RelationsInternational

global politics, relationally

15 Jun 2017
by Laura Sjoberg
14 Comments

On History and Fear, Then and Now

This is a guest post by Piki Ish-Shalom, A. Ephraim and Shirley Diamond Family Chair in International Relations and Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is part of our series on The International History of Social and Political Theory, eds. Tarak Barkawi and George Lawson. It is in response to the article that Daniel Levine describes in his post earlier this week

On one level this article is an exemplar of Daniel Levine’s writing. Levine is probably the most voracious reader among IR scholars and his work is simply a carnival of knowledge and intellectualism offering a display of learning of unsurpassable breadth. His numerous areas of expertise cover IR theory, critical theory, Judaism, Zionism, and Middle East politics and history. And indeed this article is no exception while adding European history and historiography to Levine’s areas of expertise. The article is a trove of knowledge just like all Levine’s articles and its pages present us with such familiar and forgotten names as Zalman Rubashov (the third President of Israel), Friedrich Meinecke, Jakob Burckhardt, Jürgen Habermas, Hayden White, Theodor Herzl, Leopold von Ranke, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin. These and many others are part of the colorful mosaic which Levine assembles for his readers. And then there is the epistemological and ethical bottom-line which I could not agree with more. As Levine concludes,

one cannot properly speak of history or theory as isolates; theory is always in history and predicated upon it. If that is so, the appropriate questions are less about epistemology than ethics: what modes of critical self-reflection are necessary, and sufficient, for the student of international politics who wishes to be something other than a partisan actor within history?

A noble question, no doubt. But on another level his article exemplifies the inherent problems that such a perspective raises; it raises questions I keep struggling with when I consider these issues: how to moralize the academic endeavor of theorizing without politicizing it? Which criteria distinguish the academic from the political and the moral from the ideological?

The article left me feeling unsure that there can be adequate answers to these questions, and not only because Levine offers no answers. I surfaced from my reading bothered that he had failed profoundly in this article and had blundered into a moral (or is it political and/or ideological?) morass. I kept wondering about the aims of his comparisons and the criteria that guided his choice of whom and what to compare. Were there any moral/political/ideological intentions behind his choices, and were those choices conscious? Levine’s reference to the historian Hayden White wasn’t much help in allaying my worries: “What matters less than the factual basis of claims made by particular historians is what White (1975) has called their figurative content: their ability to artfully and compellingly summon up a world that coheres morally, ontologically, and aesthetically. Factual and procedural-methodological disagreements are of course possible; but they are also, at least partly, beside the point (104).” And here ostensibly, Levine assumes the historian’s role of locating the origins of social and political theory.

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12 Jun 2017
by Laura Sjoberg
8 Comments

On Writing ‘These Days of Shoah’: History and Fear, Then and Now

This is a post in the series on The International Origins of Social and Political Theory, eds. Tarak Barkawi and George Lawson. This post is by Daniel Levine, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, discussing his contribution. A response will be posted on Wednesday. 

How did these soft people, with no word for military tactic, start bulldozing Palestinian houses?

Sarah Schulman: Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, 12.

This paper emerged as I started working through the archival sources for my current book project, tentatively entitled Israel, Palestine, and the Politics of Jewish Fear (PJF).  Over the past two years, I have been reading the early issues of a Hebrew-language strategic studies journal called Ma’arakhot (“mih-ah-rah-KHOT” – ‘campaigns/operations,’ in the military sense).  Later to become the in-house journal of Israel’s Armed Forces – the rough equivalent of publications like Parameters or Infantry JournalMa’arakhot first appeared in September 1939 as a quasi-underground publication for the Haganah, the largest of the Zionist paramilitaries then operating in mandatory Palestine.

Ma’arakhot’s timing was propitious, and not merely because its first issue coincided with Germany’s invasion of Poland. The rise of European anti-Semitism, and tightened immigration quotas in the US and Western Europe, had produced a sharp spike in Jewish migration to Palestine.  Between 1922 and 1939, its Jewish community – the Yishuv – had grown more than fivefold, from 84,000 to almost 450,000.  Though still very much a minority, the Yishuv looked increasingly like a polity, one capable of sovereign self-determination.

In the face of such rapid growth – and in no small measure because of it – Palestine’s Arab population had by 1939 been in open revolt for some three years.  To suppress that revolt, British counterinsurgency forces would at their height include two full army divisions (some 25,000 servicemen) as well as expanded police and Jewish supernumerary forces.  Some 5,000 Palestinian Arabs (and by most counts, several hundred Jews) would be killed in clashes with British and Zionist forces, and in intra-communal violence as well.  In 1917, and again in 1922, Britain had promised to develop Palestine for the joint benefit of both Jews and Arabs. That policy, called ‘dual obligation’, was now plainly in tatters. London found itself facing the prospect of a costly, unpopular, and open-ended occupation; and this just as political tensions in Europe reached their peak.  In May 1939 – some four months before the first issue of Ma’arakhot went to press – Britain announced that it would quit Palestine within ten years, and sharply curtailed both Jewish immigration and land transfers between Palestinian Jews and Arabs. Continue Reading →

31 May 2017
by Laura Sjoberg
2 Comments

The International Origins of Social and Political Theory

This is a post by Tarak Barkawi and George Lawson, introducing their edited collection, The International Origins of Social and Political Theory 

What is the relationship between history and theory? Most of the time, theory stands outside history. Social scientists tend to apply theories to historical events, seeing history as a testing bed or as a site of “operationalization” for their theoretical schemas. Others, among them historians of thought, see theory as speech acts either rooted in their particular time and place, or, alternately, as reflections of broader social forces. On either account, theory (as intellectual systems) and history (as events, experiences and practices) appear as distinct domains.

Our opening into the wider project that Relations International is exploring is the idea that the relations between history and theory are better conceived as co-constitutive. Theory is made in history, and it helps to make history. Understanding theory, and understanding history, requires inquiry attuned to the entwinement of theory and history.

But what does it mean to say that theory is made in history, and that it helps to make history? It means that theories arise historically, formed amid encounters between theorists and the events and practices they experience and take part in.

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18 May 2017
by Laura Sjoberg
0 comments

RelationsInternational Back; Forum announcement

Dear RelationsInternational Readers,

It has been a long month here at RelationsInternational – many of you know that we got hacked so badly that we had to rebuild the site from the ground up. It looks like we are secure now, so we thank you for your patience – through this, and through RI’s sporadic year this year.

Looking forward, we’re happy to announce that the revived RI will be doing a forum on Tarak Barkawi and George Lawson’s edited volume in the Political Power and Social Theory series on The International Origins of Social and Political Theory. The  editors and many of the authors will provide RI a blog post summary of their work, and RI’s interlocutors will engage in commentary and discussion. The first post, by Tarak and George, will be coming on Monday, so be ready!

Thanks again, and welcome back to RI,

Laura Sjoberg

8 May 2017
by Milos Popovic
0 comments

Russia sponsors right-wing parties, but Soviets did it too

As the FBI investigates Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 Presidential elections, the Kremlin continues to bankroll European far-right and neo-Nazi parties to destabilize governments from France and Germany to Scandinavia. Under President Putin, Russia offers money, cooperation, and propaganda support to a wide variety of movements from Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party to Le Pen’s Front National to Hungarian neo-Nazis.

For a country that boasts of being the successor of the Soviet Union, the former beacon of proletarian internationalism, Russia, and European far-right parties would appear to be strange bedfellows. Historians have long studied how the Soviet Union both overtly and covertly supported Western-European communist parties in order to destabilize post-war democratic regimes throughout the region. It had been long thought, however, that the brutal war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would preclude any Soviet collaboration with surviving Nazi elements.

Recently declassified archives from CIA and the Russian State Archive offer compelling evidence that Moscow deliberately established ties with Austrian National League in the 1950s, a party they well understood was made up of former Nazis.

After World War II, the four Allied Powers occupied Austria and divided the country and its capital Vienna into zones of control. As the shadow of the Iron Curtain descended over the old continent, the Soviets threw their support behind their ideological ally, the Communist Party of Austria (CPA), in hope that communism would triumph in the country. But the 1945 general election dealt a serious blow to the Soviet hopes as the CPA received a meager 5% of the vote. Soviet concerns about its influence in Western Europe increased sharply when in 1948 the United States launched the Marshall Plan to decrease Europe’s economic hardships. Only a year later, CPA suffered another staggering election defeat causing alarm within the Kremlin.

Moscow blamed the CPA’s election failure on their inability to win over the countryside, penetrate unions and, most importantly, attract Christian voters. The Kremlin sought to remedy this situation by linking to alternative partners, who could both attract these voters and penetrate the right-wing in order to weaken the ruling conservative People’s Party.

The CPA, with Soviet support, first tried to infiltrate nationalist Federation of Independents or VdU (a predecessor of Freedom Party of Austria) through a caucus around Josef Heger. But when VdU leadership found out that Heger was a Soviet mole, he was ousted together with his supporters in the aftermath of the 1949 elections. This forced Soviets then to choose a more radical solution after its intelligence services noticed Adolph Slavik and his newly formed right-wing party, the National League (NL). According to the Soviet archives, Adolph Slavik was a former SS officer and Hitler Youth member who established the NL together with 80 former Nazi officers and servicemen in Viennese restaurant “Fuhrer” in January 1950. NL quickly set up its committees in Vienna and Lower Austria, which drew in “quite a crowd” of “workers, peasants, housewives and petty bourgeoisie”. For a party of ex-Nazis, NL nourished a suspiciously pro-Soviet political stance aimed at “cooperation with the Soviet Union, and against turning [Austria] into a satellite or colony of American imperialism”. By 1952, NL had organized more than 500 gatherings and owned a daily newspaper with a circulation of 8 thousand copies (in contrast, the ruling conservatives had no party newspapers). Its tentacles quickly spread to rural areas where CPA had failed to garner strong support in previous elections.

Bizarrely, the Soviet report referred to NL as a “democratic” movement, while simultaneously castigating the then conservative government of Austria as “neo-fascist”. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In 1953, the Soviets admitted that there are contacts between CPA and Slavik (in the Soviet’s words he was a “progressive man”). Since Western European communist parties could not enter arrangements with other political parties without Moscow’s blessing, it is almost certain that Soviet officials encouraged this peculiar alliance.

Dozens of recently declassified CIA documents regarding Slavik and NL cast more light on Slavik’s relationship with the Soviets. In one such report, the CIA finds that as early as 1950, NL propagandists were allowed to operate in Soviet-occupied Vienna and Lower Austria in their bid to attract former Nazis to their ranks. Slavik even received funding from the Administration of Soviet Property in Austria (USIA) to publish party newspapers. Similar to present day right-wing pilgrimages in support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, NL also sent delegations to Communist-sponsored Peace Council meetings. In 1950, Slavik traveled to East and West Germany to set up an intelligence network for the Soviets in Austria, and he reportedly engaged in cross-border arms smuggling.

The most blatant show of collaboration with the Soviets, which ultimately spelled NL’s political demise, occurred on the eve of 1952 Presidential elections when Slavik openly instructed his party members to cast blank ballots in congruence with Moscow’s position, and called for NL to join the communist People’s Opposition coalition. This created dissension among League members as a number of leaders also found that Slavik had received a monthly contribution of 42,000 shillings from USIA firms to sustain the parties daily. Faced with the brewing discontent, Slavik backtracked on his decision, but it was too late as the NL voted him out of leadership. After the 1953 elections, NL largely fell into political oblivion together with its founding father.

The collapse of the National League suggests a possible strategy that similarly highlighting Russia’s ties with current right-wing parties could also discredit them with their countries electorate. This is especially important given that a few such parties may grow stronger after the elections in Germany, France, and Italy, in 2017. Failure to do so will expose Western societies to more xenophobic, anti-democratic and anti-liberal rhetoric that the weakened ruling conservatives may adopt to remain in office.

22 Apr 2017
by Brandon Valeriano
0 comments

Respecting the Outsider

Will Moore’s passing is tough to process, not just because he was such a wonderful mentor to so many people, but also because of the conversations he has started or reignited.  Especially the conversation on depression, mainly driven by the Duck of Minerva with posts by Emily Ritter and John Busby.

Even those who do not suffer from clinical depression do get to feel tinges of it given the bipolar nature of our jobs.  One day it is a lecture in front of hundreds of students (or three star generals) paying attention to every word, the next you are at a Starbucks trying to get 500 words in so you can at least feel productive. Another day you might get a journal acceptance email that was five years in the making and then, two hours later, a grant rejection email.  The highs are high and the lows are low, but they come fast and quick in academia.

Yet, there is another conversation we need to have, one about being an outsider in academia.  This is something Will suffered from given his personality. He was would say and do things that some people found shocking. (I was quite heartened to see that one of his last on Facebook posts was about dildos.) He did not hesitate to tell you the worst things about your work or say (and blog) shocking things in public.  In short, he behaved quite the opposite of many in the field.

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14 Apr 2017
by Laura Sjoberg
0 comments

(Self) Reflections on Alexander Wendt’s book Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology

This is a guest post by Matt EvansProfessor of Political Science at Northwest Arkansas Community College (in Bentonville). Dr. Evans he holds an MA in political science from the University of Louisville (where he was first introduced to Wendt by Dr. Rodger Payne) and a PhD in the same field from Northern Arizona University.

Ecce homo!

The Latin phrase means “behold the body” – it was what Pontius Pilate said to the jeering Jerusalemites in presenting Jesus Christ’s tortured body, and what Friedrich Nietzsche’s used to title his intellectual autobiography. It denotes a defense of oneself and others to an unsympathetic public, and parallels what Judith Butler said about “giving an account of oneself” (that presenting oneself creates an impossible singular task where we must invoke others and the broader web of sociality to know ourselves in public and private).

In the paragraphs below, I want to explain my own use of the phrase – in a review of Alexander Wendt’s recent book Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Of course, this book review will not only explain some of Wendt’s basic ideas in this quantum project, but also reveal something inter-textually that exists beyond and between the texts/text (thus the infinite number of spaces that we need to look to explain what something means). Examining Wendt’s most recent book tells us something about the writer, the book reviewer, and some of the social contexts in which both emerge.

More than any other writer, Wendt made me the political scientist I am today. His work on structuration, scientific realism, and constructivism unraveled my thinking on how to approach American diplomatic history. Before reading his work, I wanted to be Noam Chomsky with a political science PhD. After reading his works, I wanted to be a political theorist. Every political problem appeared, at its roots, to be a philosophical problem (that addressed both the way we did science, the way we construct causality, ontology, metaphysics, ethics). I thought all political scientists were just bad theorists, bad historians, or a combination of the two. Certainly reading King Keohane and Verba made me very amenable to some of Wendt’s denaturalization of the orthodoxies of the study of international relations and global politics. It also opened the door to an idea that political scientists could not adequately study political problems – the major paradigm shifts occurred metaphorically by connecting contents and contexts that clearly were not part of political science into the field (in a way that draws upon the insights of conceptual blending and conceptual metaphor research). Thus, Wendt had to remind everyone of the importance of philosophy of science, specifically scientific realism (from British philosopher Roy Bhaskar) and structuration (from British sociologist Anthony Giddens). He was breaking apart what counted as international relations – along with others opening the door to a wider conception of political science – and creating space for me to do whatever I would be doing to complete my MA and a PhD in political science (and thus spend much of my time taking philosophy, linguistics, sociology, gender studies, ethnic studies, communications courses). Of course, I probably stretched scientific realism and constitutive theory to their breaking points in justifying my own projects (like my dissertation). His cleaver-ness, though, was always creating a false nostalgia in making the new concept or issue appear like it had just been lost in the shuffle of the field’s creation and was always there in plain sight (kind of like Winston’s role in utilizing the memory hole in the book 1984).

The metaphoricity of Wendt’s recent project on quantum social science seems potentially ripe for contributing to the growth of the field of not just political science (but all of social sciences). He examines the mind-body problem – one of the central and intractable problems of Western philosophy – and finds it lacking for being entirely based on Newtonian physics (for example, see his Q&A here and his lecture here). The Newtonian should be replaced by the quantum. The latter challenges many of the basic assumptions of the former. All social explanations are constrained by the laws of physics, according to Wendt, and thus physics lays at the base of everything social, large and small (Wendt 7). In laying out this challenge, Wendt brings into question the broader project of social sciences (in all of its disciplines). If the social sciences are largely based on a Newtonian metaphysics (at least implicitly at their root), then the larger project of social sciences loses its purchase in explaining the world. Wendt, thus, is correcting philosophers and social scientists for not thinking through the implications of the quantum that ultimately undermine explanations about the world. We must look to the quantum, a world of potentiality and contingencies.

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12 Apr 2017
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
1 Comment

Addressing the gender gap in academic service

A just-published study — Inside Higher Ed story here — confirms, with data, something that I think is pretty obvious to many academics already: women do more service, on average, than their male counterparts. According to the study, that relationship holds true across faculty ranks, even as the amount of service overall increases as one ascends the Assistant-Associate-Professor ladder. And it is driven, conclude the authors, by “internal” service rather than “external” service, that is, by service that one performs by serving on committees and the like within one’s department or university, rather than by serving in such capacities for community groups or professional associations. Even though the results of the study are a serious indictment of the academic life, it is always nice to have data to validate one’s intuitions and link one’s local experiences to broader patterns.

I am less concerned with the fine-grained distinctions among possible causes for this gender gap than others might be (the authors of the study test hypotheses about proportionality and the gender of academic unit leadership, as well as issues related to adopting an administrative career track). I want instead to take the descriptive findings as a point of departure and propose a potential solution that intervenes directly in the moment when a member of the professoriate is asked, by anyone, to engage in internal service. (I am setting aside external service, largely because the study doesn’t find a significant gap between male and female academics in the amount of external service — although it does suggest that different kinds of external service are chosen by men and by women, which is intriguing on its own.) This doesn’t just address gender differentials, but any categorical differentials in service, because what I am proposing is that we generate impersonal metrics for internal service that allow everyone to ascertain whether they and their colleagues are doing an appropriate amount of such service.

But before I do that, we need to be clear on what an impersonal metric actually is, and what it does in practice. Continue Reading →

23 Mar 2017
by Sara Mitchell
0 comments

The Importance of Water (In)Security

Cross-posting with International Relations @ UIowa

Given that yesterday was World Water Day, it is a good time to reflect on the importance of humans’ access to clean water and the security threats that unequal access to water resources can create. While countries like Canada and the United States are fortunate to have large internal supplies of fresh water, many states like Iraq and Syria depend heavily on rivers that cross international boundaries. One third of the 263 international river basins in the world contain three or more countries, making negotiations over shared water resources complex. Israel’s seizure of the Jordan River headwaters area in the 1967 Six Day War created concerns that many more “water wars” would emerge. Yet while academics and pundits warned that water conflicts would increase in the decades to follow this conflict, most interactions between countries over shared river resources have been cooperative.

Ataturk Dam

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3 Mar 2017
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
0 comments

For Accuracy, Consequences, and Truth. A Personal Manifesto

The Trump Administration’s proclamation of “alternative facts” to suit the arguments they wish to make, and the branding of journalistic outlets that demonstrate the inaccuracy of the President’s statements as “FAKE NEWS!!!” have prompted me to do something I am not normally inclined to do: to actively campaign for the value and integrity of a broadly scientific approach as an important input to public deliberation. It’s not at all that I needed to be convinced of the value of such an approach; rather, it’s that I was somewhat blissfully unaware of the extent to which the current wave of populist politics was almost completely untroubled by notions of factuality. Sure, I had known that there was a hard core of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism that felt that scientific results and verifiable pieces of information were matters of opinion or belief — anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, people who worried about the U.N.’s supposed fleet of black helicopters that were waiting to swoop in and destroy national sovereignty — but I guess I always believed that such a minority would be held in check by the good sense of the rest of the electorate, even those with whose policy positions I disagreed. Apparently not. Apparently significant numbers of people in the U.S. were willing to vote for a demonstrated purveyor of convenient falsehoods — convenient in the sense that they support his, and their, preferred positions on a whole slew of issues. Welcome to the post-truth era.

Or: welcome to an era in which truth, and the earnest seeking after truth, is under assault, and under assault not for anything like defensible reasons. Instead, the political order of the day seems to be to make up whatever claims support one’s conclusions and then pass them off as “facts.” In my view what has changed is not politicians; politics was never about seeking truth, and frankly, shouldn’t be about truth but should instead be about making compromises and balancing priorities in order to make our common lives together work as well as they can. Believing that you and you alone have the truth makes you a poor politician, because you can’t compromise, and if you had the truth, why would you even want to? Politics is messy and imperfect, so we should never expect it to conform to ideal standards for the production of factual knowledge. Indeed, I suspect that most politicians would lie about and misrepresent situations as much as they could get away with doing so in pursuit of their agendas, because the central virtue in politics is effectiveness rather than integrity — and in the first instance that means effectiveness and gaining and retaining political power and influence.

All of which means that if we the people want our elected officials to make policy that engages facts instead of just making stuff up, we cannot rely on politicians or on the political process to defend that stance. We have to instead actively advocate and diligently defend the proper role of facts and factual explanations in relation to political contestation. Continue Reading →