Abstract
This issue brings together a selection of the most interesting contributions to the 2011 Millennium Annual Conference: ‘Out of the Ivory Tower: Weaving the Theories and Practices of International Relations’, held at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 22 and 23 October 2011.
The idea of looking – once more – into the complex relationship between theories of ‘International Relations’ (IR) and practices of ‘international relations’ emerged from two sets of considerations. First, the image of academic IR reflected in the latest BISA and TRIP surveys is one of a profession still confused about what relationship it should have with the policy world. Second, we believe that this situation is largely driven by the core (and yet flawed) assumption that informs most existing debates: the idea that theory is only for theorists and practice is only for practitioners. In fact, the debate has been articulated too often around the need to find ‘solutions’ to the ‘theory–practice gap’, and such solutions have usually revolved around the need to overcome a dichotomy not between theory and practice but between theorists and practitioners: either theorists and practitioners should speak more to each other, or single individuals should become both theorist and practitioner. We found this overall approach inherently limited in scope and its reliance on a narrow sociological view of IR as a profession of the ivory tower unsatisfactory.
The aim of the conference was, then, to produce a better understanding of the relationship between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ engagements with(in) international relations, particularly in the face of the (again, flawed) presumption of innocence the discipline enjoys with regard to its power in the lived world – the world of students and graduates, of diplomats, of policymakers, that of war victims and humanitarian workers, negotiators, lobbyists, movements, and even soldiers; and of course that of researchers – young and old. The starting point of the conference was that theory (a set of practices in itself) constructs and delimits what is possible and/or impossible in international relations. ‘IR’ does not simply gaze at ‘ir’ from a safe distance.
This issue leaves many valuable contributions out – regrettably, a number of shortlisted papers, including some of the plenary discussions, would have simply needed more time for revision than our publishing schedule could allow. We strongly feel that the present selection, nevertheless, offers a fair taste of the wide diversity and high quality of contributions the conference brought together, and certainly brings forward a debate that will never be outdated or exhausted.
Chris Brown opens the issue with a clear message: the international ought to be experienced as much as studied in order to be comprehended. Brown builds on the recent ‘practice turn’ in IR to highlight that a full understanding of world politics is achievable only by taking into account the unspoken, unarticulated assumptions without which international practitioners could not make sense of the world. He then explores the Aristotelian notion of ‘practical reason’ to show that the exercise of the faculty of reason should be based on concrete, context-dependent knowledge rooted in cumulative experience. According to Brown, the classical realist school of thought is the best example of how to apply these insights: ‘for Morgenthau and the classical realists, political judgement was not something that came from reading textbooks’. Rather, realism is ‘pre-eminently an approach … that bases its legitimacy on the study of what people actually do and why they do it’. The conclusion is that we should ‘acknowledg[e] the limits of our knowledge of international practices, [and] avoid the making of hubristic claims’. In this respect, ‘Bourdieuian and the Aristotelian approaches constitute an important advance on dominant modes of thinking about international relations, and it would be good if they both flourish’.
Also speaking to the ‘practice turn’ in IR, Morten Andersen and Iver Neumann offer a sophisticated epistemological and methodological contribution to the study of practices in IR. The authors argue that current approaches fail to make a fundamental distinction: that between lived reality and its representation in scholarly enquiry. Andersen and Neumann thus explore the notion of ‘model’: ‘practice should be conceptualised as the representation or model that may link scholars to the social world we want to study’, but should not be mistaken for the social world itself, that is, ‘raw data’. By reclaiming the heuristic value of developing a model of practice that is applicable to any aspect of social reality, rather than looking for practices in the world, they offer a way to articulate the bifurcation between the material and the ideational that discards the need to look into actors’ motivations in order to make a case for studying practices. This clearly opens up new avenues for scholarship, particularly with regard to the formulation and application of a model of practice to what are now perceived to be different domains of practical competence. By applying a model of practice to the study of diplomacy, for example, they show the need to explore actors’ own face-value understandings of the processes they refer to as diplomacy. In the last section, the authors focus on Wampum diplomacy, the diplomatic practices of the Iroquois confederacy with their Algonquian and European neighbours, to show the advantages of adopting a ‘model’-based conception of practice.
Like Brown, Christine Sylvester raises questions regarding the minimum commitment to directly experiencing the world which IR scholars are currently content with. Critically, Sylvester turns to one of IR’s foundational interests: war. The starting point of the piece is that, to date, IR scholars have ‘been operating comfortably in a world of theoretical abstractions’. What Sylvester denounces is the fact that IR has for too long conveniently ignored war’s ‘actual mission of injuring human bodies and destroying normal patterns of social relations’. Her challenge to IR is that of thinking about war from a place (methodologically but also epistemologically) closer to the harm, disruption, memories and emotions that war leaves on people. Sylvester convincingly articulates this proposal by looking at the scattered work on this subject done across feminist and critical scholarship in IR, and by presenting the challenge of looking at ‘elusive experience’ and ‘bewildering bodies’ as a theoretical framework for studying war as experience. She suggests the need to engage in interviews in situ and include first-person accounts as a necessary step towards ‘exploring and theorising war as experience as something that everyday people and elites witness physically, emotionally, and social-ethically depending on their locations’.
Drawing on Gramsci, Stephen Gill develops a radical, critical conception of praxis in the discipline of IR. By praxis Gill refers to ‘those forms of theoretical and practical activity that are not only linked to understanding, explaining and acting in international relations but also transforming those relations to help constitute a more ethical, just and sustainable world order’ (our emphasis). Gill starts from the assertion that in any social science, the consolidation of particular perspectives (or paradigms) tends to limit the boundaries of the academic enterprise through the (often unintentional) adoption of basic assumptions on what the discipline is about. This is particularly true for IR, which, according to Gill, revolves to a large extent around an ‘imperial common sense’ that ‘assumes the maintenance of structures and practices of global inequality that permit the USA and its principal allies to consume the lion’s share of global resources in ways that are often violent, unjust and unsustainable and associated with the intensified exploitation of human beings and nature’. Gill calls for challenging this ‘imperial common sense’ first of all by discarding the inherently elitist notion of intellectuals as academics, and their presumed monopoly of critical dissent (Gramsci himself wrote that ‘everyone is a philosopher’). The author therefore suggests focusing on what he terms the ‘postmodern Prince’, that is, the plurality of radical social movements that continuously flourish around the world. These movements constitute a new form of political agency which lies in the hands of potentially millions of progressive organic intellectuals, who think, claim, experiment and live beyond the horizons of the ‘imperial common sense’ and are in search of new possible forms of more humane and sustainable global governance. The reference to Machiavelli hints at the fact that IR scholars should turn to the ‘postmodern Prince’ and support its agendas in the same way intellectuals have supported less emancipatory forms of power during past centuries.
According to Christian Reus-Smit, if IR suffers from a deficit of practical relevance, the cause is not excessive theorisation. Rather, there are good reasons to believe that meta-theoretical enquiry is a necessary prerequisite for the generation of practically relevant knowledge. Meta-theoretical reflexivity is important, for instance, because theoretical assumptions inevitably legitimise some kinds of knowledge over others, and the privilege might well be in favour of what is practically irrelevant. Meta-theoretical reflexivity is also fundamental to the crafting of sound academic research where ontological and epistemological assumptions are consistent with choices on methods and research design. According to Reus-Smit, the roots of IR’s marginality in national and global public spheres are rather a problem of identity and purpose. Four main criticisms are advanced: (a) in a time of predominance of ‘economistic’ thinking, IR scholars show too little interest in fundamental questions about the nature of politics; (b) the original practical ethos of IR is underappreciated, resulting in the flawed distinction between a world of activists and a world of scholars; (c) in a similar vein, analytical and normative enquiry are too often kept apart, in favour of the former; and (d) IR scholars who play a role as international public intellectuals (defined as ‘individuals unifying knowledge, animating values and a commitment to engagement in a broadly defined public sphere’) are indeed rare. The original vocation of IR, nevertheless, is not lost for ever: re-engaging with what politics is and what actors should do ‘may well revitalise the field as an engine of ideas constitutive of political argument and debate within evolving national and global public spheres’.
Richard Beardsworth also takes issue with the relations between the empirical and the normative by exploring IR scholars’ academic responsibility at the crossroads of prediction and political vision. The empirical challenges posed by globalisation after the 2007–08 financial crisis, he argues, rule out rather urgently the possibility of marginalising normative thinking simply and exclusively as a form of political theory. Central to this enterprise is to reassess IR’s intimate relationship to the future not only in terms of prediction but also as vision. Debates on the ‘large picture’, as opposed to discussions on the marginal gains of new theoretical enterprises or probabilistic thinking, he argues, are likely to emerge within research agendas that embrace political visions as a much-needed imperative in IR scholarship. Beardsworth develops a Nietzschean framework for understanding IR’s structural orientation to the future whereby normative claims ought to be seen as originating as much from as responding to contingent historical/empirical circumstances. The call for a political European Union, regionally and internationally, offers an example of how political vision in IR can respond to the ‘large-picture’ challenges posed by current historical contingency. Beardsworth unearths the critical political role IR scholars ought to play in stimulating new avenues and causes for political leaders around the world.
Münnever Cebeci explores the power of foreign policy researchers to legitimise specific practices, policies and actors by favouring the reproduction of specific perceptions (and visions) about them and their work. Cebeci focuses on European Foreign Policy (EFP) research, challenging it from within, dissecting its texts and highlighting the contradictions that are embedded in its scripts. The main argument is that EFP researchers abide by an ‘ideal power Europe’ narrative which depicts the EU as a ‘positive force’ in world politics. Specifically, the EU is portrayed as: (a) a post-sovereign actor; (b) a model of regional integration; and (c) a normative power. Yet, Cebeci shows that these descriptions are empirically flawed: sovereign EU member states still have the lead in EFP decision-making; the European model has never emerged in other regions of the world; and the EU applies double standards when it promotes its values abroad. Why are these facts neglected? The reason is that EFP researchers construct the ‘ideal power Europe’ narrative not only on the premise that the EU acts in ‘ideal’ ways, but also often on the basis of its aspiration to act in ‘ideal’ ways. This notion, nevertheless, serves as a mere palliative when the EU fails to act in those very same ‘ideal’ ways, reaffirming a dominant narrative under any circumstance. The practical consequences of this are nevertheless underappreciated: the proactive support of EFP researchers for the EU as an institution legitimises its disciplining power on others (as in the case of military interventions or aid conditionality). As such, the mismatch between theoretical construction and reality, argues Cebeci, ‘is just another European progress story constructed to “colonise”/“influence” the others by other means’. The challenge ahead for EFP scholars is to critically deconstruct the ‘ideal power Europe’ narrative against the dominant script, and challenge its influence on what gets published in top journals.
Alexander Barder and Daniel Levine focus on the dependency of IR evolution on historical contingency and highlight the powerful influence that momentous political events have on theoretical fashions and their temporary boundaries. In particular, the authors argue that via media (or middle-ground) constructivists (Wendt, Adler, Finnemore, Checkel, Klotz, to name a few) have internalised and reified the normative assumptions of the early 1990s (in particular, political and economic liberalism), thus constraining their critical toolkit, depoliticising their works and leaving aside important questions of political domination in international relations. Via media constructivists have limited the possibility of political change within a set of fixed normative axes and end-points (see their interest in democratisation, human rights and the creation of a world state). It is in this sense that the world (of the early 1990s) might have been ‘too much with’ students of via media constructivism. Barder and Levine suggest the adoption of a new ethos based on ‘sustainable critique’ and ‘animus habitandi’ as a way out of this conundrum, a proposition that IR scholarship should always be ‘aware of its own potential role in helping constitute partisan political discourses, and seeks to do no harm’. Barder and Levine’s contribution shows (once again) that the ‘thinking space’ of IR may be far more permeable to political events, ideologies, sensibilities and contingencies – that is, less ‘free-floating’ – than is commonly supposed.
Rodger Payne argues that IR critical theory is not a ‘fantasy theory’ for a ‘fantasy world’, as Schweller puts it. He challenges common assertions about the limited value of IR to policymakers: grand strategies (such as primacy, selective engagement, offshore balancing, collective security) have in fact frequently represented a fertile ground for the influence of IR theories on foreign policy decisions. Payne then asks whether, against common assumptions that frame realism and liberalism as relatively more attractive to policymakers, IR critical theory, along with its emancipatory purpose, could possibly be informing any policy ‘grand strategy’, and how. ‘Cooperative security’, Payne argues, offers a unique and promising case in this direction, particularly as it increasingly supports consultation rather than confrontation, transparency rather than secrecy, participation rather than exclusion, and interdependence rather than unilateralism. Also, it has gone beyond a conception of security as a zero-sum competitive environment of geostrategic and military interests. Human security, which is increasingly paired with cooperative security, not only includes universal normative concerns, such as human rights and protection of the environment, but also entails that security across these domains and dimensions is indivisible. Cooperative security is nevertheless not yet an empirical reality in international relations, and Payne is clearly aware of this. That critical IR theorists ‘speak out in public forums against unilateral, self-interested and coercive policies and strategies – and … promote instead the legitimacy of inclusive, deliberative and consensual practices oriented towards addressing the wide array of existing threats to human security’, becomes therefore a key priority.
The article by Inanna Hamati-Ataya reflects on the ‘space of possibilities’ currently available to scholars culturally located outside of ‘the West’ in order to ‘explore the means these scholars have of turning their disadvantaged, non-native habitus into an agency of structural change’. Hamati-Ataya offers two complementary Bourdieusian readings of the act of IR theorisation as an international practice. The first (clinical) reading objectivises IR Theory (IRT) to show that our intellectual attitudes and production are heavily shaped by, and expressed from, a specific ‘locus’ within the discipline. This both validates the distinction between an American core and different Western and non-Western peripheries and underlines the structural conditions that allow only some theories (in particular, those coming from the American core) to emerge. The second (cynical) reading builds on these findings to suggest how periphery scholars can promote alternative scholarly/political agendas and interests. Hamati-Ataya suggests that potentially the most subversive capital in the hands of periphery scholars is their ‘non-native habitus’ and that this can be more profitably used in meta-theoretical discussions rather than empirical studies: ‘the position from which marginals look at the world and at IR(T) is a potentially privileged position for the transformation of the game, just as that of core scholars is a privileged one for its reproduction’. This article confirms the value of exploring an alternative history of IR from its margins as a powerful tool for expanding the present focus of the discipline’s mainstream.
Finally, the contribution by Magnus Ryner challenges the lack of flexibility of scholarly orthodoxies, particularly when they prove unable to account for new and unexpected events and practices – let alone ‘see them coming’. Ryner compares the surprise with which IR scholars witnessed the end of the Cold War to that experienced by European integration researchers during the recent financial Eurozone crisis. The article is divided into two parts. The first part explains the failure of European integration scholarship to predict and make sense of the recent crisis by pointing to the orthodox nature of its debates and highlighting in particular its instrumentalist basic code. The second part proposes to recast knowledge production about the EU, not dissimilarly to what happened to post-Cold War IR. Specifically, Ryner suggests opening EU integration scholarship to post-Keynesian, post-Marxist and neo-Weberian political economy – three approaches that ‘conceive production, power and … a significant element of arbitrariness as co-constitutive of “integration” itself. Hence, they are better placed to discern the arbitrary elements that generated the financial crisis, with attendant implications for the Eurozone.’ In this sense, the institutionalist turn, which is shared by contemporary EU integration theory and post-Keynesian, neo-Weberian and post-Marxist political economy, presents a promising opportunity to build a more heterodox EU integration scholarship.
The selection of articles in this issue is inevitably disparate, and drawing general trends from them would do justice neither to the authors featured nor to the wider debates they seek to contribute to, or sometimes start anew. Overall, though, they point to at least two critical areas for future reflection.
First, many of the contributions stress the importance of further interrogating how IR works as a field of knowledge production, and the implications for how research is conducted, its priorities and favoured sources. Ultimately, what determines our academic success? How much importance is given to ‘experiencing’ the international? What new difficulties would arise if we systematically included more ‘experience’ of the international as a basis for ‘doing’ IR? What are the implications for IR as a career, or for how PhD programmes are designed and evaluated? Do existing approaches to research design need to change? Some of the contributions criticise the often ‘low’ level of direct engagement with people and processes required – institutionally – of IR students and academics. We agree that, even if not necessarily in a professional role, interaction with practitioners and people, direct knowledge of organisations and institutions, and awareness about other – not necessarily academic – debates are all necessary conditions to address the relevance of research for policy, if not to inform better research questions and designs. Yet, a close proximity to international relations as a ‘lived world’ will unavoidably pose challenges that many will perceive as risks and problems – which leaves a number of open questions on how achievable this broad shift is.
Second, there is urgent need of more – or rather more consistent – research on the nature of politics, on the relevance of visionary as well as critical scholarship, and on the political role that can be played by academics (in particular, on their power to validate orthodoxies, common sense and institutional power). These debates also could be included in the curricula of IR taught courses as a set of questions open for discussion; the diversity of thinking within IR is in fact often presented to students as a menu of theoretical approaches to choose from, and more often than not students embrace one label or the other more as a sign of academic membership and personal intellectual realisation than as a stance on the role IR ought to play in the world. Current approaches to teaching IR – and attempts to present IR as a cohesive field worthy of the academic status of a discipline – arguably increase the possibilities of internal parochialism rather than encouraging broader debates on one’s own positionality between theory and practice.
The 2011 Millennium Annual Conference aimed at pushing forward the boundaries of our understanding about the relationship between theory and practice. However far we went in this direction, we ought to thank once more our conference organisers – Edmund Arghand, Maria Fotou and Nick Srnicek – for their hard work, and our conference stewards for their enthusiastic contribution. The conference was made possible by generous support from SAGE, the LSE Director’s Trust Fund, LSE Ideas, the LSE Department of International Relations and the LSE Department of International History. We would also like to express our gratitude to the panel participants, chairs and discussants, and to Millennium’s anonymous referees who were involved in reviewing the articles for this special issue. Finally, we would like to show our appreciation to our keynote speaker, Kathryn Sikkink, opening roundtable participants, Carol Cohn, Stephen Gill and Andrew Hurrell, and closing roundtable participants, Christian Reus-Smit, Stephen Chan and Christine Sylvester. Finally, we owe our thanks to Shuxiu Zhang, co-editor of volume 40, for her contribution to the conference organisation and initial phases of review, and we regret that she could not take part in editing this last issue of our volume, except for the book reviews. The editorial responsibility for the content of this issue falls entirely and solely on us.