficient; since it requires a focus, multidisciplinarity does not suffice.17 Neodisciplines emerge as a result of the sustained interrogation and conceptualization of those inadequately addressed aspects. Examples of such neodisciplines include feminism/gender studies, ecology/environmental studies, criminology, peace and conflict studies, and international relations. Each involves a core of studies around which there are a variety of other disciplinary contributions. For example, gender studies centres on conceptions of gender as a social institution, practice, identity and/or inequality. While such conceptions can be explored in part in departments of sociology, psychology, or history, as well as departments in the humanities, neodisciplinary gender studies requires more than those disciplinary fragments in order to be understood comprehensively and holistically, an approach that is impossible in line departments. Both of these forms derive from the imperative to teach, to establish a program of learning, rather than simply conduct research, and this is the source of the perceived need for a core study around which teaching/ learning will cohere. Neodisciplinarity challenges the mythical histories, identities and securities of disciplines because it insists on different criteria for the division and creation of disciplines, suggests the possibility of the emergence of novel intellectual configurations and posits the potentially limitless proliferation of disciplines. Lest this be considered an idealistic mandate that will lead to academic anarchy, it is worth considering the natural sciences. It is commonly believed that the model for the development of paradigmatic disciplines in the social sciences derives from a particular reading of specialization in the natural sciences: the disciplines of economics, sociology, psychology, political science mirror those of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. Yet, such a view of the natural sciences is breathtakingly unrealistic and indeed mythical. The history and development of the natural sciences in fact illustrates the emergence of neodisciplines in the form of the so-called

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applied disciplines, engineering, medicine, architecture, archaeology, palaeontology, the forensic sciences and so on. The history of the social sciences also shows that the disciplines that we take for granted today originated from a concern with an aspect of social life. For example, both politics and economics were considered professions and distinct fields of study before separate disciplinary institutions were founded. In this respect, the emergence of today’s neodisciplines is no different from this earlier disciplinary development. Simply thought of as new disciplines, then, neodisciplinarity perhaps seems unremarkable. Yet, insofar as neodisciplines refuse the dichotomy of inter/disciplinarity, it is considerably more radical than it might at first sight appear. Because the basis of their disciplinary foundations transgresses the distinctions of established disciplines, and because these new disciplines have not completely supplanted the old ones but rather have simply overlaid them, these are not in fact just new disciplines, they are interdisciplines both in their internal constitution and in their relations with other disciplines. Internally, there is generally some measure of methodological pluralism, whether it is in interrogating the concept or explicating the practice, though in the latter case it must be admitted that this will depend on the extent of professionalization. In terms of their methodological and theoretical pluralism, neodisciplines based on conceptualization rather than practice do not seem to differ greatly from plural disciplines such as political science, geography, or sociology. Externally, neodisciplines are a set within a multidisciplinary complex of related studies. Neodisciplinarity entails both intellectual and institutional integration and development. Whether in the end it does institutionalize into separate fora, departments, associations, and so forth, depends on a number of factors: whether the field is indeed distinguishable as a separate study, the extent to which it cannot simply be subsumed within an already existing discipline (that is, if subdisciplinary status results in marginalization), whether multidisciplinary study would be an adequate approach and, in the case of neodisciplines based on practice, the salience and socio-economic power of the profession. Some studies do not in fact consolidate or concentrate. Instead they remain subdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary, whether or not this involves any core disciplinary study. This has been the fate of many of the studies conceptualized around location and/or identity, such as urban studies, American studies, European studies, or even the catch-all, area studies, as well as population studies/demography, and in a different way, the study of industrial relations (overtaken, to a large extent, by another

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neodisciplinary configuration, business). The current predominantly subdisciplinary locus of the study of international relations noted above, as the conventional term for a subfield of political science, suggests that it has also failed to cohere as a neodiscipline. The two variants of neodisciplinarity have significant but different implications for the academic organization of IR and what that study entails. For some, the status of international relations as a discipline and/ or as the core to the broader complex of international studies stands or falls on the identification of a discernable social practice that required dedicated study in its own institutional context because otherwise it would be insufficiently accommodated under the present organization of the social sciences. According to Aron (cited in Hoffmann, 1977), international relations was the business of soldiers and diplomats. Thus diplomatic and/or military practice must be the core of international relations scholarship. This appears to be the familiar realist refrain and as a result vulnerable to accusations of narrowness. Yet, a neodisciplinary view of IR need not accept this particular view of the relevant practice – who it is that is engaged in that practice and what that practice entails. C.A.W. Manning (1962), for instance, believed that the study of international relations must begin with and be centred on an understanding of international society, for him a society of states. This led Manning to argue for an IR discipline that focused on diplomatic relations set in the context of an international system constituted by not only power but also by understandings of law (1951; 1954; 1955). On the one hand, this generated a rather narrow study that Manning idiosyncratically called diplomatics. But it also had wider implications, first in this study’s the relationship with and dependence upon other disciplines, that is, international studies – to understand international (aka diplomatic) relations one needed to understand, for example, international economics, among other things (Manning, 1954; Long, 2005), Second, Manning’s conception of IR as a discipline also entailed reflection upon the fundamental characteristics of the international, what he called social cosmology (Long, 2010). Reflection on the practice of international relations moves us towards concept-oriented neodisciplinarity. The neodisciplinary study of IR implies a holistic conception of the international, a core set of concepts and methods, considering not just those relations among agents in the world beyond nation-states but the nature of the divided global social system as a totality. Instead, at present the order of knowledge precisely marginalizes the international. Though it is a feature of a number of

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disciplines, it is considered outside the normal in each of them: it disappears completely in some, such as psychology and sociology; it is rendered in a narrowly technical way in others, such as law, economics, and to some extent history; and it is understood in terms of what it is not in political science – that is, IR is the political discourse of anarchy, the absence of political order. Always at the margin of the social science disciplines, the international is at the centre of none of them. Therefore, multidisciplinarity is no solution to this marginalization because many margins do not equal one centre in intellectual terms. By contrast, a neodiscipline of IR makes the international the essential background to, or focal point of, analysis. For example, Quincy Wright (1955) argues for reflection on the international and the need to synthesize the contributions from the diversity of international studies, suggesting fields as a concept to meld together diverse lessons from various disciplinary locations. Alternatively, Buzan and Little (2000; 2001) have proposed the concept of international system as the intellectual focus, and they explicitly call for the development of interdisciplinary theory in order to explain developments therein. Neodisciplinarity implies some measure of institutionalization as well. And as such it is primarily the concern of those involved in instruction in IR; neodisciplinarity is a concern for those who have to teach or have to construct academic programs around a theme that does not sit easily within the traditional disciplinary allocation. Because disciplinary institutionalization influences the production of theory and analysis, it is at least arguable that the appearance of a few departments of international relations in the UK was a key factor in the specific shape and focus of the English school, as also the presence of graduate schools of international affairs and policy institutes shapes the professional and foreign policy oriented study in the US.18 However, as Ashworth (2009) notes, IR has hardly become institutionalized separately, despite the growth of specialized journals and the success of academic associations. In terms of academic departments, as noted earlier, IR has been subdisciplinary (see also Strange, 1995). This failed, or failing, neodisciplinarity suggests an explanation of the paucity and poverty of international theory that is rather different to the explanation given by Wight (1960), but it nevertheless reflects a distinction between international theory similar to the one he suggested, or the reflection on what international relations is, and the more disciplinary theory of international relations, where its explanatory frameworks account for what occurs internationally. The former will be a focus of a neodisciplinary study, whereas it will be of marginal interest to a subfield of a wider discipline. Its content

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need not, indeed it should not, reflect the disciplinary norms of any traditional discipline, but should be constructed to address questions regarding the international. It is also linked to a variety of other disciplines and studies because it is a cross-cutting practice and/or concept. A neodisciplinary IR re-raises its pretensions as an autonomous discipline and, thus, the spectre of an isolated discipline cut off from wider theoretical currents in the social sciences, especially since international relations has frequently been criticized for being theoretically underdeveloped and backward (Brown, 1992). One element of the present so-called crisis of IR is the dissatisfaction with the narrowness of the grounds upon which IR is based, namely, the traditional view of international relations specifically as diplomacy, foreign policy, trade and war. Previous neodisciplinary projects – such as those similar to Manning’s – have been accused of isolating the study of international relations. Such a view is based on a misunderstanding, it seems to me. Conceiving international relations as a neodiscipline has implications for not just what is in the field but what is out, for not just the internal constitution of the subject but its external relations. A neodisciplinary IR should simultaneously encourage wider (as in different disciplinary connections) and yet more focused analysis of the international. For some this will certainly appear as a narrowing of the agenda, but this is because the agenda of the subdiscipline rests on a blurred reflection or a distant echo of political science, a very different agenda from that of a study of international relations set within the wider context of international studies. A neodiscipline would be open to global sociology and international law, not just world politics.19 By contrast, given departmental structures, the currently established subdiscipline of IR/international politics must perforce be linked to studies of national politics, political theory and so on, thus isolating the study from wider currents related to the international in the social sciences. In this setting, openings to economics or even political economy may be less obvious; so, too, are connections to international law or diplomatic history or even anthropology and cultural studies. In short, the problem of isolation is a product, not of IR’s disciplinarity, but of its subdisciplinarity. The neodiscipline of international relations might be associated with a narrowly state-centric perspective, but it need not be. It might be associated with official and public practice, but it need not be. An updated version of traditional realism would focus on international public policy, for instance, examining not just the traditional elements of the foreign policies of states but the international dimensions of health,

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environment, citizenship and so on. However, reflection on the international might go much further than that. If we shift the view of the practice of international relations from the centre and the state to the borders of communities and the crossing of those borders by people, goods and ideas, then international relations takes on an altogether different look. With respect to international studies as a whole, neodisciplinarity puts a new discipline at the centre; it provides coherence and focus as opposed to multidisciplinary diversity and plurality. At its best, neodisciplinarity means an escape from the endless and fruitless pendulum swings between disciplinary concentration and interdisciplinary diversity. It addresses the lack of focus and the loose eclecticism that afflicts multidisciplinarity, while avoiding the criticisms of the isolation of disciplinary autonomy. However, it does not settle what that core study should be. From the broader perspective of international studies, the centre could be any number of already established disciplinary or neodisciplinary configurations. The different perspectives from international studies and international relations is just one problem that neodisciplinarity poses for academic IR. The practical and conceptual bases of neodisciplinary IR are in tension, and this is implicated in the debate about the scope and character of international relations. The practical/professional variant, reflected in public policy institutes and realist scholarship, takes for granted the very concepts, and in particular the international, that the conceptually oriented neodisciplinarity seeks to reflect upon and problematize. There are concerns that neodisciplinary IR would be redundant in any case as it can adequately be encompassed in some subdisciplinary and multidisciplinary configuration – that is, specifically, with international politics as the core study. How different, it might be asked, would a separate international relations possibly be? Whatever the academic study of international relations is, it must begin with reflection upon the international in theory and practice. If this concern is regarded as unimportant or incoherent, say because it is believed in some quarters that globalization renders international relations marginal to negligible, then neodisciplinary international relations will fail. Given the history of disciplinary institutionalization and academic development, we might agree with Buzan and Little that IR has thus far failed as an intellectual project. However, I would argue that the logic of their argument suggests that this is a consequence of the failure of neodisciplinarity thus far. Institutionalized as a neodisciplinary study, by contrast,

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international relations need not fail, but it must be interdisciplinary to flourish. IR’s interdisciplinary future is not simply in the embrace of multiple international studies nor of the transdisciplinary challenge to established disciplines, it is in understanding what it means to be a novel interdiscipline.

Interdisciplinarities in international relations This chapter has been motivated by a conviction that the structure of academic knowledge shapes and limits the possibilities of knowledge production in IR; that is, it matters whether or not a subject is considered a discipline in its own right, and the manner in which a subject is or is not (inter)disciplinary. Ideally, teaching and research should be curiosity driven and problem led, not directed by structures of, or the trends in, academic organization. Disciplines are not carved in stone, nor is interdisciplinarity a good in and of itself. Still, disciplinarity and, to a lesser degree, interdisciplinarity influence the way research questions are asked, delimit appropriate answers to research anomalies and social problems, and give shape to teaching programmes in terms of curriculum development and determining what is suitable for graduate education only, or at the undergraduate level, and why. Each of these impacts international relations as an academic pursuit. Interdisciplinarity is going to impinge upon and be interpreted differently depending on academic context; that is, it has different implications depending on whether the disciplines involved are relatively more paradigmatic or plural. In addition, interdisciplinarity in general and the particular modes affect individual researchers and research groups differently from the way they impact disciplines and departments or the overall setting of academic organization and resourcing. The three modes reflect different reactions to current disciplinary establishment: multidisciplinarity accepts and builds on disciplinary divisions and specialization; transdisciplinarity integrates and/or transcends the divisions; and neodisciplinarity represents the changing terms on which disciplines are divided, and the developing character of (disciplinary) knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is primarily about academic organization, and as such it directs our attention as much toward teaching, to academic bureaucracy and resourcing, as to the intellectual focus and direction of research. The different forms of interdisciplinarity are favoured by different constituencies in the academic world. Multidisciplinarity appeals to academic bureaucracies, funding organizations (both public and

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private) as well as university administrations and conference organizers (Moran, 2006). For bureaucrats, interdisciplinarity equates to the bringing together of a number of disciplines and perspectives, and the consequent dispersal or dilution of disciplinary power. Transdisciplinarity is the approach most often taken by researchers who may advocate dispensing with disciplinary straitjackets in addressing a research problem. Neodisciplinarity is especially a concern of those involved in teaching, and for whom there is an evident felt need to organize studies and present them as a coherent whole. Produced by professions or a felt need to examine an aspect of social life that transgresses disciplinary categories, neodisciplinarity rejects subdisciplinary marginalization and is dissatisfied with multidisciplinary institutional cooperation that simply maintains established disciplinary division and hierarchy. Instead, a new and different academic institutionalization is required to provide for focused and specialized (inter)disciplinary knowledge. Unlike multidisciplinary programs where the integration, such as it is, takes place in upper level undergraduate or graduate courses or programmes, neodisciplinary programmes unfold alongside the traditional disciplines. As a result, the development of undergraduate programs, in particular, is a pedagogical indicator of the emergence and coherence of neodisciplines. In any event, without some measure of institutionalization, interdisciplinary studies are the academic equivalent of a mule, unable to reproduce itself and only the product of the component disciplines. The discourse of interdisciplinarity has been a bulwark of the common belief that IR is not a discipline. At the same time, it is commonly assumed, because of the departmental circumstances of many IR scholars, that political science is a discipline. My dissection and categorization of (inter)disciplinarity suggests that this is untenable, and indeed that the opposite may be true. Political science as a plural discipline is tantamount to interdisciplinary studies – as are, for instance, other social sciences that eschew a paradigmatic form, such as sociology and geography. International relations, inasmuch as it lends itself to being a more focused study, may be a neodiscipline, a multifaceted yet clearly defined study drawing on a number of different subjects and approaches.

Notes 1. This is an amended version of a paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, New Orleans, 24–7 March 2002, and at the University of Tampere workshop, Tampere, Finland, 11–12 September 2009. It draws on work for a wider project with Frances Woolley on

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

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interdisciplinarity across the social sciences funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For example, in their very different ways, Bourdieu (1988), Bulick (1982), Lattuca (2001), Repko (2008) and Messer-Davidow, Shumway and Sylvan (1993). An irony, given that IR is often accused of importing rather than exporting concepts and theories. In Canada, for instance, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It might also be called interdisciplinarity properly understood, but given the discussion in this chapter, it seemed better to distinguish the concept from the overarching umbrella concept of interdisciplinarity. See the account in Dogan and Pahre (1990), and also the discussion of the tribal character of academia in Becher and Trowler (1989). This is not to say that distinct means exclusive; other disciplines might address parts or aspects of the field of study of international relations. Shortly after the Second World War, the UNESCO Bureau of Social Sciences decided on Political Science, Sociology, Law and Economics. And this is exemplified by the fact that International Relations is not represented by a disciplinary organization in UNESCO’s Bureau of Social Sciences (cf. to the International Economic Association, the International Political Science Association, and so on). It is not the place to consider the multiple, contradictory meanings of the international, but suffice it to say that it is understood as foreign, world/global, and/or intergovernmental/interstate/multilateral (see also Chapter 1). Understood as the subject of international education, international studies might not even be about the traditional focus of international relations at all – the crossing of national boundaries – but instead is interpreted as the study of the variety of human experience around the world as a route to mutual understanding. For an early discussion, see Riggs (1971). Though it also insists on the creation of ‘networks’ that add value by ‘creating new cross-disciplinary (sic) research communities addressing selected topics’, a potentially more integrative mode. The same is true in some historical sociology. Space limitations do not permit a more extensive discussion that could include historical sociology and social and political psychology, as well as the literature on legalization and the social construction of international norms. For an example of the former, see Skocpol (1984). John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy. But see the special issue of New Political Economy (2009) addressing Benjamin Cohen’s categorization of divergent American and British approaches to IPE (Cohen, 2008). Weaver (2009) argues that ‘British’ IPE is more open to a variety of disciplines and methodologies outside the American positivist mainstream. But neodisciplines can also be understood in terms of the evolution of disciplines in the social sciences. The history of the development of the social sciences shows that there is nothing sacrosanct about the present disciplinary division of labour. The disciplines that are currently established were once new, and emerged, as did political science, from history and law, and all of

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the social sciences from philosophy. To argue that no new disciplines are possible is curious and demands justification. A hundred or so years ago, in economics, and more recently, in business studies, disciplinary qualities became more marked as their field was more clearly delimited, agreed upon methodologies were specified, and the academic study was institutionalized. 18. Playing a thought experiment, Dogan and Pahre (1990) contend that the only thing that would result from the elimination of departments of sociology would be the demise of courses on the history of sociology and on sociological theory; other than that, the subject matter of sociology would likely be taught and researched in other departments. By analogy, international theory has been relatively held back, or at least has not followed certain theoretical opportunities, by the absence of dedicated departments of international relations and its wider institutionalization as an academic discipline. 19. But note, nevertheless, the difficulties that interdisciplinary exchange might face as outlined in Hurrell (2001).

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Kaul, I., I. Grunberg and M. Stern (eds) (1999) Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press). Kelly, J. (2009) ‘What Can Interdisciplinarity Offer to Policy Problems? Understanding the Public Policy of Obesity’, European Political Science, 8(1): 47–56. Klein, J.T. (1990) Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press). Klein, J.T. (1996) Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia). Klein, J.T., W. Grossenbacher-Mansuy, R. Häberli, A. Bill, R.W. Scholtz and M. Welti (eds) (2001) Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving Among Science, Technology, and Society (Berlin: Birkhauser). Lattuca, L. (2001) Creating Interdisciplinarity (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press). Levitt, S.D. and S.J. Dubner (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: William Morrow). Long, D. (2005) ‘C.A.W. Manning and the Discipline of International Relations’, The Round Table, 94(378): 77–96. Long, D. (2010) ‘Social Cosmology and Diplomatics: C.A.W. Manning on International Relations’, paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, 17–20 February, New Orleans, USA. Manning, C.A.W. (1951) ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline’ in G.L. Goodwin (ed.) The University Teaching of International Relations (London: Basil Blackwell). Manning, C.A.W. (1954) The University Teaching of the Social Sciences: International Relations (Paris: UNESCO). Manning, C.A.W. (1955) ‘ “Naughty Animal” – A Discipline Chats Back’, International Relations, 1(4): 128–36. Manning, C.A.W. (1962) The Nature of International Society (London: Bell). Merelman, R.M. (1979) ‘On the Asking of Relevant Questions: Discussion Notes towards Understanding the Training of Political Psychologists’, Political Psychology, 1(1): 104–9. Messer-Davidow, E., D.R. Shumway and D.J. Sylvan (eds) (1993) Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia). Moran, J. (2002) Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge). Moran, M. (2006) ‘Interdisciplinarity and Political Science’, Politics, 26(2): 73–83. Moravcsik, A. (2003) ‘Liberal International Relations Theory: A Scientific Assessment’, in C. Elman and M.F. Elman (eds) Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Morgenthau, H.J. (1959) ‘The Nature and Limits of a Theory of International Relations’ in W.T.R. Fox (ed.) Theoretical Aspects of International Relations (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Repko, A. (2008) Interdisciplinary Research (Los Angeles: Sage). Riggs, F. (ed.) (1971) International Studies: Present Status and Future Prospects (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science). Robson, William (ed.) (1972) Man and the Social Sciences (London: Allen and Unwin).

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Rosow, S. (2002) ‘Towards an Antidisciplinary Global Studies’, International Studies Perspectives, 4(1): 1–14. Ross, F. (2009) ‘Degrees of Disciplinarity in Comparative Politics: Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity and Borrowing’, European Political Science, 8(1): 26–36. Sandler, T. (1980) The Theory and Structures of International Political Economy (Boulder: Westview Press). Sandler, T. (2001) Economic Concepts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sandler, T. and K. Hartley (1999) The Political Economy of NATO (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schmidt, Brian C. (1998) The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) Skocpol, T. (ed.) (1984) Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Stopford, J. and S. Strange (1991) Rival States, Rival Firms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Strange, S. (1970) ‘International Economics and International Relations: A Case of Mutual Neglect’, International Affairs, 46(2): 304–15. Strange, S. (1995) ‘ISA as a Microcosm’, International Studies Quarterly, 39(3): 289–95. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974) The Modern World System, I-III (New York: Academic Press). Warleigh-Lack, A. and M. Cini (2009) ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Politics’ European Political Science, 8(1): 4–15. Weaver, C. (2009) ‘IPE’s Split Brain’, New Political Economy, 14(3): 337–46. Wendt, A. (1992) ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It’, International Organization, 46(2): 391–425. Wight, M. (1960) ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, International Relations, 2(1): 35–48. Woolley, F.R. (1993) ‘The Feminist Challenge to Neoclassical Economics’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 17(4): 485–500. Woolley, F. (2005) ‘The Citation Impact of Feminist Economics’, Feminist Economics, 11(3): 85–106. Wright, Q. (1955) The Study of International Relations (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts).

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3 Organizing Interdisciplinary International Studies: From Puzzlement to Research Programmes Pami Aalto

Introduction1 In this chapter I will elaborate on some of the major questions pertaining to the organization of our research efforts when we attempt to move from international relations (IR) towards the wider and more plural field of interdisciplinary international studies (IS). When consciously moving towards the wider research directions afforded by IS, we will inevitably be faced with choices regarding the methodological means by which to open up the various aspects of the ‘international’, while drawing upon various forms of interdisciplinarity – including the multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and neodisciplinary forms of scholarship (see Chapter 2). Such methodological questions are important if and when we maintain – as we do in this book – that interdisciplinary IS will benefit from the development of systematic, well-structured approaches (see Chapter 1). Many of us have conducted interdisciplinary work out of personal interest or curiosity without thinking about the matter very thoroughly, and in some cases ended up wondering whether all the effort invested in reading and learning new literatures and techniques was leading towards something bigger. Simultaneously, for various reasons, we often fail to appreciate the interdisciplinary possibilities available for enriching our understanding of a given international problem, especially when it comes to (questions on) how to practically proceed and organize our efforts. 66

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Motivated by such practical methodological considerations, in this chapter I seek some tentative answers to the following broad questions: How can we move from the disciplinary modes of enquiry in IR towards making fruitful interdisciplinary connections? How can such individual and collective endeavours in interdisciplinary research link up and benefit from each other? What organizational formats are available for that purpose? These questions are crucial; interdisciplinary training and developing of a practical ability to conduct advanced interdisciplinary research frequently takes more time and is more demanding than monodisciplinary research (cf., Galtung, 1985). Owing to the complexity frequently involved, this may also entail collaborative work with its own organizational challenges (cf., Molteberg et al., 2000). And, although we do not posit interdisciplinarity as something inherently good in the sense of always automatically yielding something better, we see it as very necessary in order to better grasp the theory and substance of IS (see Chapter 1). For all these reasons it is useful to elaborate on the methodological means available for organizing interdisciplinary IS. In this chapter I will seek such methodological guidance from certain strands in the philosophy of science. In particular I will focus on how these have been incorporated into IR and, on that basis, discuss their import for interdisciplinary IS. Philosophical perspectives will, hence, function as a ‘yardstick’ by which to assess the character of IR as one possible entry point into interdisciplinary research. As philosophical concepts and debates are pervasive in IR, it follows that any efforts to re-examine IR must encounter them head-on (see Wight, 2002, p. 26). In the same way, philosophical concepts ought to be part of our efforts to develop interdisciplinary IS.2 Before proceeding further, an important caveat is appropriate. As developing IS is my main concern here, I will not attempt to contribute to the philosophy of science in general, nor to the philosophical debates in IR. My take on the philosophy of science is purely instrumental. It is used to bolster and critically examine the methodological armour of IS, but because of its predominant focus on (natural) science it cannot suggest any single methodological blueprint for the rich totality of interdisciplinary IS. The bulk of IS includes studies in the social sciences, while (natural) sciences and the humanities present powerful options to enrich and expand that agenda. In the context of IS, no a priori barriers should be erected between these three bodies of knowledge, even though they can be separated for analytical purposes (cf. Kagan, 2009; see also Chapter 7). For this reason the broad term

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‘studies’ is here suggested as a neutral arbiter between the different knowledge bases IS can draw upon, while no permanent bias for any one of them is advocated.3 In importing perspectives from the philosophy of science their differences must be taken into account. In the next section, I will first consider the open-ended nature of IS together with the concomitant need to organize knowledge production. In particular I will discuss how to move from what I will call ‘puzzlement’ to formulating better defined ‘puzzles’ as termed in Thomas Kuhn’s (1970 [1962]) well-known account of the history of (natural) science. Second, to conceptualize in more detail the ways in which such puzzles can be formulated to organize interdisciplinary IS, I will weigh up the import of the methodology of scientific research programmes of Imre Lakatos (1970). Third, to further scale down towards practical needs, I draw some influences from Larry Laudan’s (1977) philosophy of science – which continued from Kuhn and Lakatos – to make distinctions among paradigmatic, empirical and conceptual research programmes. Each of these programmes represents different options to move from IR to interdisciplinary IS. In the concluding discussion, I summarize my argument and contrast it to the concomitant possibility of looser formats of organization. In taking on these selected works in the history and philosophy of science, we must take account of their origins. Kuhn proposed that during periods of ‘normal science’ scholars hold on to ‘paradigms’ to organize scientific activities into a puzzle format, until these paradigms are seriously challenged and subsequently thrown away in scientific revolutions. Lakatos, instead, pointed out how persistently scholars may cling to their theories and how this may, in fact, be useful. At the same time Lakatos re-examined the wider debate on Karl Popper’s (1959) work on the conditions of falsifying theories. The contributions of Kuhn, Lakatos and later of Laudan were important for introducing a more historical or naturalist perspective to the study of knowledge formation wherein, in contrast to Popper’s positivism, the interest is in ascertaining what scientists actually do rather than assuming what they do.4 Although by the 1990s they were overtaken by other trends in the philosophy of science, their work has subsequently become pivotal to IR and many other fields with which IS has natural ties (see e.g., Hess, 1997, pp. 23–30). In each context the philosophical imports must be adapted to the local conditions whereby their role becomes that of an external yardstick, critic or sparring partner. Their functions are similarly limited here to the methods of organizing research intending to reach out from IR to IS.

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Open-ended IS: from puzzlement to puzzles Interdisciplinary IS has a flexible and open-ended character and extends towards the social sciences, natural sciences and the humanities. Therefore we must have several different methodological means at our disposal for envisioning, achieving hands-on, and ultimately organizing the realization of different interdisciplinary research tasks. Our methodological means must lend themselves to research problems of different magnitudes, and vary from more rigorous to looser formats of organization. Organization refers to the patterning of knowledge claims and findings into a more comparable format in which the novelty and import of observations, findings and arguments is better discerned and possible synergies identified. When moving towards the looser end of organization, by contrast, we will risk pursuing atomistic efforts with potentially negative consequences for relating our work to more disciplinary modes of research and for arranging collaboration across disciplines. Meticulous attention should be paid to striking a balance between highly organized and freer, or more casual, experimentation with new literatures, concepts, theories and approaches. The idea for a balance between more and less organization is implicit in Kuhn’s work (1970 [1962]). On the one hand, in the absence of organization, ‘all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant’ (p. 15). This is hardly the best context for reliably evincing novelties or innovations, and especially in the usual conditions of limited time resources where we must in any case make choices – just as, for example, applications of pragmatist philosophy to IR have rightly pointed out (Kratochwil, 2009, p. 13). On the other hand, in the case of the highly developed organization referred to by Kuhn as ‘paradigm’, knowledge is arranged in relatively ‘inflexible boxes’ wherein scholars have a ‘restricted vision’ (p. 24). Such periods of ‘normal science’ can distract scholars even from seeing other socially important problems (p. 37). Yet, this has the advantage of forcing us ‘to investigate some parts of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable’ (p. 24). In the end, there is no magic formula for balancing between higher and lesser degrees of organization. Kuhn also declined to offer much guidance on the grounds of which form of organization would be preferred (Laudan, 1977, p. 3). For Kuhn, periods of ‘normal science’ evolve into revolutionary paradigm shifts when a distinctively large number of anomalies emerges contradicting the fundamental laws and assumptions of the dominant paradigm – not just the individual theories within it. In a nonrational,

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sociological or even psychological process of conversion, the scholarly community adopts a new paradigm fairly soon (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], pp. 52–91; Elman and Elman, 2003b, pp. 19–21). Due to their mutual incommensurability, the new paradigm superseding the old one is not necessarily superior by any measurable criteria. Although Kuhn recognized the successes of modern (natural) science, he clearly professed some relativist inclinations (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], p. 198; see also Chalmers 1999, pp. 122–4), which he, himself, nonetheless, put aside (p. 206). The empirical value of Kuhn’s argument with regard to what scientists actually do continues to be debated in science studies. And, as I argue below, it is even more unclear as to what extent the paradigmatic normal science model he introduced is applicable to fields such as IS. What is of interest in this instance, however, is Kuhn’s hesitation regarding the nature of ‘progress’ in the natural sciences, which has some interesting repercussions in the context of IS. He actually challenges the straightforward, or naïve, view of the accumulation of knowledge. In the natural sciences it is often easier to hold variables constant in order to examine which of them most decisively impacts the research objects, which for their part can also more conveniently be treated as constants. In the social sciences and the humanities, both the variables and the social, cultural and political research objects are constantly changing. This means that practitioners of social sciences and the humanities have a special duty to reflect critically on their research. IS must take this duty seriously, but it must also strive to produce useful knowledge – in the same way as the natural sciences have been able to do – without resorting exclusively to the safety of endless meta-theoretical reflection that is characteristic of parts of IR. With an eye on these practical tasks, Kuhn also usefully pointed out how the paradigms of natural science are organized around sets of ‘puzzles’. Speaking of puzzles in the ‘standard meaning’, Kuhn argued that it is not the outcome of the puzzle that is of intrinsic interest but rather the fact that the puzzle is solvable. Paradigm defines a known set of puzzles that can be solved if the right measurements and approximations can be performed. Puzzles can be instrumental, conceptual and so on. A high degree of organization connotes agreement on the puzzles to be solved, and that they can indeed be solved; and on the methods by which to do so. At the same time problems that cannot be solved in a foreseeable manner using known methods do not make up puzzles and remain outside the paradigm (pp. 36–7). Some of the problems to be studied within the broad scope of IS can be organized into a puzzle format. For example, let us consider a

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situation in which a problem can no longer be analysed or solved successfully within ‘normal’ disciplinary constraints – in which, in Kuhn’s terms, significant anomalies start to emerge, questioning the prevailing paradigm. Then, an interdisciplinary approach can be proposed to outline better the scope and characteristics of the problem. On this basis the problem can be reformulated into a ‘puzzle’ format and become more amenable to solution than the original cognitive state that I will call ‘puzzlement’. In the process the problem may also be merely recast to the extent that new phenomena and problems emerge instead of a new solvable puzzle. In such cases puzzlement returns, but it now concerns a different matter. In fact, many research questions and problems on the agenda of IS are at the ‘pre-puzzle’, or ‘pre-paradigmatic’ stage characterized by puzzlement. Kuhn assumed this situation to prevail in most of the social science of his time (p. 15). Regarding the humanities he declined to say much. Because most studies on the broad agenda of IS are in practice confined to pre-paradigmatic puzzlement – while formulating better defined puzzles is the preferred goal here – puzzlement is a logical methodological starting point, and the very start to any process of posing novel questions. To grasp what puzzlement and puzzles actually convey in the context of IS, it first will be useful to examine their manifestations in IR. In this instance James Rosenau’s ‘post-international’ work is pioneering (see e.g., Hobbs, 2000). For him puzzlement is not simply a relentless capacity for asking questions or merely being in awe of the complexities and various aspects of the international. Puzzlement needs to be confronted with a degree of ‘discipline’: we must specify what observable outcomes make our existing explanations seem erroneous or insufficient. More specifically, Rosenau (1996) calls upon us to focus on huge puzzling outcomes encompassing most of humankind, which for him constitute ‘genuine puzzles’ (p. 311). Rosenau’s suggestion about bravely coming to grips with the biggest challenges of our times is laudable. It must be part of the agenda of interdisciplinary IS, too, but at the same time it is unnecessarily and unrealistically restrictive in this context. As Kuhn noted, many pressing problems are not easily solvable, if at all (1970 [1962], pp. 36–7). Therefore, today many scholars are working on much smaller questions than those found on the large canvas of the international. We must, thus, allow for less grandiose puzzles as well. For Dina Zinnes (1980), puzzles imply pieces of information, the belief that the pieces fit together into a meaningful picture – but the inability to fit the pieces together initially. When we attempt to understand international phenomena, we

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typically do not have these ingredients. We ask broad, open-ended questions. We do not use pieces of information, and we do not see our problems as fitting the pieces together. Perhaps if we thought in terms of puzzles – not general questions – we would think theoretically more naturally. (p. 316) She, hence, takes a position reminiscent of Kuhn’s understanding of puzzles being solvable, and she also accentuates the role of prior knowledge in generating the puzzlement in the first place. To become puzzled we need to observe things as not going as anticipated. Therefore: [I]f to become truly puzzled we need to know something, then it is obvious that we must expand our research horizons to look beyond the confines of specific research questions. We need to become more aware of how our research fits with the work of others. And we need to do this without being constrained by subject matter or methodology. . . . To become puzzled, then, requires that we search for relationships across studies, that we broaden the scope of a problem being analyzed. (p. 338) Zinnes’s call for searching linkages and discontinuities has potent consequences for wider interdisciplinary work which she did not anticipate. When we are puzzled, favourable conditions obtain for finding new directions. In these moments, as implied by Kuhn, the social, political and psychological dimensions play important roles with regard to where we decide to look and probe. Importantly, there are such choices to be made regardless of whether we opt for a ‘natural scientific’, ‘social scientific’ or ‘humanistic’ route in seeking to advance knowledge. Kuhn’s major contribution was specifically to highlight the ‘nonrational’ features in the development of new concepts, theories and approaches that he lumped under his elusive term ‘paradigms’ (see e.g., Kuhn, 1970 [1962], pp. 175–82). Such moments require curiosity, creativity and intuitive thinking from the researcher and the wider scholarly community. Such qualities are not easily trained, or are something that the universities of the present moment, with all their assessment procedures and expectations of steady output, would necessarily favour. Fortunately, the formats by which such open-ended processes can get underway are more readily communicable and reproducible. In a straw-man image of a disciplinary mode of enquiry, we have a question and an approach at hand to help solve it, as described by

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Kuhn. By contrast, as indicated above, in the simplest form of interdisciplinarity – multidisciplinarity – we combine or juxtapose two or more approaches from different disciplines (see Chapter 2). This may make us puzzled as to why the two perspectives differ (if they do indeed differ). Thus the original (disciplinary) problem definition is replaced by an interdisciplinary move reintroducing puzzlement. Think, for example, what approaches from geopolitics, economics or environmental politics would suggest vis-à-vis a given oil or natural gas pipeline project, or what nutrition scientists and Marxist development researchers might say about the problem of hunger. To propose such combinations we need a decisive degree of openness and open-mindedness helping us become puzzled anew, or addressing our puzzlement by means of interdisciplinary experimentation. These simple examples show the basic idea of open-ended and open-minded puzzlement: knowing that we should know better and being ready to remedy the situation by means of interdisciplinary learning. In the absence of these conditions we may well confine ourselves to disciplinary modes of enquiry. In all probability that would mean working on more limited problems and on a narrower range of subjects and solutions. Expanding the scope of actions required for responding to puzzlement beyond disciplinary divides does not mean that any perspectives from anywhere can be successfully combined at will, and it would be equally futile to suggest a comprehensive list of criteria for making interdisciplinary interconnections. To judge what new disciplines, fields of study, theories within them, and literatures need to be consulted in order to alleviate our puzzlement, we need a degree of organization of knowledge production. Yet such organization should surpass the hierarchic model which postulates a common root to all knowledge. In this tree-like model, more distinct specializations called disciplines evolve from the root. These disciplines are likely only to have close connections with those in the same branch. The disciplines supposedly respond better to the highly specialized knowledge demands of modern society than did the original all-encompassing discipline of philosophy in the Age of Antiquity. By contrast, operating with a rhizome model, the assumed boundaries between the specializations of the hierarchic model are turned upside down. Disciplines themselves are linked instead to multidimensional networks lacking any clearly separable core (see e.g., Bruun et al., 2005, pp. 34–5; 49–50; Klein, 2001, p. 49). In this instance the task of interdisciplinary research is to identify which disciplines can be usefully conjoined in given contexts, and to develop

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the organization for enabling this in practice. To this end I will consider the import of Lakatos’s methodology of research programmes.

Organizing puzzles: Lakatosian methodology of research programmes To refer to the work of Lakatos in order to help interconnect relevant disciplines and, in the process, transform our puzzlement into a better organized format may at first appear an unlikely move for advancing IS. The works of Lakatos are often criticized for using standards of natural science to label social sciences as ‘deficient’, and his views are thus seen as obstructing interdisciplinary dialogue (e.g., Hess, 1997, pp. 28–9).5 At the same time his methodology is discussed in the context of interdisciplinary enquiry (e.g., Huyssteen, 1999, pp. 90–1). It is also routinely applied, albeit in various ways, in a plethora of disciplines from mathematics to theology. Mainstream IR is one of the fields where Lakatos’s model is popular and represents perhaps the most widely quoted method of organization. Many scholars working within the main theoretical orientations of IR are comfortable utilizing aspects of Lakatos’s methodology as a useful tool for theory choice; some utilize it, albeit with varying orthodoxy, to assess whether novel facts resulting in ‘progress’ are generated; and some take it as a useful analogy for how research efforts should be organized (see Chernoff, 2005, pp. 173–6; cf., Elman and Elman, 2003a, pp. 5–8). In the context of IS, various ways of applying Lakatos must also be acknowledged and tolerated. This flexibility also translates into a preference for only exploiting certain concepts proposed by him. In other words, I support the view that philosophical models such as Lakatos’s need not be adopted in their totality but can be applied partly (cf., Keohane, 1986). This is because these models were never intended for examining fields like IR or IS. Hence seeking a one-to-one correspondence is problematic unless we think these fields are indeed primarily reminiscent of some models of natural science. Taking a cue from these models can be useful for better understanding the ‘state of the art’ and development needs of these fields, but one must be mindful of the limitations of the models (cf., Vasquez, 2003, p. 423). Flexible and open-ended IS must also take the warnings of a ‘sweet shop error’ – partial applications of philosophical models (see Elman and Elman, 2003, p. 59) – as carrying less weight than they do in the case of disciplinary enquiry. I will next briefly contrast Lakatos’s methodology

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with Kuhn’s and then discuss the conceptual import Lakatos’s methodology offers for organizing IS. Sharpening up Kuhn’s model of organization Lakatos wanted to avoid the relativistic implications of Kuhn’s work on how science progresses in big, ‘revolutionary’ paradigm-changes. Moreover, for Lakatos, Kuhn clung too tightly to the idea of a single dominant paradigm, an idea which does not bear empirical scrutiny – although he allowed for the possibility of the temporary co-existence of paradigms (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], pp. 18–19; 177). On this score Lakatos’s idea of several co-existing large theoretical aggregates is superior (Laudan 1977, pp. 73–6). This is especially so considering the wide and plural nature of IS. Lakatos further suggested that not all scientific efforts are on a par. Some concepts and findings are more fundamental than others. In this way, research can be seen as the programmatic development of implications of the fundamental choices made when building a theory or developing an approach (Chalmers, 1999, pp. 131; 137–8). The most fundamental choices are called the ‘hard core’ of the research programme. This means that research programmes are characterized by the gradual generation of ideas and continuity rather than Kuhnian radical scientific revolutions. For Lakatos, Kuhn’s idea that the scientific community simply functioned as the highest authority in maintaining or abandoning a research paradigm, and that a leap of faith or ‘Gestalt switch’ was needed to adopt a new one, represented irrational ‘mob psychology’ in place of the rational development of research programmes (Lakatos, 1970, p. 178). The conceptual basis for organizing research programmes The research programmes of Lakatos represent a series of theories on a domain of interest. For him, the hard core of a programme comprises some of the most basic hypotheses regarding that domain – the features that the protagonists of the programme will under virtually no circumstances relinquish, positing these in the methodological sense as ‘irrefutable’ (pp. 133–4). In the context of IS, which connects to this natural scientific agenda only through some of its wide scope of approaches, we could add to Lakatos’s ‘hypotheses’ several other categories capable of constituting a hard core: for example, the major ontological, epistemological and normative assumptions that are fundamental to the programme (see below).

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For Lakatos, actual research work within any programme would consist of (a) negative heuristics, which, taken to extremes, tell us ‘what paths of research to avoid’. Effectively, this means believing in the productive power of the hard core even when the programme encounters difficulties or ‘temporarily’ enters a dormant state. The hard core and the related negative heuristics, thus, through an internal logic, keep the programme going. In the case of IS, one way of defining the hard core would be to commit to a given set of disciplinary core assumptions. On top of this one would seek interdisciplinary connections not fundamentally contradicting these commitments (multidisciplinarity). Or, alternatively, the hard core would be defined anew upon combining two or more disciplines (multidisciplinarity) and/or when disciplines are merged partly or fully (transdisciplinarity) (see Chapter 2). However, for our purposes the more interesting, progressive and outward-looking element in Lakatos’s methodology is the (b) positive heuristics that tell us ‘what paths to pursue’. Thus positive heuristics in a different, more open-minded way, partly protects and partly supports the programme by guiding the development of new assumptions and hypotheses that expand the theoretical or empirical content of the programme (Lakatos, 1970, p. 132). In the case of IS, alongside assumptions and hypotheses we should again mention several other features of the programme defining its external interfaces: on the ontological level we speak of openness for conceptual development; on the epistemological level, of the ability to identify new phenomena; and on the normative level, of new goals and visions. For Lakatos, programmes in which a strong positive heuristics may lead to explaining empirical facts and phenomena, or to making theoretical claims previously thought to lie outside the remit of the theory, are progressive. In the case of IS, alongside explanations one should also look for new understandings reached, new meanings defined and normative goals specified. But programmes that repeatedly have to resort to different types of ad hoc measures to accommodate new observations, merely defending the theory without generating novel empirical or theoretical facts, are degenerating (Chernoff, 2005, p. 174). This does not, however, mean that degenerating programmes may not also produce useful scholarship. Yet the expectation is that in the long run they will lose out to more progressive programmes (Elman and Elman, 2003a, p. 48). On progressive and, thus, successful, research programmes, anomalies incongruous with the major claims made within the programme only lead to the refutation of auxiliary hypotheses in the ‘protective belt’ of

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the hard core. Many of Lakatos’s critics concentrate on this protective function of the belt guarding the fixity of the hard core (e.g., Laudan, 1977, p. 78). This fixity is taken to imply problems of empirical compatibility between different research programmes. But such fixity of the hard core does not prevail in disciplines like IR (Jackson and Nexon, 2009), and may also be an unsustainable proposition in the case of many other disciplines. In fact, often the core develops slowly and is, therefore, at least to an extent historically changing. Extending this point to the wider context of IS, I suggest taking the hard core as a starting point, while more is likely to be gained by looking at how the belt’s ‘positive heuristics’ provides autonomous, generative possibilities. The positive heuristics enables the research programme to develop, adjust and grow.6 Positive heuristics thus implies openness that can help to point out auxiliary assumptions and hypotheses with regard to more natural scientific applications. In the case of applications encompassing or relying on the social sciences and the humanities, we also speak of scholars pointing at little explored empirical phenomena and problems, or indeed problems we did not previously perceive as such; and on the normative plane, we may mention new ideas on aspects of international organization. Ultimately, we are concerned with the building of new models and theories yielding new empirical and theoretical facts, even when severely challenged by rival programmes (see Lakatos, 1970, pp. 134–75). Before further expanding on the types of programmes that can be built, I will briefly consider the limitations of the Lakatosian methodology. Limitations of the Lakatosian methodology In the wide field of IS we usually start from social scientific considerations, of which Lakatos had scant knowledge. His main case study was physics, and he only made some passing references to psychoanalysis, sociology and Marxism, without being very well informed. Of the several limitations ensuing from the context of his work, we can here take up three that help us to further tailor the research programmatic methodology to the needs of IS. First, Lakatos has been criticized for proposing mostly empirical criteria for evaluating the progress of research programmes (Laudan, 1997, pp. 77–8). However, we should not forget his notion of the importance of the ‘autonomy of theoretical science’ (Lakatos, 1970, p. 139). This notion has considerable bearing on the social sciences and on IS. These fields must be heavily theoretical, philosophical and normative – and here I also include social and political theory – in the usual absence of fully controlled experimentation and testing facilities in which indi-

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vidual variables would be neatly separable from each other and where the experiment itself would not impact the research object. But in IS the theories typically are not as strong in the predictive sense as are those of physics. They do, however, function as basic research in this field. Even though they are not routinely subjected to empirical tests in the natural scientific manner, they are applicable to the study of empirical and normative problems of varying magnitudes (Aalto et al., 2011). The predictive weaknesses notwithstanding, research programmatic methodologies can produce new theoretical models, new empirical facts and normative claims enabling us better to explain, understand and envision the international. Second, from the noted dearth of natural scientific testing facilities in fields such as IS it must follow that falsification is not at issue in the same way as it was for Lakatos. Even in the ‘sophisticated’ form he developed, falsification is not something that is often explicitly attempted or actually accomplished (at least not in an indisputable manner) in most fields within the remit of IS. This follows from the plural nature of the field, where different theories frequently help us illuminate different phenomena or different facets of the same phenomenon, or different historical episodes, even when superficially operating within the same domain. Another limitation of a falsificationist view is that to the extent science is about problem-solving – including both empirical and conceptual problems – falsificationism jumps the gun in suggesting as the primary task the evaluation of whether our theories are true, corroborated, tested or well-confirmed, while logically this only follows the process of first establishing the problems and questions and then addressing and answering them (see Laudan, 1977, pp. 14–24; 45–50). The theories around which puzzles can be formulated in IS may have uncertain verity, yet they can frequently offer useful guidance, help us to pose good questions and adequately approximate the empirical realities of interest. Third, as for Lakatos’s concern for judging the progress and degeneration of research programmes, this can only be done retrospectively. And it may take decades in the cases of dormant programmes being revived (see Chalmers, 1999, pp. 146–7). This circumstance offers very little practical advice to scholars for whom the problems are at hand, here and now. Moreover, here we run into the different timelines in the development of natural sciences and social sciences. For example, in IR none of what I below call paradigmatic research programmes are exactly dormant, and most of them are only a few decades old in their modern form. Furthermore, it is important to stress that while assessing the progress of research programmes is an important business in IR, and must concern IS

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in due course, my aims here are not to appraise progress but rather to elaborate some (pre-) conditions for programmatic, better organized work.

Types of interdisciplinary research programmes I have so far suggested that Lakatos’s notion of positive heuristics is particularly relevant for moving from disciplinary concerns such as those of IR towards outward-looking interdisciplinary research programmes. Positive heuristics helps to address and order our puzzlement into better organized puzzles by means of pointing at relevant and productive interdisciplinary connections linking up with other disciplines and/ or theories within them. By developing coherent sets of such puzzles, interdisciplinary research programmes can be created. As for the rest of the concepts of Lakatos, the hard core and its negative heuristics help to formulate the core focus of each programme (figure 3.1).

Discipline/theory b

Positive heuristics 3: interdisciplinary connections 3

Discipline/ theory c

Discipline/ theory a Positive heuristics1: interdisciplinary connections x

Hard core of research programme A: negative heuristics

Positive heuristics 2: interdisciplinary connections y

Figure 3.1 The block arrows in the figure depict interdisciplinary learning at the interface of research programme A and other disciplines or theories a, b and c, enabled and conditioned by positive heuristics x, y and z possessed by research programme A.

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The resulting research programmes may be multiple and competing. There are several types of these, as suggested by the work of Lakatos and Laudan. I will first take up the case of what I call paradigmatic research programmes with a view to moving from IR to IS. Paradigmatic research programmes In thinking of the types of possible research programmes it is a good idea to start from the grand or, paraphrasing Kuhn, paradigmatic level. By this term I refer to the largest scale in the aggregation of knowledge connoting a wide domain of interest or several such interrelated domains, families of theories and concepts, and shared beliefs on the overall direction of the research effort by the community of scholars subscribing to that paradigm.7 Without knowing where our existing paradigms may lead us, and consequently being unable to competently assess whether or not that may suffice, we remain utterly unable to make a reasonable choice regarding which new direction to take and why (cf., Laudan 1977, p. 107; Moran, 2002). Although paradigms are often associated with disciplines, they also offer starting points for interdisciplinary work. To illustrate this point let me take up the case of IR. Its major theoretical orientations are often referred to – paying lip service to Kuhn – as ‘paradigms’. But do IR paradigms translate into competing research programmes? Or, should we understand the term research programmes in a narrower sense and reserve it for individual theories that are formulated within each paradigm (Harrison, 2003, pp. 357–8)? Because IR is plural – as is IS, which also must be flexible – it makes sense to accept both paradigmatic and theory level research programmes (see Vasquez, 2003). Debate rages on whether speaking of paradigms and the associated great debates between them is appropriate in the context of IR. The majority of IR textbooks speak of paradigms (Smith, 2003). Many scholars deem paradigms a useful level of theoretical aggregation for evaluating IR (Elman and Elman, 2003a, pp. 43–4). In a sociology of science interpretation, paradigmatic debates are seen as the only hope for the disciplinary status of IR given its internal fragmentation (see Chapter 1; Wæver, 2007). By contrast, others note how IR paradigms are mostly substantial empirical categories pertaining to differences in the substantial assumptions on the nature of research objects and to consequent questions asked. IR paradigms are not differentiated by means of second-order, meta-theoretical or methodological criteria as is assumed in the philosophical approaches of Lakatos or Kuhn (Jackson

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and Nexon, 2009; cf., Wight, 2002, pp. 26; 30–2). Finally, some have suggested we focus on the work of individual scholars instead of on abstract paradigms, where the individual scholars might sit uneasily (Neumann and Wæver, 1997). In the face of this ambiguity, the paradigmatic level can be qualified as mostly a substantial rather than meta-theoretical category, and accepted as a de facto influential organizational category in IR, which we need to know in order to see the way beyond it. But simultaneously we must acknowledge the resilience of these paradigms. As stated, it is difficult to name a clear example of a fully collapsed paradigm in IR. In practice we witness a plurality of partial competition and overlap between them. A pattern of competition and co-existence among ‘paradigmatic research programmes’ is actually expected and tolerated by Lakatos (Elman and Elman, 2003a, p. 48). In Laudan’s view, too, it is a normal state of affairs (1977, ch.3), and some subsequent philosophies of science have accentuated its usefulness (e.g., Kitcher, 1995). Each of the paradigmatic programmes of IR has its own ‘hard core’, which is partly distinct, but also partly overlapping with the hard cores of other programmes. As Laudan (1977, pp. 81–92) implies, paradigmatic programmes do not in general have clearly fixed hard cores. They are not explanatory, predictive or testable on their own. Their organizational utility lies in offering directions for developing the associated individual theories and in their ability to help in solving empirical and conceptual problems. Many, especially in North American contexts, would name realism, liberalism and constructivism as the paradigmatic research programmes of IR.8 Briefly, we can say that the hard core of realism pertains to the absolutely central role of states; to a separation between domestic and international spheres; and to obstacles to cooperation between states owing to the anarchic nature of the international system and states’ endeavours to maximize their political and military power (e.g., Elman and Elman 2003, p. 26; Schmidt, 2002, p. 9; also James, 2002). In originally developing this hard core, classical realism drew on diplomatic history, international law and political theory. Since then imports from economics have helped to harden the neo-realist hard core. Liberalism’s hard core also assigns a central role to states, although it does not view this role through the same absolutist lens as does realism. Liberalism looks at the prospects of cooperation among states under anarchic conditions, where, however, other actors can also be found, as well as regimes and formal institutions regulating their conduct. The idea of economic interests – as opposed to the political or military interests

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espoused by realism – as a driving force of cooperation has been borrowed from economics. Even though liberalism is often portrayed as the antithesis of realism, the hard cores of the two paradigms do in fact overlap. This is evident in the debate on the extent to which a rationalist synthesis exists between the ‘neo’ modes of realism and liberalism (e.g., Schmidt 2002, p. 15; Wæver, 2007). The hard core of constructivism pertains to sociological imports placing the role of identity, norms and rules at the centre in the formation of constellations of conflict and cooperation among states. Yet, constructivism simultaneously overlaps with the rationalist ‘neo-neo’ debate. Both of them deal with common knowledge: rationalism at the level of assumptions shared by the actors examined, and constructivism with regard to the formation of that knowledge (Katzenstein et al., 1998, pp. 647–8; 680–2). Alexander Wendt’s constructivism is duly offered as a bridge between these traditions (Wendt, 1995, pp. 71–81; see also Adler, 1997). Many in Britain would mention the English school as the fourth paradigmatic research programme. And here, too, we find a claim of the school being able to synthesize, in this case bringing the three other main theoretical orientations under the same umbrella, and speak to each of them (Buzan, 2004, ch.1). This claim is not entirely unfounded given the nature of the school as grand theory and its assumption of a simultaneous presence of international system, international society and world society. That assumption of copresence addresses at least some aspects of realism, liberalism and constructivism. It arguably also constitutes the hard core of the programme in which the role of international society is crucial (see Chapter 4). Naturally, this breadth makes the school a broad church, and the unifying claim remains to be accepted by the other orientations. In fact none of the synthesizing efforts of the four programmes is widely accepted within the discipline.9 Acknowledging a British/European bias, realism, liberalism, constructivism and the English school can be treated as paradigmatic research programmes in contemporary IR.10 This is natural, as the key works within these four theoretical orientations have generated a large body of secondary debate and research. Many of the big organizing ideas and concepts can be attributed to them. Without much exaggeration, anyone aiming to re-examine IR seriously and become noted needs to position his or her ideas against the big theoretical debates that these four orientations are commonly held to have shaped (cf., Wæver, 2007).11 This also applies to interdisciplinary challenges. With considerable – and perhaps uncomfortable – simplification, it can be said that the most obvious Lakatosian ‘negative heuristics’

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which the four main paradigmatic programmes so defined share is the centrality of the state both as a remedy and challenge for international theory and practical policy problems.12 In other words: more than anything else, a theory of the state – from relatively conservative accounts to those acknowledging its historically changing nature – remains the centrepiece of all main IR orientations. Not a single one of these orientations wants to explain it away or ignore it. In this sense IR paradigms have some family resemblance. This understanding of four partly competing and partly commensurable paradigmatic research programmes structuring IR can now be taken as a heuristic point of departure for elaborating what is the positive heuristics each of these programmes may offer to function as a basis for moving towards new connections with other disciplines and fields of study (Figure 3.2). Accepting the heterogeneity of these broad programmes, it follows that each one of them may offer several different starting points – that is, positive heuristics for interdisciplinary work. Realism in its various guises makes references, for example, to human nature (psychology), diplomatic history and, in its neo-realist format, to economics. The connection of Interdisciplinary research programme a: disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn English school

Interdisciplinary research programme b: disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn

Realism Constructivism

The State

Interdisciplinary research programme n: disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn

Liberalism

Interdisciplinary research programme c: disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn

Figure 3.2 The joint ‘’hard core’ of the paradigmatic IR research programmes is marked by dark gray colour. The ‘’hard core’ of each individual paradigmatic programme is marked by medium gray and the ‘’positive heuristics’ by striped lines. The arrows point at hypothetical interdisciplinary research programmes a, b, c, n and so on, in disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn, and so on, linking the paradigmatic research programmes of IR with other disciplines and fields.

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liberalism to economics and political science is obvious, while psychology could also be mentioned. Constructivism links up with sociology, social theory and cognitive science but has not exhausted those rich depositories. The English school has natural positive heuristics vis-à-vis history, international law and political philosophy (see also Chapters 4 and 7). The idea of paradigmatic disciplinary structure is useful for the simple reason that it reflects the way in which IR is structured as a discipline and is intelligible to most IR scholars. Acknowledging these characteristics, and maintaining a sufficiently integral connection with the concerns of IR, new interdisciplinary research programmes with impact can be built. Indeed, here we encounter the fact that moving in new directions presupposes the a priori presence of knowledge. For example, we need to know that the disciplines or fields to be connected are meaningfully connectable. A possible checklist for ensuring this could well include some standard criteria from the philosophy of science. The primary task would be to ensure sufficient compatibility along the ontological dimension (what entities exist?). This would entail ensuring sufficient compatibility of the objects examined and their status. This should be viewed as the decisive criterion (see Wight, 2006). In the case of IR, scholars often agree on the existence of a given phenomenon and the merits of studying it. Or, they may agree that their explanations for its existence are commensurable even when coming from different theoretical orientations (Jackson and Nexon, 2009, pp. 916–18). That ontological definitions should be primary when thinking of the aggregation of knowledge is supported by Laudan (1977, pp. 79–81). Assigning primary importance to the ontological dimension is not to belittle the epistemological dimension (how can we know about those entities?), but is proposed to avoid drifting into excessive (self-)reflection on what we can possibly know. IR already has enough self-serving epistemological debate without much to say about the international. IS should not fall into the same trap. Finally, normative grounds and premises (what is desirable?) represent a possible common ground, too, but may easily lead us towards the weakest forms of interdisciplinarity. These translate into multidisciplinary research – as is evident in the record of peace research – which merely combines perspectives from different disciplines and fields. Such an approach in which each discipline adds its own perspective to an issue held as being of normative importance (such as peace) does not easily integrate those perspectives well into anything resembling research programmes, however loosely defined (see Chapter 4). For this reason shared normative considerations usually best lend themselves to looser forms of organization rather than better defined research

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programmes where analytical utility is of primary value (cf., Snyder, 2003; Simowitz, 2003). In summary, at the level of paradigmatic research programmes it is possible to enrich existing IR paradigms and to build new ones by means of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary imports from other disciplines and fields (see Chapter 2). As indicated, this is in fact how, for example, neoliberalism and constructivism were created in IR – by borrowing respectively from economics and sociology. More loosely organized directions of research in IR that are often lumped under the ‘reflectivist’ label have instead borrowed from the humanities – for example, from cultural studies and late-modern philosophy (Rosenau, P., 1990; see also Chapter 7). Before contrasting these more loosely organized bodies of literature with our discussion of research programmes we need to consider the possibility of programme types other than paradigmatic research programmes. These are constructed by also observing the same basic philosophical criteria. Other types of research programmes The paradigmatic programmes of IR constitute an example of a wider class of programmes on empirical puzzles. However, such empirically focused programmes are also found at lower levels of aggregation. The focus in these programmes is on empirical units in which two or more related fields have a shared interest. As discussed above, the puzzles related to those empirical units and to their relations with one another are ‘first-order’ problems for which the task then becomes to design suitable theories offering satisfactory solutions to render them more comprehensible. The problems are empirical because the adequacy of the theoretical solution proposed is judged against empirical evidence. Again, we confront the issue of knowledge. Empirical problems become problems only when we know enough so as to deem them problems worthy of study. There are many empirical facts ‘out there’ which we do not treat in this way for the simple reason that we have no relevant information to prompt us to do so (Laudan, 1977, pp. 14–17). We can generate such a sufficient awareness that would help to convert facts into knowledge: for example, by observing anomalies or recurrent patterns (Rosenau, J., 1996, p. 311). Yet, in generating that knowledge it is often unclear to which discipline or field the emerging problem belongs (Laudan, 1977, p. 19). On the agenda of IS, with the advent of neoliberal capitalism, this has been the case with new problems such as globalization and transformation of statehood (see Chapters 5 and

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6). Global climate change and energy shortages are further concrete examples prompting IR scholars to ponder an appropriate division of labour with other disciplines (see Aalto and Korkmaz, 2011; Chaturvedi, 2011). Puzzles requiring interdisciplinary programmatic work may also be conceptual. Conceptual puzzles differ from empirical ones. Some theoretical constructs may be internally inconsistent or incoherent, or in conflict with other theories or doctrines. Yet, they can simultaneously pave the way for meaningful empirical findings and be useful in problem-solving. For the purposes of interdisciplinary research, internal conceptual ambiguity may not, in fact, be as dangerous as excessively rigid conceptualizations can make theories less applicable to new domains. Conceptual debate removing those inconsistencies is historically an important indicator of progress. The conflicts with external theories, for their part, re-evoke the inherent ambiguity in the division of labour between disciplines. Different disciplines and fields of research frequently overlap (Laudan, 1977, pp. 45–54). The cases in which their respective problem definitions and proposed solutions differ are particularly promising and important with regard to our concern for developing interdisciplinary IS.

Conclusion I have suggested in this chapter that to develop interdisciplinary IS we need to pay adequate attention to the methodological means by which it is actualized as a scholarly enterprise producing new findings and results helping us to better understand, explain and envision the international. To this end I have advocated better organization for the meeting of, and mutual learning between, studies in different disciplines and fields than has so far been seen in the study of the international. Kuhn’s idea of puzzles that are better addressed and ultimately expected to be solvable in contrast to what I called ‘mere’ puzzlement that often characterizes interdisciplinary wondering, offers one possible organizational format. Yet, on the part of the scholar the cognitive state of puzzlement in an open-ended and open-minded form is a crucial prerequisite for any interdisciplinary meeting to materialize at all; well formulated puzzles are normally the property of disciplines. As for the more detailed conceptual tools helping us to conceive of how to turn our puzzlement into better organized puzzles and sets thereof, I considered Lakatos’s idea of research programmes and sought to adapt it to the context of IS. The hard core and the associated nega-

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tive heuristics define the domain of interest or scope of the programme. Being a wide and plural undertaking, IS can be (re)built around several partly competing and partly commensurable hard cores. For its part, positive heuristics enables locating overlapping domains of interest between disciplines and fields of study so as to meet, learn from, and mutually enrich each other. These encounters continue from where the hard core leaves off. To this end the available positive heuristics must be examined carefully to ensure sufficient compatibility most pronouncedly on the ontological level. Epistemological and normative considerations may also play a role. Drawing upon Laudan, I then considered several types of research programmes. Most of my attention was devoted to the case of large, paradigmatic research programmes reaching out from IR to IS, each with its own hard core and varying degrees of positive heuristics pointing in different interdisciplinary directions. Importantly, the same method of identifying the nature and degree of positive heuristics according to ontological and other philosophical criteria (if applicable), could very well be performed to extend any other large-scale theoretical orientation in any other discipline in pertinent interdisciplinary directions. Alternatively, interdisciplinary programmes can be built according to the same philosophical criteria in the case of empirical and conceptual problems. Even though my examples have mostly concerned the development needs of IR, accepting that IR must be an important component of interdisciplinary IS, it is entirely possible to envision research programmes, paradigmatic and others, in which IR is not involved in the study of the international. We already have such programmes, as is well seen in the marriage of sociology, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy in the study of globalization. Taken together, the organizational formats sketched in this chapter represent the more structured end of the continuum of options for organizing IS. The research programmatic methodology outlined is obviously at ease with natural-scientific type approaches seeking generalizable knowledge, but the option of building smaller scale empirical or conceptual programmes also remains open for what IR scholars commonly lump together as ‘reflectivist’ approaches in pursuit of more local knowledge. These may include work within less close-knit research directions with less of a grand, or ‘architectonic’, intent (e.g., Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007, pp. 3–4), and work on individual research problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. However, it is important to note that one aspect, or moment of puzzlement, is a situation of little

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or no organization. This in fact results when contemplating most of the scholarly activities that could today be counted as being part of IS. To avert the dangers of atomistic research efforts, my preference is for interdisciplinary international studies to become a dynamic field of research programmes debating with and learning from each other, and opening up towards other disciplines and fields of study. The intention is that the international become understood in multifarious ways, as is also the case in the history of IR. In conditions of little organization, history so far suggests that such goals are difficult to achieve.

Notes 1. For useful and critical comments crucial in finalizing this initial probe, I thank Tuomas Forsberg, Vilho Harle, Hiski Haukkala, Sami Moisio and Petri Ylikoski. The responsibility for the instances where I should have listened to more carefully their advice, as well as for any remaining problems, is mine alone. 2. Other literatures that can be consulted for purposes of re-examining IR and developing IS include, for example, the philosophy of social science (see e.g., Winch, 2008; Hollis and Smith, 1990; Kurki and Wight, 2007); the sociology of science (Wæver, 2007), and the more general methodological reflection commonly conducted within the social and cultural sciences. These possibilities are not addressed here. 3. In place of ‘studies’, ‘arts’ would be an alternative term, but it is biased towards the humanities which I take to be an unnecessarily limited perspective for IS. 4. However, it has been claimed that Kuhn’s naturalist approach retained some positivistic elements (see Bird, 2004). 5. At the same time the empirical validity of Lakatos’s model in the context of natural sciences is debatable. On the part of economists, his model initially won a wide following in setting standards for research (see Backhouse, 1994). 6. For a very different, and most likely more frequently found, solution that instead accentuates the centrality of the hard core in differentiating programmes from one another, and which has very different implications for mutual learning, see Haukkala (2010, pp. 17–21). 7. In other words, this broad definition is closer to Kuhn’s first meaning of the term paradigm as ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community’. His second meaning of the term paradigm defines it as a set of examples or models helping to solve the remaining puzzles within normal science (see Kuhn, 1970 [1962], p. 175). 8. Brian Schmidt (2002, pp. 9–10) surveys the claims for a paradigm status in IR and finds references to realism, idealism, world politics, global society and neo-Marxist paradigms and the vaguer categories of ‘pluralism’ and ‘behaviorism’ (probably referring to behaviouralism). 9. For example, most IR textbooks continue to discuss realism and liberalism separately (for an exception, see Baylis et al., 2005).

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10. As also implied by Schmidt (see note 8), Marxism or post-Marxism might qualify as a further paradigmatic programme, especially with the rising popularity of international political economy (IPE). At the core of Marxism is a strong normative concern with the exploitative nature of capitalism and the mechanism with which it operates. 11. For a critical view, see Schmidt (2002, pp. 10–12), who observes very different controversies being claimed to constitute the debates, and who doubts whether all the alleged debates have actually taken place. Yet, the important point here is that IR scholars often act as if they had. 12. Another, not completely unrelated, candidate for a joint ‘hard core’ among them would be a tendency towards positing the nexus of the international structure and the state as central to IR. However, for example, here liberalism splits into two. Of its two main strands, the neoliberal mode chiefly examines the evolving of international structure from the point of view of predominantly rationalistically conceptualized state actors (see e.g., Martin, 2007). The pluralist variant of liberalism pays more attention to bureaucratic politics within the state and other domestic sources of foreign policy (see e.g., Panke and Risse, 2007).

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Laudan, L. (1977) Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley: University California Press). Martin, L. (2007) ‘Neoliberalism’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Molteberg, E., C. Bergstrøm and R. Haug (2000) ‘Interdisciplinarity in Development Studies: Myths and Realities’, Forum for Development Studies, 26(2): 317–30. Moran, J. (2002) Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge). Neumann, I. and O. Wæver (eds) (1997) The Future of International Relations? Masters in the Making (London: Routledge). Panke, D. and T. Risse (2007) ‘Liberalism’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books). Rosenau, J.N. (1996) ‘Probing Puzzles Persistently: a Desirable But Improbable Future for IR Theory’ in S. Smith, K. Booth and M. Zalewski (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rosenau Vaillancourt, P. (1990) ‘Once Again into the Fray: International Relations Confronts the Humanities’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 1: 83–110. Schmidt, B.C. (2002) ‘On the History and Historiography of International Relations’ in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations (London: SAGE). Simowitz, R. (2003) ‘Measuring Intra-Programmatic Progress’ in C. Elman and M.F. Elman (eds) Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Smith, C.B. (2003) ‘How Do Textbooks Represent the Field of International Studies?’, International Studies Review, 5: 421–41. Snyder, J. (2003) ‘ “Is” and “Ought”: Evaluating Empirical Aspects of Normative Research’ in C. Elman and M.F. Elman (eds) Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Vasquez, J. (2003) ‘Kuhn vs. Lakatos: The Case for Multiple Frames in Appraising IR Theory’ in C. Elman and M.F. Elman (eds) Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Wæver, O. (2007) ‘Still a Discipline after all These Debates?’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wendt, A. (1995) ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security, 20: 71–81. Wight, C. (2002) ‘Philosophy of Social Science and International Relations’ in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations (London: SAGE). Wight, C. (2006) Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Winch, P. (2008) The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge). Zinnes, D.A. (1980) ‘Three Puzzles in Search of a Researcher’, International Studies Quarterly, 24(3): 315–42.

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4 Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes in International Studies: The Frankfurt School, the English School and Peace Research as Models Vilho Harle

Introduction All social activities may have an international aspect. Therefore, in academia ‘the international’ is not a monopoly of international relations (IR). Any discipline in the social sciences may, and when needed must, encounter the international. This constitutes a serious challenge to IR. Without denying the value of IR and its potentially powerful role in the study of the international (see e.g., Millennium, 3/2007), I claim that the international can best be studied via various interdisciplinary perspectives by making it a key element of interdisciplinary international studies (IS).1 In so doing, however, one must fully recognize the thousand faces of the international and beware of focusing exclusively on conventional, narrow concepts of the international as the ‘inter-state’. I maintain that the proposed expanded understanding of the international opens up new vistas for interdisciplinary international studies. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity is a valuable asset enabling us to identify new issues and questions that deserve scholarly attention. If an academic field fails to tackle new issues its intellectual thrust will expire. Interdisciplinary orientations enable us to follow and learn from innovative developments in scientific and philosophical debates within social sciences and in social philosophy. 92

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However, the positive features of interdisciplinarity notwithstanding, it is likely to reproduce the problem of contending divisions and neverending scholarly debates between the ardent representatives of various schools within IS – familiar in the image of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR (Holsti, 1987). Interdisciplinarity is, or could be, a source of innovative ideas and fruitful cross-fertilization, but it can also be a burden. Therefore, there is a positive need to retain the interdisciplinary nature of IS while also giving this interdisciplinarity a function in order to make it an asset – a means of recognizing and covering the changing and expanding international in a holistic way. Therefore, we must ask how to do this in practice. What is required in order to turn interdisciplinarity from a divisive force into an integrating element in IS? Instead of attempting to give an abstract or final answer, I suggest that something might be learned from interdisciplinary efforts past and present. There are various ways of organizing interdisciplinarity in practice, among them different research programmatic methodologies (see Chapter 3). We must look at what ideas and approaches have been applied on the practical level in relevant fields in order to make interdisciplinarity a well-functioning approach. Interdisciplinarity must be operationalized in and through practice, and there are several ways of doing it. I will discuss three examples of organizing interdisciplinarity: (a) core field-oriented multidisciplinarity, where separate disciplines are drawn together by a sort of active force of gravity of the core science; (b) research programme-oriented multidisciplinarity, where a given research programme itself is multidisciplinary; and (c) problem-oriented neodisciplinarity, where certain social and political problem(s) define the field (for the interdisciplinary terminology, see also Chapter 2). They will be here represented, respectively, by (a) the interdisciplinary materialism of the Frankfurt school (FS) during the 1930s; (b) the theoretical and methodological pluralism of the English school (ES); and (c) the Galtungian (i.e., Nordic/Scandinavian) approach to peace research (PR) (see note 7). The FS represents an interdisciplinary philosophical orientation; the ES is based on an interdisciplinary conceptual framework; and PR is focused on the normative study of peace and violence. This case selection is justified by their academic visibility and prominence, and by the fact that in their various ways they challenge the inter-state meaning of the international. This chapter proceeds in four sections. In the following section, the Frankfurt school gives us a benchmark for discussing and evaluating the cases of the English school in section 2 and peace research in section 3.

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Both ES and PR will be discussed as projects discernible in current international studies with a significant potential to contribute to the study of the international if both return to their original interdisciplinary roots. The promise of such a return will be briefly elaborated upon in the final discussion.

The Frankfurt school The early history2 of the Frankfurt school dates back to 1923, when Felix J. Weil, a student of Marxist political economy – with academic help from economist Kurt Gerlach – launched a Marxist-oriented Institut für Sozialforschung (The Institute of Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main. At the beginning of the 1930s its scholars – most of whom were Jews – had to leave Germany for Geneva, Paris and London. Finally they moved to the US, where in 1934 Columbia University became the home of the Institute. In 1949 a reduced group of key members – Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock – returned to, now, West Germany. The Institute was re-opened in 1951 in Frankfurt (e.g., Jay, 1973, p. 283; Tar, 1977, p. 133; Wiggershaus, 1994). Carl Grünberg, professor of law and politics, became the first director of the Institute. Grünberg emphasized ‘the need for a research-oriented academy in opposition to the then current trend in German higher education towards teaching at the expense of scholarship’; the aim was ‘to avoid becoming a training school for mandarins prepared only to function in the service of the status quo’. Marxism as a scientific methodology was to be the guiding principle at the Institute (Jay 1973, p. 11.). However, the disappointment caused by the failure of the German working class to participate in a Marxist world revolution led to a serious dilemma among young German Marxist intellectuals: they might (a) support the moderate Social Democrats (SDP); (b) accept the leadership of Moscow (the Communist Party); or, as the FS scholars actually did, (c) radically overturn Marxist assumptions through a re-examination of the very foundations of that theory (Jay, 1973, p. 3).3 The first members of the Institute included Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Henryk Grossman, Richard Sorge, and Karl and Rose Wittfogel; later, in the 1930s, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and Theodor Wisengrund-Adorno joined in the Institute’s work. The Institute’s core group consisted of Horkheimer, Pollock, Löwenthal, Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm: ‘It is their work, rooted in the tradition of European philosophy, open to contemporary empirical techniques, and addressed to current social

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questions, that formed the core of the Institute’s achievement’ (Jay, 1973, p. 31; see also pp. xv; 31). The history of the original Institute can be divided into four periods: (a) 1923–30, when the Institute produced Marxist analyses of bourgeois society’s socio-economic substructure; (b) 1931–9; when its prime interest was in its cultural superstructure (Jay, 1973, p. 21); (c) 1940–50, when Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on the challenge of fascism; and (d) 1950 and after, when the theory of society was formulated (Tar, 1977, p. 9; Jay, 1973, p. 21). In this chapter, I exclusively discuss the second phase, the 1930s, since it best represents interdisciplinarity. The other aspects of the FS will not be examined here (see also Tar, 1977, p. 174). Max Horkheimer started as the Institute’s director in January 1931 (formally as professor of social philosophy). Some ten papers by him, including his inaugural lecture on the nature and role of social philosophy and the task of the Institute (Horkheimer, 1988), and his papers on science and crisis, and traditional and critical theory (CT) (Horkheimer, 1972), originally published in the Institute’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS) in 1933–40, suggested a research programme which subsequently became known as critical theory (Tar, 1977, p. 28), or as I prefer to call it here, interdisciplinary materialism. Due to the well-known historical situation in the world economy, and economic and political problems in European societies since the end of the 1920s, the FS scholars maintained that society was not meeting basic human needs or making a full human life possible. Instead, the suffering of individuals had become obvious. Human beings were unable to wield power to their own advantage, to educate and develop themselves. They were subjected to passive tools or atomized objects in the hands of economic and other elites. The solution to the problem was not to be found in the overthrow of political and economic power structures in a violent revolution, but in criticism of the existing ideology and false consciousness of individual human beings. As Tar (1977, p. ix) puts it, ‘the struggle [against the oppressive systems of power] could not be limited to the real sphere: it must be extended to the changing of consciousness’. The goal was to be found in man’s emancipation from the ‘slavery of false consciousness’ (Tar, 1977, p. 175; see also Fay, 1987; Leonard, 1990). In considering the political and economic crisis, the Institute’s attention focused mainly on the role of science (Wissenschaft). Following the Marxist theory of society, science was regarded as one of man’s productive powers. Horkheimer maintained that social science (Sozialforschung)

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must not neglect its own social role, for only by becoming conscious of its function in the present critical situation could it contribute to the forces that would bring about the necessary changes (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 4). He emphasized that, in the context of the economic crisis, science was one of the numerous elements not fulfilling its function: Insofar as we can rightly speak of a crisis in science, that crisis is inseparable from the general crisis. The historical process has imposed limitations on science as a productive force, and these show in the various sectors of science, in their content and form, in their subject matter and method. . . . Understanding of the crisis of science depends on a correct theory of the present social situation; for science as a social function reflects at present the contradictions with society (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 9). Horkheimer maintained that reason had been diluted into ‘a useful instrument only for purposes of everyday life’, and it ‘must fall silent in face of the great problems’ (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 4). That is, reason and science were invoked to help to solve practical problems, not to ponder fundamental issues of society as a whole: At the present time, scientific effort mirrors an economy filled with contradictions. The economy is in large measure dominated by monopolies, and yet on the world scale it is disorganized and chaotic. . . . Science too shows a double contradiction. First, science accepts as a principle that its every step has a critical basis, yet the most important step of all, the setting of [fundamental social] tasks, lacks a theoretical grounding and seems to be taken arbitrarily. Second, science has to do with knowledge of [a] comprehensible relationship upon which its own existence and the direction of its work depend, namely, society. (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 8) Critical theory, proposed by Horkheimer as an alternative to traditional theory, constitutes a critique of the latter from an ethical standpoint. CT is concerned with a radical transformation of existing social arrangements; it is permeated by the idea of a future society as a community of human beings (Tar, 1977, pp. 29; 31; see Horkheimer, 1972, 188ff.). The school’s critical theory not only analysed the social and academic crisis (ideological criticism), but it also suggested how to get out of that crisis, how to solve the basic problems of the social crisis/false

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consciousness, and how to emancipate human beings from their bondage. The proposal was based on the idea of (social) totality (Jay, 1984; see also Tar, 1977, p. 145; cf., Wendt, 1999). Critical theory had to deal with not only the parts or elements of society (see Adorno in Jay, 1973, p. xii; Tar, 1977, pp. x; 23), but with society as a totality, as a whole. Social research had to pay attention to the whole of society, its current condition of social crisis, aiming at its abolition. Social science could not remain outside society, studying society from the outside, supposedly as an impartial observer with a neutral view (see Tar, 1977, p. 31). It had to acknowledge its place within that society and, therefore, it had to be self-reflective. Social science, like any form of social activity, could never be value-free. Social science alone could rid itself of its own particular crisis: fragmentation and irrelevance (Horkeimer, 1972). Scientific objectivity and the study of detached, narrow problems had led to a fragmentation of social science into independent academic disciplines interested only in establishing and defending their academic borderlines. Such a fragmented social science could not serve society and humankind. Fragmentation, instead, was conducive to the oppression and exploitation of human beings. Instead of emancipating human beings, social science exacerbated oppression and control of human beings, offering up the results of its work on the altar of the self-seeking economic interests of the owners of capital (Horkeimer, 1972, pp. 3–9). Horkheimer saw a connection between the current fragmentation of knowledge and the social conditions that helped to produce that fragmentation. A global economic structure, both monopolistic and anarchic, had promoted a state of knowledge that best could be described as confused. The crisis could be overcome only by overcoming the fetishist grounding of knowledge in pure consciousness, and by recognizing the concrete historical circumstances that conditioned all thought (Horkeimer, 1972, pp 3–9). To this end, Horkeimer introduced the idea of interdisciplinary materialism. As Jay suggests, this represented a return to the concerns of the leftist Hegelians of the 1840s. The FS members were interested in the ‘integration of philosophy and social analysis’, and particularly ‘in exploring the possibilities of transforming the social order through human praxis’ (Jay, 1973, p. 42). Horkheimer claimed that ‘the present state of knowledge requires a continuing fusion of philosophy and the various branches of science’ (Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 38; see also Tar, 1977, p. 26.). Social philosophy would not be a single Wissenschaft (science) in search of immutable truth. It was understood as a materialist theory enriched and supplemented by

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empirical work, in the same way as natural philosophy was dialectically related to individual scientific disciplines. The Institute would therefore continue to diversify its energies without losing sight of its interdisciplinary, synthetic goals. To this end, Horkheimer reinstated Grünberg’s noncollegial ‘dictatorship of the director’ (Jay, 1973, p. 23.). In practice, this implied a systematic organization of the Institute as an interdisciplinary community in which the role of social philosophy, above the specialized disciplines, and Horkheimer’s role, above his colleagues, were interchangeable. Horkeimer aimed to set up ‘a regime of planned work on the juxtaposition of philosophical construct and empiricism in social theory’. This necessitated a serious approach to organizing enquiry on the basis of current philosophical questions, in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and psychologists pooled their efforts to produce sustainable cooperation (Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 39). The Institute’s Sozialforschung differed from the sociology practised by more traditional German academics. The preface to the first volume of the ZfS expressed this: Social research [Sozialforschung] is research in special areas at different levels of abstraction intended to promote the theory of contemporary society in its totality. Its aim was the grasping of the societal process in its totality and presumed the possibility of comprehending forces active underneath the chaotic surface of historical events. History may appear arbitrary, but its dynamics are dominated by laws. Therefore, its cognition is a science. (Tar, 1977, p. 27) Horkheimer stressed the synoptic, interdisciplinary nature of the Institute’s work and the role of social psychology in bridging the gap between individual and society. The first issue of the Institute’s journal (ZfS) reflected the diversity of the topics to which the school was paying attention: Marx and the problem of the collapse of capitalism; planned economy within a capitalist system; sociology of literature; music; and psychological dimensions of social research (Jay, 1973, p. 27). The editions of the ZfS reveal the broad interdisciplinary spectrum of the attempted grand programme (Tar, 1977, p. 28).4 The FS scholars emphasized the inseparability of philosophy and sociology (Tar, 1977, p. 137). They insisted on the use of key philosophical concepts such as totality and on the incorporation of elements of Dilthey’s philosophical psychology and Freud’s metapsychology (Jay, 1973, p. 26). Adhering to academic compartmentalization would have signified the acceptance of the division of labour of capitalist society

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and negated CT’s aim to transcend this division of labour (Tar 1977, p. 137; also p. 138). The school was eager to develop individual disciplines, and it achieved high prominence especially in sociology and social psychology. It expected individual social disciplines to collect and analyse specific data. The effort to study the various aspects of social totality had, by definition, to be multidisciplinary. No single discipline could cover everything. The main point, however, was that individual disciplines, alone, were incapable of mastering social totality, and could not do so even through technical cooperation. Simply studying some social issues and collecting the results into an edited book would not suffice. Disciplines were not to be left alone to realize the mission. A connecting factor between the various disciplines was needed. Someone had to assume the task of collecting fragmented pieces of knowledge and data to produce a comprehensive picture of the social totality. This collecting-and-combining work was not understood in a technical sense. Totality was to be something more than the sum of its component parts. Technically, it might have been a fairly simple task to summarize the various findings, but in addition to, or actually instead of this, synthesizing interpretation was required. This was a serious theoretical task in the fundamental sense of the word. It was to present a holistic image or theory of the crisis of society. The challenge was given, as we have seen, to social philosophy, understood as a general, theoretical social science above others. The idea of interdisciplinary materialism is plausible, even if its practical realization does not always fully correspond to the suggested ideals of critical theory or interdisciplinary materialism (see Tar, 1977, pp. 203–4; Fay, 1987; Leonard, 1990): The idea of interdisciplinary research was present throughout the 50-year history of the Institute, yet it remained programmatic. Its logic and detailed mechanism were never worked out, nor was a thorough integration of monographs produced by individual members of the Institute, or a theoretical codification of knowledge gained from them, ever accomplished, perhaps because Horkheimer and Adorno had neither the training nor the interest to investigate socioeconomic bases empirically. They detested empirical research, which in their view deals with its essence. (Tar, 1977, p. 202.) * * * In spite of the harsh criticism levelled at the FS, its ideal of interdisciplinary materialism – that is, its proposed division of labour between

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specific disciplines and social philosophy (the latter actively combining knowledge to the analysis and theory of the social totality) – makes the FS a shining star for any interdisciplinary effort to emulate. However, the model cannot be adapted as such to IS by assigning IR a role comparable to that of social philosophy in the FS. IR, whether multidisciplinary or not, is just one of the social sciences. IR cannot be elevated above any other fields within international studies. Such an arrangement would imply undue academic imperialism in favour of IR. Any potential application of the idea must, hence, be aired only for the heuristic purposes of further elaboration and debate. Contemplating such an idea in light of these reservations, there would be two possibilities: IR would assume the role of combining the various ‘international’ aspects uncovered by the other social sciences and the humanities, and so on, into a coherent whole; or, someone or some school within IR would assume the role of combining the various subdisciplinary elements within IR into a coherent whole. The first option is to date best represented by Quincy Wright’s The Study of International Relations (1955). Some examples of the second option can be found in textbooks (e.g., Hudson, 2007; Smith et al., 2008; see also Webel, 2007). The first option, when concentrating on the various aspects of the international, might be worth attempting, but only with the dangers of academic imperialism and the re-emergence of (mono)disciplinarity firmly in mind. It is more important and interesting to note, however, that the second option would presuppose a research programmatic orientation and take place at the level of concrete research projects (see Chapter 3). In other words, it would be possible to realize interdisciplinarity in its multidisciplinary form. Again, we have every reason to highlight the international. In the first option the international is studied by various disciplines as one of their research problems, but more or less as a mere subordinate topic. The major interest lies elsewhere, with the international gaining prominence only as a practical consequence of globalization, for instance. The international permeates every science, from the social sciences to all others, including the humanities and, for example, medical, technical and natural sciences. The international becomes a challenge and an opportunity for them all. IR would then ponder the knowledge so accessed, attempting to develop a theory or philosophy of the international. But, then, IR should become something else than it is now. Instead of the ‘inter-state’ aspect of the international, IR should become open to a variety of its constituent aspects by returning to interdisciplinary

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international studies. This might in fact be gradually taking place (see e.g., Buzan, 2004; Millennium, 3/2007). The FS has something to contribute to this effort, but only if we acknowledge its relevance for the study of the international. If one shares – as most IR scholars continue to do – the inter-state understanding of the international, one may wonder if the FS is relevant to IR or even to IS. The FS represents ‘social research’ wherein IR or political science has no specific role. Only one of the outer-circle members, Franz Neumann, was a political scientist (see Wiggershaus, 1994, pp. 223–6; 470). The Institute’s emphasis on political economy included some international aspects, but the international as such was never examined. By contrast, it is another matter that the idea of critical theory has become familiar and occasionally followed up in IR, for example by the Wales school of critical security studies (see Wyn Jones, 1999; cf., RIS, 2/2005). However, I would suggest that the FS offers an approach to the study of international problems – conflicts, war and peace, as well as international political economy – as an element of the social totality, the school’s chief interest. Horkheimer was a pacifist concerned with social justice and the emancipation of humans from the capitalist economic and social system, in order to approach a more peaceful world (see Horkheimer, 1972, p. v; Jay, 1973, pp. 45; 283; Tar, 1977, pp. 19–20; 24; 44; 49–51; 176; Wiggershaus, 1994, pp. 42–3). Indeed, the concept of the international cannot be tied only to the inter-state. The international in the globalized world or world society (Buzan, 2004), or international political economy, subsumes much more (see Chapter 6). Space does not permit further elaboration of the social theory of the international inspired by the FS.5 Here, I would merely mention the idea of combining interdisciplinary materialism with the study of the international along the lines of FS critical theory. This would merit serious attention in IS (see Reid and Yanarella, 1976).

The English school: from IR to the study of the international? According to Tim Dunne (1998), the origin of the English school dates back to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, launched by Herbert Butterfield in January 1959. However, Linklater and Suganami (2006) do not accredit the committee similar status but suggest that the orientation started in the London School of Economics

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earlier in the 1950s (see also Jones, 1981). The two alternative narratives suggest slightly different lists of names as representing the ES, especially as regards E.H. Carr and C.A.W. Manning, who were active in the field before the ES was actually born, irrespective of which narrative we consider. Unfortunately, both lists mostly ignore the multidisciplinary history of the ES by concentrating on prominent representatives of IR and exclusively on their contributions to IR. The committee participants were interested in, or at least expected to elaborate upon, the theory of international politics. This theory was understood not as a behaviouralist or empirical theory of international interactions, but rather in the words of prominent ES writer Martin Wight (1960) as ‘international theory’ – that is, theory of, or speculation concerning the international. International theory thus represents speculation on the international in the same sense as political theory represents speculation on the political. While political theory asks ‘how can (selfish and violent) men live together in society?’, international theory asks ‘how can (selfish and violent) states live together in the anarchical international society?’ The key interest for ES scholars is expressed by the idea of international society: just as individual human beings, in certain situations, form political communities, states, in certain situations, also form societies of which they are members. ES scholars mainly deal with structural, functional and historical investigations considering, respectively, the structure of the world political stage (system, society and world society); the functions of international society and its institutions; and the historical development of international societies, both from system to society and from one society to another (Linklater and Suganami, 2006, p. 43). The ES gives a wide variety of meanings to the international, although originally it primarily paid attention to the state or the states-system. However, even then this did not imply exclusive attention to inter-state relations. On the contrary, those aspects were excluded in the sense of what today is called the neo-realist idea of international system. International institutions played the key role in international society, so the ‘relations’ occurred between states and institutions, rather than between states. This relegated the international, understood as the ‘interstate’, to the background. I, therefore, claim that the key tenets of the ES are not impossible to read in the light of the idea of ‘unlimited’ aspects of the international (see also Buzan, 2004; Buzan and Little, 2000). Martin Wight typologized international theory into realist (Machiavellian or Hobbesian), rationalist (Grotian/Kantian) and

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revolutionist (represented by revolutionary and anti-revolutionary ideologies) orientations (see Linklater and Suganami, 2006, pp. 160–8). The realist tradition denies the existence of international society. Realists maintain that states are in interaction with each other according to their needs and immediate situations, but this interaction forms no permanent relationships between them. The rationalist tradition – going beyond this conventional inter-state international towards a more complicated image of the international in which the relationships occur between the state and the norms/institutions of the international society – maintains that states form a society in the sense, [t]hat they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions. (Bull, 1955[1977], p. 13; see also Linklater and Suganami, 2006, p. 53) The revolutionist tradition rejects the ontological existence of the state, and maintains that human beings form a community at the level of humanity. The state as an organizational structure of this humanity is merely a temporal element without any real role above human beings and humanity. In this tradition, international activities take place between human subjects. The agenda of the international becomes even more complicated owing to the role of various organizational actors (e.g., the UN and the EU) and transnational companies that also come into the picture. For the realist, world politics or the ‘world political stage’ consists of states. Their interaction can be called the international system. This inter-state system is anarchical, and each state takes care of its own security. The only difference between the states is found in their military or geo-economic capacities. Kenneth Waltz (1979), the leading proponent of this orientation, argues that one can describe, explain and predict international politics by understanding the nature of the international system and its anarchical character, which makes states struggle with each other both in peace and at war in order to maintain their security. For the rationalists, states in their relations have conflicts but also aspects of cooperation. The rationalist is interested in explaining the prospects and occurrence of cooperation in the anarchical international system. The rationalist notes that states often follow and respect norms and rules in their interaction, even in wartime. Indeed, states have established and committed themselves to international institutions

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(like diplomacy, war, etc.) upon which international society is built. In Martin Wight’s words: ‘Although there is no political superior, [states] nevertheless recognize that the multiplicity of sovereign states forms a moral and cultural whole, which imposes certain moral and psychological and possibly even legal . . . obligations – even if not political ones’ (Wight, 1991, p. 7). For the revolutionist, international politics in terms of relations among states is transient. At the deeper level it is about relations among human beings; the ultimate reality is called the community of mankind. The revolutionists appeal to international morality (as do the rationalists) but that morality is understood as composed of revolutionary imperatives that require all men to work for a brotherhood of man. The world is divided between the elect, who form the community of mankind (or civitas maxima), and the heretics, who stand in its way (Bull, 1991, p. xii). Or, in Wight’s words: ‘[the revolutionists] believe so passionately in the moral unity of the society of states or international society that they identify themselves with it, and therefore they . . . claim to speak in the name of this unity. . . . For them, the whole of international society transcends its parts; they are cosmopolitan rather than “internationalist”, and their international theory . . . has a missionary character’ (Wight, 1991, p. 8). The original, classical international theory of (mainly) Martin Wight was known to a relatively small group of the committee and Wight’s students at the LSE (Bull, 1991). In 1981 Roy Jones proclaimed the death of the ES – at the same time, however, giving the orientation its name (Jones, 1981). Towards the end of the 1990s the English school switched from the study of international theory and historical analysis of international society to a more empirical study of current international issues (e.g., Buzan, 2004). This switch made it increasingly popular among those IR scholars who are at best distantly interested in political/international theory. During the first decade of the twenty-first century the English school grew into one of the major orientations in IR in Western Europe.6 This chapter is not, however, an appropriate place in which to discuss and evaluate the English school as an approach to the study of international relations. Here, I am interested in its multidisciplinary nature which, in my view, suggests an open research programme. My thesis is: the expanding concept of the international makes interdisciplinarity a major element of the ES, justifying the theoretical and methodological pluralism of the school. (cf., Linklater and Suganami, 2006, pp. 81–4). But, in addition, I claim that the ES has not fully acknowledged this.

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Instead, it has distanced itself rapidly from interdisciplinary IS, moving towards a fairly monodisciplinary IR. Indeed, the most interesting element from our point of view is the fact that the original idea and group of scholars was in many ways interdisciplinary, or rather, multidisciplinary. Indeed, the original ES was not a school within IR; the ES rather was clearly outside it. During both its first and second phases, IR scholars constituted a minority within the school, albeit a significant one. More recent lists of ES scholars almost exclusively contain IR names (see Dunne, 1998; Linklater and Suganami, 2006). Unfortunately, as an expression of the monodisciplinarity of IR, the literature dealing with ES narratives (written by IR scholars) is not interested to note, even in passing, the non-IR contributors to the school, failing to discuss their ideas of the international. The British committee was launched and organized by historian Herbert Butterfield. Martin Wight, who eventually became a professor of history, was an assistant to Arnold Toynbee at the Chatham House for the Study of History Project, taught IR, or better, international theory – which for him was located somewhere in the history of ideas, or political theory as well as history. Hedley Bull was originally an historian who was invited by Manning to join the Department of International Relations at LSE – on the explicit understanding that Bull was not an IR scholar. It was Manning who advised Bull to participate in Wight’s lectures on international theory. Adam Watson was originally a diplomat invited to join the committee, subsequently becoming a prominent history-oriented scholar in IR. In considering other figures – ones whose membership in the ES is debatable, but who in any case have been often mentioned in the literature of the ES story – we can find similar multidisciplinarily oriented figures. E.H. Carr was originally a journalist who became professor of international relations, but who left the field and became a prominent historian. C.A.W. Manning was professor of IR and also an international lawyer (Dunne, 1998, pp. 12; 185; Linklater and Suganami, 2006, pp. 5; 15; 22). In addition to history and international law, the ES’s interdisciplinarity and its conceptual framework were based on sociology and the sociological concepts of society and institutions, as well as norms, rules and principles. This being so, it is quite surprising to find that the committee did not include any international lawyers or sociologists. The sociological elements, however, were fully recognized later, but still exclusively through IR lenses (e.g., Buzan, 2004; see also Wendt 1999). As a case in point, the classical ES emphasized close relations between IR and history. International society and its institutions had to be

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understood as historically developing phenomena. International society is never an abstract or permanent structure (as is Waltz’s international system); historical change is inherent in international society. Institutions like diplomacy have their histories and undergo historical changes (Linklater and Suganami, 2007, pp. 84–97; see also Watson, 1992; Wight, 1977; Bull and Watson, 1984; and R. Holsti, 1913; Numelin, 1950). And changing international institutions imply different international societies in different historical periods (and different cultures). History was also an important source of experience and a basis for political wisdom and judgement. Indeed, during the rebirth of the ES in the 1990s, the school degenerated into a major orientation within IR, in the process ignoring the many faces of the international. It has included a rising number of scholars from countries outside the United Kingdom or the British Commonwealth, but they come exclusively from international relations. The connections to history (see, however, Buzan and Little, 1998), international law, and even to political theory, have become almost non-existent. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of Wight’s international theory, Buzan’s (2004) programmatic declaration to detach the ES from political/normative theory and make it an empirical theory of globalization is a major step from multidisciplinarity towards barren monodisciplinarity. At the same time, fortunately, Buzan’s hostility towards classical international theory is not shared by many other representatives of the ES (e.g., Ole Wæver, Iver Neumann or Robert Jackson). **** What makes the ES an open research programme is its theoretical and methodological pluralism. The school is not exclusive in its orientation; it declines to make a choice between realism and idealism (liberalism) by introducing the third way of rationalism to make the picture more flexible. Furthermore, the ES does not make a final choice among realism, rationalism and revolutionism. And, finally, the ES introduces an international theory (embracing realism, rationalism and revolutionism) on the one hand, and a three-layered international practice (including system, society and world society), on the other. It portrays international theory and world politics as interconnected areas and takes all three elements in both cases as aspects, not as the exclusive essence, of the theory or practice. We can note that the ES’s attempt to break up the dichotomy of realism and liberalism of the first debate of IR constituted a blow to another,

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more ignored dichotomy: that between the inter-state international and inter-human international. For the ES, it was not an either-or issue. The international, for the ES, has many faces and is a complex phenomenon when world society, or human beings and transnational actors, are taken into consideration (see e.g., Buzan, 2004, chapter 4; see also Chapter 7 in this book.) The ES rejects the idea of discussing just one aspect of world politics, for example, the inter-state international or international system, as Waltz does. Instead, it maintains that one must pay attention to all three aspects of world politics: the inter-state system, inter-state society, and inter-human world society – as well as to the transnational system of international organizations and companies (Buzan, 2004.) This means looking at the international in its widest sense. It is not only the multidisciplinary history of the ES that makes it relevant to us as a model for interdisciplinary international studies. The ES represents a holistic orientation covering all aspects of the international on all potential geographical scales, in light of theoretical and methodological pluralism. It represents, perhaps, the best working model of interdisciplinarity by covering all of its forms and being, both potentially and practically, a progressive research programme in the sense suggested by Lakatos (see Chapter 3). Indeed, referring back to my discussion of the FS, I wish to suggest that the interdisciplinary English school would be a serious candidate to assume the role of social philosophy of the FS and become a core field located somewhere between the various disciplines contributing to the study of the international. This field might occupy a lot of IR, but not all of it. It should also represent a common interest to several disciplines. Simultaneously, through the open-ended concepts of international society and international institutions, the ES offers a solid core for this effort. The approach can be seen as a multidisciplinary model wherein the research programme (Lakatos, 1970 pp. 48–9) consists of the hard core (international society) and its protective belt (types of international society, and its changing institutions). It combines negative heuristics (a programmatic tendency to reject the neorealist idea of the billiard ball model of the inter-state system) and positive heuristics (suggesting, fruitfully and continuously, new questions and applications). In this, the ES implies a progressive and innovative problem-shift required to make a research programme successful. Therefore, the ES can be an integrating model of interdisciplinarity promising open and flexible coherence to the study of the international.

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The realization of this promise will, of course, depend on how the ES effort continues and expands in the future. Any research programme, including the ES, may degenerate. Therefore, the dangers of ES/IR orthodoxy, loss of interdisciplinarity, and fragmentation must be considered carefully now and in the future. Should the ES be a theory of international politics (or possibly, the study of globalization) or should it be kept as a theory of the international? Should it be just an empirical theory or remain close to classical (or political) theory? Should the ES reject classical theory and political/social philosophy or maintain its connection to them?

Peace research Peace research (PR)7 was born in the 1950s in North America and Western/Northern Europe (Dunn, 2005, ch. 3, esp. pp. 46 ff.). Its founding fathers – like the father of PR, Theodore Lenz (psychology and education), as well as Quincy Wright (international law), Lewis Fry Richardson (meteorology), and Herbert Kelman (social psychology) – came from various fields to launch PR (Dunn, 2005, pp. 44–9; see also JCR, 1957; Wright, 1955). In Scandinavia, Johan Galtung, originally a mathematician and later a sociologist – with academic degrees in both (1956 and 1957 respectively) – became the leading figure. His first important published work was co-authored with the philosopher Arne Næess, and introduced strategies of non-violent action adopted from Mohandas Gandhi (Næess and Galtung, 1955). PR emerged as criticism of the traditional study of foreign policy where realist scholars advocated the use of military force in guarding the national interests of states (actually, their own states: ‘my country, right or wrong’). For peace researchers, IR had degenerated into an uncritical pandering to national interests, and a military approach to conflict management. PR introduced itself as a social study with ‘the commitment . . . to a less violent world, violence being broadly conceived’ (Galtung, 1975, p. 15). It emerged as a critical study of open and structural violence, serving the needs of human security, universal justice and equality, and common international security instead of statecentric national security; or the common interests of humanity in place of particular and national(istic) interests. In brief, PR challenged the concept of the international as an exclusively inter-state phenomenon. Therefore, PR actually implied that IR (or, better, international politics) had to be replaced by interdisciplinary PR in order to cover all aspects of

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the international – excluding nothing but domestic or private inter- and intra-personal levels (Galtung, 1975, p. 245). The origin of PR represented an idealistic and profound belief in the possibilities and power of science (see JCR, 1957). It promised to solve the problems of war and peace8 just as science had solved other problems. In order to achieve peace tomorrow, one had to do peace research today. War was presented as a disease for which PR and its wise and educated doctors promised to prescribe the appropriate remedy (Galtung, 1969, pp. 12–21; 50–6; Vesa, 1995). The goal was to produce knowledge and ideas for removing obstacles on the road to peace (JPR, 1964). PR claimed to represent an applied and normative science interested in values in addition to facts. Instead of confining its attention to correspondence between theories and facts, PR also sought to discuss the correspondence (or better: absence of correspondence) between facts and values, and values and theories. The task was not to find invariances – social scientific laws – but to break them in order to let facts and theories serve humanity (Galtung, 1977; Dunn, 2005, pp. 1–6; 35–9; see also Schmid, 1968). In criticizing traditional, nationalistic and military-oriented statecentric foreign policy, and in suggesting value-orientation and normativity as alternatives (JPR, 1964; Galtung, 1975, p. 153; Galtung, 2007, pp. 14–15), Johan Galtung wished to abolish the ivory tower model of science. Peace research, for him, consisted of research, education and action (Galtung, 1975; 1978; see also Wiberg, 1988; cf., Schmid, 1968). Merely producing knowledge was not enough. It had to be accompanied by education and action based on that knowledge. Galtung maintained that PR had to be international and interdisciplinary. (Galtung, 1975, pp. 159–60; 229; 245–6.) Traditional IR had looked at problems from a narrow national point of view. PR was to offer a more comprehensive picture. This would be achieved by inviting scholars from all parties to a given conflict to produce a balanced analysis of the conflict. Interdisciplinarity was a key element in the effort: to achieve an unbiased overall picture of the problem (conflict), various disciplines had to be combined (Galtung, 1969). The suggested interdisciplinarity was formed around a given research problem of war and violence. However, research problems were not derived from academic theories or debates; the problems had to include real human life and human suffering. The list of relevant research problems, reflecting the social responsibility of social scientist and PR, was indefinite and soon expanded from the issues of war and other cases of open violence to structural violence, poverty, inequality and injustice.

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The Galtungian ethos of PR as a normative, international and interdisciplinary effort reflecting a comprehensive understanding of social responsibility gave PR a major boost in the Nordic countries. It was academically and socially motivating, representing the most advanced and relevant studies in IR and other social sciences and suggesting an important social task for (peace) scholars. Since then peace research has been successful and influential in many ways: the number of peace studies programmes in universities has grown; new PR institutes have been established (while some of them have also died); the number of PR journals and publications has risen high (Webel, 2007; Dunn, 2005, ch. 4). The ideals introduced by PR in the 1950s and 1960s – such as the critical study of social problems, interdisciplinarity, internationality, applicability, and even normativity – are nowadays widely shared ideals. However, the original enthusiasm surrounding the critical and creative spirit of PR disappeared soon after it became an established field of study within the academic community. As Jutila, Pehkonen and Väyrynen (2008; see also Patomäki, 2001) correctly maintain, PR soon turned from a critical to a normal science. Other research movements picked up the baton of critical research orientation. Among such fields are, for instance, post-colonialist and feminist studies, political and critical geopolitics, and environmental and climate change studies. Indeed, the ‘neighboring disciplines of Critical Security Studies and critical IR’ have taken over the role previously held by PR. In this light, a somewhat ironic suggestion of the resuscitation of PR by revitalizing it as critical peace research is well justified (Jutila et al., 2008; Patomäki, 2001). While essentially agreeing with the suggested image of the fall of criticism in PR, I assign the demise of the interdisciplinarity within it at least as important a role in the process. In fact, I claim that the demise of criticism and interdisciplinarity has much to do with each other: the term ‘critical’ implies interdisciplinary, and vice versa. That is, PR pursued interdisciplinarity because it wished to be a critical science – to challenge the existing borderlines between disciplines, and to be based on critical thought. Therefore, when PR started to look like a normal science, it simultaneously turned from interdisciplinarity to (neo)disciplinarity. But PR remained, then, a fragmented field. Indeed, concerning the proclaimed promise of interdisciplinarity, PR is far from being a success. In PR, interdisciplinarity has become taken for granted – in other words, almost ignored! Its revitalization as a critical social science must be based on the revitalization of its interdisciplinary nature. In order to elaborate

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on this thesis, I discuss five interrelated and overlapping trends revealing how interdisciplinarity needs serious self-reflective (re)thinking in PR. Considering those trends would serve as a basis for reorganizing interdisciplinarity (and criticism) in PR, thereby giving its cooperation with other, critical and normal, academic disciplines a new lease of life. My thesis is: instead of pontificating on what PR is or is not in order to define it as a neodisciplinary field, we must pay major attention to the PR-relevant aspects of all (social) sciences in order to give interdisciplinarity a solid and wide enough basis in peace research. First, PR has not integrated around a common task, common concepts or theories. Even the key concepts, such as peace, violence, justice, and so forth, have remained highly contested concepts with disintegrating rather than integrating power (e.g., Boulding, 1977). Aggravating this problem, PR has not paid sufficient attention to interdisciplinarity from the perspective of philosophy or sociology of science. Instead of fulfilling such a fundamental need, self-reflection in PR has either disappeared or become rare (see, however, Jutila et al., 2008). Without any systematic organization of multidisciplinary efforts into a coherent whole, interdisciplinarity has remained in the air without any solid basis. Since the early years of the 1960s and up to around 1974 – when Johan Galtung and others discussed and debated peace research – virtually no one has continued to problematize the further development needs of PR. Peace researchers have concentrated their activity on mere practical research. It is not surprising to find, therefore, how more recent discussion of interdisciplinarity in PR simply reiterates what was said decades ago (Alger, 2007). Therefore, peace researchers have not become peace researchers, but remain(ed) representatives of their original fields (e.g., IR, history, geography, etc.). Practically no common interdisciplinary research efforts have been attempted. Some peace researchers – like Galtung himself – have become well versed in several (social) sciences9 – thereby making a transdisciplinary attempt to break free from the borderlines of disciplines. Yet, his example has not been followed up by many other peace researchers. Furthermore, there was and is nobody to draw together the different arguments and findings. Efforts have remained fragmented and multidisciplinary: each scholar studies the problem(s) exclusively from her own disciplinary point of view. If the effort is, in the best case, collected into an edited book or a volume of a journal, each contribution represents different academic fields and interests without any debate, collaboration or even communication among them.

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Second, PR has not introduced any working model for integrating interdisciplinary efforts. It has achieved some features of neodisciplinarity through research institutes and publications, but that development has represented an unfortunate move away from interdisciplinarity towards disciplinarity. PR has not fully recognized the potential revitalizing power of peace research outside PR. Here, a key mission given by Johan Galtung (1975, p. 15; emphasis V.H.) to PR has been ignored: PR was conceived of as an approach rather than a discipline, as committed social science with no respect for any disciplinary or scholastic borderline in social analysis. In this sentence, Galtung articulates, more explicitly than anywhere else in his works, that PR is or should be an aspect of all (social) sciences. This proposal for what could be called an aspectual (see and cf. Palonen, 1993) approach to PR, is something more demanding than are transdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity. These are both indeed invaluable, but the aspectual perspective calls our attention to peace research, as it were, outside PR. In such a case, at least in its pure and extreme form, a scholar – for example, an historian or sociologist – is dealing with issues of war and peace without interest in or communication with scholars and studies in other academic fields, or even with those who identify themselves as peace researchers. This is not, as such, a problem for the goals of PR. The more scholars there are within various fields carrying out peace research, the better! Indeed, such an aspectual organization for peace research provides the widest possible basis for promoting peace. It would be claimed – as did one of my professors so correctly during the planning and establishment of the Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI) in Finland in 1969 – that PR should remain an aspect in as many fields as possible in order to make peace and peace research a social responsibility and duty of all scholars. To establish a specific department (or institute) would, he warned, endanger the PR project by making peace research a monopoly of the ‘priests’ and the ‘holy church’ of PR and so excluding those who do not wish to declare themselves peace researchers. However, the potential contribution of the aspectual form of peace research outside PR must be based on interdisciplinary integration. This task should be taken seriously by PR. In this way, PR should encourage aspectual peace research – where nothing is peace research by definition, but where any piece of work (most often in social sciences and the humanities) can be read as peace research or at least be held relevant to

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PR – and improve communication between scholars willing to undertake such research. The point is that no totality of peace knowledge emerges without the conscious and systematic efforts of peace researchers (see Galtung, 2007). Third, expansion of PR to new issues has not always been positive and unproblematic. Security studies is a case in point here, as represented by the Copenhagen school. It emerged within the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI) and soon obtained a prominent place in IR (sic!).10 The school represented critical orientation and its speech act theory was introduced as a criticism of traditional military thought and attempts to move security out of, or above, open political deliberation. In this, the school was much based on the tradition of (Nordic) PR. However, it also gave ‘security’ a key role, and indirectly contributed to the securitization of everything: ‘this and that security’ became a general expression providing a ‘scientific’ basis for military interests to find new threats everywhere to justify the continuation of military means to eliminate all types of alleged threats (cf., Jutila et al., 2008). Fourth, we might speak of a displacement of PR (see, and cf., Beck, 1997; Hänninen and Vähämäki, 2000). Many scholars dealing with peace issues – some of them close to the classical realism of IR (Holsti, 1987, pp. 7–8) or even Hans J. Morgenthau himself – have for various reasons been reluctant to identify themselves as peace researchers. In the 1960s the reason was ideological; there was either a true or an alleged connection between peace research – and the idea of peace – and communist/leftist parties or left-oriented peace movements (see Schmid, 1968). In a weaker form this suspicion concerned the normativity of PR that claimed to have peace as its guiding value (JPR, 1964; Galtung, 1975, esp. pp. 224–43; see also Patomäki, 2009). More recently, the reason has been more academic: PR has not been able to maintain its role among the most developing and innovative areas in critical social sciences (Jutila et al., 2008; Patomäki, 2001). Therefore, some scholars dealing with issues of war and peace no longer need PR. In short, one might say that conventional or mainstream peace research has declined or is even dead, but ‘true’ peace research (JPR, 1/1964; Galtung, 1975) now resides elsewhere, under a different title of ‘critical thinking’ (Reid, 2003): I don’t mourn the death of peace studies, but the closing of the space for critical thinking . . . is worrying. (Reid, 2010) In other words, scholars and students in IR/IS read contributions from more innovative and more critical fields, such as social philosophy,

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feminist studies, critical geopolitics and others – but not from PR. Such scholars and students associate themselves with innovative areas of social philosophy and social studies – not with PR. This is exacerbated by the fact that PR has failed to recognize how in many ways IR has reverted to its ‘roots’ in the study of war and peace, and that the national interest studies of the realist school of the 1950s and 1960s are decidedly passé. In short, today’s IR is not the same as it was in the 1950s. While conventional realist security studies still form a mainstream in Anglo-American and Western European IR, it seems pointless to just repeat the anti-realist criticism of inter-state IR that justified the introduction of PR in the 1950s and 1960s, and ignore the fact that PR can and must find friends and collaborators within IR, too (see e.g., Jutila et al., 2008). Indeed, it appears that the most fruitful and theoretically and methodologically innovative peace research can nowadays be found within critical IR and recent social philosophy. One example is the critical study of war and globalization, or to put it under a new rubric, ‘resistance studies’. These studies address the nature of modern war and structures of power in the international, global and ‘domestic’ systems; and, instead of speaking in general universalistic terms, discuss the historical situation of the here-and-now without attempting to find a universal solution to the problem of war in general. Now the aim is to find options to resist the current power structures and the American hegemony in today’s world (e.g., Dillon, 1996; Dillon and Reid, 2009; Prozorov, 2007; Reid, 2003; 2006; 2009[2006]). Conventional IR is challenged again, even in its constructivist (Wendtian) form – just as PR was in the 1950s and 1960s (Galtung, 1975, pp. 244, 247–8) – by openly dissenting or rebellious IR scholars. And, what is really important, such studies are based on the social/political theory and philosophy of continental scholars – mainly French, Italian and German – such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Agamben, Nietzsche and Schmitt. While in this direction, Foucault at least has been recognized earlier in PR (e.g., Dunn, 2005, p. 57), peace researchers have seldom applied perspectives from Foucault or other critical social philosophers (see, however, Reid and Yanarella, 1976).11 Last but not least, attempts to pass on PR tradition(s) to new generations have been somewhat feeble and unsystematic because of the organization of PR outside university departments concentrating on research rather than education (see, and cf., Galtung, 1975, p. 281; Lopez, 1989).12 There were, originally, good reasons to organize PR in independent research institutes outside departments of political science/IR that

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uncritically served national interests and foreign policies based on military power. Unfortunately, the result is that today not many young students receive academic basic training in peace research. Instead, the education is given in IR, history, geography, and so on. The university departments are there to pass on traditions of their own. Lacking such a socializing system of transferring knowledge to new generations, few young scholars identify themselves nowadays as peace researchers, nor are they very well aware of the earlier key exponents of PR or their works. For example, Johan Galtung, who has been productive up to this day, is little known among younger peace researchers – both his earlier and more recent works are seldom found in the bibliographies of younger scholars. Even those working in PR institutes, rarely make reference to his or any other classical PR works. If younger ‘peace researchers’ come together in a research project or in a PR institute, it is not likely that they find something common among themselves as peace researchers.13 Without regarding self-identification as a peace researcher – possible only through sharing the tradition of PR – such scholars are not too interested in promoting PR as a field. Such peace researchers are more interested in specific issues (e.g., conflict resolution, migration studies, or the like), which they actually understand as a research problem in their original field (e.g., IR or geography), not in PR.

Discussion When the three examples of organizing interdisciplinary work in practice are compared against each other in light of the fragmentation/integration of international studies, it is obvious that the Frankfurt school model fares best. In the FS model the active force of a core science integrates the efforts of separate disciplines to arrive at a coherent theory of the totality. The application of the FS model in IS is problematic, however, for it is not easy to see what discipline would assume the role of social philosophy as in the model of interdisciplinary materialism in international studies. This model, however, positively rejects the core role of IR in international studies, which, instead, calls for a philosophy of the international, or international theory, to endow international studies with purpose and structure. This may imply a quest for the English school, but only in its original, classical version, wherein international theory was the central concern. Furthermore, following the FS model, the empirical study of problems of international and world society should be put to the service of international theory. Otherwise, there is a danger that the ES – while an

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undeniably progressive and expanding research programme – would represent a narrowing road away from the FS model, and from the idea of interdisciplinarity in general. In this comparison, PR stands for interdisciplinarity in words but not in deeds. The PR model has (unfortunately) remained an example of a disintegrative approach. PR does not fully understand its role in peace research and peace studies. It does not attempt to produce self-identity for peace researchers through continuous and critical self-reflection. PR even ignores its role as a bridge-builder between scholars conducting PR-relevant studies. Therefore, the PR model makes for disintegration rather than fruitful integration in international studies. While the ES moves from interdisciplinarity towards increasingly conventional IR, PR moves away from interdisciplinarity to nowhere, as it were, not recognizing what the open and comprehensive conception of the international might impart to it. By paying more attention to the international and the ensuing interdisciplinarity, PR might, however, revert to, or perhaps for the first time in its history become, a truly critical interdisciplinary orientation. In conclusion, both the ES and PR should be aware of the dangers of ignoring the problems of interdisciplinarity. Both should address their main attention to the elaboration of interdisciplinarity, making it their guiding star – with a close connection to a critical orientation. Because interdisciplinarity and critical orientation are two sides of the same coin, it would be logical for the ES and PR to cooperate to give new impetus to critical – that is, interdisciplinary – international and peace studies. Finally, it is time to add that none of the three models discussed in this chapter is perfect: interdisciplinarity is easy in theory but in practice difficult to achieve. In spite of this unsolvable problem, the three cases give us insights and ideas on how to apply interdisciplinarity as an aid to the study of the international. Four lessons can be learned here. First, the Frankfurt school, the English school, and peace research, are not competing models from which we should choose one. There is no final solution to the problem of practising interdisciplinarity; there can only be alternative roads in this direction. Each of the three examples tells us something. They tell about the magic of interdisciplinarity: interdisciplinarity is an exhortation to think in new and innovative ways. Second, we need to study the international by addressing big social issues and questions, like war, peace and the international itself – not simply engage in academic or methodological debates. Third, this means that normativity is a core aspect of any serious attempt to

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study the international. Fourth, all three examples reveal that a fruitful research programme – in our case, the study of the international – must be open, flexible, and innovative.

Notes 1. On the various forms of interdisciplinarity, see Chapter 2. For other vocabularies of interdisciplinarity, see for example, Galtung (1975, pp. 245–6). 2. Recounted in more detail by, for example, Wiggershaus (1994); Jay (1973); Tar (1977); and O.P. Moisio (1999); see also Wyn Jones (1999, pp. 10–15). 3. In spite of having its roots the German tradition of critical social science (see Leonard, 1990), the FS’s critical theory never fully approximated Marx’s model of critical studies (Fay, 1987). Furthermore, Marxism was abandoned by the FS scholars after the 1920s, when ‘CT dissociated itself from the basic tenet of Marxism: the unity of theory, empirical research, and revolutionary praxis’ (Tar, 1977, pp. 202–3). 4. O.P. Moisio (1999, p. 26), referring to Alex Honneth, suggests that the FS studies of the 1930s can be divided into three groups: (a) economic studies on post-liberalist capitalism; (b) social-psychological studies on social integration and family; and (c) study of mass culture. Moisio adds that Horkheimer himself applied six categories for the papers published in ZfS in 1932–8: (a) philosophical studies on methodology and social philosophy; (b) economic studies on the current economic problems of capitalism; (c) sociological studies on Chinese society; (d) historical studies on the background of current social relations; (e) psychological studies on the relation between the individual and the economic/cultural structures, and (f) legal studies on the change in law from liberal to totalitarian society. 5. With later generations of the FS (especially Habermas and Honneth), connections to the international (even international relations) have become more explicit (see Deitelhoff and Müller, 2005; Haacke, 2005; Hutchins, 2005; Weber, 2005; and also Millennium, 2007). Similarly, Gramsci (see Morton, 2007) has often been discussed in the study of the international, for instance by Robert Cox and Stephen Gill (see also Agnew, 2005). 6. A selective list of ES publications can be found at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ polis/englishschool/documents.htm, date accessed 15 November 2010. 7. Note that the term ‘peace research’ (peace and conflict research) represents the Nordic tradition wherein ‘peace studies’ is seldom used. I must point out that while consulting and referring to some non-Nordic pieces of PR/Peace Studies (e.g., Dunn, 2005; Evangelista, 2005; Journal of Conflict Resolution, volumes 1957–73; Lopez, 1989), the present text is based exclusively on the Nordic debates in PR (mainly Galtung’s early papers) and a perusal of two sources: Journal of Peace Research (JPR, 1964–2009), and Kosmopolis (2000–9). JPR is the journal of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), established by Johan Galtung. Kosmopolis is published by the Finnish Peace Research Association. Furthermore, I draw upon my personal experience in Nordic PR since the end of the 1960s. 8. If the task of PR is defined narrowly, as is often done (e.g., Dunn 2005, p. 7; Evangelista, 2005, p. 1; see also JPR 1/1964), the definition repeats that of IR.

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

As Holsti (1987, pp. 7–8) maintains, IR’s key question, ‘the absolutely essential, the raison d’étre of the field’, originally was: ‘the causes of war and the conditions of peace/security/order’. True, the early IR can be understood as a predecessor to PR (Dunn, 2005, ch. 2); neither it is erroneous to maintain that PR was an attempt to revert to the early interdisciplinary international studies by replacing the national interest with a normative value of peace. Galtung (1978, p. 15) put this personal multidisciplinarity (or better, a scholar’s transdisciplinary challenge to the borderlines of his/her discipline) this way: ‘The research effort [by Galtung] was spread over many fields and resulted in many articles rather than a few books with a more concentrated focus’. Some present PR and critical security studies synonymously (e.g., Guzzini, 2009), while others speak of CSS as a ‘neighbouring discipline’ (Jutila et al., 2008; see also Jutila, 2008). As Leonard (1990) maintains, critical social science consists of various traditions. The Frankfurt school represents the German tradition, while the French names in the list belong to the French tradition. Galtung’s concept of critical studies is perhaps closer to the German tradition, but it also represents a unique approach somewhat different from the other two, sharing some elements (education and action) of the third persuasion, the ‘critical theory in political practice’. The number of peace research/studies programmes in universities and colleges throughout the world is fairly high and has grown over the decades (Dunn, 2005; Lopez, 1986; Webel, 2007). In Scandinavia, university education in peace studies is offered in one place: the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Uppsala. PR education is usually provided in IR departments as an element of IR, or as an area of specialization within it. A group of young Finnish scholars working at TAPRI, discussing what it is to be a peace researcher and what characteristics such researchers have in common, speak in extremely positive terms of open debate, innovative ideas, mutual encouragement and support, and feeling and being together, and so on. Surprisingly enough, PR as an (interdisciplinary) field as a/the common nominator is not included at all! (Curticapean et al., 2007).

References Agnew, J. (2005) Hegemony (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Alger, C. (2007) ‘Peace Studies as a Transdisciplinary Project’ in C. Webel and J. Galtung (eds) Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (London: Routledge). Beck, U. (1997) Reinvention of Politics, transl. by M. Ritter (Cambridge: Polity Press). Boulding, K.E. (1977) ‘Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung’, Journal of Peace Research, 14(1): 75–86. Bull, H. and A. Watson (eds) (1984) The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Bull, H. (1991) ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations’ in M. Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, edited by G. Wight and B. Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press).

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Bull, H. (1995 [1977]) The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan). Buzan, B. and R. Little (2000) International Systems in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Buzan, B. (2004) From International to World Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Curticapean, A., M. Jutila, A. Kynsilehto, S. Pehkonen and E. Puumala (2007) ‘Matkalla rauhantutkimuksessa: pakettimatkailua vai reppureissaamista?’, Kosmopolis, 37(4): 62–74. Deitelhoff, N. and H. Müller (2005) ‘Theoretical Paradise – Empirically Lost? Arguing with Habermas’, Review of International Studies, 31(2): 167–79. Dillon, M. (1996) Politics of Security (London: Routledge). Dillon, M. and J. Reid (2009) The Liberal Way of War (London: Routledge). Dunn, D. (2005) The First Fifty Years of Peace Research (Aldershot: Ashgate). Dunne, T. (1998) Inventing International Society (Houndmills: Macmillan). Evangelista, M. (ed.) (2005) Peace Studies, 4 vols. (London: Routledge). Fay, B. (1987) Critical Social Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Galtung, J. (1969) Rauhantutkimus (Helsinki: Weilin & Göös). Galtung, J. (1975) Essays in Peace Research, Vol. I (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers). Galtung, J. (1977) Methodology and Ideology (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers). Galtung, J. (1978) Essays in Peace Research, Vol. III (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers). Galtung, J. (2007) ‘Introduction: Peace by Peaceful Conflict Transformation – the TRANSCEND Approach’ in C. Webel and J. Galtung (eds) The Handbook of Peace Research (London: Routledge). Guzzini, S. (2009) ‘Discussant’s Comments’, ISA New York. Haacke, J. (2005) ‘The Frankfurt School and International Relations: On the Centrality of Recognition’, Review of International Studies, 31(2): 181–94. Hänninen, S. and J. Vähämäki (eds) (2000) Displacement of Politics (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä). Holsti, K.J. (1987) The Dividing Discipline (Boston: Allen & Unwin). Holsti, R. (1913) The Relation of War to the Origin of the State (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia). Horkheimer, M. (1972) Critical Theory: Selected Essays, transl. by M.C. O’Connel et al. (New York: Seabury Press). Horkheimer, M. (1988) ‘Die gegenwärtige lage der Sozialphilosophie un die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung’ in M. Horkheimer (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3 (Frankfurt: Fischer). Hudson, V. (2007) Foreign Policy Analysis (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield). Hutchins, K. (2005) ‘Speaking and Hearing: Habermasian Discourse Ethics, Feminism and IR’, Review of International Studies, 31(2): 155–65. Jay, M. (1973) Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown). Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jones, R. (1981) ‘The English School of International Relations: A Case for Closure’, Review of International Studies, 7: 1–13. Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR) (1957) ‘An Editorial’, (Journal of) Conflict Resolution, 1(1): 1. Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR) (1957) (Journal of) Conflict Resolution, 1–3. Journal of Peace Research (JPR) (1964) ‘An Editorial’ [by Johan Galtung], Journal of Peace Research 1(1): 1–4.

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120 Vilho Harle Journal of Peace Research (JPR) (1964–2009), Journal of Peace Research. Jutila, M. (2008) ‘National Desecuritizations: Perspectives on Security, Nationalism and National Minorities’. An unpublished licentiate thesis in world politics, August. Department of Political Science, University of Helsinki. Jutila, M., S. Pehkonen and T. Väyrynen (2008) ‘Resuscitating a Discipline: An Agenda for Critical Peace Research’, Millennium, 36(3): 623–40. Lakatos, I. (1970) ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’ in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Leonard, S. (1990) Critical Theory as Political Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Linklater, A. and H. Suganami (2006) The English School of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lopez, G.A. (ed.) (1989) ‘Peace Studies: Past and Future’, special issue, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 504(July). Millennium (2007) 35(3). Moisio, O-P. (1999) Kritiikin lupaus (Jyväskylä: SoPhi). Morton, A.D. (2007) ‘Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International’, Millennium, 35(3): 597–622. Næss, A. and J. Galtung (1955) Gandhis politiske etikk (Oslo: Tanum). Numelin, R. (1950) The Beginnings of Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Palonen, K. (1993) ‘Introduction: From Policy and Polity to Politicking and Politization’ in K. Palonen and T. Parvikko (eds) Reading the Political (Helsinki: The Finnish Political Science Association). Patomäki, H. (2001) ‘The Challenge of Critical Theories: Peace Research at the Start of New Century’, Journal of Peace Research, 38(6): 723–37. Patomäki, H. (2009) Political Economy of Global Security (London: Routledge). Prozorov, S. (2007) Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (Aldershot: Ashgate). Reid, H.G. and E.J. Yanarella (1976) ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Peace Research in the United States: The Search for an “Intelligible Core” ’, Journal of Peace Research, 13(4): 315–41. Reid, J. (2003) ‘Deleuze’s War Machine’, Millennium, 32(1): 57–85. Reid, J. (2006) ‘Re-appropriating Clausewitz’ in B. Jahn (ed.) Classical Theory and International Relations (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press). Reid, J. (2009 [2006]) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Reid, J. (2010) Email message to Vilho Harle, 23 March. Review of International Studies (RIS) (2005), Review of International Studies, 2. Schmid, H. (1968) ‘Peace Research and Politics’, Journal of Peace Research, 5(3): 217–32. Smith, S., A. Hadfield and T. Dunne (eds) (2008) Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Tar, Z. (1977) The Frankfurt School (New York: Wiley). Vesa, U. (1995) Miten rauhantutkimus tuli Suomeen (Tampere: TAPRI). Waltz, K.N. (1979) A Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill). Watson, A. (1992) The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge).

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Webel, C. (2007) ‘Introduction: Toward a Philosophy and Metapsychology of Peace’ in C. Webel and J. Galtung (eds) A Handbook of Peace Research (London: Routledge). Weber, M. (2005) ‘The Critical Social Theory of the Frankfurt School, and the “social turn” in IR’, Review of International Studies, 31(2): 195–209. Wendt, A. (1999) Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wiberg, H. (1988) ‘The Peace Research Movement’ in P. Wallensteen (ed.) Peace Research: Achievements and Challenges (London: Westview Press). Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, transl. by M. Robertson (Cambridge: Polity Press). Wight, M. (1977) Systems of States, edited by H. Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press). Wight, M. (1960) ‘Why is There No International Theory?’, International Relations, 2: 35–48. Wight, M. (1991) International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester: Leicester University Press). Wright, Q. (1955) The Study of International Relations (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts). Wyn Jones, R. (1999) Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner).

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Part II Levels of Analysis

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5 Geographies of the International System: Globalization, Empire and the Anthropocene Simon Dalby

Disciplining international relations In the latter stages of the cold war, and through the early decades of the age of globalization, political scientists dominated the study of international relations. Notions of global politics were frequently presumed to be a matter of inter-state relations, and the study of international politics was frequently just the study of relations between territorial states. Other scholars made contributions, but the discussions of the pursuit of peace and power, to borrow Hans Morgenthau’s (1948) canonical formulation, was both a political science question in the academy, and to a substantial extent also an American scholarly preoccupation. Examining this in light of concerns about interdisciplinarity, and the contribution that other disciplines might make to the discussion implicitly raises the question of why the other disciplines might be largely missing in the first place. As Raymond Miller (2010) suggests, international relations has been dominated by political science for a very long time. Attempts at interdisciplinarity, while long part of the history of international studies, have not altered this hegemony (see Chapter 2). Perhaps not so obvious, but crucial to the argument in this chapter, is the related concern of how the fields of study of international studies and international relations are defined. Such definitions are crucial because, as Bradley Klein (1994) has made very clear, the scholarly field of strategic studies and the larger investigations of ‘security’ are not unrelated to the operation of American hegemony in the cold war period and its aftermath. How the world is specified in these discourses matters politically. If states are territorial entities in an anarchic 125

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arrangement, struggling for peace and power, and that is apparently humanity’s given situation, then all sorts of other political arrangements are implicitly foreclosed. When viewed through the lenses of contemporary geography, and the debate about scale on the one hand (Keil and Mahon, 2009; Sjoberg, 2008), or more specifically through the discussions of critical geopolitics on the other (Ingram and Dodds, 2009), this assumption of an agreed upon terrain for analysis is not at all obvious. It is not at all clear that authority, territory and matters of sovereignty can be adequately mapped in the categories of either the nation state or the international system. Power seems to transcend many boundaries (Elden, 2009) and appear in multiple authority configurations summarized by Ronnie Lipschutz (2009) simply as Imperium. The state system remains very important but, as John Agnew (2009) suggests, this is within a system of ‘regimes of sovereignty’ in which states are very far from equal and in many places only some boundaries matter some of the time. If interdisciplinarity is to work in international studies, then presumably some agreement on the ontological categories that structure the investigation is needed, but the intense discussions of globalization, empire and other related phenomena are intense precisely because the present circumstances do not lend themselves to easy analysis in the terms long taken for granted in international relations. Hence, the great difficulty with these discussions and, ironically it seems, the impetus to calls for greater interdisciplinarity to tackle difficult contemporary questions. The rest of this chapter teases out the themes that suggest the contemporary crisis in international studies – a crisis that might require interdisciplinary studies or interdisciplinary cooperation – exists, in part, precisely because the taken-for-granted mappings of the world are of territorial states, and that, following John Agnew’s (2003) terms, the discipline of international relations is stuck in a ‘territorial trap’. In the literature now called ‘critical geopolitics’, the crucial role of studies in geography is to challenge how this territorial trap has come about and to investigate what other mappings of social and political phenomena on the big scale might have to say about contemporary transformations (Ó Tuathail, 1996; Kuus, 2007). This chapter suggests that the most important contribution the discipline can bring to the task is this geographical interrogation of the implicit cartographic categories in international studies. Drawing inspiration from Rob Walker’s (2010) powerful challenge to the ontological categories of modern political thought, the chapter

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points to the usually unremarked-upon spatial assumptions that structure political discussions and scholarly analysis as key to understanding how hegemony functions, and how international relations as a discipline has perpetuated such modes of intellectual inquiry. Ironically, in the age of globalization strategic studies and the military dimensions of international relations have been reasserted in the ‘global’ war on terror. In the process it has become clear just how inappropriate these geopolitical premises are for dealing effectively with either political violence or the larger questions of accelerating environmental change (Dalby, 2009a). The problems of peace and war that had long concerned international relations as a discipline, have once again become a matter of concern for the social sciences, but are such in different geopolitical circumstances now. Looking to the discussions of empire and globalization, and then in the conclusion to the discussions of environmental change and the new artificial circumstances of humanity in the geological era now called the ‘Anthropocene’, the rest of this chapter emphasizes the crucial role of implicit mappings in structuring how contemporary political life is understood. Critical geopolitics cannot provide a definitive correction to the lacunae in the contemporary discussion of the nature of the international system, but this approach does pose questions about both how the world is currently mapped, and how tackling the geographies of empire, globalization and the Anthropocene allows for a critical interrogation of the supposed verities of our times. As such it reflects back on the ontological precepts of contemporary politics in a way that transcends at least some disciplinary limits. In the process it suggests that interdisciplinary efforts, or interdisciplinary cooperation in international studies, require persistent scepticism about the takenfor-granted categories of ‘the international’ as well as ‘levels of analysis’ in a ‘global’ world.

Inter-national ‘system’ Faced in the late 1940s with a new and vast pattern of distant commitments and a very new world order, Americans turned to political science and to the amorphous literature of ‘area studies’ for knowledge of the world that might facilitate managing the far-flung commitments that had been acquired by the simple fact of victory in a worldwide military struggle. As the cold war was institutionalized both in military doctrines and in the practices for studying such important matters, international relations as a predominantly American enterprise focused

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on matters of security and strategic studies (Klein, 1994). These terms dominated understandings within international relations and did so within a geopolitical invention, divided into two blocs of fairly stable states, with a ‘third world’ in between of mostly less capable states. Military force was understood as the ultimate arbiter in human affairs, but territorial states were the entities that mattered in the exercise of that force. Extending American influence (effectively as an informal empire in many parts of the world) was not a matter of territorial expansion (Smith, 2003). Dismantling former European empires and opening up markets to newly independent states were matters of influence and trading arrangements backed up by military power in alliance systems constructed with other, at least putatively sovereign, states. As such it was not a matter of geographical knowledge needed for direct administration, but loosely it was about knowledge of cultures and other political systems that might be much more useful than surveys, grids and practical local administration which geography might then have had to offer. Likewise, boundaries were mostly fixed, and there were no longer demands for expertise in matters of surveys, demarcations and appropriate line drawing exercises on the large scale. Although the finer points of many boundaries remained in contention, these were technical exercises not nation-constructing divisions of prior polities. As with many of the other disciplinary options Quincy Wright (1955) considered in his reflections on the appropriate scholarly tools for international relations, geography did not end up having much influence in mainstream research. Due both to intellectual and institutional developments in the decade after the Second World War, international relations became a predominantly American discipline shaped by political science (Long, 2006). States are apparently the only entities that really matter, and political science is the discipline that studies states. Ipso facto, political science is the intellectual tool kit that is needed. This limited attention to states and the tools of political science only is seriously complicated by the corollary that politics is what happens within states, and mere relations happen between these supposedly autonomous geometric spaces (Walker, 1993). With this simple cartography clearly understood, geographers would seem to have little to say about matters of the international. The post-war ‘territorial covenant’ whereby recognition of permanent state boundaries is coupled with the agreement that intervention across borders is forbidden provided an international system that specified sovereign territorial states as the key organizing principle (Jackson, 2000; Zacher, 2001).

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While this system of states is, as Walker (2010) repeatedly reminds us, a very elegant resolution to many modern political problems, it fails to grapple with numerous structural transformations in contemporary life. States frequently do not neatly contain ‘nations’ within their borders, despite the legitimization of their authority in terms of their being the political expression of national identity. Sociologists in particular seem to be unhappy with the field of international studies, as Saskia Sassen’s (2008) Territory, Authority, Rights suggests, and indeed the International Studies Association has recently launched a new journal simply titled International Political Sociology. In the introduction to the first edition of the journal, the editors Didier Bigo and Rob Walker note the contemporary convergence of sociology and international relations in terms of a cultural turn in international relations, on the one hand, and on the other a growing concern among sociologists with matters of the global constitution of politics. ‘More recent trends have seen some significant convergences between sociological and political analysis, especially in work on refugees, migrants, diasporas, protection, security, multinational enterprises, and advocacy networks’ (Bigo and Walker, 2007, p. 4; see also Chapter 7) All of which suggests that the prior intellectual apparatus of international relations is not the appropriate mode of inquiry for the analysis of these issues. Bigo and Walker suggest that in part this was because the formulations in international relations were frequently shaped by the formulations of the levels of analysis schema. But, clearly, this codification of the problematic of international relations is no longer adequate (if it ever was) to understand contemporary political developments or conduct serious scholarly inquiry into the human condition.

Geopolitics and international relations Robert Vitalis (2006), in reflecting on the discipline and its hegemony, implies a particularly interesting suggestion concerning the ‘spatial framing’ of politics in the twentieth century. He notes that prior to the First World War interracial relations were a major concern of scholars. Larger concerns with history and race were part of the intellectual milieu before the war changed numerous things. After the war the Council on Foreign Relations, and its flagship journal Foreign Affairs, formalized a new situation in which the League of Nations and international relations were more explicitly understood in terms of the relations of sovereign states. The long dividing lines of trench warfare in the First World War were followed by a period in which international

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frontiers were more obviously policed; migration was more difficult, passports became the norm – simultaneously fixing citizen identities and formalizing the practicalities of cross border travel. Protectionist policies emphasized new modes of commercial restriction on top of the earlier patterns of imperial preferences and trading restrictions in terms of the nationalities of ships. All this could be understood as a result of what Halford Mackinder (1904) called the closure of political space at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Europeans effectively ran out of additional territories that could usefully be claimed. European empires had carved up Africa and parts of Asia; the US reached the Pacific and had already purchased Alaska. The results were likely to be ominous in Mackinder’s terms: ‘Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence’. Clearly, here is the suggestion that the spatial framing had changed and, while not exactly a prediction of the world war that came a decade after Mackinder’s words were published, clearly a suggestion that the Columbian age was over and that a new arrangement of world power had arrived (Kearns, 2009). While the international lawyers were obviously busy thinking in terms of structures that followed from the League of Nations, in Aberystwyth historian E.H. Carr (1946) was working on a book that was subsequently to be claimed as one of the founding realist texts in international relations. In his discussions of great powers, revisionist struggles and the larger canvas of inter-state rivalry, Carr tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of misplaced utopian schemes and the necessity of thinking carefully and clearly about rivalries. But most of the great powers of that time were not by any stretch of the imagination nation states; they were mostly empires. Even Germany, the cause of so much anguish, was in some crucial ways still better understood as an empire rather than a unitary nation state. This matters because the logic of realism and the arguments that states exist in rivalry and compete for power and influence appears to be much more a matter of inter-imperial struggles than rivalries between nation states, most of whom coexist in relative peacefulness with each other most of the time. In simple empirical terms, the most naïve claim about realism – and the rejection of the Nazi notions of Lebensraum and pseudo Darwinian invocations of the struggle of the fittest – is simply: if realism really was about struggles to maximize security by growing in power and influence,

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why does the international system now have nearly four times as many states as it did when Carr (1946) and Morgenthau (1948) published the texts which are now taken as canonical realist tracts? In contemporary times much more than the basic attempt to gain territory and maximize control over resources is obviously going on. Indeed, expanding territorial control is increasingly passé as a mode of political life, not least because a changing political economy means wealth is now much less about territory than about capital (Nitzan and Bichler, 2009). In part, territorial disputes are less prevalent because the territorial covenant involves common agreement among states that the existing boundaries are no longer to be substantially moved, even if many disputes remain about the finer points of delimitation and demarcation. However irrational in cultural, economic or environmental terms, these lines have become the agreed upon designation of administrative spaces, and as such part of the reason why wars are apparently less frequent than in earlier times. This confirms the simple but important assertion that the UN has effectively ended the previous patterns of territorial change as the result of warfare (Zacher, 2001). Geographical status quo ante is now the norm. Precisely where the boundaries are not agreed, in for example the Palestine–Israel case and in the Kashmir dispute, violence is always an imminent possibility. Inter-state competition is apparently causing division, not amalgamation, forced or otherwise; old nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geopolitical notions of states (read, empires) that either grow or die are obviously irrelevant to these considerations.

International relations/dis-united states Nonetheless, the assumption of competing spatial entities provides the ontological categories from which much else in the discipline of international relations is derived. If in fact this geographical sleight of hand is a valid claim, might this not explain many things about international relations? Might this also explain part of the legitimatizing strategy by which American official documents and statements frequently invoke formulations such as ‘states like the United States’ when it is patently obvious that there are no states like the United States? This ability to evoke commonality, where singularity is obviously much more appropriate, is a powerful rhetorical device that draws on the presuppositions that structure international relations thinking to be efficacious. Obviously, hegemony is about much more than this, the global market society being key to much of it (Agnew, 2005), but the spatial categories

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of the Westphalian state are a key part precisely because they simultaneously constrain the political imagination and facilitate all sorts of political arrangements that obscure how power works. On the face of it, the geography of contemporary international relations is a very strange arrangement indeed. Without paying attention to the historical evolution of the international system, how could any remotely sensible scholarly classification of entities lump what we now call, say China, Luxembourg, Tuvalu and Uruguay, into the same category? Implying an ideal type, some sort of Weberian territorial monopoly of legitimate violence on the one hand, and a claim to a single national identity on the other, makes very little sense in considering these cases. Clearly, the insistence on this powerful foundational fiction is immensely efficacious for many of the privileged in this world. It structures the institutions of the ‘United Nations’ especially well, although empirical observation of much of the activity of this organisation suggests that ‘disunited states’ might be a more accurate name for the institution. But it is precisely these entities and the assumptions that this is how power works that have also long-structured international relations as a discipline. Clearly, there have been numerous problems constraining the analysis within such thinking. Economics clearly crosses boundaries easily, and the rise of international political economy in the last few decades is clear evidence that international relations focused on states, power and security is not enough to gain traction on the major shifts in global politics. But here, too, as the discussion of the differences between schools in the pages of the Review of International Political Economy recently has indicated, the ontological presuppositions in what is rather unhelpfully labelled the ‘American school’ reinforce the hegemonic specification of what it is that is to be studied and how (Cohen, 2007). In contrasting the American formulations (with their emphasis on economics and rational choice, presuppositions of rational actors, markets, struggles for primacy and so on) with the more historical and sociologically influenced ‘British school’, Higgott and Watson (2008) suggest that disciplinary preoccupations matter, and that the social context from within which scholarly questions are posed matter even more. Simply looking to states and markets as the key ingredients of what is in need of explanation reproduces the cultural logic of contemporary hegemony of what is now simply once again called capitalism. The presupposition that economic wealth, as conventionally measured in monetary terms, is the key to the human endeavour, but that it is unevenly

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distributed and administered by a multiplicity of states with different styles of management, mirrors the dominant discourses of politics (Strange, 1994). Or at least it did until 2008, when a major ‘correction’ in the financial sector of what is called the global economy clearly indicated that many of these measurements were fictitious. In challenging the logic of markets, the economic crisis of 2008 emphasizes the importance of states once again. Economics is a political matter as Niall Ferguson (2008) has recently reiterated in his historical reconstruction of previous economic calamities. The contemporary problems with the ‘global’ economy now play out in geographic terms, where fiscal crises in ‘Mexico’ or ‘Argentina’ or ‘Greece’ are suddenly nonetheless matters of great concern to ‘global’ markets. Ironically, while the territorial lines on the maps are fixed, many political problems elude the cartography. Problems supposedly result from globalization where the inadequacies of states as political containers are repeatedly asserted by politicians concerned to reassert control in the face of apparently foreign threats. But all this only makes sense if the prior division of the world into such properties and territories is taken as the ontological given for analysis and policy formulation, not to mention the premise for political community, the supposed sine qua non for modern subjects. The taken-for-granted specifications of how and where politics happens are frequently precisely that: simply assumed as the given context. As such these specifications have a powerful hegemonic effect in defining how politics is understood. Geography, and critical geopolitics in particular, focuses on these contextualizations, stagings and representations of the world as the place in which politics occurs (Sparke, 2005). As such, it acts to challenge the hegemonic scripting of global politics and the geopolitical imagination of multiple competing spatial entities as the topic for international studies. But this very obvious point is what is crucial to any geopolitical engagement with the literature of international relations, and the discussions of globalization that so frequently fail to reflect on precisely what is supposedly novel about recent developments.

Globalization Four decades after the establishment of international relations as the hegemonic specification of global political possibilities in the cold war period, the transition from that cold war to the post–cold war era dramatically changed the geopolitical cartography. No longer did assumptions about front lines, battlefields, blocs and superpower rivalry overly

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determine patterns of military confrontation. But the cold war armies left over from plans for old-fashioned tank battles in Germany were slow to adapt to the new circumstances, not least because with their upgraded technological innovations the American, British and French forces had apparently proven their worth in Iraq in 1991. While George H.W. Bush celebrated a new world order after the demise of the Berlin Wall, many more sanguine commentators were less convinced about claims to either order or novelty. In the aftermath of the cold war the appropriate designations of political reality were thrown into doubt with the demise of the bloc division of the world. Fairly quickly, Western triumphalist arguments turned what was interpreted into a victory for the West into narratives of global business, democracy, markets, development and environment, too. Tropes of management and marketization of practically everything assured the rich and powerful, and increasingly highly mobile tourists, that the world was a single place, or soon would be as the market logic of global capital took over. Emerging markets were good investment opportunities, or at least they were until an economic crisis in a vaguely defined ‘Asia’ caused some volatility in such things. The new technologies of data administration, Internet, computers and digital communication suggested a new ‘information age’. Manuel Castells (1996–8) called his huge trilogy on the new circumstances just that. It took some years for pundits to decide that we did not just live in a post–cold war era, but in one best specified by the term globalization. It took much longer for the strategic geographies of all this to get much attention. Clearly ‘humanitarian interventions’ were in order in a way that they had not been during the cold war as Somalia, the Balkans, Kurdistan, East Timor and other examples suggested. But only some maps were destroyed; the larger Westphalian assumptions of a world order of equal states remained, even as international practice suggested that in many key areas this assumption was highly dubious (Williams, 2008). The new geographies of conflict, and the emergence of what Mary Kaldor (2007) terms the political economy of organized violence in the so-called ‘new wars’, remained underspecified until it became clear that they too were tied into the circuits of the global economy. Where territorial claims were so frequently a casus belli in the past, the UN’s norm of territorial fixity has been established and widely respected in the last half century. This innovation might well be key to the decline in major inter-state warfare (Zacher, 2001). Ironically, of course, where nationalist zeal is whipped up to justify inter-ethnic violence, it has led to situations in which, if the border

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cannot be moved, then clearly people must be ethnically cleansed to adjust the population to the cartography rather than the other way round. In terms of the discipline of international relations the neat spatial divisions of blocs and the logic of states suddenly became a problem; turbulence, in Jim Roseneau’s (1997) terms, in the global system was matched by similar unpredictable intellectual storms within the discipline. John Mearsheimer became positively nostalgic for the lost verities of the earlier period, although he recovered quickly to produce a major text that reinserted great powers into the discipline’s narratives, despite the stormy discursive times (2001). The term globalization emerged as the defining term of the 1990s, neatly encompassing the recognition that – at least for capital, and those tourists, and a new generation of graduate students in search of exotic locales for research – processes of transformation were remaking the experiential world while universalizing many aspects of capitalist culture. Corporations became global, and so did culture and fashion and later the Internet, cellphones, digital media, iPods and virtual communities. All this was much easier to deal with in anthropology, economics, sociology and, yes, geography, in that in some ways they were less wedded to the state than was international relations, or at least as was the core security studies and strategy part of the discipline. What is interesting in the discussion of security and geopolitics in the 1990s is how frequently the focus on states remains. Of particular concern in the light of subsequent events is the focus by the neoconservatives on state threats to the US, threats that turned out to be irrelevant to the attack that did actually materialize on 9/11 (Dalby, 2006). The focus on states sat very uneasily with the themes of the war on terror, but its specification as a global war subsequently incorporated discussions of globalization into the specification of the terrain of conflict. The links to economic modernization and neoliberal strategies of state management were direct, the assumption being that this mode of economy would ensure peace once it had been spread round the globe one way or another (Dalby, 2007a). When linked to the discussion of networkcentric warfare, and discussions of both orbital space and cyberspace as terrains of conflict, the spatial imagination of the cold war state-system evaporated. Insofar as there is a crisis within the field of international studies requiring interdisciplinary approaches, it is surely in part because the field’s ability to proscribe the appropriate ordering of conventional politics has been transcended, only most obviously by the real-world events

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of 9/11 and the subsequent attempts to use military power to reassert a hegemony that was so spectacularly thwarted by al-Qaeda’s suicidal flyers. The importance of international relations as the conceptual infrastructure of American hegemony was shaken by the events of 9/11, not least because once again, just as in 1989, the scholarly practices that supposedly understood the world in such detail failed to predict the event or to provide anything close to an agreed upon interpretation of how to respond to it. Improvisation on the part of the CIA in Afghanistan followed; a much more deliberate military campaign in Iraq in turn followed that; both had tragic, if predictable, consequences when attempts were made to change regimes and impose local rulers more favourably disposed to their foreign masters.

Empire and order The war on terror, with troops in distant places, including Afghanistan, and with obvious connections to the extraction of resources in the Middle East for consumption elsewhere, quickly stirred up discussions of matters in imperial tropes. The invasions of Afghanistan and in particular Iraq looked imperial. In 2003 the British were back in Basra for the fourth time in less than a century – notwithstanding decisions in the 1960s to abandon military commitments east of Suez. This looked like empire, even as George W. Bush flatly denied that the US was in the empire business. But once again the categories of inter-state relations seemed singularly inappropriate to designate what was happening. While some of the gunships might now be airborne, they were still imposing a mode of order on peripheral places, and obviously doing so to ensure the continued supply of commodities for the metropolises. Imperial history is more helpful here, surely, rather than rational actor models or game theory? In attempting to fit politics into the territorial boxes of states, the premise for international relations thinking which assumes that interstate interactions are its subject, and the appropriate set of categories for understanding the causes of wars, other geopolitical possibilities have been occluded. But of late they have once again intruded forcefully into discussions of war and peace, violence and order, and in doing so suggest the limitations of the conventional international relations imagination. This is nowhere more apparent than in the hasty formulations of the Bush Doctrine (wherein states that harbour terrorists are declared the enemy), given the apparent inability of American forces to tackle al-Qaeda directly or in any other manner.

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Not surprisingly, the military violence unleashed, and the intense political coercion used in Asia, suggested to many commentators the appropriateness of metaphors of empire (Kaplan, 2005). US action certainly looked imperial, even if George W. Bush insisted, as he put it in the 2003 State of the Union speech, that America is not an empire because it does not conquer territory. Once again historical analogies were dusted off and used to reinterpret contemporary politics in ways that suggested imperial geographies, rather than sovereign states, were most important. This in turn suggests the necessity for interdisciplinary approaches to what is not now so easily discussed as a matter of strictly international relations. Globalization has made all these issues more pressing; the political cartography of spatial exclusion in the face of threats has been reinforced in the US by the initiatives of homeland security and the increased emphasis on surveillance and security. But given the fact that the 9/11 hijackers had entered the country legally in the first place, and not crossed the land frontier, this frequently looks like not just a matter of slamming the proverbial barn door after the horse has bolted, but doing so on the wrong barn altogether! Such is the persistence of an outdated geopolitical imagination tied to the weight of state institutional inertia. The spatial ordering of security is now much more important than being merely a matter of homeland security. The lines of insecurity, to use Rob Walker’s (2006a) phrasing, run through numerous political dilemmas concerning the spatialities of power. Quite how they are drawn to link sovereignty and security to concerns with imperial power is the key question of order. It is also directly related to the formulation of others, and their potential to become enemies. Indeed, precisely because of the attempts to impose security, numerous others have become potential enemies in the categories of homeland security, extraordinary rendition and the global war on terror. The remilitarization of international politics has, however, required a redrawing of the cartographies of order, with the metropolitan powers reasserting their rights to intervene in the peripheries to ensure order there and prevent the chaos of non-modern humanity intruding disruptively on the affluence of the global economy and its cities. In the rhetoric of the Bush administration Pentagon’s planning documents, US foreign policy was designed to bring modernity to all the world, by force if necessary (Dalby, 2009a). No wonder the analogy with Rome is frequently invoked (James, 2006). But this is part of a larger pattern of thinking: of the excluded as key to the security of a political order,

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defined in part against the identity of the threatening external antagonist, a matter of cities surrounded by dangerous wilderness. Insofar as the war on terror is then understood in these terms as the pacification of the wild zones distant from the metropolises, then the questions of development, nation building and international cooperation would seem to come to the fore. They might yet do so if the innovations in American strategic thinking had not reinvented classical counter-insurgency doctrine (Kilcullen, 2010). Looking to population protection as the primary task of the troops on the ground in far flung regions suggests an imperial task, and an understanding that empire is what is happening however much the official ideology of the American state denies this is the case and rearticulates matters in the standard Westphalian formulation. To put matters in Michael Ignatieff’s (2003, p. 79) blunt formulation of American policy (in the Mazar area of Afghanistan): Call it peacekeeping or nation-building, call it what you like, imperial policing is what is going on in Mazar. In fact, America’s entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don’t like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America’s legions of soldiers, spooks and Special Forces straddling the globe? These garrisons are by no means temporary. Terror can’t be controlled unless order is built in the anarchic zones where terrorists find shelter. In Afghanistan, this means nation-building, creating a state strong enough to keep al-Queda from returning. But the Bush administration wants to do this on the cheap, at the lowest level of investment and risk. In Washington they call this nation-building lite. But empires don’t come lite. They come heavy, or they do not last. And neither does the peace they are meant to preserve. Empire lite is the formulation because America is supposedly not really an empire; it is one state among others that are supposedly its putative equals. Thus politics is a matter of international relations between territorial states, not a matter of one state controlling the internal affairs of another. But the imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are finally, surely, putting an end to this geopolitical fiction and forcing scholars from numerous other fields to pay attention to the categories of politics that this supposedly post-colonial exercise of power is now suggesting are no longer appropriate. Again, imperial history may be much more useful here (Bayly and Harper, 2008). Political economists

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might also have something to say; sociologists and anthropologists, too. Certainly, world historians do matter, as Buzan and Little (2001) note in their call for IR to shake off its ‘Westphalian straightjacket’. Perhaps even a few geographers, too, to contemplate the appropriate contextualizations?

Bringing geography back in In light of all the contemporary contradictions of sovereignty, lines and cartographic practices, stepping outside the disciplinary constraints of political science and asking questions about the emergence of a field of study, known in the twentieth century as international relations, suggests that perhaps globalization is not the problem at all. Rather, it has been the geographical condition of humanity for some considerable time. The problem may begin with the drawing of lines across the map, both in the colonial scramble for Africa and the subsequent introduction of spatial strategies, of the front in war, passports and economic protections, subsequently. None of these is an ontological condition, but a series of administrative practices that reinforce a geographical designation in terms of territorial entities. Post-colonial elites of former European colonies subsequently discovered these practices had very considerable uses. Their adoption by these elites suggested a permanence that reinforced the initial assumption. This is not to overlook the immense power of territorial strategies as modes of control for administrators and security functionaries (Ripsman and Paul, 2010). Nonetheless, to confuse these strategies with eternal geographies is to fail to reflect on the spatialities of power in a crucial sense. Pushed a little further, this line of argument can be taken to suggest that the spatial categories of the cold war have so shaped international political thinking that the challenge supposedly presented by globalization might be better understood simply as a matter of inadequate spatial categories rather than a matter of novelty and threat (Dalby, 2005). While the Second World War changed many things, it temporarily reinforced the spatial divisions of the world as the predominant form of order. But only temporarily; these categories are not the ontological givens for political analysis. International relations became institutionalized in these circumstances, taking the political order of the nation state as its benchmark, as the category from which analysis should start, rather as a novelty, and one that in light of history was likely transitory. Viewed from outside the West, why might these

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arrangements, imposed in very recent history, be understood as the permanent categories? Globalization in this sense suggests that the twentieth century was the century of lines, divisions and spatial images so hegemonic that they did not need the skills of geographers to describe, delineate and demarcate. The coloured maps of here and there, distinct spaces and precise limitations of authority, are now giving way to a more complicated world of interaction and interconnection; cities may now be the most important sites of security (Graham, 2010). Perhaps the fear of new boundary crossings that animated some of the initial concerns about globalization revealed more about the autistic spatial imagination of the social sciences than it did about the uniqueness of circumstances after the demise of the Soviet Union. Business had been crossing the boundaries of the world for a very long time; these transactions had been accelerating since the 1940s, when trade had consistently been expanding at a more rapid rate than average national economic growth. Likewise, international alliances and troop movements were common, and travel in general had rapidly grown as jet airliners became ubiquitous in the 1970s. None of this was new, but the difficulty of dealing with all these things emphasized the importance of territorial states as the given category in analysis. The focus on economy, business and the transformative effects of international investment in the 1990s suggested, however, that while capital was free to move, people looking for work were not. The discussion of global apartheid likewise tried to grapple with the huge inequalities of global wealth and link them to the policies of spatial control whereby the wealthy used state boundaries to administer the inequities. Contemporary boundary fence building exercises are an ominous extension of this logic (Jones, 2009). Access to international funds, and the control of many states by distant banks and the disciplining strategies of fund managers, suggested that capitalism was well and truly global, even if the population of the planet was mostly still in particular places. The rapid expansion of media, both in terms of television stations and the Internet, has made this assumption more suspect in recent years. Al Jazeera is a particularly high profile example of how and why media escaping national markets matters, but the dreams of universal free access to either television signals or Internet traffic remain caught in struggles by states to either censor or buy off media corporations. Ironically, territorial strategies of security were powerfully re-imposed by the strategies of the war on terror, among the most obvious being

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border control in the Department of Homeland Security and the increasing attempts to police movements by using territorial strategies. Migration became a fraught terrain of political contest in the US, as in Europe, India and elsewhere in the aftermath of 9/11, but the migrants continued to come, driven by economic inequities and the simple fact that globalization is in many ways simply urbanization on the global scale, a process which, from the migrants’ perspective, is hampered by fences, guards and unintelligible bureaucratic procedures related to passports, visas and permits. This contradiction goes to the heart of the peculiar geographies of a war on terror that was finally officially called off by a new American president in 2009, one who apparently understood the folly of lumping diverse peoples and states into simplistic geopolitical categories and invoking threats of military force to attempt to discipline those who disagree with the operation of American ‘globalization’.

Interdisciplinarity? At least part of the impetus towards interdisciplinarity in present times is the recognition that the human condition is not being adequately understood by the modes of scholarship currently on offer. The risky strategies of neoconservatives and neoliberalism have come to an abrupt end, as political economy scholars predicted they would (Pieterse, 2007), but the crash in the global economic markets and the eradication of monetary wealth is not a new phenomenon. What the discussion of globalization, the newly revived discussion of empire and its perils for various forms of politics (Bacevich, 2008), as well as the larger concern with our collective ecological predicament suggests is, in part, a wider crisis of intellectual activity. The objects of knowledge that have traditionally been understood with academic disciplines seem to be flowing over the boundaries of these academic structures. Hence, the apparent need for multiple disciplinary perspectives and accounts of reality and the human condition that do not fit neatly into any discussion of conventional international relations. Looking back to the early part of the twentieth century and the discussion of matters of empire, interracial relations and related matters suggest that the most important point of all is perhaps the most obvious matter of the changing geopolitical ordering of the century (Vitalis, 2006). These imperial motifs are back in some interesting ways, not least the discussions in many places of multiculturalism, which try to deal with matters of globalization, urbanization and migration – once

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again within the spatial imaginary of nation states (Sparke, 2005). None of these things fit the Westphalian straightjacket no matter how elaborate the patterns contemporary intellectual tailors use to adjust the garment. The revival of concerns about immigration, intercultural politics, relativism, post-colonial scholarship and the overarching American fascination with race, suggests that Vitalis’s (2006) observation about interracial relations becoming international relations in the period of the First World War, might now be reverting to the old pattern with less concern given to the sovereign state as the political matter of prime consideration. In retrospect it now seems that the institutionalization of international relations, and the premise of a world primarily consisting of precisely defined nation states, might be seen as an artefact of the twentieth century and of American dominance in that period (Smith, 2003). The triumph of the autonomous actor, calculating interests and arbitrating disagreements by technological force if necessary, the basic ontological assumptions of Americanism, are written into the assumptions of the disciplinary enterprise established to understand this world. Institutional inertia tends to perpetuate disciplinary traditions, and insofar as it stifles innovation it, too, reproduces intellectual divisions of labour that may not be useful in new circumstances. Added to that is the key point that Rob Walker (1993) made in Inside/Outside as he noted that, in terms of politics, a methodological convenience whereby distinctions were made between domestic and international long ago turned into an ontological category. Methodological nationalism is reinforced by the construction of subjects, citizens and economies in terms of national registrations, enumerations and statistical measures of numerous phenomena. This tendency is frequently compounded by the ‘Willie Sutton syndrome’ in the social sciences, where research is done the way it is ‘because that is where the data is’ – paraphrasing the famous bank robber who targeted banks because ‘that’s where the money is’ (Dalby, 2007b). Territory is a juridical notion, one that hugely simplifies the tasks of making distinctions and dictating appropriate modes of conduct in particular places. But recognizing these practices as contingent strategies that are convenient, rather than as the ontological givens that are merely to be worked with in some search for perfect administration, is now a political necessity as well as a useful starting point for academic study. The necessity of tackling these matters from within many disciplinary procedures is also clear, because the human condition is not solely amenable to the fine-tuning of nation states and the detailed

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documentation of its citizens. Such matters are not a problem that is confined to international relations; numerous other disciplines have difficulties with the limitations of their topics and appropriate methods in a world in which the verities of the nineteenth century division of academic labour do not fit the contemporary categories of human experience. The collapse of the distinctions between humanity and nature and the growing recognition of the importance of processes, systems, information and codes in contemporary explanations suggest a world in which the traditional disciplines do not fit; the geographical contribution is useful in that it insists on the necessity of reflection on the spatial categories that structure academic contextualizations.

Anthropocene studies? The importance of thinking carefully about context as a way of facilitating intellectual inquiry across disciplinary boundaries is emphasized by the growing discussion of the new geological circumstances within which humanity now lives in the Anthropocene age (Brauch, Dalby and Oswald Spring, 2011). The natural sciences are making it increasingly clear that we are remaking that world as we become an urban species and the networks of interconnection between the nodes in that global economy more accurately summarize the organization of the planet’s peoples than do the cartographies of division so favoured by the social sciences (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008). This is not a new observation, either; scholars suggested in the 1970s that environmental matters were changing the context of international politics (Pirages, 1978). But these concerns were swept aside in the remilitarization of the 1980s and the revival of the cold war. Now the earth system science analyses are making these insights ever more pressing (Steffen et al., 2007); science is making it clear that we are literally remaking the biosphere, and the forces we have set in motion will shape the living conditions for humanity and the other biota of the planet for many millennia. The global political agenda for the twenty-first century will be about how to live in the Anthropocene. As climate change accelerates and the vulnerability of populations to increasingly ‘artificial’ hazards mounts, all these concerns with the appropriate contextualization of insecurity further challenge the cartographic imagination of the social sciences. Just as the division between nature and humanity is now understood as untenable while we do not seem to be able to think without the distinction (Walker, 2006b), so too is the now impossible division between people and citizens in the

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imagination of international studies (see Chapter 7). The boundaries so carefully tended in the twentieth century are crumbling both in the world and in the academy and, given the violence of twentieth-century geopolitics, that is not necessarily a bad thing! Nonetheless, territorial boundaries to the migrations of the poor and marginal are being dangerously reasserted just as the interconnections of global change are becoming unavoidable. While the war on terror temporarily diverted attention from looming environmental matters, these too have transcended the neat categorizations of international relations theory. As the old saying has it, environmental problems are no respecter of state boundaries. The debate about global warming, and the consequent phenomena of climate change, make the point about this very clearly. And, yet, the attempts to develop responses to greenhouse gas emissions remain caught in the administrative categories of the nation state, and interstate bargaining seems to be the key focus in analyses dealing with how climate regimes are to be established (Newell, 2008). Climate change is still largely understood as a pollution problem, not as one that requires more large-scale transformations of how people produce things and live so as to make life possible for future generations. Insofar as it remains a matter for government negotiation, and the matter will in part always be about this, then the terms of international relations will continue to offer interpretations and strategies. But so far the IR terms have proved incapable of grappling with the scale and speed of contemporary transformations. The larger context of all this, caught in the terminology of the Anthropocene, suggests new circumstances for humanity, circumstances that require a more comprehensive understanding of the global condition than that provided by the categories found in international relations, or for that matter in state-focused social sciences in general. Thinking about humanity as a new ‘force of nature’, as a novel ecological arrangement, and one that has begun to destabilize the biosphere (in part by reversing the long-term geological pattern of carbon sequestration through its practices of combustion), suggests that the administrative practices of territorial entities are no longer the appropriate mode of thinking for the long-term future, if at least some notion of human security is taken seriously (Dalby, 2009b). They may be necessary in the short term, given the absence of appropriate institutions that can grapple with the important matters of how humanity as a whole decides what to produce and how to tackle the ecological disruptions that are compromising human security. But they are nowhere

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near being an adequate set of institutions for the tasks that face us in coming decades. Clearly, the attempt to solve climate change difficulties in such ‘negotiations’ as those between territorial states in 2009 in Copenhagen, have not led to the kind of innovations in thinking and practice that are urgently needed. Much more than international relations (as conventionally understood) is needed to think intelligently about the global future in ways that engage ecology as a global necessity. To do so effectively will require a much more nuanced geopolitical imagination than that currently on offer in international studies. Indeed, it will probably require all three of Long’s (see Chapter 2) categories of interdisciplinarity – multi, trans and neo – if the needed complex new insights are to be forthcoming. But, if living in the Anthropocene is to be taken seriously, it will need much more fundamental rethinking of politics and places, and the interconnections between them, than can be accomplished by merely adding new disciplines to the conversation within the established categories of international relations.

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Lipschutz, R. (2009) The Constitution of Imperium (Boulder: Paradigm). Long, D. (2006) ‘Who Killed the International Studies Conference?’, Review of International Studies, 32: 603–22. Mackinder, H.J. (1904) ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, The Geographical Journal, 23: 421–37. Mearsheimer, J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton). Miller, R. (2010) ‘Interdisciplinarity: Its Meaning and Consequences’ in R.A. Denemark (ed.) International Studies Online/International Studies Encyclopedia (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). Morgenthau, H. (1948) Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf). Newell, P. (2008) ‘The Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance’, Review of International Studies, 34: 507–29. Nitzan, J. and S. Bichler (2009) Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (New York: Routledge). Ó Tuathail, G. (1996) Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Pieterse, J.N. (2007) ‘Political and Economic Brinkmanship’, Review of International Political Economy, 14: 467–86. Pirages, D. (1978) The New Context for International Relations: Global Ecopolitics (North Scituate, MA: Duxbury). Ripsman, N.M. and T.V. Paul (2010) Globalization and the National Security State (New York: Oxford University Press). Roseneau, J.N. (1997) Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (New York: Cambridge University Press). Sassen, S. (2008) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, paperback edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Sjoberg, L. (2008) ‘Scaling IR Theory: Geography’s Contribution to Where IR Takes Place’, International Studies Review, 10: 472–500. Smith, N. (2003) American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press). Sparke, M. (2005) In the Space of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Steffen, W., P. Crutzen and J.R. McNeill (2007) ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio, 36: 614–21. Strange, S. (1994) States and Markets (London: Pinter). Vitalis, R. (2006) ‘Theory Wars of Choice: Hidden Casualties in the “Debate” between Hegemony and Empire’ in C. David and D. Grondin (eds) Hegemony or Empire? The Redefinition of American Power under George W. Bush (Aldershot: Ashgate). Walker, R.B.J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Walker, R.B.J. (2006a) ‘Lines of Insecurity: International, Imperial, Exceptional’, Security Dialogue, 37: 65–82. Walker, R.B.J. (2006b) ‘On the Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection’ in J. Huysmans, A. Dobson and R. Prokhovnik (eds) The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency (London: Routledge). Walker, R.B.J. (2010) After the Globe, before the World (London: Routledge).

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Williams, J. (2008) ‘Space, Scale, and Just War: Meeting the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention and Transnational Terrorism’, Review of International Studies, 34: 581–600. Wright, Q. (1955) The Study of International Relations (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts). Zacher, M. (2001) ‘The International Territorial Order: Boundaries, the Use of Force, and Normative Change’, International Organization, 55: 215–50.

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6 Beyond the Domestic–International Divide: State Spatial Transformation as Neo-liberal Geopolitics Sami Moisio

Introduction The state is a powerful conceptual abstraction and one of the key concepts in IR, in political theory and in social sciences more generally. How one conceptualizes the state in scholarly practice depends upon the perspective from which one approaches it (Hay and Lister, 2006, p. 4). Also, different political groupings may work on the basis of different conceptions of the state – why and how the state exists, how it developed and through what processes, what is the relationship between the state and capitalism, how are elites entangled with the state, what should the state do and how should it be developed? Overall, our conceptions of the state make a difference for both policy making and scholarship. The contemporary debate on the future of the state is largely inspired by the mobility of capital and the proliferation of supranational regulative institutions. This debate has proceeded concomitantly with financial liberation and the dissolution of the previously dominant image of states as national economies. This has led to speculation as to whether the state is ‘losing’ or ‘winning’ in its metaphorical competition with the markets. However, as Georg Sørensen (2006, p. 193) points out, rather than engaging in this either-or-debate, it is more important to look at the changing state–market relationship as a constantly fluctuating one. This chapter opens up an interdisciplinary perspective on the concept of state and its position with regard the nexus of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’ by drawing on the literature concerned 149

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with state spatial transformation. This literature is interdisciplinary in a dual sense. Firstly, it is not structured around any clearly demarcated disciplinary core (see Chapter 3), but rather is a vibrant field that brings together political sociologists, geographers and scholars of international political economy (IPE) and IR.1 Secondly, the study of state spatial transformation functions through interdisciplinary concepts (such as territory, territoriality, the international and transnational) that are difficult to define as a property of any institutionalized discipline. The transformation of the state from its early roots through the absolutist state and warring state epochs towards the territorial state, the nation state and the welfare state exemplifies its changing nature. The state should thus be understood as a historical process. States continue to act as central players even today, within the era of ‘fast and borderless capitalism’, even though their form, essence and practices are changing. One should therefore focus on the ways in which states continue to act, albeit in a modified manner, during this new epoch (Jones and Jones, 2004, p. 410). As will be shown below, this qualitative transformation of the state has taken place concomitantly with the rise of neoliberal hegemony from the 1970s onwards. This chapter proceeds through seven sections. This introduction is followed by a section that briefly discusses disciplines and their connection with the increasingly problematic division between the domestic and international spheres of the state. The third section introduces two partially overlapping research perspectives that discuss the transformation/internationalization of the state under neoliberalism. The fourth section looks at the literature that has sought to spatialize the state transformation. This literature has questioned not only the hollowing out of the state argument but also the domestic/international divide that is so often built upon analysis within the social sciences. Section five investigates the writings of Richard Florida and Kenichi Ohmae as illustrations of what I call the ‘neoliberal style of thought’. It will be suggested that a specific spatiality and materiality is built up in the neoliberal style of thought, and that this mode of thought has been salient in the contemporary process of state spatial transformation in many geographical contexts. The sixth section illustrates this process in the context of Finland, where efforts to develop a globally attractive metropolis have superseded what I will call the Keynesian geopolitics of the state. Finally, the concluding section names some issues which merit scholarly attention in the interdisciplinary study of the state.

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Academic disciplines and the domestic/ international divide The territorially homogenized welfare state still guides our understanding of the state, and in so doing partially conceals the significant change in statehood that has taken place in the past forty years throughout the member states of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). This chapter is grounded in the view that the role of the state has changed in such a way that the ‘domestic’ affairs and ‘international’ contexts of a particular state can no longer be separated with ease (Sørensen, 2006, p. 207). That is to say that contemporary ‘regional policies’, for instance, cannot easily be separated from the concept of what is international, as most of these state-related practices are today informed by the neoliberal style of thought that is clearly connected with the most wildly internationalized fractions of capital. As Hay and Lister (2006, p. 4) remind us, the concept of the state has developed hand in hand with the development of institutions we usually associate with the state. In spite of the fact that the concept of state has different political connotations in different geographical contexts, the understanding of state-related concepts such as sovereignty, territoriality, democracy, government, society and international are informed by modern statehood and its characteristics, which are often taken for granted. As academic disciplines and states have developed in a conjoined manner at least from the early nineteenth century onwards, the operation of the state apparatus has influenced the division of labour among disciplines. More specifically, the formation of state institutions and discipline formation look as if they were interconnected processes in that the development of particular state institutions (schools, an exchequer, law-making bodies, diplomacy, etc.) also required a certain type of knowledge production. As a result, the task of a sociologist is to focus on a bounded national society; a legal scholar pays attention to the judiciary powers of the state; a political scientist scrutinizes political systems within states; and IR is concerned with ‘foreign policies’ and the institutions that govern relations between states and some other actors. The formation of disciplines as ‘turfs of knowledge production’ has been influenced by the often assumed qualities of states: that states have their clearly demarcated insides (national) and outsides (international) marked by state borders; that states are power containers that include a clearly delineated society and a national economy; and that states operate as rational units in order to maximize their powers in relation to the

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other states. All these assumptions are crucial ontological preconditions for an orthodox understanding of what is international simply as ‘interstate’. These assumptions domesticate the state and draw a clear border between what is regarded as international relations and what belongs to domestic affairs. As a result, the internal space of the state is often considered a purely domestic or, better, a national category. The political geographer John Agnew gives the name ‘territorial trap’ to the assumption that mutually exclusive, self-enclosed territorial arrangements must form the basic units of the global political system, and that such ‘containers’ enclose relevant political, social and economic processes (see Agnew and Corbridge, 1995, pp. 78–100). This territorial trap still persists, in many analyses, as evidence that the territorialization of state power that culminated in post-war Europe still powerfully informs thinking about the state as a social and political organization. Whereas the twentieth century epitomized the development of a ‘national constellation’ of state institutions and infrastructures, the changes of the past 30–40 years in the OECD states demonstrate a gradual unravelling of these extensive national constellations. It is important to notice, however, that state transformation takes place through divergent changes in the various dimensions of the state such as legitimacy, resources, welfare and law. As Zürn and Leibfried (2005, p. 3) suggest, the central feature of the twentieth century (welfare) nation state was that these dimensions were merged and their various activities concentrated at the national scale. Not only was the public political discourse focused on the national scale, but also welfare and economic policies and the production of infrastructures were geared to this scale. However, given that the state has always been a reflexive form of social and political organization, any analysis that takes, as givens, scales such as national, international and local, predetermines what it is able to say about the state. There is a need to move beyond such essentialist divides. The literature on state spatial transformation provides a particularly useful interdisciplinary agenda for this end.

Towards neoliberal states The literature on the state includes a huge number of approaches that cannot be reviewed here. A significant proportion of this literature either questions one of the institutions of states or explores the complex relationships among these institutions. Those interested in the functions of the state emphasize that the state apparatus aims to create and maintain the state as a ‘collective individual’ by practising infrastructural

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power, for instance (see Mann, 1988), in the form of public goods. The state is also often regarded as a regulator, facilitator and producer of the physical infrastructure for running a nationalized economy. The state may also be considered an arbiter that acts as a neutral mediator in adjudicating disputes within its jurisdiction (for a discussion, see Johnston, 1982). The state thus acts as a social engineer that ensures a certain level of distributional justice in its territory. For those emphasizing the pluralist nature of the state, many social and geographical groupings operate within its confines without any one of them being capable of grasping total control over the state. In the ensuing pages I will briefly discuss two partly overlapping approaches that have been applied to the phenomenon of state transformation during the age of neoliberal hegemony. Even though we, perhaps, may not talk about neoliberalism in the singular, it is nonetheless important to look at the social practices and discourses of neoliberalism and to examine the way in which these have become deeply entrenched in civil society and in state practices (for a useful discussion, see Plehwe et al., 2006). In this section I will look first at some ideas on the changing state from the perspective of historical materialism (including the role of ideas in the production of political order). Secondly, I will turn to the research perspective that approaches state transformation through the lenses of governmentality.

Historical materialism, the state and the ideational basis of political order For some, the state is primarily a community based on coercion. This distinguishes it from other social and political institutions. In the extreme instrumentalist view, the dominant class within the state practises dominance over people through various mechanisms. Ralph Miliband (1969) famously argued that the pluralist state is a myth, as the dominant class is able to manipulate the state apparatus irrespective of which party happens to be in government. In such a view, the state is little more than a committee for the affairs of the bourgeoisie. As a result, politics within states is reduced to reflecting dominant economic forces. Structuralist Marxists suggest that the state is there in order to perform ‘minimum tasks in support of a capitalist mode of production’ (Harvey, 2001, p. 269). The form the state takes reflects the mode of production which determines social and political relations. In Western Marxist analyses, the state has thus often been understood as a capitalist

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entity, because it operates within a capitalist mode of production. In such a view, the state as an institution is crucial, as it counters the selfdestructive process of economic competition. It ensures, for instance, the reproduction of a healthy and skilled labour force and arbitrates the conflict between capital and labour. Since capitalism as an economic system is crisis-prone, various writers have set out to explain how capital is able to constantly reproduce its dominance in spite of its contradictions. They argue that there always exists a connection between ideology and the state, so that certain specific interests of the ruling segments of society can be ‘transformed into “the illusory general interest” of the whole society’ (Harvey, 2001, p. 271). The ruling class is capable of universalizing its ideas as the ruling ideas of society. In such a view, the state is inescapably ideological in that it tries to hide conflicts between social classes behind a national consensus. Antonio Gramsci (1971) and his followers conceptualize this phenomenon as hegemony, which refers to political, intellectual and moral leadership by the dominant class (through education, the mass media and entertainment) which results in the dominated class consenting to its own domination (Jessop, 1982, p. 17). The insight here is that the power of the capitalist class resides not so much in the coercive apparatus of the state as an instrument of bourgeois values, but rather in its capability to shape the perceptions of the people. The ruled tend to accept the ruler’s moral, political and cultural values – the whole conception of the world – as societal norms, as if there were no alternative (Hay, 2006, p. 69). Harvey (2001, p. 271) has suggested that for this end, these ruling ideas need to be presented as abstract ‘idealizations’ that can then assume a life of their own. In the structuralist view the state is not a unitary actor but a specific institutional ensemble with multiple boundaries, no institutional fixity or pre-given substantive unity (Jessop, 1990, p. 267). If states are conceptualized as the products of social struggles and political alliances which will shape their development and future formation, one may suggest that they might well be changing rather than disappearing in this age of so-called globalization. From such a perspective the struggle between neo-Weberian and neoliberal scholars over whether the capacity of the state to manage economic activity has been weakened or strengthened by globalization becomes largely irrelevant. For this reason Glassman (1999) rather prefers to discuss the internationalization of the state, which he defines as ‘a process in which the state apparatus becomes increasingly oriented towards facilitating capital accumulation for the most internationalized investors, regardless of their nationality’

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(Glassman, 1999, p. 673). This definition is useful not only as it indicates that contemporary states actively engage in internationalizing activities, which may also foster their status as political actors, but also because it suggests that state transformation is inherently associated with the most internationalized fractions of capital. This observation points to the fact that the capitalist class is not homogeneous, as the various fractions of capital are potentially in conflict with each other (Harvey, 2001, p. 275). Even the most internationalized capital classes thus need to struggle through the institutions of the state to reproduce conditions for accumulation.2 The process of internationalizing states is often associated with the concept of the transnational. The ‘new Gramscians’ have sought to ‘internationalize’ the Gramscian theory of the state (see e.g., Morton, 2007; for a critique, see Germain and Kenny, 1998) by scrutinizing the emergence of a particular type of transnational common sense that is closely associated with neoliberal ideology. The concept of neoliberal hegemony or transnational common sense not only refers to the ideational consent that characterizes the contemporary international order, but also seeks to disclose the current ‘historic bloc’ which Gill (2008, p. 60) outlines as ‘the historic congruence between material forces, institutions and ideologies’ (see also Agnew, 2005). By conceiving the formation of hegemony and historic blocs on a world scale, the ‘new Gramscians’ have sought to study the role of hegemony in the process of capitalist development and to reconceptualize the relations between the ‘international’ and the ‘domestic’. Leslie Sklair’s (2001) neo-Gramscian concept of the transnational capitalist class suggests that it is not the state as such that drives contemporary capitalism but the transnational capitalist class. The latter consists of people who see their own interests, and/or the interests of their own social group, often transformed into an imagined national interest, and best served by identification with the interests of the capitalist global system. The economic interests of this class are increasingly globally linked. The state, however, has an important role to play via globalizing bureaucrats, politicians and professionals. Instead of a one-dimensional conceptualisation of the state, Sklair (2001, pp. 10; 46) discusses how transnational corporations, the transnational capitalist class and the culture/ideology of consumerism operate to transform the world and the state in terms of the global capitalist project. During the past thirty years there has been a notable movement of states in the direction of neoliberal political agendas, and this has revealingly characterized the force of neoliberal hegemony. The

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neoliberalization of the state has taken place concomitantly with the internationalization of finance and production and the rise of the ‘creative’ industries. Neoliberal agendas called into question the economic competence of the ‘overstretched’ welfare states, often dubbed as ‘nanny states’, and their governance: demand-side intervention, nationalized political mindsets and an ‘ineffective’ public sector. Governments now do their best to develop open, export-oriented political regimes for the smooth operation of international markets. In the era of state internationalization, the central priority for governments is usually economic competitiveness rather than social welfare. These neoliberal tendencies are being legitimized by arguing that the fiercely competitive economic environment abroad, coupled with increasing economic and social pressures at home, leaves no alternative but to pursue a course towards deregulation, marketization, privatization and celebration of the virtues of individualism and individual creativity (Peck, 2001, p. 445). In order to promote competitiveness, neoliberalized governments boost innovations. Simultaneously, these governments seek to open up the national economy as they perceive it as fundamentally and irreversibly shaped by international economic forces (see Jessop, 2002). The concept of protectionism is now being used to symbolize the past, characterized by closed state territories and ‘centralized planned economies’. The general thrust of neoliberal development is that more and more often state governments have started to act as market players, shaping their policies to maximize their returns from market forces in a neoliberal international environment.

The state, neoliberalism and governmentality A pivotal change as far as the neoliberalization of states was concerned began to take place in Western Europe in the late 1970s, with a shift to a more monetarist economic policy. There was surprisingly little resistance to this new ideology. Ever since, a number of institutions above and beyond the states have contributed to the strengthening of the neoliberal hegemony. The transformation of the state can also be fruitfully approached from the perspective of governmentality, which is concerned with how neoliberal thought operates within our ‘organized ways of doing things, our regimes of practices, and with its ambitions and effects’ (Dean, 1999, p. 18). The complex mix of the processes of neoliberalism has to a great extent been brought about by states. As Fougner (2008, p. 308) suggests, in neoliberal thought the market can only exist under certain political,

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legal and institutional conditions that must be actively constructed by government. The state thus needs to intervene because of the market: it must compensate for its deficiencies, limit any dysfunctions in the mechanism of exchange and create effective competition (Donzelot, 2008, p. 123). The neoliberal state thus operates through a dual logic. On the one hand, it is expected to stand aside and set the stage for market functions, but on the other hand, it is expected to be active in creating an optimal business climate, fostering competition within society and ‘behaving as a competitive entity in global politics’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 79). For this end the government, hence, needs to constantly undertake institutional and regulatory rearrangements seen necessary for ‘state competitiveness’. The discourse of national competitiveness emerged in the 1980s. With it the problem of competitiveness turned from the question of how to manage a firm into how to govern the state. As a result, the primary governmental problem of state authorities has shifted towards making the state itself more competitive (Fougner, 2008). More often than not, national competitiveness derives from the principle of economic growth; states should support competition both at home and abroad in order to maintain and foster a specific type of capitalism. The international competitiveness of states is described both as a key objective and a means of implementing a variety of state practices ranging from economic policy, via regional planning, to education. Competitiveness is presented both as the goal of state policies and a means of resolving problems that confront the state (Fougner, 2006, p. 165). Almost twenty years ago, Philip Cerny (1990) illustrated how state policies were changing as part of efforts to achieve better control over the increasing international interpenetration, and he came up with the concept of the competition state. He suggested that the promotion of international competitiveness had been adopted as the key objective of national state intervention to the extent that it had come to challenge previously hegemonic notions such as ‘national security’. The salience of the discourse of national competitiveness in contemporary state strategies demonstrates the pervasiveness of neoliberalism, which is grounded in the view that states are competitors in a global market for capital, technology and high-skilled labour. A neoliberal government must thus consider state attractiveness, effectiveness and innovation capability to be fundamental governmental problems as well as key constituents of national competitiveness. The neoliberalization of the state may indicate a gradual transformation from a civil association into a more limited form of enterprise

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association (see Cerny, 2003). In each and every one of the ways in which the state operates there emerge some features that can be traced back to fictitious markets and the pursuit of economic efficiency (see Cerny, Menz and Soederberg, 2005). In summary, neoliberal thinking is based on an idea that state strategies and projects should be organized from the vantage point of national competitiveness. This form of political thinking dominates political and economic discussions of the contemporary world order, is celebrated by international business and, quite controversially, is also eagerly promoted by state governments (see also Laffey and Weldes, 2005), even after the global stagnation that broke out in 2008.

State spatial transformation as neoliberal geopolitics This section seeks to connect the previous discussion of the neoliberalization of the state to questions pertaining to state spatiality and territory in the age of neoliberal hegemony. This is crucial given that the concept of state is usually considered as bringing together issues concerning state institutions, population, various elites and state territory. Indeed, territorial sovereignty is perhaps the most common of all the state-related concepts,3 although until relatively recently it has remained under-theorized in IR and IPE (Brenner and Elden, 2009). Recent work on state spatial transformation has specifically questioned the neoliberalization of state space. One of the key insights brought forth in the literature is that the neoliberalization of states has not led on to a non-territorial state but rather to a state space in which the relative openness of borders, together with increasing networking, are concomitant processes with the continuing operation of territoriality, territorial borders and territorially defined political identities (for a discussion, see Jones, 2009). That is, neoliberalism has taken on specific spatial and territorial forms. A particular understanding that the contemporary world is inherently associated with locational competition is a fundamental precondition for the neoliberal state, which is thus construed around a specific type of geography of accumulation. The recent literature that scrutinizes the spatial transformation of the state under neoliberalism is closely associated with the premises of historical materialism; it often argues that changing forms of capitalism tend to revolve around particular types of geographical arrangement that are historically contingent. Territory is not a static background structure for regulatory processes and political relations but rather one of their constitutive dimensions (Brenner,

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2003, p. 140). Among European states during the twentieth century, there has been a shift from Keynesian accumulation geographies to the recent neoliberal ‘glocalizing competition state regimes’ that include both upscaling and downscaling of the state space. Brenner (2004, p. 3) suggests: While we shall see that political strategies to establish a centralized, nationalized hierarchy of state power have indeed played a key role throughout much of the twentieth century, they are today being widely superseded as a more polycentric, multiscalar, and non-isomorphic configuration of statehood is created. Consequently, new conceptual vocabularies are required in order to transcend some of the entrenched assumptions about state spatial and institutional organization that have been inherited from the Westphalian geopolitical epoch. The nationally scaled welfare state represented a particular phase in capitalist development. Brenner suggests that after the Second World War the European states invested extensively in large-scale national infrastructures for capital circulation. This model came to be challenged concomitantly with the rise of neoliberalism; contemporary state strategies tend to be oriented towards a spatial concentration of productive capacities and economic assets within a few metropolitan regions (Brenner, 2003, p. 143). The message is thus that the previously established, and thus inherited, spatial formations of state space are being qualitatively transformed (see Brenner, 2009, pp. 2–4). The configurations associated with the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ model have been gradually replaced by new spatial formations that are widely understood as corresponding better to the contemporary world. Recent scholarship on state spatial transformation has tapped into this and how it has questioned distinctions between the state’s ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ sphere. This literature has also pointed out that the various state strategies and state projects need to be examined contextually, and that their contextual reading will disclose important spatial and historical formations and institutions around which capitalist states are structured. One of the central claims concerns the shift from strategies involving whole state territories to strategies focusing on networks and new scales of action such as the European megaregions, substate regions, cross-border spaces and supranational regions (see Jessop et al., 2008). The change has largely resulted from particular efforts to build more

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competitive operating environments for the needs of innovation-led economic growth and footloose capital. The developments that look as if they were purely ‘domestic’ in nature thus cannot be fully understood without exploring the linkages of such processes to capitalist restructuring. This particular standpoint is comparable to the observation presented originally by Gramsci that national states should not be regarded as self-enclosed power containers, but should be examined with respect to their complex and versatile interconnections with states and political forces on other scales (Jessop, 2005, p. 425). In other words, state power may not be treated as inseparable from other scales of political power. Indeed, recent literature on state spatial transformation under neoliberalism emphasizes that the contemporary capitalist globalization includes multiple centres, each with its own capacity to exercise authority and influence, and that this condition cannot be conceptualized simply in terms of a top-down transmission of power (see also Allen, 2004). John Agnew’s (2005) thought-provoking idea of the continuing spread of the marketplace culture and the associated ideological power of transnational liberalism is one of the recent articulations of how global power operates without any clear territorial centre of authority. For Agnew, the concept of transnational liberalism refers to the hegemonic position of a particular ideology of the market that is held and reproduced by a powerful constituency of liberal states, international institutions and capital (Agnew and Corbridge 1995, p. 164). In summary, the interdisciplinary study of state spatial transformation under neoliberalism has provided important insights on the ‘internationalization of the domestic’ – for instance, with transnational liberalism. As a result, the concept of scale has become a useful entry point for the study of state transformation because it has helped to overcome some of the theoretical flaws in methodological nationalism and state-centrism. Those interested in research into state transformation have found it useful to focus on the multiple scaling processes and strategic articulations of scale around which the politics of neoliberal state transformation revolve (Table 6.1).

Location is everything: ideational aspects of neoliberal hegemony In the previous section we recognized the polycentric and multiscalar character of neoliberalism as a geopolitical process. Neoliberal geopolitics revolves around international networks, cross-border regions and megaregions at the expense of national-scale equalizing arrangements.

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Table 6.1 From Keynesian to neoliberal geopolitics of state space Keynesian geopolitics of Neoliberal geopolitics of state space state space Regional structure

Even regional development, national integrity, decentralization in settlement and industrial policy

Economic development through metropolitan areas, regional concentration of economic and innovation activity, rise of metropolitan politics

Forms of governance

Emphasis on ‘national’, state-centred, government

Internationalization of the national, diffusing system of economic governance

Purpose of the state Economic growth, production and distribution of welfare, state ownership, provider of military security, transfers of income

Provider of conditions for effective competition; economic facilitator and supporter, creator of favourable conditions

Regulation

The Bretton Woods system, regulation by national central banks, public investments

Deregulation, freeing the financial market, enabling the free movement of capital

Nodal scale

National

Overlapping of several scales; devaluation of the national

Prevention of uneven regional development

Regional planning, transfers of income, dominance of homogenizing policies

Competitiveness and growth policy, region-led development through state income transfers, internationalization of places, specialization

Territory

Nationalization of territory, natural resources, economic growth, defence policies, societal order, sovereignty

Internationalization of territory, emphasis on attractive territorial qualities, economic growth through spatial centralization, suppression of the territorial dimension of defence policies, movement from homogenization towards territorial specialization

Source: modified from Brenner and Theodore (2002).

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I suggest that, in order to understand the contemporary state spatial transformation under neoliberalism in an adequate interdisciplinary perspective, it is also necessary to analyse the world of ideas. For instance, neoliberal geopolitics resonates well with the ideas of contemporary neoliberal intellectuals such as Richard Florida, Michael Porter, Kenichi Ohmae and many others, although it is surprising that such writers are rarely introduced as important contributors to the ideational aspect of neoliberal hegemony in spite of their participation in the political process of producing, maintaining and transforming neoliberal common sense. The ideational aspect of neoliberal hegemony is also important because there are potentially many quite distinct neoliberal ideational constellations that revolve around different spatial concepts. The set of ideas put forward by Florida and others will be referred to in the ensuing pages as a ‘style of thought’. This concept was originally introduced by Ludwik Fleck as a particular way of thinking, seeing and practising. A style of thought thus ‘involves formulating statements that are only possible and intelligible within that way of thinking’ (Rose, 2007, p. 12). The concept of a style of thought is useful for the present purpose as it refers to a system of terms, concepts and assertions that are organized into a particular form that count as an argument. ‘Style of thought’ is used here not only to accentuate the role of intellectuals in the process of creating political order but also to reveal how neoliberal hegemony involves particular ‘thought communities’. Overall, considering the style of thought of neoliberalism provides insights into its social and ideational basis, as well as into its particular materiality and spatiality. The neoliberal style of thought is often predicated upon how to produce economic growth in the post-industrial world, and upon the treatment of states, cities and ‘regions’ in terms of their competitiveness – as if they were firms operating in markets. Michael Porter’s conceptualization of national competitiveness, for instance, stresses the need for governments to constantly create competitive advantages in order to survive in the current economic rivalry in world politics: states need to increase their productivity by means of primarily supply-side economic management and by fostering ‘clustering’. If a nation loses the ability to compete in a range of high-productivity/high-wage industries characterized by innovation, high technology and world-class talent, its standard of living is threatened: ‘it’s the type of jobs, not just the ability to employ citizens at low wages, that is decisive for economic prosperity’ (Porter, 2008, p. 177).

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The underlying principle of the neoliberal style of thought is that there is a movement away from the ‘manufacturing state’ and towards a ‘post-industrial innovation state’, which is based on a combination of high-paid professionals and innovative work that Florida (2008, p. 94) calls the ‘creative sector of an economy’. The future prosperity and success of a state thus depend on its capabilities for relying on science to bring forth (technological) innovation. Competition is also regarded as a pervasive global condition. In the past, the cities of one country or region competed for investment and talent with other cities in that same country or region. Now locations all across the globe are competing with one another (ibid., 2008, pp. 28–9). According to Florida, the ‘creative class’ is the key to economic growth, innovation and the future success of a location and company. Coping with creative people includes fostering a specific type of spatiality (ibid., 2002). As Peck (2005, p. 740) correctly points out, Florida’s ideas have proved enormously seductive among civil leaders around the world. He associates the concept of creative class with a workforce composed of a relatively large group of people in creative jobs in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, the arts, music and entertainment. For him, in times of globalization, economic competitiveness is crucially connected with the locational preferences of this creative class which secures economic growth. Florida justifies his claim by stressing that successful firms tend to locate where the talent is. These are not the cheapest locations, but firms nevertheless want to locate in them as these hubs are where the highly talented creative class resides. Successful firms in the creative economy need highly specialized employees who, according to Florida, tend to settle where the ‘quality of life’ is best. And because the talented people are becoming more and more mobile, the challenge of places and states is to manage that mobility. The neoliberal style of thought is grounded in the view that economic success is not only place-bound but also inherently associated with high-tech industry and the attractiveness of city–regions with regard to talent. Firms relocate to the places that provide the best environment for talented labour. And as a result, these ‘few world-class cities’ benefit and prosper. Firms in the creative industry form clusters, and thereby support a process that attracts more talented people to move into the ‘creative city’. As a consequence, cities must actively scan the horizon for investment, monitor competitors and emulate ‘best practices’ (see Peck and Tickell, 2002, p. 47). They have to restructure themselves to respond to the creative class’s needs just as much as companies have already done (Peck, 2005, p. 742).

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For Florida (2008, p. 32), the emerging global politics is not a matter of competing states but rather competing metropolises. He divides the world into three groups of cities according to their economic performance: peaks, hills and valleys. This topographic distinction is a direct response to the thesis of another well-known writer, Thomas L. Friedman, who famously argued that the world was becoming ‘flat’ – a view in which geography has lost its significance, as innovative work is possible everywhere (see Friedman, 2006). Even though the arguments put forward by both Florida and Friedman are based on the same style of thought, they end up emphasizing different spatial dynamics. Florida argues that talent, innovation and creativity are not distributed evenly across the world but tend to concentrate in specific locations – which makes global competition a harsh spatial game: When looked at through the lens of economic production, many cities with large populations are diminished and some nearly vanish. Three sorts of places make up the modern economic landscape. First are the cities that generate innovations. These are the tallest peaks; they have the capacity to attract global talent and create new products and industries. They are few in number, and difficult to topple. Second are the economic “hills” – places that manufacture the world’s established goods, take its calls, and support its innovation engines. These hills can rise and fall quickly; they are prosperous but insecure. Some, like Dublin or Seoul, are growing into innovative, wealthy peaks; others are declining, eroded by high labour costs and a lack of enduring competitive advantage. Finally there are the vast valleys – places with little connection to the global economy and few immediate prospects. (Florida, 2005, p. 48) In such a view, the really significant locations in the world economy remain limited in number – Florida in fact estimates that this economy is dominated by only a few places. He presents provocative maps which show that there are at most two dozen places worldwide that generate significant innovation. These regions have ecosystems of leading-edge universities, high-powered companies, flexible labour markets, and venture capital that are attuned to the demand of commercial innovation – and there aren’t many of them. (Florida, 2008, p. 25)

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In the neoliberal style of thought, economic growth comes from the clustering and concentrating of talented and productive people, the new mobile social class: ‘our productivity increases when we locate close to one another in cities and regions’ (Florida, 2008, p. 6). It is for this reason that global politics will, according to Florida, hinge on the tensions brewing among different locations that are all seeking to manage successfully in the global economic game. The main dividing line in global politics will in the future be between the innovative talentattracting ‘have’ regions and the talent-exporting ‘have-not’ regions. This is a world of concentration, centralization and networks. In such a view, global politics is about rivalry for particular jobs, people and investment: ‘what we face is not a clash of civilizations but a deepening economic divide among the world’s spikes and valleys’ (Florida, 2008, p. 32). At first sight, Florida’s arguments do not touch upon the state; the state is laid aside. However, the message is ultimately about the territorial state: it is the responsibility of the state to foster development that asserts the role of metropolises as havens of jobs, talent and investment. Irrespective of Florida’s seemingly objective observations, his theory is highly political, enormously normative and politically geographical. Florida is a devoted urbanist who observes the world primary through the lens of metropolises: ‘global cities are magnets for people – particularly those who are ambitious and highly skilled’ (Florida, 2008, p. 4). He reformulates state–city relations in the post-industrial age and posits the ‘creative city’ as the crucial component of state success. This citycentred view of the world coupled with the emphasis on mobility and creativity characterizes the contemporary neoliberal style of thought. Florida’s implicit normative lesson is that the territorial state is an outdated political unit as far as the production of economic growth is concerned. The very logic of the neoliberal style of thought is designed to show that there has already been a movement away from economies, success and prosperity characterized by state territories. It is particularly striking to notice how contemporary spatial planning in most of the OECD world is based on these neoliberal ideas of economic growth. Rather than critically questioning this idea, scholars have, surprisingly, often taken it for granted. As a result, it is common today to speculate on how spatial planning (public intervention) can positively affect the innovation potential of a region in a world of few real megaregions (see, for instance, Cappellin, 2007).

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The megaregion is one of the central concepts in the spatial understanding of neoliberal world politics, whereby the spikes of the world are perceived as more connected with each other than they are with the people and places in their ‘national backyards’. Florida argues at length how the successful metropolitan cities are morphing into megaregions, ‘home to tens of millions of people producing hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars in economic output’ (Florida, 2008, p. 7). The idea of the restructuring of the world into megaregions was first presented in the early 1990s by Kenichi Ohmae, then a McKinsey consultant. Ohmae’s idea that metropolitan regions, not entire nation states, are indisputably growth centres is part of a wider discursive and material re-envisioning of world politics that began in the 1990s, and which is today shared by many policymakers and distinguished scholars. A leading regional scientist, Allen Scott (1996, p. 396), suggests, for instance, that regions are becoming ‘motors’ of the entire capitalist system: We seem now to be shifting into a transitional political phase on the way to a more effective global regime. . . . We are on the road, in short, towards a vastly more integrated international system, or to what Ohmae has referred to in more dramatic terms as a borderless world, although we still remain far from its theoretical final point of destination. As we move in this direction, the territorially based sovereign state is giving way to the ‘trading state’, whose economic well-being depends to greater and greater degree on its successful pursuit of export-oriented production within an international division of labour. Ohmae’s (1993) ideas reflect another key principle in the neoliberal style of thought: a distinction between ineffective state politics and effective corporate culture. In his view, state-centred decision-making is harmfully biased towards the political interests of political elites. States are dysfunctional entities specifically in spatial terms. Ohmae tailors a map in which conglomerates of metropolitan regions become the most effective units in the global economy in place of old-fashioned states: The nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavour in a borderless world. It represents no genuine, shared community of economic interests; it defines no meaningful flows of economic activity. On the global economic map the lines that now matter are

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those defining what may be called ‘region states’. The boundaries of the region state are not imposed by political fiat. They are drawn by the deft but invisible hand of the global market for goods and services. (Ohmae, 1993, p. 78) In such a view, if the state does not allow its most ‘capable regions’ to fully enter the global economy, the state as a whole is in danger of becoming isolated from that economy. This has also fed ‘network-talk’ that represents the world as dominated by flows (capital, people) and nodes. These nodes are understood as providing effective entry points into the global economy because the characteristics that define them are shaped solely by that global economy and not by harmful state policies. In summary, the arguments of Florida and Ohmae are underpinned by principles of social and economic progress. Their arguments belong to the neoliberal style of thought that involves specific spatiality. This spatiality revolves around concepts such as cluster, network, spike, valley, hill, megaregion and metropolis, to mention but a few. It is also striking that a critique of the territorial state is inherently built into the neoliberal style of thought, even if very little is said explicitly about the state. The power of the neoliberal style of thought is partly based on the fact that it suggests how the state should be reworked spatially in order to better fit market requirements. In other words, the power of the neoliberal style of thought may be based on its promise to be more efficient at creating prosperity and competitive advantage than is politically biased state-centric politics. An economy that is structured around metropolitan and megaregional concepts is offered up in the neoliberal style of thought as an antithesis to the dysfunctional nation state.

The gradual neoliberalization of Finland As indicated above, it is possible to recognize the operation of neoliberal style of thought and the associated geopolitics in numerous institutional contexts. The European Union (EU), for instance, had become a territorial management operator by the 1990s, and the current Europeanization of space (see Jensen and Richardson, 2005), with its emphasis on economic growth through flows and global nodes, is ultimately based on neoliberal geopolitics. In fact, European integration accentuates the role of large-scale metropolitan city-regionalism and global networks as fundamental components of competitive statehood. The same ideas also underwrite the state transformation process

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in the case of Finland, EU member since 1995, which in this section will be taken up as an illustrative case study of with what kind of research agendas and needs of conceptualization we are faced.

From equalization to competition Before scrutinizing the more contemporary projects aimed at increasing Finland’s competitiveness, a few words should be said on the history of the territorialization of state power in Finland. In retrospect, the period that began in the late 1950s and continued up to the 1990s marked a tremendous territorialization of state power. The state territory became a central constituent of state strategies that sought to foster economic growth. This period was thus marked by Keynesian territorial management. The construction of the nascent welfare state brought together manufacturing based on natural resources, a relatively closed national economy, a state territory through which sovereignty performances were effectively played out and interventionist welfare and regional policies that fostered the national scale as the primary one for political action and loyalty. The state increased its visibility throughout the territory through the creation of institutions such as universities, and the industrialized peripheries exploited their natural resources and, in so doing, connected these regions with the emerging national economy. Territorial equality figured prominently on the political agenda, and welfare structures were enlarged. The nationally scaled territorial economy was further affirmed as a system of significant transfer payments, and an extensive system of public services was constructed from the late 1960s onwards. Finnish governments became politically committed to using their administrative power to promote ‘geographical universalism’ in the providing of public services throughout their territory. Most of the politico-economic strategies and projects revolved around the national scale. As its infrastructural power increased, the state very effectively penetrated the everyday lives of its citizens from the 1960s onwards. The construction of the Finnish welfare state was a territorial project par excellence which subordinated specific places to the territorial state. This was part of a wider international development – the rise of the welfare state – which marked the creation of the most extensive state territorial regimes the world has ever seen. Subordinating localities to the state was thus an inherent part of the Keynesian form of territorial management. The territory of the Finnish state was a crucial component

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of state sovereignty and an element in its security policy. It was a strategic resource that was to be defended in its entirety. Post-war territorial management was thus grounded in the idea that the nation’s independence, which was perceived as threatened, could best be secured by constituting a form of national integrity based on loyal citizens who were settled throughout the territory. Most of the projects that territorialized state power in Finland were motivated by a complex combination of security and economic concerns which can be termed ‘spatial Keynesianism’. It was ultimately based on the fostering of the national scale in order to create nationally standardized frameworks for capitalist production and collective consumption in a fight against the spread of communism. The construction of the welfare state was primarily a nationally oriented equalizing process that sought to establish balanced regional development throughout the nationalized peripheries: equal growth and equal urbanization all across the national territory. This process shaped socio-spatial configurations such as city–state relations within the state space. The massive global changes that took place at the turn of the 1990s gradually destabilized that Keynesian geopolitics. In place of territorial management emphasizing the state territory as a strategic resource, it became commonplace to argue that Finland is located in the midst of economic competition between political units that are all seeking to maximize their shares in a volatile global knowledge-based economy. The emergence of a neoliberal style of thought in Finland in the late 1980s included fostering a particular type of ‘culture of competitiveness’ and connecting the state with the dominant principles of international finance and trade. A significant portion of new legislation revolved around the new language of internationalization and competition. New institutions were also founded. One of the most revealing examples was the Finnish Competition Authority, in 1988. It was, in fact, the first Finnish state institution that sought to protect sound and effective economic competition, to increase economic efficiency in both private- and public-sector activities, and to increase competition in fields hitherto heavily regulated (Kilpailuvirasto, 2009). Since the early 1990s, most institutional and political reforms have been based on their contribution to the strengthening of a particular type of state transformation in which a culture of competition and effectiveness largely on international and global scales has emerged as an unquestionable principle for organizing the economy and social relations within the political community.

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Towards an international state space Contemporary state strategies in Finland are dominated by neoliberal styles of thought. In these strategies the success and survival of the state and nation are linked to concepts such as creativity, attractiveness, innovation, metropolises and megaregions. Moreover, these strategies are based on an increasingly salient consensus that the ‘manufacturing state’ is coming to an end, which in turn will require dissolution of state structures that were created during the industrial era. Contemporary state success and failure is thus understood as being connected with the capability of the state to develop innovations that can be commercialized. National competitiveness is connected with ‘learning’, ‘education’, ‘innovativeness’, ‘skills’ and ‘creativity’. The development of a successful knowledge-based economy defines the demands and obligations placed upon Finland and its citizens and institutions. The rise of the knowledge-based economy in Finland has led to an increasing scalar argumentation, one which requires more internationalization of the state and its people. For instance, the government launched a ‘country branding project’ in 2008, chaired by Jorma Ollila, the former CEO of Nokia and current chairman of Royal Dutch Shell (and one of the most prominent Finnish representatives of the transnational capitalist class). The secretary of the branding group, revealingly, stated that the very purpose of such branding is ‘to enhance Finland’s international competitiveness: strengthen the operating potential of Finnish businesses; increase foreign political influence; and promote interest in Finland as an investment target’ because countries which fail to foster their brand ‘could find themselves in the company of North Korea, Myanmar or Zimbabwe’ (Tuomi-Nikula and Söderman, 2009). As a new national project, an internationalized Finland of innovations would replace the ‘outdated’ information society project of the 1990s. The latter is understood as being outdated because it was too closely based on the national state structures that originated in the 1960s and echo decentralization and territorial fixity. The next wave of economic growth should now be based on re-scaled national capacities such as globally significant talent and a capability for coping with constant change. The project is geared to moulding the geographies of economic development, material and immaterial investments and political struggle into a new spatial fix that is more international, selective, effective and competitive than previous ones. The adjustment of the Finnish state to resonate better with the underpinning rules of the neoliberal style of thought presupposes reworking

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(or better, optimizing) the state spatially. This includes not only a fundamental devaluing of the spatially decentralized structures that were constructed during the cold war (and largely preserved during the 1990s), but also the hype that surrounds the notion of metropolis as the ultimate cornerstone of the creation of a globally competitive, efficient, flexible, attractive and creative state. The construction of new infrastructures and institutions has been at the core of this process. The efforts at accommodating Finland into what are understood as the rules of the contemporary global economic game have perfectly revealed that state power does not necessarily have to operate through fixed territorial arrangements but can be re-territorialized around new spatial scales and institutions. In other words, the process of ‘internationalizing’ Finland does not necessarily involve the construction of the global scale at the expense of nationally scaled configurations but, perhaps more interestingly, may also give rise to ‘glocalization’ (see Swyngedouw, 2004). Various political forces have been suggesting from the late 1990s onwards that the Finnish state space should be streamlined (in other words, re-scaled) in order to respond better to the new competitive environment of global politics. In many of these visions, which seek to attract some of the mobile money and talent, the Helsinki region should be developed as a truly international ‘metropolitan region’ that would operate as a powerhouse, or growth engine, for the whole nation. I have conceptualized this process as the creation of a metropolis state. This view of Finland as a metropolis state refers both to the power of the neoliberal style of thought and to the spatial formations around which this particular style of thought tends to revolve, and which it nurtures. Metropolitan city-regionalism places weight on ‘international’ scales of action. Its political construction is closely connected with attempts by the government to increase the state’s capability for innovation. As such, the process of fostering metropolitan city-regionalism can be understood as a manifestation of the world as envisaged by Richard Florida and Kenichi Ohmae. In the discursive construction of metropolitan city-regionalism, places are located on different scales with reference to their capacities for contributing to national survival. In this process regions with significant innovation potential come to be classified as global and international, whereas the least valuable places are categorized as being of only national or local significance. These new place hierarchies indicate the presence of a neoliberal style of thought in which places are valued primarily in terms of their market and innovation potentials and their

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ability to attract the creative class. National competitiveness becomes almost exclusively linked to large-scale urban environments. The search for a new wave of innovation-led economic growth has meant that there has been an emphasis on greater unit sizes, a demand for specialization, an emphasis on pursuing the international peak, criticism of all decentralized state structures and an association of small unit size with poor quality and inefficiency. The ideational and material construction of the metropolitan state is grounded in an association of state success with the opening up and adopting of global models. In this view, Finland’s ‘national survival’ will require the development of both top international know-how concerning innovations and a new state space that would enhance the culture of creativity. Thus, Finland’s national survival has today become synonymous with the success of the metropolitan region and its institutions, which has, hence, become a national question shared by all Finns. It is thus often argued that further liberalization will require a significant spatial centralization of population, infrastructures and investment. Furthermore, the increase in spatial selectivity is regarded as an irreversible national process which will inevitably contribute to the internationalization of the state. The process of constructing internationally attractive city-regionalism around Helsinki is ultimately based on the expected needs of footloose capital. In other words, the re-scaling of the Finnish state is intriguingly associated with the figure of the international investor. In the development of a metropolitan state, Finland’s urban network is being re-scaled in relation to the national, provincial, European and global scales on the basis of the expected capability of different places to occupy roles in the global economy. The spatially renewed neoliberal state has, thus, abandoned the principle of equal ‘internationalization’ of the different parts of the national urban network and, instead, has taken to directing the regions along differing paths of development. The operation of the neoliberal style of thought will lead to the formation of a new place hierarchy, which in turn will contribute to an uneven distribution of public investment, for example, in research and development, and will thereby further help to differentiate the development paths of localities.

Concluding remarks It has been suggested in this chapter that the transformation of statehood includes a notable spatial element and presents scholars of international studies with an enormous catalogue of conceptual and

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substantial challenges that touch upon the ways in which we understand the link between state and territory. It is evident that the static view of state territory as a passive backdrop for political action and social processes is problematic (see Häkli, 2008). The literature on state spatial transformation has succinctly pointed out that, instead of focusing on state territory as a rigid space, scholars ought to pay attention to the territorial processes which are not only shaped by international politics and economics (mode of production), but are also co-constituted by the latter. I have also suggested in this chapter that contemporary ‘superstar economists’ such as Michael Porter, Richard Florida and Kenichi Ohmae should be critically examined as important and influential theorists of the ‘international space’. More specifically, I have introduced some of their key tenets as being based on the neoliberal style of thought that motivates current practises in state transformation. Since the late 1970s an enormous number of practises that explicitly aim at internationalizing the state have been based on domestic policy reforms and have sought to transform the state in order to respond better to the assumed requirements posed by transnational world politics. This indicates that the ‘international space’ is actively being territorialized in contemporary state transformation. Yet, even though the Keynesian notion of state territoriality has been qualitatively reworked, the territorial state remains pivotal to the re-scaling process and, therefore, to the spread of the neoliberal hegemony. Current state transformation does not mean that state territoriality itself is somehow less relevant than before, but rather that a set of territorializing processes are at work ‘in, around and through the national state’ (Peck, 2001, p. 450). The study of state spatial transformation should look at the discursive scalar practices through which the internationalization/transnationalization of the domestic economy takes place. It is in these practices that concepts such as international gain their scalar meaning and, in so doing, guide state institutional and infrastructural reforms and their associations with rescalings of the state apparatus, itself, its governance systems and regulatory regimes (Jones and MacLeod, 1999). One of the most intriguing challenges for the study of state spatial transformation is to scrutinize how the neoliberal style of thought is increasingly embedded in almost all state reforms, from defence policies to a range of public policies. It may seem that the operation of the neoliberal style of thought as a contemporary form of common sense is making the world more homogeneous. Yet, even though the neoliberal style of thought seems

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to be deeply rooted throughout the OECD world, one of the greatest challenges is to enquire into how these transnational practices always take place in particular geohistorical contexts, assume different forms because of the different inherited state structures and institutions, and have potentially different outcomes in different places. State spatial transformation and transnationalization are always, therefore, both historically and spatially contingent. Given this geographical contextuality, it becomes crucial to investigate how transnational ideas are adopted and modified in different national contexts. The transformation from the Keynesian to the neoliberal state that has been tracked in this chapter is perhaps best conceived ‘not as a unilinear transition from one coherently bounded regulatory system to another, but rather as an uneven, multiscalar, multidirectional, and open-ended restructuring process that generates pervasive governance failures, crisis tendencies, and contradictions of its own’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002, p. 19). One of the key challenges for the study of state transformation/ state transnationalization is to further develop interdisciplinary research programmes to examine the political conflicts that result from these failures, uneven development and potentially increasing social and spatial injustice. It will similarly become crucial to examine the operation and political power of the intellectual networks organized around the different fractions of capital. Finally, neoliberal state transformation may give rise to new social movements and actions that not only challenge the neoliberal ideas of world politics but also contribute to the emergence of alternative scales of state spatial restructuring.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Many scholars working in this field have interdisciplinary backgrounds. Neil Brenner, for instance, has a BA in philosophy, an MA in both geography and political science, a PhD in political science and works as a professor of sociology. The state may also be considered as forming the arena for a struggle between social interests – not only those represented by ‘capital’ (see Painter and Jeffrey, 2009, p. 55). The concept dates back to the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, who conceptualized state authority in a particular area as being singular and absolute (Skinner, 1989). The principle of territorial sovereignty was later highlighted in the writings of Max Weber (1994 [1919], pp. 310–11), who famously stated that ‘we have to say that a state is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this “territory” being another of the defining characteristics of the state’. This conception of the state is deeply

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rooted in political and academic discourse. In fact, the popular concept of a failed state not only refers to a territory which lacks a single sovereign power, but often also depicts an undesirable and chaotic world of state failure (for this discussion see Luke and Ó Tuathail, 1997).

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Fougner, T. (2008) ‘Neoliberal Governance of States: The Role of Competitiveness Indexing and Country Benchmarking’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37: 303–26. Friedman, T.L. (2006) The World is Flat (London: Penguin Books). Germain, R.D. and M. Kenny (1998) ‘Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24: 3–21. Gill, S. (2008) Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Glassman, J. (1999) ‘State Power Beyond the “Territorial Trap”: The Internationalization of the State’, Political Geography, 18: 669–96. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart). Harvey, D. (2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hay, C. and M. Lister (2006) ‘Introduction: Theories of the State’ in C. Hay, M. Lister and D. Marsh (eds) The State: Theories and Issues (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Hay, C. (2006) ‘(What’s Marxist About) Marxist State Theory?’ in C. Hay, M. Lister and D. Marsh (eds) The State: Theories and Issues (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Häkli, J. (2008) ‘Regions, Networks and Fluidity in the Finnish Nation-State’, National Identities, 10: 5–20. Jensen, O. and T. Richardson (2005) Making European Space: Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity (London: Routledge). Jessop, B. (1982) The Capitalist State (Oxford: Martin Robertson). Jessop, B. (1990) State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jessop, B. (2002) The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jessop, B. (2005) ‘Gramsci as a Spatial Theorist’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8: 421–37. Jessop, B. (2008) State Power (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jessop, B., N. Brenner and M. Jones (2008) ‘Theorizing Sociospatial Relations’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26: 389–401. Johnston, R.J. (1982) Geography and the State (London: Macmillan). Jones, M. (2009) ‘Phase Space: Geography, Relational Thinking, and Beyond’, Progress in Human Geography, 33: 487–506. Jones, M. and R. Jones (2004) ‘Nation States, Ideological Power and Globalization: Can Geographers Catch the Boat?’, Geoforum, 35: 409–24. Jones, M. and G. MacLeod (1999) ‘Towards a Regional Renaissance? Reconfiguring and Rescaling England’s Economic Governance’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24: 295–314. Kilpailuvirasto (2009) Suomen kilpailuviraston kotisivut, http://www.kilpailuvirasto.fi/cgi-bin/english.cgi?luku=about-us&sivu=about-us, date accessed 10 February 2009. Laffey, M. and J. Weldes (2005) ‘Policing and Global Governance’ in M. Barnett and R. Duvall (eds) Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Luke, T. and G. Ó Tuathail (1997) ‘On Videocameralistics: The Geopolitics of Failed States, the CNN International and (UN)governmentality’, Review of International Political Economy, 4: 709–33. Mann, M. (1988) States, War and Capitalism (New York: Basil Blackwell). Miliband, R. (1969) The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet). Morton, A.D. (2007) ‘Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution, and the International’, Millennium, 35: 597–621. Ohmae, K. (1993) ‘The Rise of the Region State’, Foreign Affairs, 72: 78–87. Painter, J. and A. Jeffrey (2009) Political Geography (London: Sage). Peck, J. (2001) ‘Neoliberalizing States: Thin Policies/Hard Outcomes’, Progress in Human Geography, 25: 445–55. Peck, J. (2005) ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29: 740–70. Peck, J. and A. Tickell (2002) ‘Neoliberalizing Space’ in N. Brenner and N. Theodore (eds) Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe (Oxford: Blackwell). Plehwe, D., B. Walpen and G. Neunhöffer (2006) ‘Reconsidering Neoliberal Hegemony’ in D. Plehwe, B. Walpen and G. Neunhöffer (eds) Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique (London: Routledge). Porter, M. (2008) On Competition, updated and expanded edn (Harvard, MA: Harvard Business Press). Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Scott, A. (1996) ‘Regional Motors of the Global Economy’, Futures, 28: 391–411. Skinner, Q. (1989) ‘The State’ in T. Ball, J. Farr and R.L. Hanson (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell). Sørensen, G. (2006) ‘The Transformation of the State’ in C. Hay, M. Lister and D. Marsh (eds) The State: Theories and Issues (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Swyngedouw, E. (2004) ‘Globalisation or Glocalisation? Networks, Territories and Re-scaling’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17: 25–48. Tuomi-Nikula, P. and R. Söderman (2009) ‘Finland’s Plans for Managing its Country Brand’, http://www.nation-branding.info/2009/07/22/finland-plansmanaging-country-brand/, date accessed 10 September 2009. Weber, M. (1994 [1919]) ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ in P. Lassman and R. Speirs (eds) Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Zürn, M. and S. Leibfried (2005) ‘Reconfiguring the National Constellation’, European Review, 13: 1–36.

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7 The Human Subject in International Studies: An Outline for Interdisciplinary Research Programmes Pami Aalto

Introduction1 In this chapter I will explore the research directions amenable for making the ‘human subject’ an integral part of the wide and plural field of interdisciplinary international studies (IS). I will ask what options open up if and when we examine the various aspects of the ‘international’ from the point of view of the human subject. The human subject is taken as the most fundamental concept for referring to ourselves and our fellow human beings in the international sphere, a concept from which other more-precise notions like ‘human nature’, ‘individual’, ‘individual actor’, ‘decision-maker’, ‘citizen’, ‘subject-position’, and so on, can then logically flow and materialize. It will emerge that attempting to ‘humanize’ international studies in this manner can lead us in several directions. At one end, it provides added value by sharpening the analytical and explanatory potential of IR and, at the other end, it offers normative potential by helping to better understand our interhuman ties, to expose inequalities and ‘human wrongs’, to promote our empowerment and allay our common fears. In order to ascertain the options for ‘humanizing’ international studies it will be useful first to proceed from the roles assigned to the human subject in the various theoretical orientations of the discipline of international relations (IR). Exploring the scope and limitations of

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disciplinary approaches is a good starting point for interdisciplinary thinking and research as it reveals what is excluded within existing disciplines, what outward-oriented engagement can produce, and in what outward directions one should go (Moran, 2002, p. 2). On that basis it will then be possible to outline what directions beyond IR – what related disciplines and fields of study – we can explore in order to extend our understanding of: the roles the human subject can play; what aspects of the international those roles manifest; and how all this can improve our understanding of international issues, processes, tensions and problems. It will emerge that the human subject is already in many ways present in contemporary IR. However, none of those presences or roles assumes similar centrality in the field, as did the conceptualization and study of the human subject prevalent in the cold war era ‘psychological school’ of IR – as a singular decision-maker and/or acting as a member of a wider circle of national security experts in the midst of nuclear control issues, superpower tensions and crises, and other such dramatic events. In contrast to this dramatic image, the faces of the human subject presently in IR are more diverse, while their overall standing among the many research foci and explanatory tools of the field is less consequential. This is partly a result of the fragmentation of IR into different theoretical orientations, research programmes and less closely knit bodies of literature (see Chapters 1 and 3). And, partly, it is due to a lack of willingness and of a systematic effort to include the human subject in theory building and actual empirical research (cf., Byman and Pollack, 2001, pp. 108–9). To reinforce our capacity to examine the various aspects of the international from the human point of view, I suggest that we consider several interdisciplinary directions that help us to extend the study of the human subject from the realms afforded by IR approaches, old and new, towards several other disciplines and fields of study. These interdisciplinary directions will mostly be transdisciplinary in nature. We are, hence, dealing with approaches wherein existing disciplinary boundaries are challenged by means of applying or transferring theories or other imports from other disciplines to IR. In some cases the option of merging IR with one or more disciplines remains a theoretical possibility that to date, however, has not been fully implemented, unless we take political psychology as an example (see Chapter 2). Some of the interdisciplinary directions to be considered will tell us more about representatives of elite groups such as foreign policy decision-makers and other states-people; in a more analytical sense some

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will situate human subjects in the role of individuals, reflecting on the bifurcated role of citizens as both anchors of the states-system and as critics of existing forms of international conduct; some will, instead, focus on inter-human ties across various scales, also including people’s everyday routines; and some will introduce subject positions such as those of refugees, displaced people, or women in relation to men, who, in those capacities help to maintain international practices of power. Human subjects, hence, occupy very diverse places and are invested with very different powers. In the following section, in order to show the range of opinion within IR, I will briefly reflect on some key markers in the debate on the place of the human subject in it. Then I will move on to introduce three relatively coherent interdisciplinary research programmes and two allegedly less coherent, but nevertheless pertinent, research directions. Each of these retains a meaningful connection to IR while simultaneously better incorporating the human subject into the picture and, as such, contributing to the wider field of international studies. Naturally, only some of the most obvious programmes and research directions can be covered here. First, in terms of case selection, reasonable representation is ensured by demonstrating that suitable starting points in IR – which would enable the incorporation of the human subject – range across nearly the whole spectrum of IR’s main theoretical orientations. Of these, realism, liberalism, the English school, and the more ‘reflectivist’ camp – the possibilities afforded by post-colonialism and feminism – will be considered.2 To systematically detect the differences among them, I will compare them according to their ontological, epistemological and normative premises, with the most important weight assigned to ontology. However, for each case the discussion will have to be limited to a few key scholars whose work best offers ‘positive heuristics’ for making interdisciplinary linkages capable of generating theoretical and/or empirical progress – that is, new content in the study of the human subject (see Chapter 3). Second, interdisciplinary literatures and perspectives extending these grand theoretical orientations towards the better operationalizable middle-range level are found among each of the three big cultures of knowledge production – the (natural) sciences, social sciences and the humanities (see Kagan, 2009). Third, in the concluding section I will discuss how the programmes and research directions so located open up the various aspects of the international.

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The international relations debate on the human subject In IR most of the debate on the human subject is historically tied to the level-of-analysis debate that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Initially, Kenneth Waltz (1954) mentioned the individual as ‘the first image’ of international politics alongside states and the international system. Then David Singer (1961) omitted the first image when reconceptualizing Waltz’s state–system relationship in terms of a methodological choice between two levels of analysis – the international system and the national state. Further contributions to the debate revealed Singer’s confusion of the ‘level-of-analysis’ and ‘unit of analysis’ with each other, arguing that the level-of-analysis always includes two or more types of units interacting (Nurdusev, 1993). The human subject and his or her links to the state and state bureaucracies were also re-established as a relevant level-of-analysis after Singer’s omission of it. For some, it appeared as the primary level of analysis (Isaak, 1974). John Burton introduced a ‘cob-web’ model where ‘individuals’ and groups of ‘people’ were equally as useful to analyze as states to develop an accurate idea of the interactions constituting ‘world society’. Though he did not primarily frame his work as a contribution to the level-of-analysis debate, it implied that different levels of analysis can be looked, depending on what questions we are asking and what issue area those questions may concern (Burton, 1972, pp. 37–8). Overall, level-of-analysis has been a recurrent problem in IR in various ways – for example in the agent-structure debate that, together with sociological imports into the discipline, led to the birth of constructivism (e.g., Wendt, 1987). It is fair to say, however, that the individual level never realized its full potential in any of these debates. In this context Benjamin Solomon’s plea in 1997 for a return to the ‘first image’ stands out for its direct advocacy. He noted that the main theoretical orientations of IR at the time – realism and liberalism – both explain the destiny of humankind by means of ‘impersonal, indirect, under-the-surface, and inevitable trends or forces, benign or malign’ (Solomon, 1997, p. 249). Solomon wanted to help citizens to better understand their ability to influence the operation of those impersonal forces. This would entail nothing less than launching a global education project, a Herculean task in which peace organizations and movements had previously failed. But progress in such a task could help by creating some preconditions for new accommodative and cooperative interactions and transnational institutions. In this manner IR theory would also be geared to better understand the role that citizens play

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as anchors of the inter-state system. Overall, Solomon argued that an action programme of this kind would empower the global citizenry to change the system towards one that is more conducive to good life (ibid., pp. 249–55). Solomon’s proposal set human subjects and their interaction with other units as a partial level-of-analysis invested with causal and explanatory power, in largely the same fashion as in the original levelof-analysis debate in which the focus was on better explaining international outcomes such as war and conflict. Yet, in a spirit reminiscent of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, Solomon’s ultimate concern was to help us sharpen our awareness of what is going on around us and think of what we can do to alter those realities. In this sense Solomon’s message fits into the normative end of the possibilities of ‘humanizing’ IR explored here. A similar ethos is also to be found in the work of Ronnie Lipschutz (2001, p. 323), who in sketching a people-centred approach to global political economy asserts: ‘A theory of global politics that disregards the people that make up the global polity is, at best, an idealized fantasy and, at worst, an impoverished nightmare’. The same normative argument is defended on a more general level in the philosophy of Margaret Archer, and linked to an explanatory framework. Archer attempts to find a middle way between idealist subjectivism and extreme forms of objectivism by focusing on how ‘our human powers of reflexivity have causal efficacy – towards ourselves, our society and relations between them’ (2003, p. 9). She tries to ‘reclaim Humanity which is indeed at risk’, in particular in academia, by the ‘postmodern onslaught upon humanity’ (2000, pp. 2–3). Archer would be gravely concerned by the postmodern attack on the human subject in the emerging body of work on ‘post-human politics’. This is a transdisciplinary literature inspired by currents in social theory, philosophy, human geography, media studies, computer science and gender studies (see e.g., Badmington, 2004, p. 1344). One of its main theses is that the development of cyborgs, nanotechnologies, gene technologies, artificial intelligence and the like have demolished the differences between machines and humans (e.g., Gray, 2001). Another line of writing attacks the anthropocentric ‘humanist tradition’ which not only views the human as an essence or norm against which animals and machines are measured, but also sets humans as the origin and centre of history. Consequently, those (liberal) accounts – like Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future (2002) – defending humanity as a meaningful starting point are vigorously criticized in a poststructuralist deconstruction. Overall, the authors applying these perspectives

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on IR question the assumption of a universal, rational (and Western) human subject which, according to them, characterizes both realism and liberalism. One such analysis suggests that the unacknowledged possibility of ‘non-western and non-human centred approaches to international politics’ threatens to negate ‘pluralism under the name of human rationality’ (Oga, 2007). Between the normative extremes offered by Solomon and ‘posthuman politics’ we find other perspectives in which the focus on the human subject is more analytical. By far the biggest and most coherent body of such research is the already mentioned rich tradition of the ‘psychological school’, which seeks to explain international outcomes by drawing upon the wider field of political psychology (McDermott, 2004a, pp. 2–3). Today it conserves the research agenda that dates back to the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, the school has extended its scope to cognitive research on learning (e.g., Levy, 1994) and to the formal modelling of prospect theory (e.g., McDermott, 2004b; 2004c), as well as to the role of identity and emotions in foreign policy (e.g., Hymans, 2006). However, as stated, today the school’s relative standing in IR has declined notably compared to the cold war era of the 1960s, when it had a prominent status within the ‘second debate’, or as part of the behaviourist challenge to traditionalist IR theory centred around realism. The relative marginalization of the ‘psychological school’ in IR exemplifies an ignorance of human subjects, the study of which has, for example, been left to ‘psychologists’, historians and area studies specialists (Byman and Pollack, 2001, p. 110). It is also attributable to the structural turn in IR since the 1990s. This includes the challenge of constructivism – inspired by Giddens’s structuration theory –to structural neo-realism and the increasing popularity of often-likewise structural neo-Marxist perspectives and other grand theories such as that of the English school. At the same time, on the margins of IR several new approaches to human subjectivity are emerging, each of which draws upon different interdisciplinary combinations. These range from psychological perspectives to peace and conflict research (e.g., Blumberg, Hare and Costin, 2006), to new openings in the study of everyday life in world economy (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007), on to gender analyses of women subject-positions and resistance (Stern, 2005) and the subjective roots of geopolitical discourses (Aalto, 2003).3 Of these, peace research has partly formed its own transdiscipline. The study of world economy could be counted as a critical response to transdisciplinary international political economy (IPE) (see Chapters 2 and 4). While

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gender research on the subject is already substantial, subjectivity and geopolitics have not been a frequent combination in critical geopolitics (for an exception, see Pain and Smith, 2008), while this literature overall has remained closer to the geography discipline than to IR. The major point here is that none of these approaches seriously addresses IR’s ‘great debates’, around which the discipline is very much centred (Wæver, 2007; see Chapters 1 and 3). Consequently most IR theorists do not pay much attention to these approaches or to the balance of possibilities and drawbacks they manifest. To rectify this apparent marginality and maintain a maximum of contact with IR’s great debates without sacrificing conceptual innovation, a healthy balance is needed between mainstream and ‘reflectivist’ orientations as starting points for interdisciplinary enquiry. Briefly, that suitable starting point for making the human subject integral to interdisciplinary international studies can be found across nearly the entire spectrum of IR, means that the human subject should be far less marginal than the record of actual empirical research suggests! There is no single ‘right’ way of better incorporating the human subject into our research efforts. Rather, there are several ways, each of which is open to interdisciplinary work enriching our conceptualizations. This is, in fact, not an entirely unfamiliar situation in IR, as historically speaking its main theoretical orientations, as well as many of its middle and lower level theoretical constructs, are to a large extent imports from other disciplines (see Chapter 1). As Quincy Wright put it, IR ‘cannot be understood without considering the disciplines which have contributed to its creation, the subdivisions into which it is organised, and the objectives which it seeks’ (Wright, 1955, pp. 28–9). This also concerns IR’s most famous theoretical orientation, realism.

A realist programme extending towards the humanities Out of the main theoretical orientations of IR, realism is commonly associated with the long tradition of political theory, starting with Thucydides, leading to Hobbes, and on to the present day – although these early writers never wrote of ‘IR’ (Schmidt, 2002, p. 7). Nevertheless, among IR’s orientations, realism is a relatively coherent, albeit multifaceted, theory of fundamental questions about the problems of war and peace among states – with a pessimistic and prudential dominating account (Elman, 2007). Realism is in principle a good candidate to qualify as a scientific research programme in a modified Lakatosian

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sense (Lakatos, 1970; see Chapter 3). Nevertheless, judged on its success as such a programme dissolves into the question of which realism is at issue. Some doubt whether Waltz’s neo-realism (1979) constitutes a progressive research programme, or indeed a programme at all, given its rigidity with regard to incorporating any new elements alongside its system-centric focus. Experts also disagree on whether neoclassical realism is a progressive or degenerative programme (see Harrison, 2003, pp. 357–8). But when speaking of a promising realist programme for including the human subject, a strong start is available in Hans Morgenthau’s classical realism.4 Morgenthau is often associated with the ‘disciplining’ move of IR in the 1950s. Yet, as argued in this book, his work contains unequivocal interdisciplinary influences as well (see Chapter 1). The second principle in his Politics among Nations (1985, p. 5) asserts that a realist theory of international politics will ‘guard against two popular fallacies: the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences’. Morgenthau claims that motives are the ‘most illusive of psychological data’ and that the good intentions of statesmen do not necessarily lead to good outcomes. For this reason political theory must judge, not motives, but the ‘political qualities of intellect, will and action’. Here, Morgenthau opens the door to what became the ‘psychological school of IR’ by saying that deviations from the rational conduct of foreign policy and diplomacy may, in fact, form a coherent system of irrationality from which the study may open up space for a theory of its own (pp. 5–10).5 From here, his theory goes on to elaborate issues such as the qualities of statesmanship, the role of citizens in the form of perceptions of personal insecurity, the assumption of a ‘minimum’ of psychological unity of the world, and consideration for the role of morality in international politics and world public opinion – all of them alongside a mostly state-centric agenda. As far as the human subject is concerned, Morgenthau’s realist ontology refers chiefly to statesmen and other elite groups. They have a fixed ‘human nature’ characterized by aggression; a drive for power; fear; and rationality (Crawford, 2009, pp. 271–2).6 Yet, mass psychology and the role of public opinion are accounted for in backing, or eroding, the state’s foreign policy. However, Morgenthau ultimately deems world public opinion and moral considerations, as they operated in his time, unlikely to ‘keep the struggle for power [among states] indefinitely within peaceful bounds’ (p. 27). In epistemological terms, Morgenthau’s realism is, perhaps, best deemed ultimately traditionalist. He originally came from the German

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Verstehen tradition. Yet, in his early work he also toyed with positivism, before denouncing science and positivism altogether in the context of IR in his The Scientific Man and Power Politics in 1946. In his later work he repeatedly referred to the search for laws, but by this he meant, for example, the biological laws that governed international politics, not a need to make IR ‘scientific’ (Wight, 2002, pp. 27–8). According to one interpretation, this was his way of accepting the pressures of the time for the importance of attempting to explain cold war politics that he encountered upon emigrating to the US (see Neumann and Sending, 2007, p. 684; cf., Guzzini, 1998). In Morgenthau’s view, IR has to cope with uncertainty, and with the impossibility of making exact predictions. This led him to conclude that the best one can do is to study the fundamental patterns of history, which reveal the correlations between past and present arising from the perennial quality of human nature (p. 19). On this basis, in its foundations the normative approach of this programme represents a psychoanalytical effort to control the powerseeking aggression of human nature. State leaders need to be educated by analysts to act ‘prudently’. Wise leaders must skilfully exploit the balance of power mechanism to promote aspirations for peace. Diplomacy and international law help further in channelling the balance of power to constrain the use of violence and threat of war, and do so much more than do abstract or universal moral principles (pp. 11–12; 25–7; see also Harle, 1999: Korhonen, 1983). With his focus on statesmanship and prudence, Morgenthau assigns diplomacy a very central role in balance of power politics. He does not merely examine diplomacy in a narrow sense of looking for applied knowledge of the ‘right’ conduct of professional diplomats vis-à-vis one another in the midst of the historically specific circumstances of the system of states. He is profoundly informed on the historical context of the European states-system, particularly Bismarck’s Germany (see Chapter 1), and of Bismarck’s capacity to master the ills of human nature. Morgenthau’s account of foreign policy is built on the history of diplomacy, and he shows interest in speculating on what diplomats might have to say about, and how they view and judge, international relations (see Sharp, 2009, pp. 7; 53; 59). This all suggests that Morgenthau’s realism includes strong positive heuristics vis-à-vis the humanist tradition of diplomatic history. Henry Kissinger, a controversial figure but nevertheless a classic in this field, once commented: ‘As a professor, I tended to think of history run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make’ (Isaacson, 1992; cited in Byman and Pollack, 2001, p. 108). Kissinger

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aptly summarizes the challenge of bringing diplomacy to the realm of academic study: Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them. And there is a vast difference between the perspective of an analyst and that of a statesman. . . . The analyst has available to him all of the facts; he will be judged on his intellectual power. The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time that he is making them; he will be judged by history on the basis of how wisely he managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how well he preserves the peace. That is why examining how statesmen have dealt with the problem of world order – what worked or failed and why – is not the end of understanding contemporary diplomacy, though it may be its beginning. (Kissinger, 1994, pp. 27–8) Kissinger also somewhat tacitly acknowledges the links between classical realist tenets and diplomatic history in his commentary on the future course of his own country’s foreign policy: ‘In the twenty-first century, America, like other nations, must learn to navigate between necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen’ (p. 812; emphases added). To summarize, Morgenthau’s realism is indeed compatible with diplomatic history: (a) when it comes to ontology, diplomatic history, just like realism, concentrates on elites, but can also accommodate the state leaders’ needs to cope with peer group pressures as well as public opinion. The interdisciplinary value added is that diplomatic history provides a more personal touch to the analysis, making it easier to comprehend the meaningfulness and appearance of policy choices available in the historical situation in which the decision-makers found themselves. Realism, for its part, can offer a more abstract framework within which to situate idiosyncratic diplomatic histories. In terms of epistemology, (b) diplomatic history relies on traditionalism, which broadly speaking is compatible with Morgenthau’s realism. In the normative sense, (c) diplomatic history concentrates naturally on negotiation and consultation as the chief tools by which to prudentially address questions of peace and war, which are of paramount concern to realism. Alongside this realist research programme extending towards diplomatic history in the humanities, it would also be possible to construct a programme extending towards the (natural) sciences. This would push Morgenthau’s psychological and psychoanalytic agenda further

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by drawing conceptual tools from neurobiology (see Crawford, 2009, pp. 278–9). Such a science-oriented programme can also be sketched from a liberal perspective.

Liberal research programme extending towards the (natural) sciences The ideational grounding of liberalism is diverse, but much of it culminates in the Kantian copresence of self-interest and the capacity for moral thought and reason (MacMillan, 2007, pp. 21–3). Liberalism includes classical variants as evinced in Adam Smith’s work accentuating the role of trade in pacifying domestic and international relations combined with political freedoms; and ordoliberal variants bringing in the state more powerfully. Today, on the most general level, liberalism can be taken as paradigmatic research programme, even though it actually covers several theories that examine cooperation, interdependence and institutions among states. Two main directions can be noted, while others are possible (see Chapter 3). First, at the structural level, neoliberal theories explain cooperation in international organizations and regimes by referring to economic rationalities (Martin, 2007). Second, at the lower levels, we have pluralist ‘second-image’ models of how ideas, sectoral interests and other domestic processes impact states’ foreign policies (Panke and Risse, 2007). Within liberalism as broadly understood, James Rosenau’s ‘post-international’ framework as expressed in his Turbulence in World Politics (1990) offers probably the most wide-ranging and comprehensive grand level framework wherein the human subject has a strong role.7 Rosenau offers a complete research programme for studying the ‘micro level of individuals’, focusing on learning, analytic skills, cognitive maps, role scenarios, cathectic capabilities, compliance orientations, legitimacy sentiments, political loyalties and locus of control (Rosenau, 1990, pp. 210–11). Changes within these variables are interlinked with processes on all other levels of analysis and ultimately with the transformations or ‘turbulence’ that Rosenau detects in global politics. In other words, Rosenau treats human subjects as highly reflective individuals within a distinctively ‘post-international’ research programme geared at global level analysis. Ontologically, Rosenau’s framework covers individuals equally as decision-makers and citizens. According to him, in the post-industrial era, ‘like the citizen, the official has become a battlefield on which the conflicts that constitute the global agenda at any moment in time are

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played out’ (p. 214). For this reason Rosenau approaches citizens and practitioners as ‘composite of identifiable and competing roles’, dividing them into their analytical parts rather than taking each of them as an entity. Yet, he allows for both rational calculations and subconscious predispositions. Epistemologically, Rosenau’s drive for studying the causes of change in global politics leads him to caution against philosophical fixations. We should just boldly go and theorize the puzzles and actual developments – if needed, without first consulting other relevant theories (Rosenau, 1996, pp. 309–16). Speaking of observables, causes and theory development, Rosenau at this point could easily be taken as a positivist, but not necessarily as of a very orthodox type. After all, he was initially an empiricist prior to becoming an advocate of science opposed to relativism (Mansbach, 2000, pp. 8–12). The decidedly analytical nature of Rosenau’s programme serves to a degree to hide his precise normative aims. These do not resemble the (bourgeois) concept of the progress of classical liberalism; he clearly wants to analyse the world for our sake rather than for the sake of mere theory development. It could be suggested that Rosenau’s introduction of the micro level of individuals mostly serves the analytical purpose of helping to better explain macro-level change, which in turn can help us to better explain our own place in the midst of those changes. If this is correct, such an aim is not very far from the scientific nature of the ‘psychological school’ of IR and its work on the psychology of decision-making. Rosenau’s approach thus offers strong positive heuristics for situating the individual as a decision-maker in the web of psychological and bureaucratic influences. For their part, the natural science–oriented psychological literatures on operational code, belief systems, political personality and learning provide conceptual focus points for a better grasp of the psychological basis of individual perceptions, preference formation, framing and other cognitions underlying individual choices and decision-making. In this way Rosenau’s individuals can be situated into a richer theoretical perspective operationalizable at the middlerange level of theorizing (see also McDermott, 2004a, pp. 268–9). The proximity of Rosenau’s liberal programme to the ‘psychological school’ is evident in how the research focus of Robert Jervis has evolved since the publication of his classic work of the ‘psychological school’ (1976): This world will be more structurally and cognitively complex than the previous era, will call for more value trade-offs, and will require greater tolerance for ambiguity. Beliefs about security and the causes

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of war will also be important. The psychological biases of risk aversion, the assimilation of evidence to fit beliefs, and the propensity to see what one needs to see will operate strongly. Because the external environment is less compelling than it was, the range of choice and role for values will be increased. (Jervis, 1994, p. 769) Jervis also notes further important aspects of compatibility: Students of cognitive psychology have always argued that what people believe plays an important role in world politics. To put it in the ‘levels of analysis’ framework viewed by students of international politics, we must examine national decision-making; domestic politics and the state’s external environment, although important, rarely fully determined the state’s policy. (p. 772) In summary, there is (a) sufficient ontological compatibility as both Rosenau’s liberal pluralism and the ‘psychological school’ deem cognitions and emotions important. For Rosenau, emotions refer to ‘cathectic capabilities’ and Jervis speaks of ‘empathy’ (p. 773). Bueno de Mesquita and McDermott (see McDermott, 2004b, p. 155) have also introduced emotions into the study of decision-making. Moreover, both literatures seem to allow some place for elites and the broader publics alike, even though the latter remains a less exploited possibility in political psychology. (b) In terms of epistemology, the positivist inclinations of liberalism pose no problem for the ‘psychological school’, which in the past decade and a half has developed an even sharper (natural) ‘scientific’ or formal edge than it had in the cold war era, namely prospect theory. This literature takes stock of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, as well as of Amos Tversky’s assertions of humans being loss averse in decisionmaking under conditions of risk and, therefore, often operating from a status quo perspective. The prospect theory approach encompasses a two-part research agenda: framing (how prospects are presented) and evaluation (how choices are made vis-à-vis gains/losses). In the (c) normative sense, both literatures try to better elucidate human conduct in a complex environment. Alas, prospect theory has moved the ‘psychological school’ in a highly abstract direction wherein the rationality of the individual in pondering choices is modelled in a context remote from many concrete life situations. Yet, with this move we gain a highly coherent research programme offering considerable positive heuristics in the directions of cognitive science, social psychology, game theory and microeconomics, organization theory and

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even evolutionary biology. Hence, this programme extends the scope of international studies as close to natural sciences as is practically possible. A wider social scientific programme can, for its part, be approached from the perspective of the English school.

The English school programme extended towards the social sciences The English school has an open-ended character which makes it a very potent platform for interdisciplinary work. This is evident in its origins in no less than three distinct traditions of political theory: realist/Hobbesian, rationalist/Grotian and revolutionist/Kantian thinking (Bellamy, 2007, p. 78). These traditions are reflected in the school’s conceptual triad of international system, international society and world society, all of which represent different aspects of the international. Owing to this richness the English school offers a promising platform for building interdisciplinary research programmes (see Chapter 4). Within the English school’s conceptual triad, the human subject appears alongside transnational actors within the strongly normative and political theory influenced world society tradition. This tradition also offers a take on the human subject very different from the realist and liberal programmes discussed above. World society is, however, an amorphous and under-theorized realm of the school. This is amply apparent in Barry Buzan’s seminal treatise From International to World Society? (2004). Despite its name, the book practically gives up the concept of world society while re-theorizing it. First, Buzan introduces the new terms of ‘interhuman’ and transnational’ domains or societies, in which ‘individuals’, and companies as well as other transnational actors are respectively situated. Interhuman society represents a mechanism, or a web, of ties among people which together with transnational society may either support or erode inter-state society. Second, borrowing from Wendt, Buzan also introduces an indirect mechanism by which interhuman ties come into play. He makes distinctions among three different mechanisms which help to keep inter-state society together: coercion, calculation and belief. Of these, the belief mechanism is something which inevitably opens up his framework to the worlds of human subjects as, for Buzan, belief in the righteousness of the arrangement in question represents the strongest binding mechanism (pp. 118–38). Inter-state society, however, remains primary in Buzan’s ontology. Interhuman and transnational societies provide the cohesive force or, alternatively, the eroding mechanism of inter-state society. In other

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words, human subjects and other actors have less inherent ontological currency than do states. For Buzan, the belief mechanism upholding inter-state society also has a functional role instead of possessing a primary ontological status of its own. Human subjects remain vaguely conceptualized as some sort of individuals or ‘people’.8 In epistemological terms, Buzan’s English school leaves room to move in the directions of traditionalism, mild rationalism and post-positivism alike. Normatively, Buzan’s structural rebuilding of the English school is mostly an analytical treatise on the evolution of inter-state society. Overall, with regard to the incorporation of the human subject, Buzan’s ES is rich on ‘positive heuristics’ but is more of a start that leaves us on a fairly general level. A considerable degree of ambiguity remains in relation to the direction middle-range approaches should take and the way they should be operationalized if the possibilities opened up vis-à-vis the human subject are to be utilized and turned into empirical research. Considering the options available, one is struck by how Buzan’s English school breaks with the humanist and historical orientation of the school’s classics and adopts a self-consciously social scientific posture in utilizing sociological literature and making some moves towards the study of globalization and transdisciplinary IPE. In particular, Buzan takes the first steps towards theorizing the market institution in international society, and to counter the scant attention paid to (the) economy by the school’s founding fathers and contemporary theorists alike. With his main concern remaining inter-state society, he elects to bypass the role of human subjects as consumers and actors within the international political economy where they mix and mingle with states and transnational actors. Human subjects as economic actors shaping the market institution can be usefully approached through John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke’s (2007) everyday international political economy (EIPE). This is a holistic approach combining all levels of analysis, just as does Buzan’s ES. By bringing in economics and individual actors simultaneously, EIPE helps us to unpack important aspects of Buzan’s discussion of the relationship between transnational and interhuman societies. It gets us beyond conventional IPE work, which has focused on hegemony, trade and financial flows and international regulatory institutions at the international level. This has included, for example, Hobbesian hegemonic stability theory, Lockean neoliberal institutionalism, or regime theory, and most recently, Kantian analysis of the ways in which states are ‘socialised into deep cooperation within an increasingly tight international society’ (pp. 5–6). However, EIPE rather attempts to

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analyse how our everyday actions can transform world economy – how the weak, including individuals and meso-groupings and larger-scale aggregations, affect and respond to the dominant patterns, and how their co-constitution can generate global change. The human faces now emerging with the EIPE perspective are very different from the diplomats, decision-makers and ‘individual citizens’ of the realist and liberal programmes, and push the English school’s vague conceptualization of the human subject in a more particular direction, where a deep lacuna has so far prevailed. The subjects of EIPE include various non-elite groups and also non-Western peoples, for example peasants and their relationship to the Zapatista liberation army in Mexico; migrant labourers organizing themselves into transnational advocacy networks and building large business empires in Asia; small investors for whom pension investment decisions have been privatized in the US and UK, and the consequent impact of their investments on global markets; trade union activists resisting global capitalism; and other representatives of low-income groups.9 Their actions are defined as: acts by those who are subordinate within a broader power relationship but, whether through negotiation, resistance or non-resistance, either incrementally or suddenly, shape, constitute and transform the political and economic environment around and beyond them. (pp. 15–16) The EIPE framework hence helps to sharpen the understanding of the evolution of the market institution opened up for examination in the new structural English school work of Buzan by focusing on the everyday level actions of individuals in various locales. The mutual compatibilities are sufficient. At the (a) ontological level, Buzan accentuates how international societies are often regionally based and how important regional differences can be discerned in the way in which societies are formed and internalized across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and so forth. EIPE deepens the analysis vis-à-vis the internalization aspects and adds to that various techniques of bottom-up change: defiance (overt resistance), mimetic challenge (covert resistance whereby agents appeal to the normative discourse of the dominant in order to work their own way); hybridised mimicry (how agents filter dominant normative discourses through their own cultural lenses, thereby producing hybridized normative orders), and axiorationality (selecting new behavioural patterns that meet actors’ welfare-enhancing

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interests, including economic rationality and social well-being). (b) Epistemologically, the EIPE framework is compatible with the English school in attempting to balance between rationalism and post-positivism (pp. 4-5; 8–9). (c) Normatively, EIPE is more or less compatible with the revolutionist element of the English school and adds to it a post-Marxian take.

Reflectivist research directions extending towards the humanities To add to the places found for the human subject by proceeding from the main orientations of IR, it will be useful to consider the highly diverse, albeit internally less coherent, ‘reflectivist’ theoretical orientations of IR. Of these highly diverse approaches, post-colonialism and feminism particularly stand out as theoretically interesting and sizable enough literatures for making further interdisciplinary inroads better incorporating the human subject into international studies. Both of these literatures are in themselves already wide, and self-consciously and explicitly transdisciplinary. They cross several disciplinary boundaries and are not predominantly evinced as theoretical orientations of only IR, unlike realism, liberalism and the English school. This wide-ranging transdisciplinary character of these two literatures also obviates the need to seek any definite interdisciplinary extensions to the research directions they offer for enriching our understanding of the human subject in international studies. Concomitantly, the wideranging character means they do not offer research programmes as coherent as those of mainstream theoretical orientations. Instead, they are better characterized as loose approaches posing several puzzle-sets which may not necessarily be theoretically determined but ‘call upon the scholar to expand the range of information necessary to provide a convincing answer to a puzzle’ (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007 p. 3; see Chapter 3). Of the two, post-colonialism originates in literary and cultural studies. In the context of IR, post-colonialism attempts to change the Westerncentric character of the discipline towards acknowledging the power relationships that link the North and South together in both colonial and post-colonial contexts. Post-colonialism directs attention towards people, identities and resistance in those contexts, and examines the workings of power as a relational force creating subjectivities. Subjects are seen as being influenced by colonial experiences that continue today in various contexts ranging from non-West to West, sometimes

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resulting in hybrid identities mixing traditional and modern capitalist psychological and cultural experiences. The marginalized or subaltern subjects studied by post-colonialism can also resist becoming re-colonized into the western modernity of the ‘colonizer’, developing new cultural forms (Abrahamsen, 2007, pp. 111–19). The faces of the human subject emerging from this literature are not those of the decision-making elites or highly individuated citizens of the realist and liberal programmes, but are the faces of those who may be directly affected by their decisions, wealth and power – like migrants, refugees, detained or ‘encamped’ asylum-seekers, and freedom fighters or other campaigners in West and non-West. Some of these faces, however, do bear some resemblance to the capable grassroots and meso-level actors of EIPE. Post-colonialism mainly examines culturally formed subjects who may have a claim to a certain identity, or who may be approached as having such a claim. In this sense, faith is invested in the subject and in his or her agency. EIPE’s subjects, for their part, are purposive and capable economic agents working their way from bottom-up positions. Both types possess power and are possible agents of change. By contrast, a far more pessimistic take on subject roles, such as refugees, is present in works inspired by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s bio-politics, in which the body is seen as always caught by the deployment of power, ending up as a relatively powerless field of play (for a review, see Pehkonen and Puumala, 2010, p. 52). In these conceptualizations the subject in fact becomes ‘abject’ with little further role than to suffer. It is dissolved into a mere playground of discursive power structures, at worst making the humankind assemblage of disembodied textualism where humans are lost and textual representations reign supreme (Archer, 2000, p. 2).10 This image approximates the fairly depressing portrayal given by ‘post-human international politics’ of ourselves, our capacities and wills. Feminism extends the list of places available for the human subject even further from the picture provided by post-colonialism. It includes Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) accounts of women in the international sex industry, women as textile workers in the international political economy, and in domestic service as wives of diplomats and soldiers on military bases. These roles do pertain to inter-state relations and its institutions, such as war and diplomacy, but rather than examining them from the top-down perspective of elites, the view is as those who maintain the society and its institutions. A case in point is the Filipino domestic workers and nannies around the world who contribute a

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sizable part of the national economy by sending their earnings back home (see Griffiths et al., 2009, pp. 288–92). Overall, these faces of women subjects vary from targets of control to bottom-up agents of international society, and on to resistant subjects thwarting the efforts of would-be manipulators to control their agency (Enloe, 2007, p. 102). A further example of a feminist research focus examines human subjects not just as ‘soldiers’ but as male soldiers and male peacekeepers – a perspective that has raised issues of HIV/AIDS, escalation of prostitution and associated human trafficking around the sites of their deployment (Whitward, 2004). In summary, the faces of the human subject and the research directions responsible for revealing them are so multifarious in these two literatures that (a) at the ontological level, we may in a general sense only speak of an image of a disadvantaged subject that is most commonly present, one which may not enjoy full citizen or civic rights, and which at its weakest is an ‘abject’; or which at best is a conscious, if underprivileged, agent of social and political change. (b) At the epistemological level, a variety of post-positivist perspectives dominates, even though elements of more modern critical theory are also evident. Finally, (c) in the normative sense there is a clear aim to reveal subjugated positions and promote their empowerment. Alas, when this is seen, somewhat nihilistically, as hopeless, the aim is to criticize those in full political power for failing to acknowledge the face of human suffering and ‘human wrongs’ (see Booth, 1995).

Conclusion The several faces and places of the human subject explored in this chapter represent the full spectrum of possible interdisciplinary research programmes and directions available for ‘humanizing’ international studies. Those options include variants that represent relatively comfortable extensions of the agenda of mainstream IR orientations, even for hard-core IR scholars, and those who challenge the ways in which we have traditionally viewed IR as well as the wider field of international studies. Several further avenues naturally remain within that wide spectrum. What we have gained by this discussion of the interdisciplinary research programmes and research directions incorporating the human subject is a perspective on the various aspects of the international, wherein we and our fellow human beings have a role. In short, international studies painting images of international interaction without

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noting how the very constitution of the international would never have been possible without human beings, would be a very strange endeavour, both in the academic and normative sense. Given this causalanalytic and normative role of human beings it would be odd to now exclude ourselves from the analyses. The aspects of the international charted in this chapter cover the entire spectrum from the familiar and dominant image of inter-state relations – now examined from the decision-makers’ point of view – to inter-bureaucratic and interhuman ties at the level of ‘inter–psychological’ or ‘social-psychological’ encounters, clashes and outcomes. Postcolonial and many other forms of identity politics, and critical analyses of the various ‘wrongs’ in interhuman relations and of how these could possibly be remedied, are part of the plethora of research foci opening up for interdisciplinary international studies (Table 7.1) In other words, some of the possibilities opening up when we examine the various aspects of the international from the point of view of the human subject merely add a transdisciplinary cutting-edge serving the analytical goals of a fairly traditional IR agenda. Further possibilities are evident in literatures that from the very start have a transdisciplinary agenda, and which may be more or less relevant for our understandings of the international. The question is not how to judge between them, but for what purposes these options should be used. Both analytical and normative purposes should have a legitimate place in interdisciplinary international studies incorporating the human subject into its research agenda. Finally, it could be noted that the bulk of the possibilities discussed stay at the fairly detached academic level even when discussing issues and processes directly relating to ourselves. Practical relevance, when included, ranges from policy relevance to decision-makers to wider societal relevance and criticism, but only rarely are these programmes and directions first and foremost action-oriented in the political sense. Yet, they each promise ‘positive heuristics’ whereby international studies can be enriched theoretically and empirically. In stark contrast to the bulk of the approaches discussed here, ‘post-human international politics’ would instead offer a predominantly ‘negative heuristics’ for the study of the human subject as human. The point may sound like a trivial reminder of the very purposes of that literature, but at the same time it accentuates how keeping interdisciplinary international studies broad presupposes simultaneous choices in forming pertinent clusters of research that serve our purposes and address research questions, including our normative premises.

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Ontology

Elites; public opinion as mass psychology

Elites and individual citizens as both cognate and emotional

Interhuman ties, beliefs and ‘bottom-up’ actions in upholding, eroding and changing interstate society and global economy

Disadvantaged subjects in West and non-West; hybrid and ‘abject’ identities; agents of change

Realism (Morgenthau + diplomatic history)

Liberalism (Rosenau + ‘psychological school’)

English school (Buzan and Linklater + EIPE)

Reflectivism (Postcolonialism and feminism)

Post-positivism and critical theory

Traditionalism/ post-positivism, with possibility for (neo-Marxist) critical theory

Positivism with creative, unorthodox theorizing

Traditionalism with mild positivism (search for recurring patterns)

Epistemology

Research programmes and directions for studying the human subject

Programme/research direction

Table 7.1

Reveal inequalities in empowerment of human subjects and change realities to better serve the needs of marginalized

Evolution and shaping of international society and its constituent state units to better serve human collectives

Analyzing complexity for our own good

Constraining violence and threat of war through diplomacy, etc.

Normativity

Interhuman

Interhuman

Inter-state, interbureaucratic struggle; interhuman; inter/ social-psychological

Inter-state

Aspect of the ‘international’

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Notes 1. For illuminating feedback, which I have mostly incorporated and partly resisted, I wish to thank in particular Stefano Guzzini, Petr Drulak, Tuomas Forsberg, Juha Vuori, Tarja Väyrynen and my co-editors, Vilho Harle and Sami Moisio. 2. Constructivism, notably, does not provide a fruitful starting point owing to its lack of any interest in, or ‘positive heuristics’ for, incorporating the human subject: ‘because of it roots in historical sociology, constructivism is a curious beast: an interactionist paradigm in a psychological vacuum’ (Lebow, 2008, p. 16; cf., Checkel, 1998; Kowert and Legro, 1996). To date only some few models attempting to redirect constructivism on this score have been proposed (e.g., Aalto, 2003, ch. 2). 3. The study of human security could be mentioned, but for example a flagship publication bearing the phrase ‘the safety of people’ is mostly silent on people and their ‘bottom-up’ concerns, and is instead centred on the political theory and ethics of security and war and on institutions relevant for human conduct such as diplomacy, self-determination, intervention and the like (see Bain, 2006). 4. Some further possibilities are available in Raymond Aron’s production that also reserves a prominent role for diplomacy conducted by states-people and prudence as their best ethical standard (see Aron, 2003 [1996]). 5. This potential remains unexplored, for example, in the work of McDermott (2004a, p. 7), according to whom, for Morgenthau, ‘individuals mostly do not matter in the outcome of political events’. 6. The same assumption on human nature can allegedly be found in Waltz’s neo-realism, even though his variant is a structural theory dismissive of human subjects (see Crawford, 2009). 7. Here, I bypass Rosenau’s earlier state-centrism and tendency to merely treat individuals as complexes of roles and statuses, while also recognizing how my categorization of his work under liberalism is, so to speak, liberal, for an author who defies categories (see Mansbach, 2000, pp. 8–10). 8. This can be contrasted with the more normative conceptualization of Andrew Linklater, who probes the possibilities of states becoming ‘international good citizens’, acting to ‘reduce the harm done to individual citizens located in separate communities’. In this way, Linklater primarily treats human subjects as citizens. At the same time the political means, mentioned by Linklater, to promote the cause of humans-as-citizens are located in the inter-state domain. In particular, these means include the possibility of formulating a foreign policy that would promote the unity of humankind while concomitantly maintaining international order (Linklater and Suganami, 2006, pp. 8; 224–32). In short, while for Buzan individuals perform a function vis-à-vis state-based society, for Linklater the society of states and the state actors therein are asked to perform a function for citizens. The actual faces offered for the human subject range from somewhat ambiguous ideas of humankind to groups of ‘people’ and citizens. 9. In terms of the types of the groups of human subjects EIPE takes up, it has some affinities with the research in development studies that some two decades ago started exploring the microeconomic and microsocial impacts

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of development cooperation and assistance. However, EIPE has a more pronounced, critical focus on resistance and bottom-up change. 10. The literature on body-politics is influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (e.g., 1980), who, in contrast to Agamben’s pessimistic take on the human subject, reserves more scope for resistance.

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McDermott, R. (2004a) Political Psychology in International Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). McDermott, R. (2004b) ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Political Psychology, 25(2): 147–62. McDermott, R. (2004c) ‘Prospect Theory in Political Science: Gains and Losses From the First Decade’, Political Psychology, 25(2): 289–312. MacMillan, J. (2007) ‘Liberal Internationalism’ in M. Griffiths (ed.) International Relations Theory for the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction (London: Routledge). Moran, J. (2002) Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge). Morgenthau, H.J. and K.W. Thompson (1985) Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Neumann, I.B. and O.J. Sending (2007) ‘ “The International” as Governmentality’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(3): 677–701. Oga, T. (2007) ‘Universal World, Pluriversal Globe: the Kyoto School, PostMarxism and Post-(Human) International Politics’, paper presented in the ISA annual conference, 28 February 2007, Chicago. Pain, R. and S.J. Smith (eds) (2008) Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life (Aldershot: Ashgate). Panke, D. and T. Risse (2007) ‘Liberalism’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pehkonen, S. and E. Puumala (2010) ‘Corporeal Geographies between Politics and the Political: Failed Asylum Seekers Moving from Body Politics to Bodyspaces’, International Political Sociology, 4(1): 50–65. Rosenau, J.N. (1990) Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf). Rosenau, J.N. (1996) ‘Probing Puzzles Persistently: A Desirable But Improbable Future for IR Theory’ in S. Smith, K. Booth and M. Zalewski (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schmidt, B.C. (2002) ‘On the History and Historiography of International Relations’ in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations (London: SAGE). Sharp, P. (2009) Diplomatic Theory of International Relations. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Singer, D.J. (1961) ‘The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations’, World Politics, 14(1): 77–92. Solomon, B. (1997) ‘Return to the First Image’, Journal of Peace Research, 34(3): 249–55. Stern, M. (2005) Naming Security – Constructing Identity: ‘Mayan-Women in Guatemala on the Eve of ‘Peace’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Waltz, K. (1954) Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press). Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill). Wæver, O. (2007) ‘Still a Discipline after All These Debates?’ in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wendt, A. (1987) ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, 41(3): 335–70.

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Whitward, S. (2004) Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping (Boulder: Lynne Rienner). Wight, C. (2002) ‘Philosophy of Social Science and International Relations’ in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations (London: SAGE). Wright, Q. (1955) The Study of International Relations (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts). Yurdusev, Y.N. (1993) ‘Level of Analysis and Unit of Analysis: A Case for Distinction’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 22(1): 77–88.

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Part III Concepts

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8 Power in International Relations: An Interdisciplinary Perspective Tuomas Forsberg

Introduction Power has traditionally been an extremely important notion in the study of international relations. In particular, the realist school of thought has built around it the whole theory of international relations. Hans Morgenthau (1979 [1948]) wanted to define the study of international politics through interests defined in terms of power. For Kenneth Waltz (1979), distribution of power was the key variable in determining the nature of an international system. John Mearsheimer (2001) regards power as the currency of great-power politics. Power is pivotal, however, not only for realist scholars; all IR theories have to deal with the concept. As Stefano Guzzini (2005) has noted, power is too important a concept to be left to the realists. All major IR theories have an built-in idea of power, whether explicit or not. Liberals understand power in terms of trade, or soft power; Marxists in terms of production forces and capital; constructivists in terms of norms; and post-structuralists in terms of discourses – at least, these descriptions are how the standard and somewhat stereotypical accounts of these approaches would like to have it. The very plethora of approaches to power tells us that, in IR, there is no single notion of power on which the discipline would converge. This further underlines the fact that power is a very difficult concept to define and pin down. It may, therefore, be questionable whether there is any room for an interdisciplinary approach to power reflecting the idea of international studies (IS) and whether such an approach would bring any added value to the present understanding(s) of power in IR. The existing plurality of IR theories has not enhanced the level of power analysis in world politics. By contrast, Janice Bially Mattern (2008) has argued that 207

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‘international relations scholars have responded to the breadth of the discipline by narrowing both their views on power and their empirical, methodological, and normative schemas’. Influences from other disciplines have been marginal, for example, in Felix Berenskoetter’s (2007, p. 3) view recent key texts on power in the study of IR do not discuss the power debates in social and political theory. Yet, power is a multifaceted concept and, hence, merits interdisciplinary analysis. Though realists and many others have claimed that power is a concept primarily pertaining to, and defining, political science, it is also a very important concept for many other disciplines. Exactly because the concept of power is deemed so central, IR scholars could pay some more attention to studies of power in other disciplines. Apart from political science in general, power has been a concept that has figured prominently in sociology, psychology, administrative science, history, geography and philosophy. To this list one can add at least linguistics, law, the arts and economics. And finally, of course, one should also remember the natural sciences, which are also concerned in various ways with power. Such a multidisciplinary understanding of power is the starting point of the 2008-launched Journal of Power, which could ultimately be a nodal point for neodisciplinary power studies (Haugaard and Malesevic, 2008). Against this background, this chapter asks whether an interdisciplinary approach reflecting the idea of IS can open up the concept of power in international relations; add some relevant insights to the current conceptual debates, theoretical models and applications of theories based power; and perhaps be able to sort out some of the current fragmentation and confusion related to the concept of power in IR. In particular, this chapter tries to encourage an analysis of power that could be based on an interdisciplinary taxonomy to be used in various social contexts. Such a taxonomy, and research based on it, would help us transcend the disciplinary barriers surrounding the study of international relations that prevent us from seeing relevant research in other fields. Before going into taxonomies, we begin with definitional and conceptual issues, since if different disciplines define power in incommensurable ways, then any interdisciplinary attempt to draw together studies on power would not only be too ambitious, but also essentially futile.

The concept of power It may be surprising how little attention such a basic notion as power really has received in the study of international relations, but conceptual

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analysis has never counted among the strengths of the discipline. In the absence of a common terminology, as David Baldwin (1989) notes, discussions about power are often marred by miscommunication. Berendskoetter (2007, p. 1) remarks that, despite paying attention to the constitution of the objects through language, ‘the linguistic turn in IR did not really spark much interest in debating “power” ’. Definitions of power are important because if one wants to theorize power, one needs to have a definition of power that is compatible with the theoretical perspective adopted. Moreover, it is also important to study the concept of power because any analysis of power would be irrelevant if it merely proclaimed its understanding of power without demonstrating its superiority over alternative definitions. It avails little if we just define power in one way, and on the basis of that definition discuss what power is and what it is not with no consensus on the justification or purpose of the initial definition. Power as a concept cannot simply be ignored or wished away. Some have suggested that we should reject the whole concept of ‘power’ in favour of notions such as ‘influence’ (Mueller, 1995, p. 7). Power, it is claimed, is too ambiguous or too closely associated with military uses of influence. Those who believe that military power has lost its effectiveness in contemporary world politics regard the concept of power as obsolete. If we reject realism, we should thus also reject the concept of power. Yet, there are differences between the concepts of ‘influence’ and ‘power’, which have nothing to do with the latter’s association with military force. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that substitute terms, such as ‘influence’, would be any less problematic. In other words, terminological choices are no substitute for conceptual arguments. There are good reasons why power is so persistent in political language. For a social scientist, the existence of confusing definitions of a concept should not be reason for its rejection. Rather, we should pursue more appropriate uses of it. What then remains more important is to challenge particular and distorted definitions of power, such as the view that power has ultimately to do with military power. Conceptual choices in IR would therefore benefit from philosophical and interdisciplinary meta-theoretical reflection. The concept of power is a shining example of how such reflection helps, since on closer inspection, it turns out that empiricist power analysis has not conceptualized power in a satisfactory way, and that some of the conceptual problems in the study of power can be overcome if we go beyond empiricist assumptions. In fact, an empiricist power analysis cannot come to terms with the lay definition of power (which is to regard power as

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the ability to affect), because it converts power either into observable resources or observable outcomes. Indeed, empiricists accounting for power have not been able to settle this definitional problem among themselves, although much of the power analysis in IR has dealt with whether we should understand power as resources or as outcomes (Hart, 1975). Some claim that power is ultimately about effects, hence, one should look at outcomes. Others claim that it is futile to look at outcomes because the exercise and possession of power are two different things. According to Waltz, power should be defined in terms of power resources. So cumbersome is this debate that authors can disagree over what most scholars agree on. Hence, Alan Lamborn (1991, p. 42) argues that ‘there has been a remarkably enduring and widely shared belief according to which the key to great-power status could be found in the relative scale of the financial and human resources available to central government’, whereas John Rothgeb (1993, p. 21) claims that ‘controlling other actors is a central theme in the definitions offered by a number of scholars’. This disagreement derives partly from the fact that many authors may use both definitions of power at the same time. Morgenthau (1979, p. 26) famously argued that ‘when we speak of power, we mean man’s control over the minds and actions of other men’, but he (1979, p. 102) also defined power in terms of its resource-like components. Waltz (1979, p. 191) criticized the outcome-oriented analysis of power by stating that ‘to define “power” as “cause” confuses process with outcome’. Yet, he (1979, p. 192) also offered the simple notion that ‘an agent is powerful to the extent that he affects others more than they affect him’. At some point, James Rosenau (1980), in turn, avoided the concept of power altogether and used ‘capabilities’ for resources and ‘control’ for outcomes. Although I will argue that this debate has been misplaced (Lukes, 2005), let me first note that different conceptualizations of power need not necessarily be considered a problem. Of course, people may use the concept of power differently and, hence, also define it differently. Conceptual borders are fluid and may change. How the term is then understood always depends on the context. There may be different ways of using the same concept, all of which are defensible. There may also be reasons for using the concept of power in various contexts with different meanings and, in fact, we often do so without major complications. Sometimes we may claim that power is close to domination, and sometimes that it is more like (legitimate) authority (Hindness, 1996). This partly explains why conceptual disputes are not likely to be settled. There are different meanings which exist latently in the concept of

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power in ordinary language and can be emphasized if needed. As with many other concepts, power is cluster-like. It has a number of differing connotations, which are often attached to it but are not necessarily part of the definition. One may even say that the word ‘power’ may refer to various different but closely related concepts. In those cases, the exact meaning of ‘power’ depends on the context, and especially on with what term it is contrasted. The conceptualization of power is thus likely to remain an essentially contested concept. This may lead us to conclude that it is fruitless to search for a single conceptual definition of power, a definition which could be imposed whenever the concept is used. Yet, as the political theorist William Connolly (1983, p. 227) has remarked, there is nothing contradictory in first admitting that the meaning of ‘power’ is essentially contested and then making the case for the best possible definition. The essential contestability does not imply that any definition is equally good, nor that linguistic rules can be broken without justification. People may have good reason to define power differently, for this may allow them to talk about different issues. The problem is, however, that specific definitions often seem to be conflated with a more general understanding of power, and it is this unnoticed switch from the specific understanding to a more generally shared web of connotations which is problematic in individual works, and which is also at stake when definitions of power are contested. The importance of contesting concepts is that there is always a normative point that is implicitly shared, but not always articulated, which in the case of power, in Connolly’s view, is responsibility. In other words, the ‘essential contestability thesis’ does not mean that it would be entirely futile to set about the task of reconstructing a better and more precise concept of power, which might then gain acceptance by a wider audience. This is a legitimate mode of conceptual analysis. Many people have attempted this (Oppenheim, 1981), some more convincingly than others. There are, however, usually three problems with such work. First, because such analyses are often restricted to one language, the definitions which are provided may be ethnocentric and unhelpful for those writing in a different language (e.g., Aron, 1986). Second, the reconstruction of concepts seems to downplay the heterogeneous use of any term, a use seen as unnecessarily harmful. Third, because concepts always exist for some purpose, a definition based on even a close and sound analysis of different contexts in which the concept is used may be useless as a conceptual argument if the definition serves no relevant purpose. Therefore, it could be advisable to start from

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the other end of the conceptual analysis and ask: What follows if we understand power in a particular way? Why do we need such a concept? What is its role in social scientific analysis? (Guzzini, 2005). If concepts are theory-laden, the point of conceptual analysis is, in the first instance, not to make all concepts fit our theory, but to spell out the theory behind a particular understanding of a concept. Conceptual analysis cannot ignore ordinary language, and the usual sources of ordinary usage are dictionaries. In most dictionaries we find a variety of potential uses of the word ‘power’, but what is essential is the idea that power is the ability to do something (Morriss, 1987, p. 13). As Barry Barnes (1988, p. 92) has argued, the whole value of the concept of power in everyday life resides in its deeply theoretical character as a label for capacities. The crux of this definition is that if power is the ability to cause effects, it is neither a thing nor an effect, but it is a dispositional concept. According to this logic, power exists even when it does not cause anything, but on the other hand, all effects are caused by some sort of power. Dahl’s (1957) much-cited intuitive idea of power, for example, was that A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. Despite the widespread criticism of Dahl’s analysis of power, I think that this idea of power may well serve as a useful approximate definition. To repeat, as Morriss (1987, p. 49) has argued, what is at the core of the concept of power, as understood conventionally, is that it is a capacity to cause effects. When we are talking about social power, these effects concern other people. Although this basic idea can be conveyed with different words, and one’s theoretical background can be further explicated in the context of the definition (and although one may discuss whether the ability to develop an ability is power), the most important implications for the study of power are there in Dahl’s concept of power. The trouble associated with Dahl’s definition of power is caused rather by Dahl’s other examples, and other empiricist applications or operational definitions which cannot but reduce the concept to a regular relationship between cause and effect. According to Morriss, then, ordinary language supports the idea that power is a general capacity to effect. Yet the variety of ways in which the word ‘power’ may be used in ordinary language, and the equivalent words in different languages, gives us reason to be cautious when taking examples from ordinary language to support or refute a particular conceptual argument. It is a fallacy to think that ordinary language leads automatically to the best conceptualisations. As Connolly (1983, p. 221) has argued, ‘it is always necessary to decide whether the counter-example

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will be allowed to override the thesis or the thesis to override the counterexample’. Conceptual analysis is also always temporally located, since meanings may change (and our argument may be part of the change), as Terence Ball (1988) has argued. Pure ordinary language analysis of concepts may often be inadequate and therefore cannot be more than the starting point for making conceptual arguments. Hence, the first argument against regarding power as resources or outcomes is that the concept that power as a disposition to cause effects fits better with ordinary language. But we also need a second argument which is that there are insufficient reasons for understanding power in terms of resources or outcomes over the alternative of treating power as a disposition. I argue that the reasons given for definitions of power based on both resource and outcome simply have to do with the empiricist understanding of power. Power is difficult to capture by means of empiricist analysis, since capacity is not directly observable and cannot be conceived of in terms of regularities. As Andrew Collier (1994, p. 75) has pointed out, one of ‘the most enduring and damaging legacies of empiricism is the tendency to ask questions of the form “how do we know about x?” and think that the answer settles the question “what is x?” ’ Because of this, power is an extremely tricky concept for empiricists. Although some scholars may insist that ‘the most useful definitions are those which direct efforts to empirical research’ (Nagel, 1975, p. 175), this view tends to convert all real definitions into operational definitions (Isaac, 1989 p. 73). The definition of power as the ability to affect implies a statement that B could probably act differently in a hypothetical situation in which A’s power is not present. Because such a counterfactual situation is typically hypothetical, it is not easy to know when power really is present. Here, power analysts face the so-called ‘three dimensions of power’ debate. The first dimension, based on Dahl’s (1957) intuitive definition of power, operates at the level of decisions. According to this view, the one who wins a dispute has more power. We know power from the stated preferences. The second dimension, based on the study by Bachrach and Baratz (1962), counts non-decisions as well: those who have power can use it in such a way that disputes do not make it onto the agenda. The third dimension, added by Lukes (1974), includes even those apparently voluntary decisions that run against real preferences. Lukes’s point is that powerful actors can manipulate the interests of others so that the disputes do not even exist in terms of differing opinions. In other words, we have to consider all these options, overt manifest conflict, a conflict that is not manifest in terms of action but in terms

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of attitudes of the actors, and a conflict of ‘real’ interests, which may not be manifest in terms of the attitudes of the actors. It is especially in the latter case, where power cannot be directly observed, and requires a theoretical reconstruction. Many people have wondered if such an understanding of ‘power’ as a general ability to affect is too broad. The means of power can be anything from military force to different forms of persuasion or manipulation. Power may reside in all possible contexts of action, and the effects of power may be good or bad. Therefore, as the famous phrase goes, a theory of power would be like a theory of (w)holes (Morriss, 1987, p. 45) and can hardly be located in any particular discipline. In fact, the critique against a broad concept of power can be either practical or normative. Firstly, it can be argued that such a concept of power cannot explain anything, because it cannot be operationalized or because it explains everything. In other words, it is deemed practically useless for scientific purposes. Secondly, it can be argued that a broad concept of power loses the normative point, which has to do with responsibility, in other words, it is normatively questionable. There are several ways to delimit the definition or sharpen the normative point, none of which are necessary, however, since ‘power’ as a general capacity to affect is a meaningful concept without any limitations having to do with the nature of intentions, means or outcomes. Because most of these arguments in support of limitations are based, in the first instance, on ordinary uses of the concept of power, we may just show that this way of limiting power cannot convincingly be based firmly on ordinary language but rather on certain contextual uses of the concept. Secondly, we may say that none of the distinctions lose the moral point, which has to do with responsibility, although they would not directly follow our judicial definitions of it. Some have tried to argue that only those outcomes that are beneficial represent power. Yet, the capacity to affect can be seen as power regardless of the nature of the effects. Some sort of capacity is needed to produce harmful effects, too. The one who exercises power does not necessarily use it in order to further his or her own interests. For instance, we can say that somebody has power to hurt himself. Neither should we count freeriders, who have no power themselves to effect the system, as being powerful simply because they benefit from it. We also think that those who do harm to themselves are also responsible for it, and for that very reason nobody else should be held responsible. A second possibility is to limit power to certain methods. Typically, this is done by regarding power as coercive. This would exclude persuasion

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and other positive means of effecting from the realm of power. Some have drawn this distinction in terms of power and influence. Connolly (1983, p. 96), for example, states explicitly that ‘to threaten someone successfully is to exercise power over him while to make him an offer in a context where other options are reasonably open to him is surely not to exercise power over him’. Yet, although power is often used negatively, we should not assume that power must be necessarily coercive. And although there is a moral distinction between threatening and offering, we are also sometimes responsible when we persuade somebody to do something or when we offer somebody something in exchange for doing something even without coercion. If I hire a contract killer, I am responsible for what he or she does. I alone may be held responsible, if I coerce somebody to kill someone, but the responsibility persists in spite of my using other methods. We may even be responsible if we do not stop somebody from doing something bad if we have the power to do so. A further possibility is to limit power as an agency concept in contrast to explanations that are located at the structural level. Connolly (1983, p. 219), for instance, calls such power structural constraints or structural determination. If power is considered ability, there is, indeed, a fundamental reason not to regard structures in terms of power, since structures do not have the ability to regulate their use of power. But this does not mean that the idea of ‘structural power’ is ‘redundant’ (Dowding 1996, p. 28) since impersonal structures can clearly have causal effects which are not necessarily actual. To separate agency power from structural power, Guzzini (1993) prefers the term ‘governance’ for the latter, but according to him both of them together form the scope of power analysis. If structures are seen as causally effective for something that happens, then the individual responsibility is reduced, although it may not disappear entirely. Finally, in line with Bertrand Russell’s (1938) famous definition of power – ‘power is the ability to produce intended effects’, some people want to attach power only to those outcomes which are intentional. For example, Morriss (1987 pp. 25–8) regards power as an ability which must be exercised at will. Although there is a distinction between intended and unintended effects, this is not necessarily a distinction that should be attached to power. We may well say that the president has the power to dissolve the parliament or that the superpowers have the power to destroy the world despite whether they have any intentions of doing so, and if they do so they also exercise power. It is, of course, hardly possible that any president would dissolve parliament without any

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intentions of doing so, but the superpowers might destroy the world without any intentions of doing so. Responsibility may increase if the acts are intentional, but not all unintentional acts are free from responsibility. In short, the fact that the consequences are unintentional does not necessarily mean that we are free from responsibility. A state can be held responsible for shooting down an aircraft and killing the passengers, although it was not the intention. These are the major lines along which conceptual debates over the meaning of power have been carried out. The list is by no means exhaustive, and I have summarized them only briefly because this discussion has already been conducted extensively. I hope to assert what is essential here, namely that power can be regarded as a general capacity to affect and this does not necessarily need any further specifications. To say that power can be a meaningful concept without any of these limitations is not to say that these limitations make no sense. It is only to contend that there is no reason to attach them necessarily to the concept of power. Why these disputes are so intense is, in the first instance, not because people would disagree over the empirical contents of the concepts in a purely scientific sense, but because they have to do with our normative views. All the qualifications attached to the definition of power reflect different degrees of responsibility. Because people often disagree on where the borders of responsibility lie, the definitions of power are contested. The definition of power as a capacity to affect is thus not above normative contests. Power has to do with responsibility, but in a slightly different way than as understood by Connolly. His shortcoming is in looking solely at the responsibility of the acts. But we may also be responsible for something that happens without our doing anything. In the context of North–South issues, the starvation and malnutrition of the masses may be worse than the effects Western states have intentionally brought about. Therefore, the way power is tied to responsibility has not so much to do with acts as such, but the relationship is doubly negative. If you have no power, you have no responsibility (Morriss, 1987, p. 21). The claim is partly true that the concept of power as a capacity to affect is much too wide for any empirical research. Wide concepts easily become overloaded by extension and are then emptied of more specific meanings. However, pace Connolly, this does not mean that power is purely a normative concept distinguished from other concepts only by normative criteria (Morriss, 1987, p. 201). Power has empirical uses, as does the concept of ‘hole’, but as we do not see it as meaningful to study

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holes generally, we should not see it as meaningful to study power generally, either. To study ‘power in the international system’ empirically is like studying ‘beauty in nature’: we can hardly arrive at any meaningful generalizations; the best we can get is a set of interesting fragments or broad historical outlines (Mann, 1986; 1993). To reiterate: when ‘power’ is used empirically, it needs to be specified. We do not even normally use the word power without such specifications: the sentence ‘I have power’ is not easily understood without a context (‘what sort of power do you have?’ and ‘over whom do you have power?’ would be the likely responses). Even categories such as social power or political power are probably too wide. There is a fundamental message in Baldwin’s (1989, p. 131) often repeated insistence (taken from Lasswell and Kaplan) that in discussing power (empirically) ‘it is essential to specify or at least imply who is influencing whom with respect to what; in short both scope and domain must be specified or implied’. Of course, we may not be able to say exactly how precisely the scope and the domain must be specified. The important point is that we are able to spell out those features of the context that explain why some sort of power in that context is an ability to cause effects. To what extent, for example the current international system is a meaningful context in which to study power, is open to argument. The ‘shadow of war’ as one defining feature of the international context may apply extensively to current international relations but not to established zones of peace. The analysis of power cannot be reduced to the study of zillions of microcontexts in which power is always something different. Nevertheless, Baldwin’s hope that substantial discussions of international power should be oriented ‘less toward general theories of power and more toward contextual analysis’ is reasonable. To sum up this part of the argument, drawing on ordinary language and on philosophical research on the concept of power such as Morriss’s (1987) analysis of it, we can define power as ability to effect. This is not the only possible definition of power, but it is clearly an understanding of power that is interdisciplinary but neglected in the study of IR, where the focus has been on empiricist conceptualizations of power based on resources or outcomes. Therefore, it is worth considering what follows if this definition of power is taken as a starting point of power analysis in studying international phenomena, processes and structures. In this spirit, the trivial point is that because power is a general capacity to affect, the objects of the study of virtually all sciences, such as law, geography, history, psychology and so forth can be seen in terms of power, and to demarcate international relations or political

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science by virtue of their focus on power is no longer possible. Because of its general nature as the ability to effect, neither does it seem very promising to construct a neodiscipline around the concept of power. Power remains such a multifaceted phenomenon that does not warrant building a substantial theory of power but rather requires a framework where more substantial explanatory theories can be located. This need for contextualization might bring us back to the need for a division of labour between disciplines, but it would be a mistake to assume that contextualization can take place in isolation. By contrast, to know the importance of a context requires that we can compare different contexts across disciplinary domains and for that purpose we need interdisciplinary frameworks of power.

Interdisciplinary taxonomies of power There are a number of taxonomies of power. It is useful to review at least some of them from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to build common frameworks across various social contexts. Using such taxonomies in IR would help us to learn how power works in other contexts and to critically examine why certain forms of power are seen to be privileged in international relations – and with what consequences. It is particularly important that the underlying logic of the categorization be made visible so that the taxonomy becomes both differentiated and exhaustive. The study of IR is best known for lists that include various elements of power. Morgenthau (1978 [1948]) famously named eight elements of power: geography, natural resources, industrial capacity, military preparedness, population, national character, national morale and quality of diplomacy; he later added quality of government to the list. Aron (1966), in turn, made distinctions among space, material and immaterial resources and collective action capacity. Waltz (1979, p. 131) notes ‘size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, military strength, political stability and competence’. It is not possible here to discuss the various problems with listing such components of power. Suffice it to point that those lists of elements of power are not meaningful if they are not tied to an analysis of how power works. That is why we need taxonomies of the various mechanisms of power. The most common taxonomy of various mechanisms of power used in the study of international politics is based on distinctions among military, economic and cultural – or ideological – power. This trichotomy of power derives from E.H. Carr (2001 [1939]), but it has subsequently

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guided much analysis of power. The ideal type constructions often used when talking about the EU, for instance – a traditional military power, trade power, and normative or civilian power – are partly based on the same logic. This trichotomy is somewhat modified in other famous treatises on power related to international relations, for example Susan Strange (1988) uses it, but then, more famously, introduces a fourfold taxonomy of structural power consisting of security, production, financial and knowledge structures. The taxonomy of military, economic and cultural power is seldom used in other social contexts. An exception is Kenneth Boulding, the economist and peace researcher who elaborated this trichotomy in a book-length study (1989) in which he regarded what he called integrative power as superior to military power – the power to destroy – and economic power – the power to produce and exchange. The trichotomy is thus applicable to social contexts other than international relations, although it is very rough and often confuses the idea of having power in a certain issue area with the mechanisms of power. Another researcher who has used a similar taxonomy of power in a broader context than simply the international is the historical sociologist Michael Mann, who in his study (1986) of the history of power distinguished among military, economic, cultural and political power. Mann thus added political power as a separate form of power and defined it as being centralized and based on territoriality. Yet, one may ask in what sense political power truly differs from the other types of power, or whether it is simply an aggregate type of power used for political purposes or by political actors. Mann’s definition seems to suggest that he is talking more about political actors, states, having political power than about political power being a clearly different type of power. It is not impossible to regard political power as a separate type of power, but it seems to me that if political power is indeed seen as a different type of power then it needs to be based on authority embedded in political hierarchies. Nevertheless, Mann’s work is important because it adds an historical dimension to this taxonomy of various mechanisms of power. Moreover, it is also worth mentioning the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) taxonomy of different forms of capital as a source of power. He coined the notions of social and cultural as well as symbolic capital, but curiously he did not pay attention to ‘military capital’ as a separate source of power that would perhaps have its corresponding field in some settings of international relations. Again, although Bourdieu has come to be frequently cited in the international relations literature, his

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analysis of various forms of ‘capital’ is seldom applied to it, but applied instead is his concept of ‘doxa’ as the realm of those things that are taken as self-evident in social practices and discourses. It is also common to distinguish between positive and negative forms of power. In international relations, Joseph Nye (2004) has famously distinguished between hard and soft power, where the latter is based on attraction and co-option and the former consists of military and economic means. In Nye’s view the difference between hard and soft power is best seen as a continuum rather than as a sharp boundary. Indeed, the common mistake is, however, to think that military power is negative and economic power is positive, since military power can be positive when exercised as protection and economic power can be negative when used as sanctions. Cultural power can equally be positive and negative – for example, in forms of praising and blaming. Nye’s study makes the point that soft power is becoming more effective than ever in international relations, but he does not refer to much literature from other disciplines to explain why this should be the case. The idea that negative means of influence prevail in international politics is also equally hollow if one seeks explanations. There are some rational choice-based attempts to explain when negative or positive means of influence are more effective, but the literature is scattered and often not easy to use in support of the efficacy of negative means in international relations. For example, the economist Mancur Olson (1965) stipulated that collective action can be better enforced by positive sanctions if the number of actors is limited, and that this is often the case in a state-based international system. Indeed, very few IR scholars have turned to the psychological and sociological literature in order to study the differences between positive and negative means of influence. James Davis (2000) emphasizes the psychological aspect of fear when using threats but reputational concerns are often seen as equally important. These taxonomies of power mainly deal with direct forms of power between agents. There are, however, forms of power that are more subtle and embedded in the structures rather than being found in the capacities of agents. Traditionally, IR scholars have largely ignored these forms of power, but Andrew Bennett and Raymond Duvall (2005a; b) have proposed a taxonomy of power that distinguishes among compulsive, institutional, structural and productive power. Compulsory and institutional forms of power work between specific actors, whereas structural and productive powers constitute the actors. Compulsory and structural forms of power, in turn, represent direct

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forms of power, whereas institutional power and productive power are indirect. Compulsory power entails the direct control by one actor of the actions and conditions of another. It is not limited to material resources but also includes rhetorical and symbolic tools; the label of ‘compulsory power’ may be unnecessarily biased towards negative means of power. Institutional power refers to an actor’s ability to control another indirectly. The actor that wields institutional power cannot be said to possess the institutions, but she can use the institutions by shaping their agendas, practices and policies to bring about the desired effects. Structural power concerns the structural relations that constitute the subjects such as master–slave and capital–labour. Structures thus create different capacities. Productive power works through diffuse social processes such as discourses and systems of knowledge that create meaning and identities – an insight into power that is typically associated with sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1994) understanding of power. The importance of Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy lies in its very ability to lift up these latter categories of power, integrate them into the analysis of power and show – through empirical analysis – how relational and discursive structures that are much more frequently paid attention to in diverse sociological studies are also able to constitute subjects in international relations. There are thus already quite a number of ways of classifying power in IR and there are clear connections to other disciplines and their understanding of power. Yet, taxonomies of power from other disciplines could still help refine the understanding of power in international relations. Perhaps one potential taxonomy merits closer treatment here because it deals with the mechanisms of power. The social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven (1960) draw distinctions among coercive power, reward power, legitimate power, referent power and expert power. Coercive power is the ability to force somebody to do something through physical harm or threats thereof. Reward power is the ability to give others what they want and get something in return. Legitimate power is based on a position of authority in an institutional system or organization. Monarchs, prime ministers and policemen can exercise legitimate power. Referent power will manifest itself when somebody wants to act like you. Charisma is the archetype of referent power. Expert power is based on knowledge and the capacity to persuade. The taxonomy has gained extensive popularity in the literature on organizational studies but, with a couple of exceptions, has not been applied to international relations.

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Raven and French’s taxonomy is insightful because it typologizes power on the basis of the mechanisms by which it works. In that sense it comes close to Habermas’s (1984) taxonomy of different rationalities. If his idea of strategic rationality, normative rationality as well as communicative rationality, are understood as different power mechanisms, we end up with three types of power plus physical power that works outside the realm of rationality. These mechanisms of power can also be derived from the functionalist sociologist Talcott Parsons (1963), who distinguished between coercion and inducements, activation of commitments and persuasion. Although his background theory was very different from that of Habermas, the underlying logic of separating the forms of power is the same. Power that works through strategic rationality can be defined as an ability to manipulate the utilities of the other both through threats and promises. The second mechanism, based on normative power, refers to the activation of commitments, and rests on the prior obligation of B to do something demanded by A. Authority structures, prescribed in law, are the primary example of such instances of power. The third mechanism, based on communicative rationality, is to get B to do something through persuasion or the force of a better argument that, by means of factual or normative reasoning, changes B’s value assessments of her existing options for action. Persuasion may require rhetorical skills of A, the ability to manipulate information or related properties, but in the pure case of persuasion, it is no more A’s properties directly which cause B to change her mind, but rather the truth value of her words. Two important reminders about power can be drawn from this taxonomy to improve our critical reflection of how power works without completely losing sight of its material bases. First, in contrast to pure physical power, social power always depends on B’s perceptions of A’s power. Nuclear weapons have the power to destroy cities or even the whole world in spite of our perception of them but, as political weapons that are not used, perceptions and discursive signification play a crucial role. Therefore, there is no objective way to define what are relevant power resources in social interaction. Of course, B’s view about the effectiveness of A’s resources and her ability to use them, may be mistaken. The mistakes may be of two sorts. First, B may err in assessing A’s physical power. She may believe that A has only three divisions when, in fact, she has ten. In war such misjudgements may be crucial, and if those natural powers are used, B may be seriously punished because of her erroneous belief. But second, and equally important, B may also misjudge A’s social power. The interactionist view of power

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is too narrow when it focuses only on the relationship between A and B, since society consists of more than two actors. Because A may use her power to get C or D to use their power to influence B, B has to take account not only of A’s natural power but also of her social power. In other words, when assessing A’s power, if B thinks that she can be affected, she needs to take into account not only her own view of what A’s power is in their relationship but also the general assessment of A’s power in society. Because B needs to do this, we may claim that social power is not purely objective, not purely subjective, but in an important sense, socially constructed so that it may be ‘objectified’. In an important sense, social power in international relations, too, is thus based on shared understandings of power (van Ham, 2010). This fact has several consequences for how power can be used in social relations. Firstly, although natural power remains a power regardless of whether it is used, power resources cease to be indicators of social power if there is a shared understanding that they will not be used. Secondly, shared understandings reproduce power, since those who have social power may use this to strengthen the shared understanding of power. Thirdly, the shared understandings of power are necessarily simplified versions of the real power relationships. In other words, distribution of power is, as Barnes (1988, p. 92) calls it, an aspect of distribution of knowledge. The capacity of people to grasp and represent a distribution of power sets limits to the possible form that such a distribution can take. ‘Maps of power’ may then become more relevant than real relationships. As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1979, p. 113) has argued, the social constitution of power is exactly a means to reduce the complexity of social systems. According to him the direct communicative recourse to power is replaced by reference to symbols which commit both sides normatively, and at the same time take into account the presumed power differential. The institutional anchoring and practicability of such substitutes renders exact calculations unnecessary, and even renders problematic any attempt to do so. A further important reflection in distinguishing these different rationalities underlying power is that it is not self-evident that B should comply simply because A has power, no more or less in international relations than in other social contexts. Power, in itself, does not explain anything. Rather, the idea that it is somehow justified to comply because A has power is a mechanism of power that is based as much on strategic as well as on normative or habitual rationality (Lake, 2009). The point here is that rules constitute every power game, including wars between states, not only what we think are ‘institutionalized forms of power’

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in a hierarchical power structure. According to Neumann and Sending (2010), the international is dominated by liberal political governmentality that works as a major technique of power when the international has become thicker with more actors populating it. In other words, social power never works in a non-interpretative vacuum that international relations is often traditionally perceived to be, but in Richard Ashley’s (1990, p. 269) words, power resides ‘in a domain of doxa’ which naturalizes the rituals of power. For the philosopher John Searle (2010, 155–160) this is ‘background power’. It is not that interpretative structures are shaped by pre-existing power but that ‘power’ itself is shaped by such structures. The structure may thus constrain the more powerful as well as the weak. A superpower may have power to pacify its ‘backyard’, but in order to preserve its status as a superpower it is also necessary that it does so. The argument of this section has been that in order to better understand power in international relations it would be helpful to think of different types of power in terms of taxonomies applicable to all kinds of social contexts. Rather than denying some of the basic realist views about the nature of power in international relations, we could try to explain the differences in the forms and functions of different power mechanisms with the help of other disciplines and thereby answer questions as to whether and why the realist views about power hold only in certain spatio-historical contexts of international relations, or whether they have any wider significance, or conversely, how power mechanisms typical in other contexts are also at work in international relations. Many traditional political and social theories of power often assume some organizational or normative contexts to the extent that students of IR see those schemes as not easily applicable to the study of power in world politics, but it is equally problematic to think that because of international anarchy, or some other feature of the international system such as territoriality, power needs to have a certain ‘realist’ logic. Many assumptions to do with the prevalence and efficacy of military force in international relations turn out to rest on a socially constructed basis that derives more from normative rationality than from any natural corollary of strategic rationality in the context of international anarchy.

Conclusion This chapter discussed the benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to power in the study of IR and sketched out an agenda for understand-

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ing power in IS. Added value can be found on at least two fronts. First, a conceptual engagement of power that takes into account philosophical and linguistic studies would lead to a better conceptual analysis and definitions of power which would help to overcome some dichotomies and confusions currently underpinning the study of power in IR. Second, building interdisciplinary taxonomies as frameworks for studies on power would lower the disciplinary boundaries around IR and make it possible to explain why certain types of power are more prevalent and/ or effective in international politics than in other contexts of social life. Too much that could be empirically investigated is simply assumed in the study of international relations, in particular by realist scholars. Interdisciplinary studies aiming at better understanding power should be a two-way street. Whereas IR scholars need to support their analysis of why certain forms of power work in relations between states or in world politics more generally, scholars in other fields should broaden their frameworks of power to cover international aspects of power. In this way the space for interdisciplinary international studies would be enhanced. Both scholars of IR and of other disciplines need to be more explicit when explaining why certain forms of power are able to produce effects; if power in international relations has different forms than in other social contexts, it needs to be ascertained whether this derives from the means available, the anarchic nature of the system, territoriality, lack of trust between estranged communities or norms and practices developed in the course of world history. Whatever the answer, it is almost always possible to check whether the explanation holds in other social contexts than in the international, contexts that share at least some of the same essential characteristics, or lack them. Increasingly, however, the international is further away from any ideal type that would legitimate a distinct theory and account of power, but the underlying rationalities of power that dominate in the sphere of the international exist in domestic political, organizational and other contexts. Such studies on power would constitute a truly interdisciplinary research agenda on power that would increase our understanding of power as a core concept in international studies and in IR, with a challenging and critical angle.

References Aron, R. (1966) Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company). Aron, R. (1986) ‘Macht, Power, Puissance: Democratic Prose or Demonical Poetry’ in S. Lukes (ed.) Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

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226 Tuomas Forsberg Ashley, R. (1990) ‘Imposing International Purpose: Notes on a Problematic of Governance’ in E-O. Czempiel and J. Rosenau (eds) Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges: Approaches to World Politics for 1990’s (Lexington: Lexington Books). Bachrach, P. and M.S. Baratz (1962) ‘Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review, 56: 641–51. Baldwin, D. (1989) Paradoxes of Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Ball, T. (1988) Transforming Political Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell). Barnes, B. (1988) The Nature of Power (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Barnett, M. and R. Duvall (2005a) ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization 59: 39–75. Barnett, M. and R. Duvall (2005b) ‘Power in Global Governance’ in M. Barnett and R. Duvall (eds) Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Berenskoetter, F. (2007) ‘Thinking About Power’ in F. Berenskoetter and M. Williams (eds) Power in World Politics (London: Routledge). Boulding, K. (1989) Three Faces of Power (Newbury Park, CA: Sage). Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The Forms of Capital’ in J. Richardson (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood). Carr, E.H. (2001 [1939]) Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan). Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (London: Verso). Connolly, W. (1983) The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Dahl, R. (1957) ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science, 2(3): 202–15. Davis, J.W. (2000) Threats and Promises. The Pursuit of International Influence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Dowding, K. (1996) Power (Buckingham: Open University Press). Foucault, M. (1994) Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3, J.D. Faubion (ed.) (London: Penguin Books). French, J. and B. Raven (1960) ‘The Bases of Social Power’ in D. Cartwright (ed.) Studies in Social Power (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan). Guzzini, S. (1993) ‘Structural Power: The Limits of Neorealist Power Analysis’, International Organization, 47: 443–78. Guzzini, S. (2005) ‘The Concept of Power: A Constructivist Analysis’, Millennium, 33: 495–521. Habermas, J. (1984) Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press). Ham, P. van (2010) Social Power in International Politics (London: Routledge). Hart, J. (1976) ‘Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations’, International Organization, 30(2): 289–305. Haugaard, M. and S. Malesevic (2008) ‘Power and Culture’, Journal of Power, 1(2): 109–10. Hindness, B. (1996) Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Isaac, J. (1987) Power and Marxist Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Lake, D. (2009) Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

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Lamborn, A.C. (1991) The Price of Power: Risk and Foreign Policy in Britain, France, and Germany (Boston: Unwin Hyman). Luhmann, N. (1979) Trust and Power (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons). Lukes, S. (1974) Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan). Lukes, S. (2005) ‘Power and the Battle for Hearts and Minds’, Millennium, 33: 477–93. Mann, M. (1986) Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to a.d. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mann, M. (1993) Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and NationStates 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mearsheimer, J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton). Mattern, J.B. (2008) ‘The Concept of Power and the (Un)Discipline of International Relations’ in C. Reus-Smit and D. Snidal (eds) Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Morgenthau, H. (1978 [1948]) Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th edn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Morriss, P. (1987) Power: A Philosophical Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Mueller, J. (1995) Quiet Cataclysm: Reflections on Recent Transformations of World Politics (New York: HarperCollins). Nagel, J. (1975) The Descriptive Analysis of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Neumann, I. and O.J. Sending (2010) Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press). Nye, J. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs). Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Oppenheim, F. (1981) Political Concepts: A Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Parsons, T. (1963) ‘On the Concept of Power’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107: 232–62. Rosenau, J. (1980) The Study of Global Interdependence: Essays in the Transnationalization of Global Affairs (London: Pinter). Rothgeb, J. (1993) Defining Power: Influence and Force in the Contemporary International System (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Russell, B. (1938) Power: A New Social Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin). Searle, J. (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Strange, S. (1988) States and Markets: An Introduction to International Political Economy (London: Pinter). Waltz, K. (1979) A Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley).

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9 War: From Disciplinarity to Multidisciplinarity and Further to Transdisciplinarity Petr Drulák

Introduction The study of war and peace used to be seen as a disciplinary core providing a clear identity for the study of international relations (IR) in the twentieth century, making IR a discipline separate from political science and other areas of social inquiry. On the other hand, as Aalto, Harle, Long and Moisio remind us in their introduction to this volume (see Chapter 1), in its origins in the 1930s the scholarly study of war and peace was part of an interdisciplinary project of international studies (IS). It was only later that it became overshadowed by the ‘disciplinary turn’ in the shape of the single discipline of IR. This tension between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is not so surprising given that there are only few phenomena other than war which would generate greater attention in such a wide variety of scholarly disciplines and in other modes of representation. Apart from IR, war has been especially prominent in history, which has traditionally focused on wars as key subjects of research, and in international law, which came into being in the Grotian shape of ‘the law of war and peace’. Moreover, it has also been widely addressed by political philosophy and a number of specialized sciences such as political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, political economy and demography, to name just the most prominent. In addition, war has also inspired and provoked a huge number of artistic representations which have usually been ignored by both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. These representations can be found in literature, film, painting, sculpture, architecture and music. War is in the focus of such 228

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ancient masterpieces as Homer’s Illiad as well as contemporary Oscarwinning movies such as Bigelows’s The Hurt Locker. Thus, the students of war can tap into an enormous fund of knowledge and representations pertaining to their subject. However, as implied, this fund is compartmentalized into different disciplines and genres. On the one hand, this compartmentalization is necessary and beneficial, as it enables the enhancement of knowledge and the refinement of artistic representations. While the scholar relies on the body of preceding scholarly texts, the artist refers to the body of preceding artistic representations. Their own contributions are then defined with respect to these bodies which grow in their diversity and/or richness of information thanks to these contributions. Some scholars may frame these contributions in terms of the progress of advancing knowledge within a Lakatosian research programme (see Lakatos 1970; also Chapters 3 and 7). But the idea of progress will be challenged by other scholars (Kuhn 1962) and it will be difficult to defend in the artistic fields (Gombrich, 1971). In any case, thanks to boundaries of disciplines and genres, and irrespective of the presence or absence of progress, one can speak of the growth in a variety of perspectives, growth which enriches our ability to come to grips with the phenomena of interest. On the other hand, these boundaries also divide and isolate. Disciplinary narrow-mindedness is the price to be paid for the benefits of compartmentalization. Students of war often end up as prisoners of their disciplines who know a lot about the specific features of war while ignoring the broader picture. For example, IR research on war tends to focus on a couple questions related to the causes of war, emphasizing international distribution of power, leaders’ (mis)perceptions, domestic political regimes and economic ties (Levy, 2002). Not that these questions are unimportant, but they cannot cover other important aspects of war, such as its internal dynamics or its meaning for war participants, and they may not help us much in our attempts to understand contemporary conflicts (Kaldor, 2005 [1999]). Some alternative perspectives on war can be found within IR but much more is available beyond its disciplinary boundaries. Therefore, the study of war presents a clear case for interdisciplinarity. However, this interdisciplinarity usually takes the form of a multidisciplinary project which lays different disciplinary approaches next to one another, showing their diversity without any attempt at synthesis or integration (for a conceptual discussion on interdisciplinarity and its manifestations, see Chapter 2). What we need is a transdisciplinary approach able, at least to some extent, to integrate these approaches

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when analysing war. This does not mean that transdisciplinarity necessitates a grand synthesis of all possible theories and analytical frameworks. Instead, it calls for common ground upon which these theories and frameworks can be related and compared to one another. The analysis of conceptual metaphors offers such common ground. War is an abstract concept and, like any abstract concept which is not part of our immediate experience, it is understood in terms of metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). These metaphors relate war to more tangible experiences, such as physical combat, games or storms, among others. Therefore, a particular understanding of war is always embedded in a specific metaphor or in a set of metaphors which relate it to quite different areas of our experience. It is on the basis of these areas that different representations of war are constructed. Thus, by examining conceptual metaphors which inform scholarly and artistic representations of war, we gain insights into the construction of these representations and bring them to a common analytical ground upon which they can be compared. For example, we can find many overlaps between the metaphor which relates war to physical combat and the one which links it to a game, just as we may see important differences between these two metaphors and the one which pictures war as a storm. In the course of four steps, I substantiate metaphors as a means to arrive at a transdisciplinary examination of war. I start with epistemological questions distinguishing theory, history and arts as three distinct forms of representation which are essential for understanding war. I also make the theoretical case for arguing that each of these representations relies on metaphors. Following this, the key issues in the scholarly study of war are summarized by looking into metaphors used within IR, history and other scholarly disciplines such as political science, sociology, political economy, psychology, anthropology or demography. Consequently, the multidisciplinary perspective is further broadened by examining the representation of war in fiction. Finally, on the basis of this multidisciplinarity, a transdisciplinary approach using conceptual metaphors is introduced.

Theory, history, art and metaphors Theory and history present two different modes of scholarly inquiry into war. In practice, they are often intertwined and sometimes are hard to distinguish from each other. Thus, historiography has a long record of engagement with, and divorces from, the theories and methods of social sciences starting with Marxist history to les annales and on

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to quantitative history. By contrast, sociology, which by default represents a theory-oriented reflection on society, has developed a subfield of historical sociology in which theory meets history (Hobden, 1998). Similarly, the theory-oriented discipline of IR is much indebted to history. It started its modern existence in the history-oriented writing of classical realists (e.g., Kissinger, 1957), and the same orientation was followed by the broad stream of scholars who today are identified as belonging to the English school. More recently, post-structuralists have made attempts at ‘historicizing’ IR (Ashley, 1989; Walker, 1989) and, currently, IR seems to be going through a ‘historical turn’ (Teschke, 2003, pp. 1–2). Many important IR contributions are in many respects closer to history than to theory, as is the case, for example, with Erik Ringmar’s thought-provoking interpretation of the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War (Ringmar, 1996). Despite these affinities and overlaps, it makes sense to distinguish analytically between the two. Thus, Ringmar carefully distinguishes between ‘historical writing’ and ‘social science explanation’ which corresponds to the distinction between history and theory. While historians recount stories which unfold over time and which should get as close as possible to what actually happened in a particular case, social theorists instead aim at a general causal law which would not only explain one particular case but also a set of cases which share some formal features but which are not temporally connected. Similarly, leading theorists and historians of war and peace have identified several differences between the two modes of scholarly inquiry (Elman and Elman, 1997). These can be briefly summarized in terms of ideal types rather than actual practices (Table 9.1). A textbook example of a purely theoretical study of war, which uses history only as a source of data, is the Correlates of War Project. This project is based on a huge data set of military conflicts since 1816, from

Table 9.1 Differences between theory and history Theory

History

Time orientation

Preparing for the future

Understanding the past

Object of inquiry

Set of events

One event

Result

Simple law

Complex narrative

Method

Deduction

Induction

Epistemology

Nomothetic explanantion

Ideographic understanding

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which general patterns of states’ behaviour in war are derived by means of statistical methods. This research does not raise questions such as why a particular state attacked its neighbour. Instead it asks general questions such as under what general conditions do states attack their neighbours. By contrast, historical studies dwell on specific cases. For example, Fritz Fischer (1975) asserts that the German empire was keen on starting a great-power war in 1914, and Ringmar (1996) argues that the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War was conditioned by the peculiarities of the process of Swedish identity construction at that time rather than by more objective factors. But neither Fischer nor Ringmar propose a general law or pattern which could easily be applied to other military conflicts. Despite these differences, both history and theory share a commitment to truth, be this a detailed truth about a particular event or a general truth about a series of events. In this respect they differ from the arts, which are committed to aesthetic values and from a scholarly perspective may seem inaccurate or fictitious. In the arts the mode of expression counts more than whether the ideas are seen as truthful or normatively acceptable. Many great works of art came into being as a celebration of ideas which may be quite alien to the contemporary audience, for example, military aggression, racial supremacy, chauvinism or praise of dictatorship, but this does not prevent their general appreciation. For example, one scholar confesses his love for ‘Puccini’s Turandot and Madame Butterfly while at the same time being repulsed by their orientalist representation of the “Far East”’ (Bleiker, 2003a, p. 422), and another warns those with political objections to Wagner that they should not listen to his music so as not to be seduced by it (Krippendorff, 1999). Artistic work is frequently open to competing interpretations, while theoretical and historical works offer ideas which can be expressed in different ways, with the mode of expression tending to be secondary, works of art offer a set of expressions to which different ideas can be related and which for their part are treated as secondary. Of course, in artistic fields these distinctions have been subject to heated debates between those stressing the independence of artistic expression (l’art pour l’art) and those who emphasize its social, cognitive and political functions (e.g., Marxists). But even Marxists will concede that the cognitive role of the arts is different from that of science, and this difference boils down to the quality of expression, held as being more important than the underlying ideas (Lunačarskij, 1975).

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However, how should we then understand the famous Aristotelian dictum that the poet is closer to philosophy (and thus to the truth) than the historian (Aristoteles, 1996)? Aristotle appraises poetry higher than history because according to him the former seeks to account for the general and the universal while the latter dwells on the particular. In this respect, poetry, and art in general, has a theoretical quality of producing a message which pertains to a set of events rather than to a single event. This quality is also recognized by modern aesthetics. Thus, Jan Mukařovský, a leading member of the Prague Circle, argues that a truly great work of art transcends the conditions of its origins and speaks to audiences of different historical epochs (Mukařovský, 1966 [1936]). For example, Leo Tolstoy’s monumental novel War and Peace deals with the fates of three Russian aristocratic families at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. However, the message of the book goes beyond those particular events and individuals as it endeavours to tell us something more general about the nature of war, about the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and about many other things readers can discover there. IR students have been turning to the arts since the 1990s, at least (Holden, 2003). Not only has IR experienced its ‘historical turn’, but it also went through an ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker, 2001; 2009). This turn is about engaging ‘the innovative nature of the aesthetic to rethink deeply entrenched and often narrowly conceived approaches to understanding and solving world political problems’ (Bleiker, 2003a, p. 417). More briefly, art ‘challenges the modern tendency to reduce the political to the rational’ (Bleiker, 2003b, p. 395). What does this mean for the study of war? With respect to the First World War, Bleiker (2003b, p. 395) argues that while the theoretical search for laws and generalizations provides ‘a view of world in which people are all but invisible’, such painters as Otto Dix or Max Beckmann, who portray dying soldiers, are ‘able to express a sense of terror that could hardly be captured in words’. Art thus mediates ‘the human side of war’ (ibid.). Moreover, war can be linked with the concept of the sublime, as Francois Debrix does with respect to the American intervention in Iraq (Debrix, 2006). The sublime is sometimes described as ‘the pleasurable experience through the visual representation of a situation that is otherwise normally painful, terrorizing or destabilizing’ (Debrix, 2006, p. 768; Mirzoeff, 1999, p. 16). It refers to ‘fascination, awe and even delight at events that are inherently painful and horrific’ (Bleiker, 2009; Bleiker and Leet, 2006, p. 734). For example, in an artistic context and

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interpretation, the images of the suffering, or even tortured, enemy, the atomic bomb mushroom cloud, or the spectacular fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, all are capable of evoking the experience of the sublime. This morally contradictory experience can hardly be captured by the instrumental reason of scholarly examination. However, art can provide some insights: ‘Burke and Kant believed that poetry, because of its very obscurity, is particularly well suited to engage the sublime’ (ibid., pp. 723-4). In this connection, it is probably no coincidence that wars generate such huge waves of artistic creativity. But art, and especially literature, has much in common with history. Like history, it usually addresses the particular – specific events and persons. In this respect, there is a distinction between epic, drama and film on the one hand, and, on the other, lyric and music, but even lyrical and musical compositions are often inspired by particular events such as wars. Moreover, historical writing usually has literary ambitions as well. Like the arts, how historians express themselves, in other words the aesthetic dimension of historical writing, is an important attribute of its quality. Therefore, artistic representation merges the theoretical quest for a general statement with the historical focus on particular events and persons. All in all, the relationship among theory, history and art can be visualized as a triangle. Theory is linked with history by the search for a factual truth; art is linked with theory by the quest for a message which transcends particular events; and art is linked with history by expressing the particular and by art’s concern for aesthetic norms (Figure 9.1). Another link connects theory, history and art. Each can be analysed in terms of metaphors. The case for metaphors is relatively uncontroversial Theory

Expressing factual truth

Expressing the universal

History

Art Addressing the particular

Figure 9.1 Relationship between theory, history and art.

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in the study of artistic representations, in which metaphors have always been used as analytical tools. However, metaphors may seem less appropriate to the analysis of scholarly texts. Therefore, more needs to be said about the relationship between metaphors and scholarly thought. Metaphor has traditionally been considered as ‘a device for seeing something in terms of something else’ (Burke, 1945, p. 503; quoted in Cameron, 1999, p. 13). It links two different phenomena, pointing out their similarities and identities. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), whose concept of metaphor is used in this text, understand metaphors as both figures of speech and figures of thought. From their perspective, metaphor links two conceptual areas – source and target – making it possible to understand the target area in terms of the source area. In other words, what we know about the source area is applied to the target area as the metaphor establishes a formal identity between the two, stating that ‘A is B’. This definition of metaphor also includes all forms of analogical thinking. The presence of metaphors in both thought and speech produces the distinction between conceptual metaphors and metaphorical expressions (Lakoff, 1993; Drulák, 2008). Conceptual metaphor is an abstract conceptual mapping between source domain and target domain, which is identified on the level of thought and reason. It is an abstract rule which governs our thinking by providing links between the two domains. By contrast, metaphorical expressions are specific words by which the conceptual metaphor is substantiated. ‘State was defeated’, is an example of such a metaphorical expression, which frequently occurs in the political discourse. However, like the words ‘attack’ or ‘defence’, this phrase is linked to the conceptual metaphor WAR IS A PHYSICAL COMBAT.1 All refer to the COMBAT metaphor that conceptualizes war as a hostile encounter between two individuals who resolve their dispute by physical force. Even though these expressions may seem obvious and unproblematic, our analysis points to their cognitive dependence on the COMBAT metaphor, with tangible implications for political practice. Statements like ‘defeating the enemy’ or ‘imposing our will on our opponent’ would have been meaningless without this conceptual metaphor. Given that our conceptualization of a certain target domain (for example, war) usually depends on a relatively narrow set of conceptual metaphors, the analysis of metaphors also uncovers the cognitive limits of the language we use to capture a certain domain or phenomenon. The extent to which even abstract and heavily mathematicized theories of natural science depend on metaphors is surprisingly high. Their

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history abounds with examples of unexpected metaphors which significantly enhanced our knowledge of the world and then entered our conventional wisdom (Duhem, 1974; quoted in Bourdieu et al., 1991, pp. 194–5). For example, seeing LIGHT as SOUND by Huygens yielded the concept of the light wave and made the analysis of light more intelligible. Considering ELECTRICITY as HEAT enabled Ohm to apply a developed body of knowledge about the latter to transform into a pristine area of the former. These metaphors are hardly visible in practice, as the scientific procedure entails applying a set of equations developed for the analysis of the source areas (sound, heat) to the analysis of the target areas (light, electricity). This seemingly neutral and objective procedure frequently makes us forget that the very justification of the transfer of equations is embedded in a particular metaphor. Not only do metaphors produce new insights to be translated into theories, exemplifying the most powerful tools of ars inveniendi (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 5), but they also lend substance to the logical constructions of theories as well as providing explanations. Therefore, these ‘scientific metaphors’ (ibid., p. 55) are at the heart of theories, being essential, and ‘without which theories could be completely valueless and unworthy of the name’ (Campbell, 1967; quoted in Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 196). What is true in the abstract world of natural science is even more the case in the realm of social science. The basic concepts used in the rational inquiry of society are inevitably metaphorical (Lambourn, 2001). The very concepts of state and society tend to be metaphorized as PERSONS who make decisions, have organs, enter relationships, suffer from illnesses or have their moods. There are further metaphors of society, frequently seen as an OBJECT moved by forces modelled on physical laws; as a FAMILY; or as a BOXING MATCH, among others. Importantly, hardly any definition of such an intangible concept as society can exist without a metaphorical link to a more tangible, familiar entity. In this connection, de Man (1984 [1978]) aptly points out the inevitability of metaphorical language by showing how Locke, despite his rejection of figurative language, is himself dependent on metaphors – while also pointing to their indispensable and unacknowledged role in the writing of Condillac and Kant. Similarly, despite his harsh criticism of the figurative language of poets, Plato actually makes some of his most important points by means of a metaphor – for example by comparing people to prisoners of a cave who take for real the shadows on the cave walls (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

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The role of metaphors has also been acknowledged in the study of history. Hayden White’s ground-breaking book (1973) shows that historical accounts depend on shaping language, and that this language not merely embellishes speech, but also embodies the plot and logic of the historical interpretation. In this respect, he referred to four classical tropes, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, to distinguish four types of historical writing accordingly. However, he sees metaphor as central with respect to the others. Moreover, the above conceptualization of metaphor, unlike the classical one, also covers many linguistic features traditionally associated with other tropes. To sum up, metaphor provides a possible common ground for a meeting between theory and history as various forms of scholarly inquiry, as well as between scholarly accounts and artistic representations. Now, it is usually the case that metaphors are examined either with respect to science (Lakoff and Nunez, 2000) or with respect to the arts (Lakoff and Turner, 1989). However, it is quite rare to look into metaphors of both scholarly texts and works of art, examining how these two avenues of our experience can be brought together within a single framework. That is what this chapter does in the name of developing a transdisciplinary understanding of war. Before this metaphorical transdisciplinarity can be properly outlined, the results of multidisciplinary research on war first need to be discussed.

War in scholarly perspectives War has been studied in IR and in other disciplines for a long time. This study has yielded a variety of important scholarly results. I start by summarizing a few key reviews of the study of war in IR (Levy, 2002; Diehl, 2005). Next, I examine some contributions to the scholarly understanding of war which come from other disciplines and help to broaden the interdisciplinary understanding of war, namely, psychology, economics, sociology and anthropology (Kurtz, 1999). Finally, I consider an example, coming from historiography, of a reflection on war. Most IR research focuses on the question of why wars occur. The question of causes was the key subject of Kenneth Waltz’s (1954 influential treatise Man, the State and War, and has also been underwritten by the quantitative research which has dominated war studies in IR since the 1960s. It is with respect to the search for causes of war that the concept of levels of analysis has been introduced. I will use the levels of analysis debate to summarize the most important IR perspectives on war.

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Starting with the most general level of the international system and international interactions, mainstream IR accounts offer several explanations for the outbreak of war. Realists emphasize the changes in the distribution of power among states, changes which are presented as rational actors seeking power. However, realists cannot agree as to whether war becomes likelier with an increase in the concentration of power in the hands of one state, or whether such a concentration actually fosters peace and stability (Levy, 2002). It all depends on whether war is seen as a result of a breakdown of hegemonic rule or as a result of a possible breakdown of freedom, which is the result of international anarchy. Liberals look into economic interdependence and domestic democracy. Unlike power distribution, interdependence and democracy are usually defined at the dyadic level rather than at the systemic. Thus, they investigate pairs of states with respect to their reciprocal economic ties, or to their domestic political regimes (for this reason I discuss democracy at the international level, not at the unit level). The interdependence argument relies on the model of states as welfare seekers which are likely to avoid war if the economic ties are close enough. The democracy argument emphasizes that democratic states are likeminded in some important respects. This decreases the risk of military conflict between them. The democratic peace argument points to norms and identities. One could actually speak about democratic normative ties between states, which are studied by constructivists and frequently omitted from, or barely mentioned in, mainstream IR perspectives on war (Diehl, 2005; Levy, 2002). The constructivist understanding of war at the international level addresses norms regulating the use of violence between states (Wendt, 1999), distinguishing between norms which encourage the use of violence and those which inhibit it. The next level of analysis is that of the unit – the state and domestic factors. Realists are again divided into offensive ones, who believe that states are bound to have aggressive intentions regarding one another, and defensive ones, who attribute to them moderate intentions considering aggression as a result of ‘domestic pressures and pathologies’ (Levy, 2002, p. 354). Scientific rationalists rely on an expected utility theory of war which sees the decision to go to war as a result of cost-benefit analysis (Bueno de Mesquita, 2005 [1980]). The same logic applies to most game theoretical models of war. Sometimes the same logic is applied to a particular group within the state which can gain benefits from war and which is strong enough to influence state behaviour, for

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instance the military-industrial complex. This explanation is related to the ‘diversionary theory of war’ (Levy, 2005a; b) according to which this nefarious group is the political elite itself, which starts wars to distract attention from domestic problems. Constructivist unit level theories consider wars as results of, or as a means of, particular identity construction (Ringmar, 1996). Students of decision-making processes explain wars as inadvertent consequences of decision-making procedures of the state apparatus (Tuchman, 1962; Allison, 1971). Finally, at the level of the individual, IR scholars refer to psychological theories to account for leaders’ (mis)perceptions of political reality. In this perspective, wars can be attributed to their erroneous perceptions. However, these distortions reflect systematic biases which go beyond the concerned individual and can be addressed as general patterns of misperception (e.g., Jervis, 1976). That is where IR theory-oriented research differs from the historiographic research, which in general tends to put more emphasis on individual actions while attributing possible perceptions and misperceptions of leaders to unique circumstances rather than to general patterns. However, IR theory-oriented research at the level of the individual also differs from psychological research on war, despite their shared focus on the mind of the individual. Psychology addresses war by examining both its causes and consequences at the level of a generalized individual, not necessarily an individual in a leadership position. Thus, Freudian psychoanalysis ascribes war to (self)destructive drives of individuals originating in their subconsciousness. For Freud, war is ‘a pathological destructiveness, freed from the restraints of conscience and civilization’ (Hartman, 1999, p. 134); it is a victory of nature over civilization. Building on Freud, Fornari sees war as an adaptive mechanism which responds to anxieties experienced in early childhood (ibid., p. 135). It results from an inability to mourn, which is resolved by constructing images of the good, to be identified with, and the evil, to be destroyed. Similarly, others focused on the psychological need for an enemy and for differentiation at the group level – ‘narcissism of minor differences’ (ibid., p. 136) – which enhance the self-esteem and identity of the group. But psychological studies also show that this natural aggression is counter-balanced by a human reluctance to kill other humans. Drawing on ethology, it is argued that people share this reluctance with animals, which also refrain from killing their own kind. It is argued that in a combat situation ‘combatants stop thinking with their forebrain, which is the part of the brain which makes us human, and start thinking with

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the midbrain . . . which is the primitive part of the brain that is generally undistinguishable from that of an animal’ (Grossman and Siddle, 1999, p. 140). But ethological analogies can also point in the opposite direction, linking warfare with the spread of the genes to the next generation (Wisman, 1999, p. 632) or with an innate drive to control territory (Gissy, 1999, p. 29). In this perspective, war enhances biological reproduction. Especially valuable are the studies on the psychology of combat and on psychological effects of combat experience. They introduce the concept of a ‘psychiatric casualty’ to account for disorders afflicting people after the extreme stress and exhaustion of the combat situation (Grossman and Siddle, 1999, p. 140). They also point to the psychiatric traumatization of non-combatants due to exposure to destruction (Wessels, 1999, p. 159). The economic perspective considers war as a form of ‘economic behaviour’, or ‘a form of competition for command over scarce resources’ (Wisman, 1999, p. 631). In this connection, economists can contribute to the analysis of the causes of war by arguing that war is waged as long as it pays off. They often point out ethological analogies. However, most economists focus on consequences – the costs of war. They point out its overall negative effects for the modern economy, including a variety of indirect costs, wherein war is unprofitable even for the victors. This leads to seeing war as an irrational accident (Seiglie, 1999). Anthropology examines how warfare is integrated into the cultural system of the society, developing the concept of ‘warrior societies’ (Sanders, 1999, p. 775). In this perspective, war is seen as a product of specific cultural norms which are reproduced in a variety of rituals. Thus, war can serve the reproduction needs of collective identities. It is a rule-bound practice full of symbolic meanings. However, anthropology also studies the interplay of cultural factors and material conditions such as competition for scarce resources. Many of these anthropological approaches and insights have been used in military sociology (Siebold, 2001). Sociology tends to see war as obsolete, irrational and unfit for modern industrial society – the main focus of this discipline (Spencer, 1999). However, society can address war in connection with revolution as an outcome of social inequalities. Historical sociology has provided insights into a variety of social causes of warfare, as well as into the intimate relationship between European wars and the rise of European states (Hobden, 1998). The theory-oriented perspectives discussed so far rely on several conceptual metaphors of war: GAME, QUARREL, HARVEST, ACCIDENT, PRODUCTION, NATURE (Table 9.2). Some, but not all of them, are

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Table 9.2 Metaphors of war in theory

Source domain

Theoretical perspective

Explanation of the source domain. War is ...

GAME (COMPETITION)

IR realism, game theory; etology

Intentional clash between rational actors. Each of them has clearly defined stakes in the conflict which it tries to maximize at the expenses of others

QUARREL

Psychoanalysis

Intentional or unintentional clash between emotional actors

HARVEST (GOOD OR BAD)

Economics; IR expected utility theory

Source of material gains for individuals or ruling groups. Unlike in the GAME metaphor, there is no interaction with others. The focus is on costs and benefits of war

ACCIDENT

IR misperceptions, Result of unfortunate failures and bureaucratic politics, misunderstandings due to a variety secret diplomacy; of factors classical sociology; economics

PRODUCTION (TRANSFORMATION)

IR diversionary theories; Marxist political economy; anthropology

NATURE

Etology; psychology Inevitable part of human existence. Like animals, people are part of nature and cannot escape its laws

Man-made device which brings about new products (such as states or particular identities) and helps to maintain the extant products

mutually exclusive (e.g. GAME and ACCIDENT or PRODUCTION and NATURE). Each highlights or constructs different features of war. Unlike theorists, historians do not address war as such. Instead, they examine specific historical events which are related to a concrete case of war. Moreover, even more than the ‘not-so-international discipline of IR’ (Waever, 1998), historiography is not international at all, being divided into nationally oriented disciplines. Therefore, it is impossible to offer any comprehensive summary of historiographic writing on war. Instead, I illustrate the historians’ approach by referring to the work of the German historian Fritz Fischer (2004 [1961]) on the FIRST WORLD WAR, which is one of the most influential and controversial historical accounts of this war in German historiography.

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In the early 1960s Fischer made claims that the German empire was weighing up the world war option for a few years before its actual outbreak – meaning that it actively exacerbated international tension in the run-up to the war, and that it was actually interested in starting the war. These claims were not really surprising outside Germany, as they reflected the position of the world war victors, who argued from the very outset that the Germans were to blame for the outbreak of the FIRST WORLD WAR. However, their claims ran contrary to the traditional view of German historiography, which subscribed to the official reasoning of the imperial German leaders that Germany was drawn into the war against her own will and against her own better judgement. Fischer challenges the view that the FIRST WORLD WAR was ‘an operational accident of history’ (Fischer, 2004 [1961], p. 11) to which all the parties were drawn against their own inclinations. This view then prevailed in Germany, while it has remained popular elsewhere until today. The scholarly literature which relies on the metaphor of the FIRST WORLD WAR as an ACCIDENT tends to focus on the role of the mobilization plans of Germany, Austria and Russia in the outbreak of war (Tuchman, 1962; Levy, 1986). After the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian archduke, Francis Ferdinand, the unexpected interplay of mobilization plans sidelined political leaders and led the bureaucratic war machineries of the European great powers into inevitable conflict, despite the last-minute efforts of their leaders, including the German Kaiser, to preserve the peace. By contrast, Fischer argues that the FIRST WORLD WAR was an intended consequence of the German ‘bid for world power’ (Griff nach der Weltmacht). He supports his argument with a sociological and economic analysis of the Wilhelmine Empire and, most importantly, with detailed archival research. It is thanks to German archives that he gains unique insight into the decision-making process of the German leaders. On this basis, he proves that the German political leaders, especially the Prime Minister Bethmann Hollweg, were preparing for war while calling for peace in their public statements. Their anti-war rhetoric only served to foster domestic political support for their aggressive foreign policy (at which they succeeded) and also to keep Britain out of the war (at which they failed). For example, Fischer reveals the double game of German diplomacy in July of 1914, when it seemingly encouraged British mediation efforts towards Austria while actually working to torpedo these efforts. His careful analysis of German war aims shows that Germany saw the war as a means to raise its status from a European great power to a world

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power. Moreover, these aggressive war aims were widely supported within German society, including business leaders, political parties, nationalist NGOs and military leaders. According to Fischer’s archival sources, the military leaders deemed the summer of 1914 an optimal moment for starting the war, because they saw German troops as better prepared than Russian and French forces, and expected this favourable margin to disappear within one or two years. All in all, far from being seen as an unintended ACCIDENT of history, the FIRST WORLD WAR is interpreted by Fischer as a well-calculated bid for power in a destructive GAME launched by Germany. Thus, even though Fischer’s, and in general historians’ accounts, tend towards a detailed description of archival facts, it cannot do without metaphorical expressions (‘bid for world power’) and conceptual metaphors (GAME) on which the historian’s narrative relies.

War in the arts Like historical accounts, artistic representations of war reflect one particular event, which makes it difficult to summarize them in any meaningful manner. Therefore, they offer unique metaphorical expressions which capture the particularity of the situation. At the same time, like theoretical interpretations, they try to express something transcending the particular event, aiming at the universal, which for its part enables the preparation of some sort of a summary at the level of conceptual metaphors. However, in the absence of the summarizing secondary literature on the metaphors of artistic representations of war, I will use just three illustrative examples to show how metaphors of war are used in novels. Each of the three novels offers a profoundly different reflection of the FIRST WORLD WAR. While Erich Maria Remarque’s (1967 [1928]) All Quiet on the Western Front is among the most famous anti-war pieces in twentieth-century world literature, Ernst Jünger’s (1978) Storm of Steel is often considered a celebration of militarism (Jünger, 1978), and Jaroslav Hašek’s (1985a; b) The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War counts as a superb war satire. Despite this, the three novels have a lot in common. They were written by former soldiers (Remarque and Jünger served in the German imperial army, Hašek in the Austro-Hungarian army) and their main characters are soldiers. All three novels have been translated into numerous languages and shaped the popular perception of the First World War, and of war in general. Remarque tells of a young German volunteer who is trapped in the trenches of the Western front. Both the main character and his fellows

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sincerely hate the war and try to survive as best they can. However, one by one they fall, and eventually the main character dies as well. Remarque uses numerous distinct metaphors to mediate his understanding of war to the reader. These connote both the universality and particularity of metaphors of war in the arts (Table 9.3). Like Remarque, Jünger bases his narrative on his own firsthand account of the German volunteer soldier and, like Remarque, reflects on the human suffering and the material damage the war brought about. However, unlike Remarque’s main character, Jünger’s protagonist is not disillusioned by the war. He rises to become an officer and, despite his numerous injuries, seeks dangerous combat situations which he actually enjoys. My identification of Jünger’s metaphors draws upon previous research (Verboven, 2003) (Table 9.4) The main character of Hašek’s novel is also a volunteer soldier. In contrast to the previous characters, he is not a young idealist. Švejk is an aged dealer in stolen dogs who is officially certified as insane and physically unfit for military combat. His main feature is his tendency to end up in difficult situations and to get out of these situations, either by lucky coincidence or by telling everyone unending stories which are supposed to explain what happened. These stories convince his listeners, usually his superiors, that Švejk is crazy and nothing can be done about it. The question whether the main character is really insane or whether his supposed insanity only masks a cunning survival strategy is never answered in the novel. Even though the novel is about war, and the protagonist is a serving soldier, it never addresses combat situations. Instead, it focuses on Czech wartime society, all the main characters being Czechs, and on the inner workings of the Austrian military machine (Table 9.5). What do these metaphors tell us about war? Let us start with those identified in at least two of the three novels. The metaphors which link war with NATURE (Remarque, Jünger) point to its inevitability and to lack of any personal responsibility for war. It is a natural phenomenon beyond human control. The metaphors of TRANSFORMATION (Remarque, Jünger) put emphasis on its profound impact on everything war touches. War is primarily seen as a change which includes loss of individuality and the awakening of human animality. Jünger’s metaphor of HUNT which implies that humans turn into hunted animals is close to the metaphors of TRANSFORMATION. However, unlike these, it is asymmetrical as it is based on the distinction between hunter and hunted. The metaphors of ACCIDENTAL VIOLENCE (Remarque, Hašek) picture war as something beyond any rational scheme or common

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Table 9.3 Metaphors of war in the arts (I) Source domain

Description

TRANSFORMATION

Individuals are transformed into a single whole. Soldiers are like formerly individual coins which were melted down and then minted anew (Remarque, 1928/67, p.154) Individuals become part of the surrounding nature ‘our hands are earth, our bodies are mud, our eyes are rain puddles’ (ibid., p.161) Individuals turn into animals: ‘Three quarters of soldiers’ vocabulary is about food and digestion (ibid. 13), ‘we turned into dangerous animals’ (ibid., p.70). Animality protects humans against insanity (ibid., p.155)

NATURE

War is a strong wind destroying everything (ibid., p.38), ‘iron fountains’ (ibid., p.66), enemy fire like ‘rain’ (ibid., p.79)

EXTREMES

Humiliation – officers humiliating soldiers in boot camp, humiliating conditions of life (latrines, sex in the barrack room) (ibid., p.152) Physical pain – dying people, dying horses (ibid., p.42) Mental anguish – regrets after killing the enemy in close combat (ibid., p.125–27) Consumption – soldiers eat until they get sick from it (ibid., p. 135) Friendship - the war experience brings people closer together than any other possible experience

ACCIDENTAL VIOLENCE

Individual survival is a matter of coincidence (ibid., p.63)

CORRUPTION

Bribes in the military hospitals (ibid., p.140)

DISEASE

People die of war as they die of ‘cancer, tuberculosis, flu, diarrhoea’ (ibid., p.153)

Note: The first column examines the universality of the conceptual metaphors by listing the source domains which have been used in the novel. The second column addresses the particularity of the metaphors by describing their respective metaphorical expressions.

conventions. Similarly, metaphors of DISEASE (Remarque, Hašek) also evoke this kind of fatal exceptionality, especially if the disease in question is seen as incurable, such as certain cancers or mental disease. By contrast, the metaphors of CORRUPTION (Remarque, Hašek) deny any exceptionality to war. It is just business in harsh conditions. Like the metaphors of ACCIDENTAL VIOLENCE and DISEASE, Remarque’s metaphor of EXTREMES also stresses the exceptionality of war conditions. However, in contrast to these, it is not unambiguously

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Table 9.4 Metaphors of war in the arts (II) Source domain

Description

NATURE

‘Steel storm’, ‘fire waves’ of attacks (Jünger, 1978, p.284), ‘floods’ enemy troops (ibid., p.294) and ‘wind’ or ‘rain’ of enemy fire (ibid., p.87)

PERFORMANCE

The artillery fire is associated with ‘musical melody’ or with ‘dance’, one believes to listen to ‘drums’ or ‘fifes’ in the battle and military clashes are described as if they were a ‘play’ in a theatre (ibid., pp.11; 33; 90; 29; 238)

TRANSFORMATION

People are ‘smelted’ in ‘blast furnaces’ and ‘hammered’ on (ibid., p.135; 11; 149). Soldiers turn into various animal species or simply into ‘animals’ (Verboven, 2003, p.149). The loss of the common sense in the fighting mood as if in a dream or intoxication (Verboven, 2003,pp.190–1). The landscape is remade by war and the transformation. Inanimate objects turn into animals such as tanks as ‘elephants’ or ‘giant beetles’ (Verboven, 2003, p.198)

HUNT

Soldiers hunt for their enemies (Verboven, 2003, p.182–3)

COMMUNICATION German fire is ‘responded’ to by the fire of the enemy (Verboven, 2003, p.83; Jünger, 1978, p.32) GAME

Soldiers play either an unspecified game with the enemy or they try their luck by games of chance or juggling.

negative as it refers to extremes in both negative conditions such as suffering or cruelty, and in conditions which are neutral or positive such as consumption or friendship. Thus, the metaphor of EXTREMES evokes exceptionality which can go either way. At the same time, this exceptionality of war is hidden by the three metaphors of PERFORMANCE, GAME and COMMUNICATION, which Jünger uses as they picture the war as something usual, normal and rational. Hašek’s metaphor of POOR HARVEST, as well as all the other metaphors he uses, need to be interpreted in light of the irony with which the novel is written. War is pictured by means of logistical problems of business people and soldiers, which makes it somewhat ridiculous. The same applies to the metaphor of QUARREL, which likens war to pub brawls. Also, ironically, the main character of the novel, who is certified as mentally challenged, maintains his common sense while the supposedly rational elites behave crazily.

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Table 9.5 Metaphors of war in the arts (III) Source domain

Description

MENTAL ILLNESS The main character is certified as insane but his judgement is more or less commonsensical. In contrast, a genuine insanity penetrates the high ranks of the Austrian army. There is a senile general completely out of touch with reality and ‘Austria had plenty of such generals’ (Hašek, 1985b, p.96) or the general who turned mad and whose crazy orders needed to be transmitted because the procedure required so even though nobody obeyed (1985b, p.81). All the army chaplains are mentally disturbed. QUARREL

The Austrian emperor’s thinking is put as: ‘You killed my uncle, so I’ll sock you in the jaw. The war surely comes’ (Hašek, 1985a, p.23). There is a comparison of war to a small revenge among the beer drinkers concluding ‘wanting to take revenge on someone ... innocent people take the rap’ (1985b, p.91).

POOR HARVEST

A usurer complains about losing his claims with officers who are killed or captured (Hašek, 1985a, p.178–9), a hop merchant despairs over the war damage done to breweries and to the supply chains (Hašek, 1985a, p. 220). The war against Italy is expected to bring short food rations for soldiers (Hašek, 1985b, p.91).

ACCIDENTAL VIOLENCE

An accidental death of a soldier is described in a cynical manner (Hašek 1985b, p.54), ‘he has his bowels in his pants’. Soldiers are humiliated by officers, a private is ordered to creep like a dog in the office (1985b, p.268). An NCO has a boy executed without an obvious reason (1985b, p.275), Jews are beaten up for ‘spreading rumours’ (1985b, p.325).

CORRUPTION

The archbishop of Budapest prays for soldiers: ‘God bless your bayonets that they penetrate the bellies of your enemies. Let the justest God direct the artillery fire above the heads of enemy staffs. Let the merciful God spill blood in quashing all the enemies by the wounds which you cause them!’ (Hašek, 1985b, p.98). Austrian officers steal and sell the food for their troops (ibid., p.108).

Discussion This chapter did not aim at the identification of all possible war metaphors in the scholarly literature and artistic representation. Instead, it sought to show, first, the enormous diversity of resources which

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can be used for conceptual reflection on war, and, second, how this diversity can be ordered in a transdisciplinary manner by examining metaphors. We can see how most of the above conceptual metaphors cut across the disciplines and go beyond scholarly investigation. Moreover, the identification of conceptual metaphors makes it possible to overcome disciplinary labels and to focus on the insights which various interpretations provide. It is variety of insights which leads to a new knowledge no matter what their disciplinary backgrounds. Thus, GAME, TRANSFORMATION and ACCIDENT are each present in many different perspectives on war, both within a single discipline and among the disciplines. But the disciplinary story is secondary to the analysis of profound differences among these conceptual metaphors themselves. Whereas the GAME metaphor mediates the instrumental understanding of war as a more or less controlled process, the ACCIDENT metaphor implies the loss of control over it at some point, and the TRANSFORMATION metaphor rules out any control by default as it implies a profound change in everybody and everything being affected by war. However, it is also useful to look into how the very same conceptual metaphor is associated with different metaphorical expressions and different entailments in line with the discipline in which it is used. The GAME metaphor can lead to a game theoretical analysis, but it can also inform ethological theories of war as well as narrative accounts of how soldiers play with the enemy or turn into game-addict ‘gamblers’. The NATURE metaphor can evoke objective laws which scholars of all possible disciplines identify, or it can lead to analogies with earthquakes and storms. The ACCIDENT metaphor is behind theories which examine flaws in individual perceptions, in collective decision-making or in social conditions, but it can also be captured by literary accounts of random violence. The PRODUCTION/TRANSFORMATION metaphor may subsume scholarly accounts of the reproduction of, and change in, social identities by war or the accounts of its impact on the psychology of the combatants, but it also informs vivid literary descriptions of combat experience. In addition, some conceptual metaphors are only elaborated by one discipline or by a single artistic representation while being ignored by others. Such metaphors can then serve as a source of innovation in the disciplines in which they have been so far neglected, as long as their respective metaphorical expressions and entailments can be developed there. For example, the metaphors of war as DISEASE, MENTAL

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ILLNESS or CORRUPTION, which come from the novels, have so far not been much elaborated in the scholarly literature, and the insights they offer could possibly provide new avenues of research. Making these connections and comparisons possible, the analysis of war metaphors entailing different scholarly and artistic representations goes beyond a simple multidisciplinary listing of these representations. It is transdisciplinary. The research benefits of any transdisciplinary project are obvious and have already been extensively discussed (see Chapter 2). However, the project introduced in this chapter differs from usual transdisciplinary projects such as political psychology or political economy (see Chapter 2), which are discipline-centric as they lead to new disciplines arising on the margins of existing ones. This project is an example of a concept-driven, or concept-centric, transdisciplinarity. Unlike traditional transdisciplinarity, concept-centric transdisciplinarity does not strive to merge parts of different disciplines into a new one. Instead, it starts with a concept, such as war, and then collects a variety of its reflections and representations to link them on their common metaphorical grounds. This kind of transdisciplinarity is less ambitious, more practical, more flexible and more innovative than the usual one. It attempts at epistemic integration (see Chapter 1) at the conceptual level rather than at the disciplinary level, and it does not prescribe which disciplines are to be engaged. Indeed, their choice will differ from case to case as it depends on the concept in question. Moreover, the concept-centric transdisciplinarity also brings about important benefits in teaching. Not only does it make students aware, from the very beginning, of the multifaceted nature of war and of concepts, but it also makes war and other concepts more tangible by including their historical and artistic representations. On the other hand, these benefits of concept-centric transdisciplinarity may sometimes be outweighed by the costs of academic politics in which disciplines can serve as key structures for the accumulation of resources needed in institutional battles over budgets and recognition. In this perspective, traditional transdisciplinarity or neodisciplinarity (see Chapter 2) may provide viable alternatives. However, the results of such a cost-benefit analysis will depend on the state of the organization of the respective academic fields and these fields are frequently more national than international. In this connection, the drive to create new disciplines, whether transdisciplinary or neodisciplinary, may be much stronger in big countries with well-institutionalized academic disciplines, such as the US or UK, than in small countries with weakly

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institutionalized disciplines as is the case, for example,. in Central and Eastern Europe (Drulák, Karlas and Königová, 2009). Cutting across the disciplines, and going beyond them, metaphors provide us with two valuable contributions. First, at the level of conceptual metaphor they connect distinct areas of human reflection which may seem unconnectable and incommensurable. In so doing they reveal abstract models of thought which hint at unexpected links. Second, at the level of metaphorical expression – where the artistic reflection is especially important – metaphors point to the practical consequences of abstract concepts, for example, by making the horrors of war more tangible or by reflecting the contradictory nature of the sublime within the war experience. These two contributions to knowledge make the analysis of metaphors of war, and of other political phenomena, a promising path for transdisciplinary research.

Note 1. In order to distinguish between conceptual metaphors and metaphorical expressions, we CAPITALIZE conceptual metaphors.

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 251 Cameron, L. (1999) ‘Operationalising “Metaphor” for Applied Linguistic Research’ in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Campbell, N.R. (1967) Foundations of Science: The Philosophy of Theory and Experiment (New York: Dover Publications). De Man, P. (1984 [1978]) ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’ in M.J. Shapiro (ed.) Language and Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Debrix, F. (2006) ‘The Sublime Spectatorship of War: The Erasure of the Event in America’s Politics of Terror and Aesthetics of Violence’, Millennium, 34(3): 767–91. Diehl, P.F. (ed.) (2005) War, vol. I-VI (London: Sage). Drulák, P. (2008) ‘Identifying and Assessing Metaphors: Discourse on EU Reform’ in T. Carver and J. Pikalo (eds) Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and changing the world (London and New York: Routledge). Drulák, P., J. Karlas and L. Königová (2009) ‘Central and Eastern Europe: between Continuity and Change’ in A.B. Tickner and O. Waever (eds) International Relations Scholarship around the World (London: Routledge). Duhem, P. (1974) The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (New York: Atheneum). Elman, C. and M.F. Elman (1997) ‘Diplomatic History and International Relations Theory: Respecting Difference and Crossing Boundaries,’ International Security, 22(1): 1–16. Fischer, F. (1975) War of Illusions (New York: W.W. Norton). Fischer, F. (2004 [1961]) Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag). Gissy, W. (1999) ‘Political Economy of Violence and Nonoviolence’ in L. Kurtz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press). Gombrich, E. (1971) The Ideas of Progress and their Impact on Art (New York: Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture). Grossman, D. and B.K. Siddle (1999) ‘Psychological Effects of Combat’ in L. Kurtz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press). Hartman, J.J. (1999) ‘Psychoanalysis’ in L. Kurtz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press). Hašek, J. (1985a) Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, 1, 2, (Bratislava: Slovenský spisovatel). Hašek, J. (1985b) Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, 3, 4, (Bratislava: Slovenský spisovatel). Hobden, S. (1998) International Relations and Historical Sociology: Breaking Down Boundaries (London: Routledge). Holden, G. (2003) ‘World Literature and World Politics: In Search of a Research Agenda’, Global Society, 17(3): 229–53. Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Jünger, E. (1978) In Stahlgewittern, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Kaldor, M. (2005 [1999]) ‘New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era’ in P.F. Diehl (ed.) War, vol. I (London: Sage).

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252 Petr Drulák Kissinger, H. (1957) A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Krippendorff, E. (1999) Die Kunst, nicht regiert zu werden: Ethische Politik von Sokrates bis Mozart (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf). Kuhn, T.S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kurtz, L. (ed.) (1999) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, vol. I-III (London: Academic Press). Lakatos, I. and A. Musgrave (ed.) (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lakoff, G. (1993) ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’ in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, second edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Lakoff, G. and M. Turner (1989) More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Lakoff, G. and R. Núnez (2000) Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books). Lambourn, D. (2001) ‘Metaphor and its Role in Social Thought’ in International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Ltd.). Levy, J.S. (2002) ‘War and Peace’ in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage). Levy, J. (2005a) ‘Misperception and the Causes of War: Theoretical Linkages and Analytical Problems’, in P.F. Diehl (ed.) War, vol. III (London: Sage). Levy, J. (2005b) ‘The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique’ in P.F. Diehl (ed.) War, vol. III (London: Sage). Levy, J. (1986) ‘Organizational Routines and the Causes of War’, International Studies Quarterly, 30: 193–222. Lunačarskij, A.V. (1975) Stati o umění: Estetika, kulturní politika, teorie literatury (Praha: Odeon). Mirzoeff, N. (1999) An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge). Mukařovský, J. (1966 [1936]) ‘Estetická funkce, norma a hodnota jako sociální fakty’, Studie z estetiky (Praha: Odeon). Remarque, E.M. (1967 [1928]) Na západní frontě klid, a Czech translation of All Quiet on the Western Front, German original, Im Westen nichts neues, (Praha: Naše vojsko). Ringmar, E. (1996) Identity, Interest and Action: a Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War (New York: Cambridge University Press). Sanders, A. (1999) ‘Warriors, Anthropology of’ in L. Kurtz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press). Seiglie, C. (1999) ‘Economic Costs and Consequences of War and Peace’ in L. Kurtz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, vol. 1 (New York: Academic Press). Siebold, G.L. (2001) ‘Core Issues and Theory in Military Sociology’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 29: 140–60. Spencer, M. (1999) ‘Sociological Studies, Overview’ in L. Kurtz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, Conflict, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press). Teschke, B. (2003) The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London and New York: Verso).

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Part IV End Comment

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10 End Comment: The Practices of Interdisciplinarity Iver B. Neumann

In this concluding comment, I try to take stock of the discussion presented in the volume. First, moving from the general to the specific, I set off with a discussion of how academic disciplines emerge as a result of both ‘fission’ and ‘fusion’. Of the two options, international studies (IS) began as, and remains, a case of fusion. Second, I then try to identify the ‘centripetal force’, and find it in subject matter as well as in social theory. Since their institutional inception within academia, social sciences have acquired a certain cohesion through social theory. This may also be seen in the types of historians and lawyers who are drawn to international studies: there tends to be at least some theoretical bent involved. Third, I turn from the level of disciplinary discourse to the level of practices. The key hindrances to further development of international studies are to be found not only in the different kinds of reasoning that characterize extant disciplines, but also in their different styles of reasoning. Throughout this discussion I draw on my own experiences – foremost amongst them my decades-long involvement with area studies (Russian studies and also, to some degree, European studies) – and my experience in acquiring an anthropological voice in addition to the international relations (IR) voice that I already possessed since my early training.

Interdisciplinarity through fusion Sociologists of academic disciplines stress how new disciplines tend to grow out of already established ones (Becker and Trowler, 2001). One example would be the emergence of geology out of physics, which was a straight case of fission. As discussed in this volume, international 257

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relations has a rather different history. It was only to a limited degree the result of fission (splitting off) from political science. For this reason it is a straightforward historical mistake for political science to claim international relations, with political theory, comparative politics and administration and organization, as one of four ‘branches’ of that discipline. Historically, international relations grew out of interdisciplinary conversations among history, law and sociology. The process was energized, not first and foremost by fission, but by fusion. I note in passing that this was not only the case when speaking of scholarship within the major powers, as discussed by the editors and David Long (see Chapter 1). It was also true for a peripheral country like my own – Norway – where IR congealed around the history and law-oriented milieu of the Nobel Peace Institute (Leira and Neumann, 2007). As seen from within IR, a phenomenon such as international studies, in which representatives of other disciplines pool resources with the – now fairly well established – discipline of international relations, is a return to early days, but from a position of strength. It must also be noted, however, that IR never really left those other disciplines. As Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2001) point out, most IR scholars who bring something new to the table do so not only by refining and extending material already extant within the discipline. They also customarily make raids into neighbouring disciplines. One may add that representatives of those disciplines are, themselves, also happy to ride in on their own accord, hawking their theoretical insights and empirical findings about the ‘global’. The example prominently on display in this volume is that of geographers. Becker and Trowler (2001) may talk about fission as new disciplines emerge, but the social sciences make up a fuzzy set, and the boundaries with regard to history and law are fuzzy as well. In this volume, David Long introduces a useful categorization when he notes that interdisciplinarity may be said to have three aspects: common subject matter, common concepts/methods/theories, and/or common institutionalization (see Chapter 2). If the subject matter is what holds the enterprise together, we have multidisciplinarity. If concepts, methods and theories are common, there is transdisciplinarity. If there is common institutionalization, there is neodisciplinarity. Analytically, these three seem to be modular. Common subject matter invites common languages, and common languages invite common institutionalization. Area studies may serve as an example. The common subject was a territorial region (for example, Africa) or a political one (for example, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe). Out of the conversations

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on the common subject came convergence on certain common concepts (totalitarianism) and, even if to a very limited degree, theories and methods. Then there was institutionalization, both in the sense of common seminars and conferences, separate journals and book series and units (typically centres) within academia. The example of area studies also points up the limits of a view from the inside and out, which is by definition the perspective used in area studies. This is because the key precondition for all this to happen was not that academia would pursue this kind of inquiry. It was much more important that American institutions bankroll the entire enterprise. What Foucauldians call the power/knowledge nexus was such that the rationales at work within academia were less important than those at work without. That in no way detracts from Long’s categorization, but it is a reminder that interdisciplinarity is particularly sensitive to political conjunctures and, hence, is probably shot even more through with power than are other spheres of knowledge production.

The cohesion of social inquiry As Long points out (see Chapter 2), international relations, international politics and international studies are neodisciplinary (held together by institutionalization) to only a limited degree. There are certainly conferences and seminars, and their absolute numbers as well as the number of people attending them have increased heavily since the end of the cold wars. The numbers attending the annual conference of the International Studies Association (ISA) have, to note but one key example, increased more than threefold. The increase in the number of journals and book series has matched – given the neoliberal pressure for more ‘deliverables’, probably more than matched – the increase in the number of practitioners. It remains a fact, though, that although the trade of international studies is practiced at over a thousand think-tanks worldwide, the number of separate university institutions remains limited. International studies are rather kept together by what Long calls multidisciplinarity. As discussed at some length above, the subject matter is given as social discourses and practices concerning and/or involving the crossing of politically relevant borders. Changes in the overall pattern of the subject studied (shorthand: from international relations to world politics to globalization) have been intense over the last decades, and have been a precondition to the swelling of our numbers. The second thing that makes for cohesion is what Long refers to

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as transdisciplinarity. In this book, the major stress is on the plurality of concepts, methods and theories. I do, of course, agree with all those contributors who stress the tremendous pluralism of methods, methodologies and theories within IR. It should be noted, however, that this pluralism is not unique where disciplines are concerned. What do a sociologist of culture and a statistical sociologist have in common? I would say neither more nor less than their opposite numbers within IR. Pami Aalto’s chapter (see Chapter 3), in which he discusses the state of play in terms of Lakatosian research programmes, is a useful reminder in this regard. At the same time it is also true that large chunks of international law and history, disciplines which were already very much there when the social sciences went through a decisive phase of gestation in the early 1900s, remain at some conceptual, methodological and theoretical distance from other forms of social inquiry. Still, I would argue that within international studies the closest thing to a least common denominator remains social theory, broadly understood. In his chapter on three different historical attempts at institutionalization along interdisciplinary lines, Vilho Harle celebrates the efforts of the Frankfurt school in this regard. He points out that their model, in which the active force of a core science integrated the efforts of separate disciplines into a coherent theory of the totality, proved to be historically productive. The core science was social philosophy. It may, particularly in a perspective that envelops more than Germany, be useful to think of social philosophy or continental theory as the merging of two core sciences, namely philosophy and sociology. Note that sociology at this point was usually a shorthand for social inquiry overall. Harle concludes as follows: This model, however, positively rejects the core role of IR in international studies, which in its [i.e. IR’s] stead, calls for a philosophy of the international or international theory to give purpose and structure to international studies. (see Chapter 4) I agree with Harle that, if we are talking in terms of organizational models (as distinct from political commitments and teleological historiosophies), and if we relax the authoritarian role of the director and the insistence on a high degree of political and theoretical conformity, then the Frankfurt school model is very promising indeed. The core idea is to insert a particular social theory at the heart of interdisciplinary work. Harle goes on to argue, however, that if international studies broadly understood are going to head down this path, then it will negate the

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core role of IR. But that all depends on how IR evolves. My wish would be that IR fully acknowledge its status as a social science, which means that the core of IR itself should be social theory. If social theory is at the core of IR, then IR may be at the core of international studies, and the problem identified by Harle is dissolved. The first step in such a direction is to acknowledge that it is social theory as such, and not any one particular type of theory, which forms the core of IR. Patrick Jackson (2011) has recently published a very useful book in this regard. He discusses the unity of disunity of IR as a community of science and celebrates the plurality of ways of doing social theory. One thing that Jackson’s book can do for us is to highlight how the fault lines that divide IR will continue to exist within the wider field of international studies, and for the simple reason that they are common to social inquiry overall. Jackson reviews the normative debate on how to delimit science, and he defines science by its goals, not by its methods or theories. It is systematic, communal and empirical production of knowledge. Social science is the systematic production of empirical, factual knowledge about political and social arrangements. Jackson is sceptical of prescribing more rigorous standards to practicing scholars, preferring instead to celebrate a broad church and pushing ecumenical dialogue. In short, he is an ally of those producing this volume. As to diversity, Jackson finds it first and foremost in philosophical ontology, that is, in the hook-up to the world that we make in order to produce knowledge in the first place. The key fissures in overall debates about science concerns, first, what kind of hook-up the scholar has to the world. Am I a constitutive part of the world, or do I follow Descartes in thinking about my mind as radically cut off from the (rest of the) world? In the former case, I am a mind-world monist. In the latter case, I am a mind-world dualist. The fissure between monists and dualists is matched in divisive power by a second one, which turns on a question of scientific ontology: namely, what kind of status our theories are given. Are they transfactual, meaning that they are based on the real existence of structures that generate observable stuff that we may then study? Or, are they phenomenalist, meaning that they are based on the scholar’s experiences (and not rooted in any further claim about something really existing outside of those experiences)? Note that Jackson privileges these two fissures at the cost of a number of other candidates, such as positivist versus interpretivist and qualitative versus quantitative. Such fissures easily degenerate into questions of methods – techniques for gathering and analyzing bits of data – questions which are less foundational than the questions of ontology

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and methodology singled out for discussion here. Depending on what philosophical wagers scholars place regarding the two key fissures, they place themselves in one of four cells in a two-by-two matrix: neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism and reflexivity. Each cell gives a different answer to the problem with which we have wrestled since Descartes, namely how to overcome the mind/world split when we hook our inquiry up with the world. Neo-positivist workhorses find the answer in falsification. Critical realist ones find it in the best approximation between determining dispositional properties and the object under study. Analyticists and reflexivists dissolve Descartes’s problem by drawing up an ideal–typical analytic or by analyzing themselves and their own experiences as effects of structures. The main point here is that the diversity highlighted by Jackson may be found in all social inquiry and, hence, in all disciplines that concern themselves with such inquiry. This means that these commitments are not only divisive in the sense that placing your wager with one of the four positions will divide you from those placing any one of the three other wagers. Taken as a set, the commitments are also inclusive, because everybody must choose among variants of these four options and so, like participants in a carnival where you have to come dressed as something from a deck of cards, the universe of choices already makes you part of a series. A parallel to nation states may be made here: the matters that have a role to play in constituting them – territory, population, central administration, flags, anthems – obviously differ from one another, but they differ within an already set frame. To use Sartre’s term, they make up a series. One key factor that hampers interdisciplinarity is simply ignorance about the universe of choices that constitute people as participants in the same undertaking (see also Chapter 3). If we acknowledge IR as a social science, formed around a commitment to social theory, then international studies will be the wider set of scholarly activities in which the object remains the same. IR will have what we may call a meta-cohesion in the sense that the discipline’s multiform concepts, methods and theories are mutually recognized by its practitioners, whereas the relationship between IR and international studies would be marked first and foremost by what Long refers to as multidisciplinarity (see Chapter 2). There are a number of interesting developments in this direction. To mention but one example: as a global society has emerged as an object of governance, international law has become increasingly interested in questions regarding state building, regimes, fields and discourses. One particularly interesting area for further interdisciplinary research

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is what is now referred to as global administrative law. The basic idea here is that global politics has reached a level of density where it makes sense to talk about a number of processes in the language of administrative law. That language emerged as part of state-building processes, so here there is a central challenge to IR and its constitutive focus on state sovereignty and international anarchy. IR is at a disadvantage visà-vis the emerging field of global administrative law, inasmuch as its remit has no direct bearing on what other agents in global politics do, whereas legal scholarship is traditionally a science of governance whose results feed much more directly into that part of social processes that we refer to as legal. Here we have an example of the consequences of focusing on the human subject in international studies as discussed by Aalto (see Chapter 7), and also an example of the importance of power in many disciplines as discussed by Tuomas Forsberg (see Chapter 8). IR scholars, beware!

The practice of interdisciplinarity Aalto’s plea for making the human subject an integral part of the wide and plural field of interdisciplinary international studies may serve as a pointer towards the future of international studies overall. It may also serve as a reminder of how this volume has not taken full advantage of one resource common to social theory, namely the theorizing of practice. This book is a useful exercise in that it asks what interdisciplinarity is and how best to go about it on an abstract level. Most of the participants have their own experiences with how to live interdisciplinarity, but we learn little or nothing about all that. I would say that, not least thanks to this book, the debate about interdisciplinary international studies is now ripe for a practice turn (Neumann, 2002; Bauer and Brighi, 2009; Pouliot, 2010). As Drulák reminds us (see Chapter 9), such a turn should give proper due to linguistic practices. It is time to look at the specific practices involved; not only to identify differences in concepts, methods, theories and so on, but to study what actually happens when transactions play out between practitioners of different disciplines or when practitioners of one discipline venture into the territory of another. Such work may be based on observation of interaction, or it may be autoethnographic (RIS, 2010). Let me illustrate what I am talking about by outlining my own transition from being trained as a political scientist to practicing as an IR scholar to being trained again as I recently took a second doctorate, this one in social anthropology. Two themes stand out: my problems with

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a focus on outcome, and the related problem with getting a handle on the style of presentation needed to present material which is geared to constitutive practices instead of political outcomes. It is a regrettable fact that, after ten years of trying to retool from a political scientist to a social anthropologist, and despite my oneyear exposure to university anthropology at the impressionable age of twenty, I still cannot let go of my infatuation with the outcome of political processes. Actually, I do not even really want to. Strathern (2004, p. 23) wrote about me when she wrote about ‘knowledge workers’: The knowledge that is attached to them goes with individuals when they leave one job for another, moving locations; insofar as their knowledge was originally created in the company of others, then it is the community from which they take. It is visible in being left behind. But in what sense can a person ever leave a previous community (so to speak) completely behind? To the extent that knowledge is embedded in what they do, it will in turn show traces of their training, occupation and the contexts in which they have used it. It is not only jobs but academic disciplines and professions as well. There can be no academic discipline without discipline being practised. My three degrees in political science and my long years in a thinktank doing applied, outcome-oriented IR have disciplined me in more senses than one. The micromechanisms of power whereby I was being moulded to serve the needs of anthropological knowledge production clashed with my embodied practices. I would actually argue that it is the blossoming of political anthropology that keeps the classical study of politics alive. If we go to the classics of political theory, there is a focus on the preconditions for political order, and there is a focus on how that order is maintained. Many present-day political scientists and IR scholars seem to have forgotten about the preconditions. With very few exceptions, they take the existence of certain institutions, or the need to create them, as the starting point of the analysis. In terms of doxa, an anthropologist would find it interesting that donors spent around one billion dollars on the Republic of Congo’s first-ever election in 2006, and they would concentrate on how that event reflected and changed social processes overall. A political scientist would ask if the election adhered to already established practices as they have emerged elsewhere, which parties ran, and who won.1 To put the point differently, anthropologists focus on the constitutive, while political scientists focus on the outcome. Anthropologists

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tend to define politics as a question of who we are, while political scientists tend to define it as who gets what, when, how. In the terms of classical political theory, anthropologists focus on the preconditions for political order, and political scientists focus on how that order is maintained. Ian Hacking (2002) problematizes modes of knowledge as what he calls styles of reasoning. Styles of reasoning are characterized by the objects which constitute the world to be known, preconditions for making truth claims and ‘criteria of proof and demonstration’ (Hacking, 2002, p. 4) – that is by an ontology, an epistemology and a methodology.2 I would argue that the difference in object of study (constitution versus outcome) reflects an ontic difference between seeing the social world as being emergent, as do most anthropologists, and seeing it alternatively as being structurally given or in terms of methodological individualism on the other, as do most political scientists.3 This ontic difference is tied in with how the two disciplines lean towards different epistemological commitments (in Weberian terms, understanding versus explanation) as well as towards different methodologies (some variant on the phenomenological themes of intent and reflexivity on the one hand versus defining the object as a ‘dependent variable’ to be studied by other stuff that is held to be invariant – independent variables – on the other). I am talking here about what the (obviously incomplete, pace Strathern) transition from political science to anthropology has been about for me, and would schematize as follows (Table 10.1): If I should identify the major challenge in my transition from political science to anthropology, however, it is to do with style, with how to write up the material. For someone theorizing styles of knowledge production, Hacking actually gives very little attention to style (see, instead, Derrida, 1985 [1978]). Writing anthropology is very different Table 10.1 Ideal-typical styles of reasoning in anthropology and political science

Ontology

Anthropology

Political Science

Reality constructed

Structure or agents given

Epistemology Constructing (understood as)

Excavating Truth

Methodology

Identify means and intent

Reflexivity

Data collection Reading and fieldwork Reading and interviews Source: Neumann, 2011.

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from writing political science. A decade ago, Finn, one of my political science students, reported that his first political science professor had written down the following piece of advice on the blackboard for the initiates to read: ‘Write boringly’. To him, and arguably to political scientists at large, writing should reflect the idea that you are writing from nowhere, about objectively given stuff. Consider what Ardener (1989, pp. 213–14) has to say about the change of horizon that characterizes the ethnographic, field working experience: There was a time when the relativity of cultural categories was raised to a philosophical bogey as ‘relativism’. Anthropology then was discovering a mismatch between the categories of the observer and those generated by the purported object – other people. When the differences are more subtle, the gap is narrower between these two; the mismatch is virtually simultaneous. Since mismatch is our experience of relativity, then the reduction of ‘transmission time’ (between the observer and the purported object) and the narrowing of the mismatch (between the categories of the observer and the other), demonstrates that the process that we first called relativization is not a form of anti-objectivism, but (as its application to ‘familiar’ experience more clearly shows) is on the contrary our only mode of objectivization. This problem simply does not arise for most political scientists, for whom the object of study is already objectively given. Therefore, there is no such book title as ‘Writing Political Science’ (but cf., Shapiro, 1988). Here, we also have the reason why political science finds selfreflection, such as the one I am engaging in now, to be meaningless. As seen from political science, all the contortions that the situation identified by Ardener brings to anthropological writing are simply so many misconceptions that keep anthropologists from getting on with the job. ‘The job’ is, of course, what political scientists define as their job, namely objectively to tell the reader what kind of process led to what outcome. If everything should build up under the conclusion in this way, and the conclusion should be reached by means of explanation, then it follows that the writing style itself becomes teleological. This means that anthropological talk about showing it, not saying it, about letting the data decide the form of presentation, about being reticent about passing judgement on statements by interlocutor goes directly against the grain of political science. Marcus (1998, p. 119) maintains that the ethnographer

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tries to get at a form of local knowledge that is about the kind of difference that is not accessible by working out internal cultural logics. It is about difference that arises from the anxieties of knowing that one is somehow tied into what is happening elsewhere but, as noted, without those connections being clear or precisely articulated through available internal cultural models. In effect, subjects are participating in discourses that are thoroughly localized but that are not their own. There is, in addition, the anxiety identified by Strathern of being in the grip of a kind of academic reasoning and knowledge production about which I felt, and still feel, deeply ambivalent. ‘Despite their very different values and commitments,’ Marcus (1998, p. 125) argues further, ‘the ethnographer and his subject in this project are nevertheless broadly engaged in a pursuit of knowledge with resemblances in form and context that they can recognize’. This does not necessarily hold true for relations between anthropologists and political scientists. Although the subfield of political anthropology has blossomed over the last fifty years, interdisciplinarity between that subfield and political science has, nonetheless, remained very rudimentary indeed. Political scientists have largely been uninterested in the preconditions for political community to exist, and anthropologists have largely been interested in the outcome, in terms of the winning and losing, of the processes that they study, beyond looking at them as symptoms of wider social tensions. This difference has spawned two different styles of writing; one suggestive, another explicit. I can report that if you take the same material and subject it to these two different ways of seeing and writing, the result will be two very different products. The text will hardly pass muster for publication beyond the disciple whose style of reasoning has been used. Even more damning for interdisciplinary efforts, practitioners of other disciplines may fail to find something interesting there whatsoever.

Wrap-up The devil is, as the saying has it, in the details. This volume suggests a very useful language for discussing interdisciplinary international studies and their relations to the discipline of international relations. By including a number of people from a neighbouring and infinitely older discipline, namely geographers, it also demonstrates the fruitfulness

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of interdisciplinary approaches in practice. We should now build on this work and, perhaps taking a leaf from science studies, look at the everyday obstacles to interdisciplinarity. One way of doing this would be to turn to one of interdisciplinarity’s many fruits, namely practice theory. Let me end with three concrete suggestions for how to proceed: diversification of our reading, increased scholarly cooperation and support of interdisciplinary journals. It will be noted that I am following Long’s categorization here, suggesting one multidisciplinary, one transdisciplinary and one neodisciplinary way to proceed. First, multidisciplinarity: international studies would stand to benefit from a stronger focus by its practitioners with regard to what is going on within social theorizing overall. Far too often, patterns of publications present themselves as a hindrance, in the sense that any one scholar tends to follow only journals within her core field. The extent to which she also follows journals in other fields that run articles relevant to the issues researched, or indeed interdisciplinary journals, seems to be much more uncertain. To take but two examples, studies in regional integration often proceed without taking into consideration what the hundred-year-long tradition of studying integration as a general social phenomenon has to say. Again, studies in the importance of religion to international studies tend to begin in medias res, without looking at how the phenomenon of contacts between religions has been studied, and continues to be studied, within theology, the history of religion and the sociology of religion. A second way of furthering interdisciplinarity would be collaboration with scholars from other disciplines. Time and again, I am struck with how discussing with, and, ideally, co-writing with, colleagues from other fields widens my grip on the subject matter by increasing the number of concepts, methods and theories at my disposal. The best should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good; we are not necessarily talking about full immersion here. Simply increasing the gray areas of our knowledge, of increasing our side view, as it were, may prove immensely fruitful. A third way of going about interdisciplinarity is to found and contribute to interdisciplinary journals. These seem to be proliferating, with one prominent example for international studies being the aptly named Cambridge journal, International Theory, which is explicitly interested in boosting social theory as a common core of international studies.

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To sum up, we should turn to the study of interdisciplinary practices, and we should begin by reflecting and diversifying our own scholarly practices with a view to furthering interdisciplinary international studies.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

To dedifferentiate, my source here is actually the work of a political scientist; see Autesserre (2011). Note that objects to be known here simply means phenomena, and so is something different than the specific class(es) of phenomena that Long has in mind when he talks about subject matter (see Chapter 2). Despite its name, methodological individualism is clearly an ontic commitment to treating individuals as given resource maximizers. Note that one may dedifferentiate the two givens by arguing that an ontic commitment to a world of given individuals may actually be treated as a structural commitment; if the social world consists of maximizing individuals, then this would be a structural precondition for any one action.

References Ardener, E. (1989) ‘Remote Areas: Some Theoretical Considerations’ in E. Ardener, The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell). Autesserre, S. (2011) Failing the Congo: International Intervention and Local Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bauer, H. and E. Brighi (eds) (2009) Pragmatism in International Relations (London: Routledge). Becker, T. and P.R. Trowler (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press). Buzan, B. and R. Little (2001) ‘Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do about It’, Millennium, 30(1): 19–39. Derrida, J. (1985 [1978]) ‘The Question of Style’ in D.B. Allison (ed.) The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Hacking, I. (2002) Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Jackson, P.T. (2011) The Conduct of Inquiry in International relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge). Leira, H. and I.B. Neumann (2007) ‘Internasjonal politikk i Norge: En disiplins fremvekst i første halvdel av 1900-tallet’, Internasjonal politikk, 65(2): 141–71. Marcus, G.E. (1998) Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Neumann, I.B. (2002) ‘Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy’, Millennium 32(3): 627–52.

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Neumann, I.B. (2011) At Home with the Diplomats: The Ethnography of A European Foreign Ministry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Pouliot, V. (2010) International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press). Review of International Studies (RIS) (2010) ‘Forum on Autoethnography and International Relations’, 36(3): 777–818. Shapiro, M.J. (1988) The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press). Strathern, M. (2004) Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability, and the Flow of Knowledge (Wantage: Sean Kingston).

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Index 9/11, 135–137, 141, 234 Aalto, Pami, 24–25, 228, 260, 263 Aberystwyth, 11, 130 abject, 195–196 aboriginal studies, 39 actor, 7, 136, 142, 154, 178, 221 administration, 60, 128, 134, 137–138, 142 administration and organization, 258 administrative science, 208 see also management Adorno, Theodor, 94, 95, 99 aesthetic turn, 233 Afghanistan, 8, 136, 138 Africa, 130, 139, 258 Agamben, Giorgio, 114, 195 agency, 7, 195–196, 215 aggression, 185–186, 232, 238–239 Agnew, J.A., 126, 152, 160 Alaska, 130 America, 108 American Political Science Association, 13 Americanism, 142 Anthropocene, 25, 127, 143–145 anthropology, 4, 20, 23, 27, 36, 40, 42, 46, 57, 135, 228, 230, 237, 240, 263–267 anthropological voice, 257 Archer, Margaret, 182 architecture, 54, 163, 228 Ardener, E., 266 area studies, 4, 20–21, 40, 54, 127, 183, 257–259 Argentina, 133 Aristotle, 233 Aron, R., 55 arts, 14, 26, 163, 208, 230, 232–234, 237, 244 Ashley, R., 224 Ashworth, L.M., 56

Asia, 130, 134, 137, 193 Austria, 242, 247 Bachrach, P., 213 balance of power, 186 Baldwin, D., 209, 217 Balkans, 134 Ball, T., 213 Baratz, M.S., 213 Barnes, B., 212, 223 Barnett, M., 221 Basra, 136 Baudrillard, J., 114 Becher, T., 258 Beckmann, Max, 233 belief, 46, 60, 71, 109, 189, 191–192, 210, 222 Bennett, Andrew, 220 Bentham, Jeremy, 6 Berenskoetter, F., 209 Bigelow, K., 229 Bigo, D., 129 bio-politics, 195 Bismarck, Otto von, 17–18, 186 Boulding, K., 219 Bourdieu, P., 219 Brenner, N., 159 British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, 101, 105 British school, 132 Bull, H., 105 Burke, K., 234 Burton, J., 181 Bush, jr, 136–138 Bush, sr, 134 business studies, 31 Butterfield, Herbert, 101, 105 Buzan, B., 25, 56, 58, 106, 139, 191–193, 258 calculation, 189, 191, 223 capitalism, 85, 98, 132, 140, 149–150, 154–155, 157–158, 193 271

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272 Index Carr, E.H., 102, 105, 130–131, 218 cartography, 133, 135, 137 Castells, M., 134 Cerny, Philip, 157 China, 132 classical realism, 81, 113, 185 climate change, 86, 110, 143, 145 coercion, 153, 191, 215, 222, 137 Cold War, 18–19, 22, 125, 127, 133–135, 139, 143, 171, 179, 183, 186, 190, 259 Collier, A., 213 Collier, P., 48 colonial government, 13 community of science, 261 company, 103, 107, 163–164, 170, 191, 264 comparative politics, 21, 37, 258 computer science, 182 Condillac, 236 conduct of foreign relations, 13 Connolly, W., 211–212, 215–216 constructivism, 4, 8, 81–82, 84–85, 181, 183 Copenhagen, 145 criminology, 53 critical critical IR, 110, 114 critical realism, 4, 262 critical security studies, 101, 110 critical theory, CT, 25, 95–97, 99, 101, 182, 196 cultural studies, 6, 39, 57, 85, 87, 194 Czech, 244 Dahl, R., 212–213 Dalby, S., 25 Davis, James, 220 Debrix, F., 233 Deleuze, 114 democratic peace, 20, 238 demography, 40, 54, 228 Descartes, 261–262 development studies, 39–40, 48 Dilthey, 98 diplomacy, 8, 57, 104, 106, 151, 185–187, 195, 218, 242 diplomatic history, 11, 13, 25, 57, 186, 187

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diplomatic studies, 39 diplomatics, 55 see also foreign policy disciplinarity antidisciplinarity, 32, 42, 49 crossdisciplinarity, 43 disciplinary imperialism, 43, 45, 49 disciplining move of IR, 185 intradisciplinarity, 37, 44, 47, 49–50 neodisciplinarity, 23, 25, 31, 33, 38–39, 52–60, 66, 93, 111–112, 208, 249, 258–259, 268 subdisciplinarity, 13, 16, 18, 20, 36–37, 54–58, 60, 100 supradisciplinarity, 32 unidisciplinarity, 42 Dix, Otto, 233 Drulák, Petr, 26, 263 Dublin, 164 Dunne, T., 101 Duvall, R., 220–221 earth system science, 143 East Timor, 134 ecological predicament, 141 economic geography, 46 education, 32, 34, 59, 94, 108–109, 114–115, 154, 157, 163, 170 Eichengreen, B., 46–48 EIPE, 25, 192–195 emotion, 183, 190 empire, 7, 25, 126–128, 130–131, 136–138, 141, 193, 232, 242 Enders, W., 47 energy, 20, 86 English School, 4, 9, 15, 19, 24–25, 56, 82, 84, 93, 101, 104, 107, 115,–116, 180, 183, 191–194, 231 see also international, international society; rationality, rationalism; revolutionism; world, world society Enloe, C., 195 environment environmental and climate change studies, 110 environmental problems, 144 environmental studies, 39, 53

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Index 273 epistemology, 21, 187, 190, 265 epistemic integration, 20, 249 epistemological, 8, 43, 75–76, 84, 87, 180, 185, 189, 192, 194, 196, 230, 265 Europe, 108, 141, 152, 193, 250, 258 European integration studies, 4 see also integration European studies, 39–40, 54, 257 everyday international political economy, 25, 192 falsification, 78, 262 feminism, 26, 53, 180, 194–195 feminist economies, 44–45 see also post-colonialist and feminist studies Ferguson, N., 133 Finland, 25, 112, 150, 167–172 Fischer, F., 232, 241–243 fission, 257–258 Fleck, Ludwik, 162 Florida, 150, 162–167, 171, 173 foreign policy, 16–18, 31, 56–57, 108–109, 137, 179, 183, 185–187, 242 see also conduct of foreign relations Fornari, 239 Forsberg, Tuomas, 26, 263 Foucault, Michel, 4, 19, 114, 221 Foucauldians, 259 see also governmentality Fougner, T., 156 Franco, 17 Frankfurt, 94 Frankfurt school, FS, 24, 93–95, 97–98, 100–101, 107, 115–116, 182, 260 French, 221–222 Freud, 98, 239 Friedman, T.L., 164 Fromm, Erich, 94 Fukuyama, F., 182 fusion, 26, 97, 257–258 Galtung, J., 25, 108–109, 111–112, 115 game theory, 136, 190

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Gandhi, Mohandas, 108 gender studies, 44–45, 53, 182 Geneva, 94 geography, 4, 11–14, 16, 20, 25, 35–36, 46, 54, 115, 126, 128, 132–133, 135, 158, 164, 184, 208, 217–218 geographer, 48–49, 128, 139–140, 150, 152, 258, 267 geology, 257 geopolitics, 21, 25, 32, 73, 110, 114, 126–127, 133, 135, 144, 150, 160, 162, 167, 169, 184 critical geopolitics, 25, 110, 114, 126–127, 133, 184 Gerlach, Kurt, 94 Germany, 94, 130, 134, 186, 242–243, 260 Gill, S., 155 Gilpin, R., 47 Glassman, J., 154 global governance, 7 Global Society, 49 governmentality, 25, 153, 156, 224 see also Foucault Gramsci, A., 154, 160 Gramscian theory, 155 Gramscians, 155 Greece, 8, 133 Grossman, D., 94 group dynamics, 14 Grünberg, Carl, 94, 98 Guattari, 114 Guzzini, S., 207, 215 Habermas, J., 222 Hacking, Ian, 265 hard core, 75–77, 79, 81–82, 86–87, 107 Harle, Vilho, 24, 228, 260–261 Hartley, K., 48 Hašek, J., 243–246 Hay, C., 151 hegemony, 7, 114, 125, 127, 129, 131–132, 136, 150, 153–156, 158, 162, 173 hegemonic stability theory, 192 Hermann, M.G., 51 Herz, John, 18

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274 Index Higgott, R., 132 historiography, 8, 11, 16, 230, 237, 241, 242 history historian, 6, 49, 98, 105, 112, 130, 139, 183, 231, 233–234, 241, 243, 257 historical materialism, 25, 153, 158 historical sociology, 41, 43, 51, 231, 240 historical turn, 231, 233 historical writing, 231, 234, 237 Hitler, 18 Hobbes, Thomas, 184 Hobden, S., 45 Hobson, J.M., 192 Hodgson, G.M., 46 Hoffman, S., 14 Holsti, K.J., 4, 6 Homer, 229 Horkheimer, M., 94–99, 101 human human condition, 129, 141–142 human geography, 182 human nature, 83, 178, 185–186 human security, 108, 144, 182 human subject, 25–26, 103, 178–185, 188, 191–197, 263 see also interhuman society; post-human politics humanitarian intervention, 134 humanity, 103, 108–109, 126–127, 137, 139, 143–144, 182 humanities, 8, 25, 32, 53, 67, 69–71, 77, 85, 100, 112, 180, 187 Huygens, 236 identity, 16, 21, 44, 53–54, 82, 116, 129, 132, 138, 183, 195, 197, 228, 232, 235, 239 Ignatieff, M., 138 imperial history, 136, 138 India, 141 Institute of Social Research, 94 institutional inertia, 137, 142 integration, 4, 16, 20, 23, 39, 47, 49, 54, 60, 97, 99, 112, 115–116, 167, 229, 249, 268 see also Europe, European integration studies

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interhuman society, 191–192 international international economics, 15, 31, 37, 39, 55 international economy, 39 international history, 9, 15, 37 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, 11 international law, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17–20, 37, 39–40, 49–50, 57, 81, 84, 105–106, 108, 186, 228, 260, 262 international law and organization, 11 international organization, 13, 50, 77 international political economy, 4, 25, 45–46, 48–49, 101, 132, 150, 183, 192, 195 see also everyday international political economy; Marx, marxist political economy international society, 7, 15, 24, 55, 82, 102–107, 191–192, 196 International Studies Association, 12, 19, 129, 259 International Studies Quarterly, 12 international system, 7, 24–25, 31, 55–56, 81–82, 102–103, 106–107, 126–128, 131–132, 166, 181, 187, 191, 207, 217, 220, 224, 238 international theory, 56, 83, 102, 104–106, 115, 260, 268 international trade, 13 interracial relations, 129, 141–142 invariance, 109 IPE, 4, 9, 20, 23, 25, 45, 47–48, 51, 150, 158, 183, 192 see also international, international political economy Iraq, 134, 136, 138, 233 irony, 237, 246 irrationality, 185 ISA, 12–13, 19, 259 see also international, International Studies Association Israel, 131 ivory tower model of science, 109

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Index Jackson, P., 261–262 Jackson, R., 106 Jay, M., 97 Jervis, R., 189–190 Johnson, M., 235 Jones, Roy, 104 Jordan, R., 36 Journal of Political Economy, 48 journalism, 53 Jünger, Ernst, 243–244, 246 justice, 101, 108, 111, 153 Jutila, M., 110 Kahneman, Daniel, 190 Kaldor, M., 134 Kant, 234, 236 Kaplan, Morton, 34, 217 Kashmir, 131 Kaul, I., 48 Kelman, Herbert, 108 Keohane, R., 21–22, 45 Kirchheimer, Otto, 94 Kirk, G., 18 Kissinger, Henry, 18, 186–187 Klein, B., 125 Klein, J.T., 9, 32–33, 45 Korhonen, P., 22 Krugman, P., 46 Kuhn, T.S., 24, 68–73, 75, 80, 86 see also normal science; puzzle Kurdistan, 134 Lakatos, I., 24, 68, 74–81, 86, 107 see also hard core; negative heuristics; positive heuristics Lakoff, G., 235 Lamborn, A.C., 210 Lasswell, H., 217 Laudan, L., 24, 68, 80–81, 84, 87 Law of Nations, 6 law of war and peace, 228 Lawson, S., 20–22 learning, 5, 34, 50, 52–53, 66, 73, 86, 88, 170, 183, 188–189 legal studies, 39, 53 Leibfried, S., 152 Lenz, Theodore, 108 levels of analysis, 10, 25, 127, 129, 181–182, 188, 190, 192, 237 Liberals, 8, 207, 238

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275

linguistics, 23, 208 Linklater, H., 101 Lipschutz, R.D., 126, 182 Lister, M., 151 Little, R., 56, 58, 139, 258 Locke, J., 236 London, 94 London School of Economics, LSE, 101, 104–105 Long, David, 23, 145, 228, 258–259, 262 Löwenthal, Leo, 94 Luhmann, N., 223 Lukes, S., 213 Luxembourg, 132 Mackinder, 130 Madrid, 17 de Man, P., 236 management, 40, 52, 108, 133–135, 162, 167–169 Mann, M., 219 Manning, C.A.W., 15–16, 55, 57, 102, 105 Marcus, G.E., 266–267 Marcuse, Herbert, 94 market market institution, 192–193 market society, 131 marketization, 134, 156 Marx, 98 Marxism, 4, 9, 77, 94 marxist political economy, 94 see also neo-Marxism Mattern, J.B., 207 Mazar, 138 McDermott, R., 190 Mearsheimer, John, 135, 207 media studies, 53, 182 megaregion, 159–160, 165–167, 170 Merelman, R.M., 49 de Mesquita, Bueno, 190 metaphor, 32, 230, 235–237, 242, 244–246, 248, 250 metaphorical expression, 235, 243, 248, 250 methodology, 4, 15, 24, 43, 68, 72, 74–77, 87, 94, 262, 265 metonymy, 237 metropolis, 150, 167, 171

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276 Index Mexico, 133, 193 Miliband, R., 153 military science, 13 Miller, R., 125 misperception, 239 Moisio, Sami, 25, 228 Morgenthau, Hans, 17–18, 21, 25, 113, 125, 131, 185–187, 207, 210, 218 Morriss, P., 212, 215 Moscow, 94 movies, 229 Mukařovský, J., 233 multiculturalism, 141 multidisciplinarity, 23, 31, 33, 38–40, 49, 52–53, 56, 58–59, 73, 76, 93, 106, 112, 118, 224, 230, 258–259, 262, 268 music, 98, 163, 228, 232, 234 Myanmar, 170

normal science, 68–70, 110 see also Kuhn normativity, 109–110, 113, 116 North Korea, 7, 170 Nye, J., 220

Næss, A., 108 national national interest, 7, 18, 108, 114–115, 155 national security, 108, 157, 179 natural science, 5, 8, 12, 53, 67–70, 74, 78, 100, 143, 180, 187, 189, 191, 208, 235–236 natural scientific models, 4 negative heuristics, 76, 79, 82, 86, 107, 197 neoclassical neoclassical economic models, 43 neoclassical economics, 44, 46, 49 neoclassical realism, 185 neo-Gramscian, 155 neoliberal institutionalism, 192 neo-liberalism, 4 neo-Marxism, 41, 43 neo-realism, 4, 183, 185 Neumann, F., 94, 101 Neumann, I., 26–27, 106, 224 neurobiology, 188 Nietzsche, 17, 114 Nobel Peace Institute, 258 norm, 130–131, 134, 182

Pacific, 130 pacifism, 13 Palestine, 131 Paris, 94 Parsons, T., 220 Patomäki, H., 22 peace and conflict studies, 39, 53 peace research, PR, 4, 13, 23–25, 84, 93–94, 108–116 Peck, J., 163 Pehkonen, S., 110 perception, 222, 243 philosophy philosophical and linguistic studies, 225 philosophy of science, 9, 22, 24, 67–68, 84 philosophy or sociology of science, 111 physics, 53, 77–78, 257 Plato, 236 poet, poetry, 233–234, 236 political policy studies, 39 political power, 17, 160, 174, 196, 217, 219 political psychology, 4, 23, 25, 49–51, 179, 183, 190, 249

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objectivism, 182, 266 Ohm, 236 Ohmae, Kenichi, 150, 162, 166–167, 171, 173 Ollila, Jorma, 170 Olson, M., 220 Oncken, Herman, 17 ontology, 21, 180, 185, 187, 191, 261, 265 ontological, 44, 75–76, 84, 87, 103, 126–127, 131–133, 139, 142, 152, 180, 188, 190, 192–193, 196 operational research, 14

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Index political – continued see also psychology; social, social and political psychology political theory, 4, 6, 9, 17–18, 21–22, 57, 77, 81, 87, 102, 105–106, 108, 114, 149, 184– 185, 191, 208, 258, 264–265 Pollock, Friedrich, 94 Popper, K., 68 Porter, M., 162, 173 positive heuristics, 24, 76–77, 79, 83–84, 87, 107, 180, 186, 189–190, 192, 197 see also hard core; Lakatos; negative heuristics post-colonialist and feminist studies, 110 post-human politics, 182 post-international politics, 10 postmodernism, 41, 43 power studies, 208 progress, 70, 74, 77–79, 86, 167, 180–181, 189, 229 prospect theory, 25, 183, 190 see also Kahneman, Tversky psychoanalysis, 77, 239 psychology psychological school, 179, 183, 185, 189–190 psychology and sociology of international relations, 13 see also political, political psychology; social, social and political psychology public public health, 39 public opinion, 185, 187 puzzle, 5, 24, 68, 70–73, 78–79, 85–86, 189, 194 puzzlement, 24, 68, 71–74, 79, 86–87 puzzle-set, 10, 194 see also Kuhn rationality, 183, 185, 190, 194, 222–224 rational actor model, 136 rational choice, 46, 48, 132 rationalism, 82, 106, 192, 194

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Raven, B., 221–222 Realists, 8, 18, 103, 207–208, 231, 238 refugee studies, 39 regime theory, 192 regional studies, 14, 39 Remarque, E.M., 243–245 Republic of Congo, 264 resistance, 25, 37, 41, 44–45, 114, 156, 183, 193–194 Review of International Political Economy, RIPE, 46, 48, 51, 132 revolutionism, 106 Richardson, Lewis Fry, 108 Ringmar, E., 231–232 Robson, William, 34 Rome, 137 Rosenau, James, 25, 71, 135, 188–190, 210 see also turbulence Rothgeb, J., 210 rule, 235, 238, 240 Russell, B., 215 Russia, 242 see also Soviet Union Sandler, Todd, 47 Sarajevo, 242 Sartre, 262 Sassen, S., 129 satire, 243 Scandinavia, 108 Schmitt, 114 scientific revolution, 68, 75 Scott, A., 166 sculpture, 228 Seabrooke, L., 192 Searle, J., 224 second debate, 8, 183 security studies, 39, 101, 110, 113–114, 135 see also critical, critical security studies Sending, O.J., 224 Seoul, 164 sexuality studies, 39 Singer, David, 181 Sklair, L., 155 Smith, Adam, 188

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278 Index social social and political psychology, 31 see also political, political psychology; psychology social cosmology, 55 social philosophy, 4, 24, 92, 95, 97–100, 107–108, 113–115, 260 see also philosophy social power, 212, 217, 222–224 social psychology, 41, 51, 98, 99, 108, 190, 197, 221 social science explanation, 231 social theory, 4, 23, 26, 84, 98, 101, 182, 257, 260–263, 268 sociology sociology of knowledge, 32 sociology of science, 80, 111 soft power, 207, 220 Solomon, Benjamin, 181–183 Somalia, 134 Sørensen, G., 149 Sorge, Richard, 94 sovereignty, 126, 137, 139, 151, 158, 168–169, 174, 263 Soviet Union, 140, 258 see also Russia state transformation, 150, 152–153, 155, 160, 167, 169, 173–174 statehood, 25, 85, 151, 159, 167, 172 states-system, 102, 180, 186 Strange, S., 31, 219 strategic studies, 4, 26, 39, 125, 127–128 Strathern, M., 264–265, 267 subjectivism, 182 see also human sublime, 233–234, 250 Suez, 136 Suganami, H., 101 survival, 17, 170–172, 244 synecdoche, 237 synthesis, 14–15, 46, 82, 230 systems theory, 41 theory of international politics, 101–102 Tolstoy, Leo, 233 totality, 55, 67, 74, 97–101, 113, 115, 260

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Toynbee, Arnold, 105 transdisciplinarity, 23, 31, 33, 38, 40–53, 59–60, 76, 112, 230, 237, 249, 258, 260 transnational actor, 107, 191–192 Trowler,P.R., 258 turbulence, 135, 188 see also Rosenau Tuvalu, 132 Tversky, Amos, 190 unit of analysis, 181 United Kingdom, UK, 13, 40, 56, 106, 193, 249 United Nations, UN, 103, 131–132 United States, US, 13–14, 16–17, 56, 94, 130–131, 135–137, 141, 186, 193, 249 the universal, 233, 243–244 urban studies, 39, 54 Uruguay, 132 de Vattel, Emmerich, 6 Väyrynen, T., 110 Verstehen, 186 Vietnam, 18 violence, 20, 93, 108–109, 111, 127, 131–132, 134, 136–137, 144, 186, 238, 244–245, 248 Vitalis, R., 129, 142 Wæver, O., 19, 106 Wagner, R., 232 Walker, R.B.J., 21–22, 126, 129, 137, 142 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 42 Waltz, K., 103, 106–107, 181, 185, 207, 210, 218, 237 Washington, 138 Watson, A., 105 Weber, Max, 17 Weberian terms, 265 Weil, Felix J., 94 Wendt, A., 45, 82, 191 White, H., 237 Wight, M., 56, 102, 104–106 Willie Sutton syndrome, 142

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Index Wilson, Edward, 14 Wittfogel, K., 94 Wittfogel, R., 94 Wolfers, Arnold, 18 women’s studies, 32 world world economy, 95, 164, 183, 193 world geography, 13 world history, 13, 20 ,225 world society, 40, 82, 101, 106–107, 115, 181, 191

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World War I, 17, 36, 129–130, 142, 233, 242–243 Wright, Q., 13–16, 56, 100, 108, 128, 184 Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, ZfS, 95, 98 Zimbabwe, 170 Zimmern, A., 11–12, 15 Zinnes, D.A., 71–72 Zürn, M., 152

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