Experiencing the end and afterlives of International Relations/theory

Introduction

A few years ago I posed the question: whither the international at the end of International Relations (IR) (Sylvester, 2007a). Contemporary IR had been experiencing significant discipline-changing pressures. The end of the Cold War, together with the third ‘debate’ (or fourth interparadigm ‘debate’), had pulled and stretched the field far beyond the narrow boundaries maintained up to that time by various realisms, liberalisms, and institutionalisms (plus Marxisms in Europe). I argued that the field had now fragmented and diversified as new cadres, topics, and interests came over, through, and around the walls of IR, ignoring the old ways and insisting on identifying and studying the international and its relations as they saw fit. The International Studies Association (ISA) was suddenly swarming with scholars from geographical and intellectual places that had been obscured by the old British–American–Australian whiteout of the larger world. The Cold War had not just been the métier ‘out there’ in international relations. It had been ‘in here’ as well, that is to say in IR and organizations like the ISA and BISA, where a range of approaches, let alone a full range of the world’s IR scholars, had been hard to find — missing, made to disappear, shut out of the few disciplinary outlets for their ideas — for decades.

The global and intellectual changes that resulted in restructuring the field continue; and they have been liberating for many whose tenure in IR straddles two eras. There are now sections of the main professional organizations that highlight gender, postcolonial, global South, and political sociology analyses, among other new topic areas. There are six journals sponsored by the ISA alone; there used to be only one. ¹ The membership of that organization has grown to over 6000 and 45% are now based outside North America. IR has been globalizing, without a doubt, which suggests that its composition now reflects events and people living in the real and very large world of international relations. Yet the process of growing IR into a more in-touch and insightful field has also been producing an unanticipated effect: it is turning many of the new topic areas or subfields into self-referential camps that push out or sideline topics, writings, scholars, and journals that do not fit particularistic codas. It is a trend that has been noted by several analysts of IR as a field (e.g. Hellmann, 2009; Kornprobst, 2009; Waever, 2010). My argument in 2007 and continuing into the present is that the smoke from proliferating IR campfires makes it increasingly difficult to see even friendly neighboring camps, let alone those pitched purposely at a remove. I see the inability of today’s IR to communicate across diversity as problematic when it comes to conceptualizing and understanding the many dimensions of our world, including war.

In saying that, I do not want to be misinterpreted: traditional IR was far more problematic than camp IR is today. Once over-tightly identified with states, their organizations, and their interactions, the international is now whatever and wherever a recognized grouping in the field says it is. That openness provides far more security for some in IR than was the case in the days of conformist pressures; one might say that the new camp structure lowers opportunity costs to doing innovative research. It also makes a one- or two-theory IR impossible to attain any longer. Ole Waever argued during his panel presentation on this topic at the 2012 ISA that IR needs tight and strong theory in order to challenge misguided policies. Yet strong theory can lead to internal hegemonies, which, again, it seems that many active IR scholars want to resist at this moment. With most thinking done within camps rather than across them, however, it could also be argued that IR theory per se is at an end. Or, as another possibility, it is in transition to a post-World Wars I and II and post-Cold War afterlife. Jacques Derrida (2003: 9) spoke of afterlife in two senses: ‘“after” as in coming after, or “post”: and “after” in the sense of “according to” — d’apres … following without following.’ IR has indeed moved ‘after,’ as in post its limited landscapes of the past. Now there is need to go d’apres, as in following newly included knowledges while keeping an eye on what lies beyond one’s own camp.

My point of entry to complex questions of where the field is leads me into an old IR space and d’apres to new knowledges and theoretical approaches. I want to consider briefly what the new structure of the field currently means for the study of war, one of the oldest and most central topics of IR. I start by considering IR’s structure today in more detail and then move to a brief discussion of the remarkable turn in some quarters of IR toward studying war up from work a day people rather than down from states, systems, national interest politics, military strategies, and statesmen only.

Camp IR

There is a mini-debate in IR about how the field recently came to change. It could be said that IR has kept pace with the events of real-time international relations. It was a smaller Cold War field during that specific historical period and now it is a field that responds to globalization by diversifying its range of scholars and ideas, all the while holding together in response to continuities in global structure (Hay, 2010). Some, myself included, would argue instead that IR’s knowledge was so wedded to realisms and concerns with conflicts of a certain recognizable type that the field was sharply outpaced by events that ran counter to realist expectations (also Smith, 2010). Overrun by the magnitude of what came after the unanticipated end of Cold War bipolarity, IR transformed in a helter-skelter. From a narrow field that operated at the state or systems level, far above the human fray beneath it, IR turned raucously populist, with many leaders emerging in many subfields alongside a handful of mainstream notables. Today it is a field that proliferates journals, globalizes jobs, and embraces literatures once deemed entirely outside IR. This is all a far cry from the way things were as recently as the 1970s, and very far from IR in its early days.

At the same time, IR was always more nonconsensual, nonparadigmatic, and divided than it appeared. I saw that first-hand when I worked for the World Order Institute during its World Order Models Project (WOMP) heyday. WOMP was the only going concern in IR confidently predicting that the bipolar era would soon end, largely through people power (see e.g., Falk et al., 1982). The larger IR community considered WOMP a bit loopy. Yet the historical record shows that its prediction was correct in the end; meanwhile, realism missed the system-moving agency displayed by ordinary people pushing against the Iron Curtain in 1989 because it was looking higher up for the real power. Another sign of nonconsensus has been the famous split between American IR and European and antipodean IR (Smith, 1995). North American scholars embraced science as the promised road to description, explanation, and prediction of international relations. The British and Australians did not tend to follow suit, preferring to retain their more historical, philosophical, and normative orientations. Other splits: there was from the beginning a clear bias in IR toward the analysis of Great Western Powers, effectively ignoring the concerns of non-Western states, colonies, histories of imperialism, and the IR academics who detailed the issues that would later be called postcolonial analysis, for example Ali Mazrui and Ashish Nandy (see Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004). And of course there was a big gender problem in IR of the pre-camp days: very few women were studying IR to the PhD level prior to the 1990s, and fewer were let into the elite fold of the field once they turned up, a situation that can be read from the history of ISA presidents to today. Put bluntly, IR was a sea of men and their theory talk.

The intensity of the confrontation that erupted in the 1970s and 1980s between reflectivism and science suggested that a revolution had been percolating for a while against the positivist orientation of the canonical field, wherever located. That last debate, such as it was, brought to IR theorizing a range of continental philosophies by the likes of Foucault, Agamben, Schmitt, Baudrillard, and Ranciere, to name just a few of contemporary Europe’s (all male) consorts. Their ideas, for example on power defining truth, exceptionalism under the law, and the politics of events, found fertile ground in the cynicism that overtook a very brief moment of optimism about a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. The expectation that military budgets in the West would be turned into ploughshares for developing countries and new energy research and development in the West went bust quickly. Progress also seemed illusive in the wake of Western union busting, privatizing of services, manufacturing shifting to Asia, and decaying city infrastructures. Considerable skepticism was afoot about the very possibility that the promises of science and competing political ideologies had ever been credible. Quite possibly, IR’s treasured theories, too, were just powerful stories that blocked alternatives and muffled epistemological/methodological diversity and dissent (Ashley and Walker, 1990; Ferguson and Mansbach, 1988, 1991; Harding, 1986). Cynthia Enloe (1996), for one, argued that power-oriented IR was remiss in not studying the power it took to keep women out of international relations. She drew on feminist theorizing for that point, not the new continental men of letters, but her concern joined larger third debate critiques that put objectivity, the usual cover for positivist politics, in the hot seat. Pluralism became a justification for seeking the international and its relations wherever power was being applied and resisted — which in the Foucauldian scheme of things was everywhere.

The manner in which the Cold War ended further shattered the dominant theories of IR by showing that everyday people could have international power and could successfully resist domination if they got the timing right. People whose existence ‘over there’ had been mostly beside the point during the period of East–West preoccupation showed up IR’s spectacular failure to imagine a peaceful demise of the Soviet Union. No branch of mainstream IR theorized that a powerful state — a superpower — would declare itself defunct one day without putting up a strong fight. Given that superpower relations had been IR’s favorite topic during the Cold War, this fundamental failing weakened the field and enabled the plethora of new ideas, theorists, and topics to stretch a small constellation of knowledge. Women, racial minorities, migrants from the global South and Eastern Europe, trafficked people, and workers in shifting global factories all came into IR, in the flesh or as subjects of research. Through the 1990s they not only rearranged IR’s boundaries but also introduced methodologies that had not been associated before with IR per se, fieldwork key among them. New theoretical concepts of biopolitics, agency, securitization, governmentality, gender, intersectionality, new wars, and human security also came into the IR lexicon. The new ideas did not render mainstay concepts like the state, national interest, realism, war, Marxism, and international organization anachronistic. Rather, the new and the old began to travel on parallel, coexisting, and nonintersecting paths.

The once narrow and peopleless field of Cold War IR theory and practice needed these jolts, whether they came from the demise of the Soviet Union, a ‘debate,’ or what could have become an IR revolt of scholars akin to the 2001 Perestroika moment in the American Political Science Association annual conference, when many argued angrily that the entire field was being taken over by rational choice scholarship. ² A large world of international relations now keeps the theoretical jolts and decentering trends in motion, first with the assault on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the ensuing wars of 2003 to the present, and most recently with the lingering Arab Spring of 2011. Remarkably, however, camp IR continues to chase international relations after the fact: those early 21st-century events were also largely unanticipated by the new field. An ongoing process of recognizing the world of people, and not just the world of states and other abstract actors, is still required before any notion of the new international and its myriad relations can edge the contours of IR — if such is even possible again.

That point needs underscoring as we contemplate the prospect of an endist moment in IR: whether it is small or large, narrow or expansive, the IR of the moment seems to blink in surprise as key events in the world outpace academic expectations. Is it possible that no matter how reconfigured, much of IR will remain unprepared for the presence, let alone the power, of ordinary people in international relations — people who walk through the Berlin Wall, execute a Velvet Revolution in Central Europe, both events helping shift Cold War polarity, or who toss out autocrats through a series of Middle East revolutions? Social movements have power today, but much of IR has not woken up entirely to that fact. The ordinary people who comprise those movements remain overwhelmingly absent from IR’s canon because people are still not theorized as key stakeholders across the field’s many versions of international relations. The one big exception is feminist IR, which has labored for 30 years to make sure that a variety of excluded or marginalized people are put into IR’s frame. Even as IR gets bigger, broader, and more diverse, the hulking bulk of it relegates people to the sidelines of the international instead of foregrounding them as key agents of relations of power and change.

Another way of putting this is to say that while IR has come around to studying the Arab Spring (e.g. Davenport and Moore, 2012), it is difficult to find the spring-ers in the analyses. If one looks for them, or other people living international relations, within the 2012 volumes of the journals the ISA sponsors, the results will disappoint. Of 188 articles spanning six journals, only three conceptualize any particular puzzle of international relations at an individual level of analysis. Two of the three feature experiments with samples of accessible subjects to determine: in one case, ‘the difference between those who will work peacefully through the political process, and those willing to take violent action to bring about the outcomes they desire when faced with the same environmental stressors’ (Hatemi and McDermott, 2012: 13); and, in the other, the existence of ‘folk realist’ beliefs among average people who are presumably unfamiliar with IR realist theory (Kertzer and McGraw, 2012). Both studies are complex, sophisticated, and insightful, but both also put random people into artificial situations and manipulate the range of knowledge they must respond to in the experimental environment. Put differently, they go to the individual level of analysis but they do not go to ground by exploring people who have experienced peaceful or conflictual situations and must decide how to act, or those who use or express realist folk wisdom to influence outcomes (as in voting or political activism). Individuals aggregated into data points cannot share their voices, their power, their agendas, and their experiences with international relations. And that is my point: in IR, individuals are studied using someone else’s script, not their own, which might be a reason why IR is on the back foot when it comes to anticipating people as stakeholders, actors, and participants in international relations. ³

The third article in the ISA complex of journals that focuses on individuals is by Todd Hall and Keren Yarhi-Milo (2012). They consider policy-relevant impressions that individual heads of state formed of their counterparts during and following World War II. Their dependent variable of ‘sincerity judgments’ is examined in relation to affective rather than rational determinants. It is a piece in the tradition of foreign policy analysis of elite office holders as the only powerful individuals of international relations. Two additional articles start with President Obama (Patterson, 2012; Skidmore, 2012) and his promises or policies, but both quickly segue into references to the Obama and Bush administrations or American policy. One incorporates the regrets of key figures in international relations in a study of global justice memories around the Rwandan genocide (Olesen, 2012). It mentions Bill Clinton, Kofi Anann, and Romeo Dallaire within a framework that includes global institutions and films that evoke the Rwanda of 1994. Indeed, names of individuals scatter throughout many of the articles; yet across these six journals, at least one of which is named as a key IR journal around which considerable American IR communicates (Kristensen, 2012), the dominant trend is to address the state, international organization, foreign policy, or international political economy; also, various articles consider the state of the discipline or of one of IR’s camps. ⁴ The slim attention directed to the study of people subjects them to experimental manipulation or takes some people’s roles as given in driving power or control (or not) of foreign policy agendas. ⁵

While applauding an IR that now has many rooms of one’s own, to stretch Virginia Woolf a bit, it is also important to point out that the camp structure itself can be an impediment to finding or comparing notes on the people of international relations. Each of around 30 camps, depending how one does the counting, organizes around a fairly bounded set of research interests, identities, geographical locations, and/or methodologies. There are European networks of critical IR scholars and American security networks, each impelled by a different understanding of the concept and components of security. Some camps are schools of thinking linked to locations: the English, Aberystwyth, Copenhagen, and Paris schools. Some organize by broad interests in international political economy, terrorism studies, or international law. Some camps, such as those associated with feminism, peace studies, critical theory or poststructuralism, are offshoots of social or philosophical movements. No matter the origins, each camp generates a particularistic vocabulary and set of revered personages. Each also canonizes a somewhat different array of texts that camp followers are expected to know and cite with devotion and amour (Sylvester, 2007a), even if other camps might not know those texts at all or ever put them on their reading lists. Each camp can also be relatively secure today, comfortable in the knowledge that it has a power base in the field, small or large as that might be, and resources available from professional organizations to legitimize and sustain it; a hefty number of panels at annual conferences constitutes just one of the prize resources for any camp. ⁶

As a result, debate, once thought of as a disciplinary sport, is now mostly confined to within-camp issues. Collaboration across camps is not the norm. If you specialize in critical approaches, you might reasonably share some of your fire with scholars from feminist IR, European critical security studies, postcolonial analysis, or poststructuralist analysis; but you might also bury your neighbor in footnotes (C.A.S.E Collective, 2006; Sylvester, 2007b) or in mentions of feminism that are not accompanied by any citations to actual feminist researchers (Kurki, 2011). Since many IR camps have their own journals, it becomes relatively easier to concentrate on preferred orientations and to assume that other journals do likewise. Ironic as it might be, the professional IR camp scene today can seem conservative even as it is liberating: there is a whiff of neoliberal privatization and self-aggrandizement in its smoky air.

Although there have always been groupings and schools of IR, as noted earlier, the major change of our time is that no camp is strong enough to set the parameters of the field or to knock out any upstart camp through brilliance, fiat, or control over academic publishing and positions. One camp might accuse another of not studying the real international relations, but words cannot hurt today like they used to — not fatally at least. There is space for everyone within some camp, where identity is a mark of belonging to the discipline rather than wandering its halls alone. Moreover, Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen (2005) maintain that, in fact, living camp-style is a mark of our time. The formal or informal camp is the prototypical social unit of all contemporary life in a West that likes to be among like-minded others and insulated from unsafe spaces and lifestyles. Is camp-based IR a more insulated IR that cannot bring its variegated knowledges to bear on the world?

That concern animates a recent special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies (2012) on ‘Out of the ivory tower’. I argue there that camp myopias and embedded abstractionism keep IR remote from the world of people and their international relations (Sylvester, 2012). Chris Reus-Smit argues there against that type of view. The real blockage, he suggests, is motored ‘by IR’s marginal interest in the nature of politics as a distinctive form of social action; by the dissipation of the field’s early practical intent; by the persistent bifurcation of explanatory and normative inquiry; and, symptomatic of these problems, by the virtual extinction of the figure of the international public intellectual’ (Reus-Smit, 2012: 526). Each of these factors, however, can actually align with the abstraction argument. The absence of interest in politics strips IR of a down-to-earth, low politics research orientation. Theoretical models that present normative issues as biases replace practical intent in the field. And there are public intellectuals today, but they tend to be media mouths who, in the USA at any rate, are mostly promoting abstract ideological commitments that are absent palpable concern with people. Perhaps comments coming from a disappointed critical theory advocate, Milja Kurki (2011: 130), are closer to the mark: ‘it really is rather disappointing for — and a disappointing symptom of — alternative, or so-called “critical”, thinking in the social sciences that even when the problems of the dominant model are evident, there is no real systematic, effective or realistic opposition to it.’ The Left has seemingly left power to others and turned inward to word-bound philosophy as its crest of success. Kurki would prefer to see more successful activism in the world and in the field of IR relative to publishing in proliferating journals that just sing to an academic camp choir.

In addition, US training at the PhD level largely carries forward older traditions of testing theory with quantitative methodologies, applied now to ever-larger data sets through electronic wizardry. In fact, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2013: 4–5) assert that the key characteristic of American IR is its obsession with a ‘simplistic hypothesis testing’ that is unmoored from theory or only loosely tied to it. The show-off skill in American IR is sheer statistical acumen galloping down what they call ‘the road to ruin.’ Methodological preoccupation is certainly part and parcel of a distinctly American outlook on the world and in the field of IR, yet there are notable exceptions to that orientation which Mearsheimer and Walt do not mention. A number of IR scholars who studied at the University of Minnesota do not work at all in the quantitative tradition (e.g. Tarak Barkawi (2006), Jutta Weldes (1999), Ann Towns (2004), and Himadeep Muppidi (2004)). ⁷ Meanwhile, it can seem that many European, Australian, and other IR scholars have found new ways to continue looking to the past for keys to events in our time. Foucauldian genealogy was initially a progressive orientation to research that enabled understanding of how concepts and policies become canonical by effectively blocking competing ideas. Today, genealogy can be an end in itself whenever the past becomes a large frame housing a smaller present; or when the textual nuances of a great man’s writings become as important as nuances in contemporary thinking and problems (Sylvester, 2007b). Similarly, people can come out of steam rolling statistical analyses as flattened stick figures, whose gender complexities, say, are erased by statistical requirements of classification. Feminist IR has offered one corrective to both tendencies. It brings in contemporary thinkers — women as well as men — is unafraid to probe the international for powerful quotidian relations, is normative in orientation, and is practical. These are points that Reus-Smit (2012) completely overlooks but that Patrick Jackson (2011) readily sees and applauds.

If all this maneuvering, fragmenting, and particularism signals the end of IR, it is one of those ends that lingers on and becomes normalized, an end endlessly and self-protectively adjusting to its end. As I have written elsewhere (Sylvester, 2009), art history is said to be at a similar end place (Belting, 2003; Danto, 1997). It was mightily upstaged by Andy Warhol’s audacity in making simulacra of Brillo boxes and Campbell soup ads in his factory (not studio) and presenting both as art. More, in doing something radically different, those transgressions got attention and set in motion even bolder breaks with honored art-historical traditions and texts. At the end of art, ‘art’ refused to be the art that professional art-historical narratives and norms long endorsed. The result for that disciplinary field is very similar to what we see in IR: in place of one canonical art history there are ‘many histories that exist side by side’ (Belting, 2003: 7); or as art philosopher Arthur Danto (2002: 31) puts it, there are now fewer ‘constraints on what a work of art has to look like. Works of art can look anyway at all.’ Art after art is liberated from the shackles of theory. So is much of endist IR today.

But is it? Might not art today get away with the trick of pretending to be art, like the assault force of 11 September 2001 got away with pretending to be ordinary air travelers? Jean Baudrillard (2005), a continental philosopher much in vogue, wrote of being oppressed by art after art. What has ended, he maintains, is restraint and good taste. Moving off a bit from Danto’s focus on the end of art history, Baudrillard argues that ‘art does not die because there is no more art, it dies because there is too much’ (2005: 64). ‘Art’ is everywhere, which means it is nowhere. Might the same be said about camp IR and its proliferating locations of the international and the many relations that now seem pertinent to it? International relations is now everywhere, thereby uncapturable and running dangerously wild. Or is Danto’s optimism about ungoverned possibilities of art a better measure of IR’s moment? Certainly there are many examples of ends and resurrections, jolts and afterlives in other academic fields declared to be at an end, such as architecture (Noever, 1993), history (Fukuyama, 1989), nature (McKibben, 2001), science (Horgan, 1997), geography (Camilleri and Falk, 1992), literary theory (Eagleton, 2003), and critical theory of all kinds (Critical Inquiry, 2004). Why would IR be an island of stasis in the seas of change that others find roiling all around?

One way to gauge the moment is to pause briefly to consider recent scholarship from camp IR that takes on a topic pre-camp IR considered ‘core’ — war. Is something new happening in this key area of research, is the topic moribund or, as the British might put it, is war the same-old-same-old? This topic is handled in more detail elsewhere (Sylvester, 2013); I can only hint at the richness of the latest writings in this area in the next section.

Doing war

In discussing the development of IR as a field, Steve Smith (2010) critically foregrounded the debates long held to have shaped the discipline. He pointed out that the very term ‘debates’ conjures a sense that argumentation across time took place on a level playing field where two equally powerful theoretical and epistemological opponents competed for adherents. In reality, he said:

what actually happened is that realism dominated the discipline, given that it claimed to explain the bipolar structure of the international system, while liberalism was able to cover secondary issues to do with institutions and trade, with Marxism being invoked to explain relative economic power and structural inequality … the priority accorded to explaining the military confrontation enabled realism to assume primacy. The key point to note is the power of assumptions about ‘what’ the world of international relations consisted of in determining the explanatory power of rival theories. Thus, since international relations was defined as being about war, the theory that would appear to be most useful in explaining it, not surprisingly, would be the one that focused on war. (2010: 4)

Today, realism contends more vigorously with liberalism in the American IR context, which is not the context Smith is describing above. And war, the sine qua non of an earlier era of international relations, now contends for scholarly interest with the broad subfield of security; indeed, it could be argued that security has cannibalized war in post-Cold War IR. Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen (2009: 91) note that the first realist deviation from studying war per se came with the development of Strategic Studies as a parallel field to IR, thanks in some measure to the emergence of several well-funded think tanks in Europe and North America, which were interested in studying nuclear and related public policy issues of Cold War politics. Once that epoch of international relations ended, security studies, like IR, confronted the exigencies of superpower competition in a post-nuclear age. Facing an endist crisis of its own, security studies ended up aligning somewhat with re-emergent peace studies. Both broadened their referent objects to include economic, ecological, technological, and political forms of security and insecurity, as well as human security as an individual, group, national, and international concern (e.g. Burke, 2007; Dillon, 2003; Duffield, 2001; Huysmans, 2006; Paris, 2001). Feminist IR, critical IR, and poststructuralist IR added their angles until the concept of ‘security’ became a catch-all theoretical and practical orientation that popped up in almost all of IR’s new camps. The events of 11 September 2001 then imprimatured security as the concern of the early 21st century.

One might think that having a link concept like security would militate against extreme disciplinary fragmentation. Instead, security has settled into each new camp in particularistic ways. It has become a major topic, for example, in feminist IR, spawning a vibrant feminist security studies within the camp. The overarching concern there is to consider how various approaches to security — strategic, political discursive, human — incorporate gender issues and consider women as subjects and agents of security (e.g. Hansen, 2000, 2001, 2006; MacKenzie, 2009; Sjoberg, 2009; Stern, 2005; Tickner, 1992; Wibben, 2011). Recently, an overlapping but distinctive group has deviated from this path in order to study war again in IR — directly rather than through security studies, and with an eye on gender and women’s concerns. Significantly, this is further evidence that the camps are diversifying in their interests. Among those who choose to study aspects of war through feminist lenses are Bina D’Costa (2006), Tami Jacoby (2006), Miranda Alison (2009), Swati Parashar (2009, 2011), Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2010, 2013), Cynthia Enloe (2010), Kimberly Hutchings (2011), Megan MacKenzie (2012), Inger Skjelsbaek (2012), Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg (2012), Tina Managhan (2012), Cami Rowe (2013), Elina Penttinen (2013), and Sungju Park-Kang (2012).

There are several noteworthy characteristics of these feminist IR scholars tramping on realism’s well-trod soil. They do not usually cite realist IR, just as they tend not to focus on the USA as war central in our time. Taking a wide geo-perspective, feminist IR war studies finds that post-Cold War wars have many and varied authority centers at domestic, regional, and international levels. Some centers revolve crucially around the activities of women, as in the case of Liberia, where authority dispersed to people routinely off IR’s grid — the peace women forced Charles Taylor into peace talks, and the kidnapped war women led by Black Diamond simultaneously gained notoriety as fierce combatants in the bush (Holzner, 2011). Much of the new work in feminist IR war studies also takes seriously the experiences of ordinary people and operates less with grand abstract constructs like globalization, militarization, imperialism, capitalism, or patriarchy to characterize war. Importantly, the new research contests feminism’s previously uncontested emphasis on peace and considers situations that place everyone in the gray zones between war and peace, conflict and post-conflict.

Some of that work is also based on interviews conducted in situ. Interview research is late to take hold in IR, where the emphasis has often been on philosophical, historical, statistical, mathematical, or discourse forms of analysis that assume, produce, and encourage positional distance from the phenomenon studied. By contrast, Annica Kronsell (2006: 121) argues that ‘interviews are an important source of information because they can provide an in-depth, detailed account of how gendered practices are actually carried out within institutions as well as of how gendered identities are constructed.’ Interviews can foreground ordinary people and their agencies, good and bad, as components of international relations, rather than putting these off stage to the main events. Again, studying people’s responses to activities that appear as abstractions in IR means something more than working at the individual level of analysis within positivist IR. It assumes that the field can learn about some facet of international relations from people who live through or with it. It further assumes that elite decision-makers are not the only people whose positions, knowledges, resources, and sources of information count in international relations. Ordinary people work in global garment factories, witness war, migrate, interact with international communication technology and often with NGOs, and shape and are shaped by many factors that IR associates with globalization. The idea behind studying people’s experiences is to learn how the world looks and works according to those who actually, rather than theoretically, face forces of international relations. The point is not to test hypotheses that could help predict how others would react to similar or simulated conditions of international relations, or to gather true and accurate information on the ground. The point rather is to fill in the abstract contours of our knowledge by acknowledging that people are involved in daily and extraordinary activities of international relations — their lives are affected by the forces a field studies, and what they do can affect the world and should affect what IR studies.

IR war studies researchers affiliated with the Experiencing War project argue, each in his and her own way, that war is in fact human experience of a particularly violent and body-affecting type. ⁸ War is a political activity used to resolve or seek to prolong disputes through collectively violent, armed techniques of injury to bodies and to social structures. To quote Elaine Scarry (1985: 67, emphasis in original), whose early non-IR study of pain returns us to the main point of war: ‘reciprocal injuring is the obsessive content of war and not an unfortunate or preventable consequence of war.’ This might seem obvious enough, but there is unmistakable reluctance across all of IR’s other camps to theorize war as a politics that endeavors, and therefore is intimately tied, to safeguarding some bodies by injuring other bodies. All this injuring intent hides behind the common war-defining term of ‘collective violence’ and behind IR’s longstanding preoccupation with explaining the causes of wars rather than dealing directly with the content of war (Barkawi, 2011).

If this is at least one direction in which a camp within a camp is going, there are undoubtedly other new and challenging directions proliferating around IR. Such would be the components of a discipline’s afterlife rather than end point. IR was right to study war in its inter war and Cold War periods; but it can be both a symptom of nostalgia and perhaps a sign of field insecurity in its fragmented moment to lean too reliably on depersonalized traditions at a time when the world of people clamors for attention. In the case of the old master topic of war, it is time to recognize that war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people and not only down from places that sweep blood, tears, and laughter away, or assign those things to some other field to look into. War is personal, experiential, and complex in its intersections with local and global institutions, identity politics, and agencies. Studied as such it becomes a topic that is post-IR — post in the sense of d’apres, and thus open for ongoing theorization that could draw on many camps in IR and streams of thinking beyond them. Of course, that move requires a certain willingness to be d’apres camp IR, too.

Is IR at an end?

An absolute end? Hardly. Parts of the field are just beginning and require the time that realism and liberalism had to carve out key niches as IR and therefore experience being in IR for a while. IR is only at an end in the way that art is at an end: both fields have been outpaced by unanticipated and unstoppable practices that pay no heed to what the respective experts in the field pronounce. Today, professional IR’s camp spirit can be open and welcoming while also producing specific insularities. It can be innovative in the actors, levels, locations, and methodologies it pursues and also rather scholastic and itsy-bitsy in its attention to textual details. This is a point others are raising, often with a feeling of considerable frustration. Kurki (2011: 131), for example, is convinced that:

… as academic professionalisation, disciplinisation and fragmentation take effect, philosophical debates in IR are increasingly depoliticised and abstract and critical theory increasingly offers many divergent but internally rather insular theoretical visions. I suggest that the ‘academic success’ of philosophical and theoretical agendas, or their increasing diversity, is not necessarily progressive in IR, nor emancipatory for the world at large.

The jury is out on that argument, but I am not inclined to agree with it entirely. To my mind, the challenges facing the democratic opening and expansion of IR are threefold: to share knowledge across camps, something that is not happening effectively now; to form unlikely and unexpected alliances around policy initiatives; and, crucially, to pay greater attention across the field to the international relations of ordinary people, who are turning out to be impressive movers and shakers of our time. Starting at the top of that short list, if many different camps are investigating a topic in particular camp-related ways, then routes must be carved between camps and discussions must take place across differences. Ways must also be found to forge arguments and policy views that can then be communicated beyond IR and into the world of people and their problems. One sticking point noted earlier is that today’s ‘difference IR’ can be so comfy for some. You do not have to hear that you have strayed from IR: there is a group, a camp, for every major interest. You do not have to suffer a turn away from field publications: there is a journal on every IR street corner. That side of academic IR is covered better than at any time in the field’s history. What is not covered is communication between those who publish happily in core journals and those who are just as content to talk camp in newer — and often more exciting — journals. And, as Kurki implicitly admonishes, it is important to engage in more than the panels and journals routine of established IR practices. Perhaps greater numbers of us should follow John Mearsheimer and Stephen Waltz’s (2007, 2009) bold, brave, and painful determination to spell out to policy elites what they see as a problem in US foreign policy. If their example seems wrong-headed to some, how about offering consulting services to Syrian or Yemeni rebels? People are doing international relations while IR holds panels and proliferates specialist camps and journals. Academic liberation has its costs, and one cost appears to be a neglect of people’s liberations as IR talks self-referentially about its theory at the end.

Today it is technologically easy to communicate and so difficult to communicate across IR and to the forces ‘out there’ that exceed IR. I draw hope from the new feminist IR interest in turning toward rather than away from the continuing experiences of war that affect so many people across the world. A turn toward people is a turn away from depoliticized abstraction. One hopes it is d’apres, yet humble enough to recognize the importance of listening to other campfire tales of war rather than writing and then rehearsing only its own new stories, new people, new places, new constructs, and new heroes and heroines of post-IR international relations.