New essay on 'Post-Truth, Complicity and International Politics'

We need to talk about truth. Or, more precisely, “post-truth.” As has been widely reported, shared, liked and ridiculed, this was the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2016: “[R]elating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Although in use since at least the early 1990s, in the year of Brexit and Trump, post-truth was claimed as a kind of zeitgeist. Cue much pensiveness and gnashing of teeth.

A new essay on 'Post-Truth, Complicity and International Politics' that I wrote in response to recent debates on these issues has published at E-International Relations.

Writing about US politics at present is a bit like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I started writing the piece in the immediate aftermath of the Trump election in November. It was updated in the early part of the year to reflect various changes that had occurred by that point. Consequently, I didn't comment on some more recent contributions mentioned in a previous post.

So, this is really my attempt to make sense of the politics of nonsense that Trumpism embodies. It is, in this sense, an ongoing project; something of a collective work in progress.

I write particularly from my current disciplinary situation in International Politics (or International Relations, delete as appropriate). Nevertheless, this is a discussion that goes well beyond any academic circumstance.

I'm very glad to have it out there (even if I'm currently experiencing the customary apprehensiveness that comes from having one's own thoughts suddenly on public display!).

The prison house of disciplinarity and the poverty of paraphrasism

Working within a discipline is a tricky thing, particularly when your work doesn't fit at all neatly into any discipline in particular. Such are the quandaries of inter- trans- or multi-disciplinary, neatly summarised here:

Intradisciplinary: working within a single discipline.
Crossdisciplinary: viewing one discipline from the perspective of another.
Multidisciplinary: people from different disciplines working together, each drawing on their disciplinary knowledge.
Interdisciplinary: integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines, using a real synthesis of approaches.
Transdisciplinary: creating a unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives.

My PhD project involves writing a history of the concept of the environment, particularly in the 19th century. One basic methodological principle I have adopted is to work 'semasiologically' – that is, to take a word and explore its possible meanings as opposed to 'onomasiologically,' which takes a concept or thing and explores its possible significations.

Of course, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. However, prioritising the former has an important consequence: it is impossible to limit the study to pre-specified disciplinary domains. For example, while geographical uses of 'environment' are extremely important to the story I'm telling, they cannot be prematurely isolated from the popularisation of 'milieu' as a term in literary theory or linguistics.

Disciplinarily, I am housed within and funded by a department of International Politics, although I also have supervision from geography and the history of science. This is working out to be a very productive arrangement as it combines a substantial degree of intellectual freedom with a continual demand to think more intensively about the political consequences of what I'm working on.

So, clearly my work is inter- or multi-disciplinary, depending on how you look at it. It is also trans-disciplinary inasmuch as I am not just combining different areas of knowledge haphazardly or indifferently but also thinking about things that none of these 'boxes' really encourage (although, institutionally, they may to some extent facilitate).

However, it is perhaps easier to define the kind of disciplinarity that I am working against than what I am working towards. Obviously, nothing about this project is 'intra-disciplinary.' However, it seems to me that strict intra-disciplinarity is becoming more and more rare, at least in the areas that I am familiar with.

The aspect of disciplinarity that I would really see myself as resisting has more to do with the 'cross-disciplinary,' or perhaps a better term would be 'para-disciplinary.' This is something that I find to be particularly prevalent in International Relations, although by no means only there.

In a word, I would call it 'paraphrasism' – that is, the norm that a scholar residing within one discipline, looking to other disciplines for interesting ideas and then essentially paraphrasing these ideas, repackaging them for colleagues in their home discipline, makes not only an acceptable but a highly valued form of intellectual contribution to collective knowledge.

For example, within IR it is possible to be a scholar who works primarily on the philosophy of science. To varying degrees, ideas taken from disciplinary philosophy of science may be adapted to the specificities of IR; however, equally they may remain debated in the abstract among other IR-philosophers. Sometimes such debates do get to the point of going beyond what has been said elsewhere. However, the important point is that paraphrasing and 'bringing in' these ideas is considered to be original intellectual work in itself.

Such para-disciplinary repackagings seem to score highly on assessment metrics and are generally a sound route to professional success. I find this rather disappointing. I hasten to add that I'm not condemning or demeaning this sort of endeavour. It is worthwhile. However, it is also extremely limited.

I try to set myself quite different goals. If I am making use of ideas derived from the philosophy of science, the history of science and anthropology, I want my recombination and rethinking of these ideas to entail original contributions to each of these areas. That is, every significant adoption should entertain the possibility of productively feeding back on whence it came.

I hasten to add once again that this is extremely difficult to achieve and that I do not expect that I am any more capable of this than anyone else. It is difficult to add to any one area of knowledge, never mind several. However, this is rather beside the point. The important thing is to choose your implausible objectives very carefully – to construct one's own intellectual obligations in such a way as to make such a thing possible rather than foreclosed from the start.

I expect that this is not an altogether original thought. However, I don't know of anyone articulating it in quite this way. For example, in Why International Relations has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to do About it (2001), Barry Buzan and Richard Little argue that the "semipermeable membrane that allows ideas from other disciplines to filter into IR, but seems to block substantial traffic in the other direction" amounts to their discipline's 'failure.' They propose that IR qua coherent, ontologically grounded discipline must have something to 'give back,' balancing the trade deficit with other coherent, ontological grounded disciplines, particularly sociology. That 'something' is the very thing that gives the discipline its 'ground': the concept of 'international systems.' Along very similar lines, in International Relations in the prison of Political Science (2016), Justin Rosenberg proposes that the discipline find its ground in the concept of 'political multiplicity' – it is this disciplinary heartland that will let IR scholars hold their heads high at the table of social sciences.

Personally, I have little interest in such intra- and inter-disciplinary politics. I have the luxury, at present, of ignoring such things. However, at some point, I will have to dress myself in the garb of one house or another. Clearly, my past and present institutional circumstances have effected my reference points for thinking about these things. Disciplinarity is certainly not something that can be shrugged off. It is an ongoing, continual conditioning effect operating via a variety of means, obvious and otherwise. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing – I mean it when I write that my situation in an IR department provokes me to think politically in a way that I would not elsewhere.

There is something of a tightrope to navigate. However, I won't content myself with paraphrasism, even if that would make for an easier life. I just find that altogether too boring.

Exploring the international through film

As part of my teaching this term, I am screening and introducing five films (or collections of films) from around the world that deal with various aspects of international politics. Below are my synopses. Looking forward to it!

1. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Regularly listed as one of the greatest films ever made, Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece has won plaudits and provoked controversy ever since its release. Set during the Vietnam War in 1969, the film follows Benjamin L. Willard, a Captain instructed to travel up the Nung river and assassinate Walter E. Kurtz, a Special Forces Colonel gone rogue, establishing himself as a demigod somewhere inside neutral Cambodia. Simultaneously realistic and surreal, Coppola once claimed that: "My movie is not a movie. My movie is not about Vietnam. My movie is Vietnam." Having as much to do with the drugs, the lies and the madness of the era as with the war itself, Apocalypse Now will make us ask: Does this film really criticise war or, rather, subtly glorify it? Does it undercut racism or just reproduce existing prejudices? And can we, in the end, separate the cinematic spectacle, the 'entertainment value,' from the politics it plays out?

2. Our Friend the Atom (1957)/The War Game (1965)
Appearing just eight years apart, these two short films show two very different sides of Western nuclear politics in the mid-twentieth century. Our Friend the Atom was produced by Disney to educate the public about nuclear science and extol the virtues of this 'magical' technology for everything from energy and transportation to health. In stark contrast to such bubbly optimism, The War Game depicts the events and aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain. It was produced for the BBC but deemed "too horrifying" to broadcast. With recent debates around the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system and, in light of global warming, the vices and virtues of nuclear power, these films offer a window onto past attitudes to nuclear politics that will help inform our thinking in the present. These films will make us ask: How are apparently 'elite' issues of strategy and planning connected to public perceptions of legitimacy, security and science? What do these differing understandings of nuclear technology tell us about our collective attitudes towards the future? And is it even possible to have a 'rational' debate around these issues, given how massively emotive they have been for such a long time?

3. Mustang (2015)
Set in a parochial, provincial Turkish village ("1000 miles from Istanbul"), this Franco-Turkish production tells the story of five teenage sisters, rebellious and orphaned, living with their kind but conservative grandmother and brutal, controlling uncle. After one act of youthful disobedience too many, it is decided that the girls are to be married – forcibly, if needs be. As a result, their home is gradually turned into a prisonlike "wife factory" – complete with bars on the windows. However, while the film does not shy away from the horrors possible in a patriarchal society, it is not a film about suffering but, rather, about resistance, love and the exuberance of youth. With a relevance that transcends its particular cultural circumstances, Mustang will make us ask: What are the sorts of violence that young women are particularly vulnerable to and how are these vulnerabilities perpetuated? What sorts of agency do women, of all ages, have to resist these unequal and unjust relationships? And what message might this film have for those of us living, seemingly, much further away than "1000 miles from Istanbul"?

4. World War II short films (1935-1945)
World War II was perhaps the heyday of propaganda films. Huge numbers were produced on all sides, across a wide variety of genres. This session will play a selection of British, American, French, German, Japanese and Soviet short films and cartoons, as well as excerpts from feature films such as the infamous Nazi epic Triumph of the Will (1935). Placing all these audiovisual artefacts side-by-side will demonstrate the differences but also the similarities between the competing schemes of national representation and vilification that were tearing the world apart at this time. While in many ways 'of their era,' we will find in these films certain tropes and techniques that remain in continual use, right up to today. These films will make us ask: How were perceptions of the War produced through film and how did they differ between different nations? What do these differences tell us about our own hyperactive media environments? And what, in the end, is a 'propaganda' film, anyway?

5. Embrace of the Serpent (2016)
Like Coppola's Apocalypse Now, this film also features a journey down a tropical river – a journey taken under desperate circumstances. Théo, a German explorer, seeks the help of an Amazonian shaman, the only man for many miles who can cure his fatal illness. However, this is not another story of a white European disappearing into the frightful foliage of the wild and 'primitive.' Instead, the story is told from the perspective of Karamakate, the shaman. Set against the background of the 'rubber wars' perpetrated by Euro-American invaders seeking to exploit Amazonian rubber trees, Embrace of the Serpent is simultaneously a scathing indictment of colonialism and, in the words of its director, "an attempt to build a bridge between Western and Amazonian storytelling." This film will make us ask: What place is there in our political attention-spans for forms of violence and exploitation apparently at the 'fringes' of civilisation? Are we even able to recognise all the forms of violence that such projects of domination enact? And how, given all of that, can we 'build bridges' between different ways of living and surviving in the world?

Rethinking environmental determinism historically and speculatively for future geopolitics—Tübingen, EWIS, April 2016

I'm pleased to say that I'll be off to Tübingen in April for EWIS (European Workshops in International Studies). Specifically, a workshop on 'International Politics in the Anthropocene,' organised by Delf Rothe.

Very much looking forward to it. Here's my abstract:

Rethinking environmental determinism historically and speculatively for future geopolitics 

Geographically, climatically and environmentally deterministic forms of knowledge have ancient roots, often being traced back to Herodotus. As the likes of Mike Hulme have recently argued, such epistemic tendencies are evident in forms of climate science that project narrowly defined human futures on the basis of abstract and reductionist calculative practices. To so much as have a conversation about ‘the Anthropocene’ requires some degree of discursive absorption of the progressive produce of calculative rationality. However, there is equally an imperative not to turn the looming spectre of vast, inhuman forces into deterministic narratives that paralyse political possibility. This paper will build on a discussion session that I arranged at the RGS-IBG conference in September 2015. It will, first, set out a brief history of determinism and its critics and, second, engage with contemporary speculative philosophical debates around geophilosophy and geopolitics in order to begin to creatively re-articulate how determinism can be intellectually and politically overcome without lapsing into voluntaristic denial of the crushingly urgent facts of the Anthropocene. In short, it attempts to articulate an updated form of possibilism that might help to facilitate the production of future geopolitical analyses—and future geopolitics.

I'm also hoping that I'll have time to stop off in Karlsruhe on the way back to have a look at the 'Reset Modernity!' exhibition at ZKM to which I have contributed an essay.

What is 'International'? A few reflections on Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's 'Must International Studies Be a Science?'

I didn’t go to the Millennium Journal of International Studies' conference at the LSE last year. (I did in 2012 and intend to attend this year.) However, a selection of the papers from the conference have just been published, including the keynote by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson ‘Must International Studies Be a Science?’ (His short answer: no.)

I don't want to go into the whole thing (or even the main of the thing) but just to draw out a few points that interest me.

The essay is set up with a good mixture of sweeping breadth and due humility:

“Depending on which authority one consults, ‘we’ are a group of scholars held together by our ‘great debates’, by our concern with the implications of inter-state anarchy, by our implication in a (neo)colonial project of establishing European hegemony, by a set of so-called ‘paradigms’ which almost no one claims to adhere to any longer even though we keep organising our introductory textbooks and courses according to them, etc. […]

I do not propose to resolve this controversy here. Instead, I will circumvent it by simply elucidating what I mean by ‘international studies’ so that my answer to my initial question becomes clearer.”

So, first of all, what about that troubling term ‘international’?

“The way I understand it, the term ‘international’ picks out those aspects of anything that involves cross-boundary encounters with difference. The international aspect of a military manoeuver or a financial transaction does not simply begin at the moment that a formal territorial border is crossed, but as soon as the existence of some other—the alien, the foreigner, the stranger—is taken into account in the operation. Representations of otherness, which shape and structure what we come to regard as legitimate or acceptable or appropriate action towards or in reaction to those others, are the common thread connecting all of our myriad substantive concerns, and the ‘return’ of culture and identity to the scholarly agenda is better thought of as a clarification of what we were all already interested in in the first place.”

A commendably open definition though this is, what portion of the human sciences does not deal with otherness (or, indeed, boundaries)? One might admit that anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. do not primarily deal with otherness across 'boundaries' as such (although what is a boundary?); however, I think that the pivot point ‘primarily’ is a rather vulnerable 'single point of failure.' The question becomes: Why does one need a distinct discipline to deal with such things? Perhaps the answer could be that cross-boundary otherness comes in many forms and, while of course it is dealt with in a wide variety of epistemic milieus, it is important enough to demand a particular disciplinary focality, a programme of concentrated examination that would think through such phenomena taken together, regardless of their usual disciplinary partitionment.

IR (or IS) would then be essentially interdisciplinary. It would not have its own ontological ‘turf’ (the Durkheimian dominion-making assumption that a ‘science’ must have its own distinct ontological domain has dominated the discipline since at least Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics [1979]). Instead, it would draw together a range of concerns that no other discipline examines in an assembled and focused manner. Anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, literature theory, etc. etc. – all these encounter ‘cross-boundary otherness’ but severally. This would be an interesting proposition. However, I’m not sure that this is what PTJ is arguing.

He does note that “the term [international] does not pick out a discrete realm or region of social life” (i.e. the boundaries in question are not just state boundaries). However, he redefines it (having first undefined it) not quite as I have described but rather:

“I would therefore locate the ‘international’ in ‘international studies’ not in the object of study, but in the way that we approach the object of study—which means that virtually everything has an ‘international’ aspect, potentially, depending on how we look at it.”

He goes on: “After all, ‘physics’ does not name an object of study, but a way of studying objects; why should ‘international’ be any different?”

I find this to be a strange and sudden segue. ‘Way of studying’ suggests methodology – and this is, of course, the theme on which the talk was to be given. However, there’s a confusion here between methodology and ontology, at the very least. Is physics a ‘way of studying’? This is a rather obscure abstraction. PTJ seems to want to avoid the ontology of domains by talking about methods (or at least practices) but this won't work. The whole notion of a ‘physical domain’ as categorically distinct from the chemical and biological is indeed rather outdated. However, the ‘monist’ claim that these disciplines engage ‘the same’ things from different perspectives leads us back down precisely the wrong path. A lamentable regression.

We should shed the terms ‘physics’ and ‘chemistry’ here. Every scientific research exercise addresses distinct entities. These are not the ‘domain’ that grants or guarantees scientificity and I do not deny overlaps all over the place but to sever science from its particular objects, or to melt everything into a single ‘world’ that is only broken apart again when engaged by human agents is, in my view at least, completely wrongheaded. Sciences are established neither by domains nor by ‘ways’ (whatever they are). The only means of making sense of what sciences are without the traditional distinctions is as networks and assemblages (here I am of course betraying my own philosophical preferences) – networks and assemblages that include distinct objects, distinct practices, distinct epistemic standards and norms…; none sovereign or permanent but none to be unduly confused or conflated, either.

PTJ goes on to discuss his heuristic take on knowledge production, expanding on technical and epistemic 'ways' of knowing and building on his The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (2010). I will skip over this as I want to concentrate on the aforementioned issues.

Long story short, I find that, ‘otherness across boundaries’ seems to overemphasise the ‘inter-’ and wash out the ‘national’ (or leave it crucially underexamined), leading to a disciplinary vision that at least risks being somewhat superfluous. PTJ does not note the etymology of ‘nation’; however, it is instructive:

“c. 1300, from Old French nacion ‘birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland’ (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio) ‘birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe,’ literally ‘that which has been born,’ from natus, past participle of nasci ‘be born’ (Old Latin gnasci; see genus).”

Perhaps there is something in this (though we must tread carefully). We could say that where IR/IS/IP went wrong was in assuming that ‘national’ meant ‘nation state,’ or at least nation in a modern, mass mediated sense where humans are symbolically and technically conjoined in their millions. Tribe, village, family, city – these might all be involved in ‘international’ relations – and relations on their own scale, of their own kind – in this expanded sense, tied more definitely perhaps to a sense of birth and nurturing, culture and cultivation.

(Incidentally, this could be related to the world history interpretation offered by, for example, Barry Buzan and Richard Little in their International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations [2000], where they explode any hint of presentism in the study of the relations between human groups in the longue durée.)

But, again, don’t think that what I’m describing here is what PTJ is arguing. He is in no way trying to prescribe what others should mean by ‘international’ (and the studies thereof); he is only articulating what he means by that term. However, he is nevertheless setting out his stall by articulating a kind of ideal typical vision of what ‘International Studies’ would be, then later breaking that down by proliferating 'ways' of knowing (and only of knowing). I wonder if this is not precisely the wrong way to approach disciplinarity; it is at least the wrong starting point. It is effectively saying: ‘here is my vision of disciplinary identity; you will surely have your own’ – and that’s commendable to some degree but the underlying assumption is that disciplinary identity is the issue at hand; that it is on this level that discussion should proceed.

I would prefer to begin by understand disciplinarity in a very particular manner, which only partially matches up to PTJ's arguments (and then only in his concluding remarks). A discipline can be understood as an environment, a milieu of sorts. It is a space within which knowledge production occurs. Its prevailing conditions, accidental or designed, variously enable, disable, orient and disorient the many actual and possible courses of research that are undertaken under that more or less actively conducive, more or less permeable, more or less flapping, fluttering, stuttering membrane.

Seen in this way, what a discipline ‘is’ is purely and simply a means of formatting that space. It is secondary and it is one formatting operation among others.

Given these principles, we might be able to think of efforts such as PTJ's as being interventions towards the pluralisation of the epistemic-possibilistic space that is the discipline of International [Whatever] (the fact that the name is variable doesn’t necessary meant that we’re not talking about a particular space – just more permeable). Indeed, he writes in conclusion:

“[…] the field should contain space for all of these kinds of knowing, and should resist the call to be exclusively a form of aesthetic expression, a mode of technical practice, a normative enterprise—or an epistemic science.

Instead of intending to produce one homogenous body of knowledge, the field of international studies and we scholars within it should work to become more comfortable with the irreducible plurality, plurivocality, and diversity of knowing. Such an attitude can, I think, best be cultivated not merely by our paying lip-service to the existence of other forms of knowing, but by our actively seeking to position ourselves as scholars in the spaces between these diverse ways of knowing.”

I couldn't agree more; however, this affirmation clashes, I think, with some of the presuppositions from which it issues (as I have attempted to explain, however inchoately). 'Ways' of knowing are too quickly abstracted from the rest of the world; 'the world' is too quickly defined as something singular that is only broken up by ways of knowing. 'Ways' are given too much credit, things not enough. He sets out his terms and definitions before he explores what the act of terming and defining does. As I hope I am making clear, I have many sympathies with this approach but find that it comes up short in a variety of ways.

I was first drawn into this epistemic-possibilistic space over a decade ago, during my undergraduate degree. It has for some time seemed to me that IR as a discipline has always been about 10-15 years behind the curve of the rest of the human sciences. It is an oddly introverted intellectual culture, especially given how quintessentially outward facing one might think it would be given its matters of concern (political geography, for example, is far better connected with its neighbours). Now that I am heading back into the hothouse, I do feel a little bit like holding my breath. However, the particular pocket into which I am to be immersed is a peculiarly breathable one. This much is reassuring!