The Imperfect Is Our Paradise

Wallace Stevens

1. Introduction

One significant consequence of the subsidence of positivism as the dominant methodology of the social sciences has been the strong emergence of an emancipatory conception of international relations. Reisisting pedestrian calls 'to define one's terms', let us rather try to be more useful and characterize the general idea behind it in terms of its aim. The aim of any emancipatory international relations is to reveal to subjects who continue to suffer economically, politically, socially, psychologically, etc., not only that their condition is based on false beliefs but that in learning why such conditions came about, they will acquire the motivation and other instruments to eliminate them. Let us call any such conception, with some considerable trepidation of misunderstanding, 'an emancipatory conception of international relations'. Since we can, under the same rubric, further distinguish classical Marxism, critical theory, post-structuralism and feminist international relations, we evidently must acknowledge that an emancipatory conception of international relations is not all of a piece. The subjects who are picked out by the emancipatory theory may be working class, or women or society's marginal people, but, whomever the subject, the theories addressed to them share the liberatory idea that there is something drastically wrong with the way human life is lived on this planet, and that, more importantly, people live in certain ways because they have an erroneous understanding of what their individual and collective existence ought to consist of which can, and should, be changed.

In 1973 the United Nations published an influential study x of the emergence of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and their impact on the world economy in general and less developed countries (LDCs) in particular. The Report was based on a painstaking collection of statistical data and other information on TNCs broadly covering the 1950s and 1960s, The Report's significance, apart from being one of the very few documents containing a large amount of information on the subject, lay in the fact that for the first time an official and authoritative body explicitly recognised that the operations of TNCs can be a source of conflict and in particular that the pursuit of corporate objectives may well be incompatible with the goals of national development in the LDCs. In fact, both the Report and much of the debate that it generated exhibited a sense of urgency reflecting the discovery of existing or impending conflict. Thus, the Group of Eminent Persons, set up to consider certain problems in greater depth and provide recommendations for national and international action, noted.

I would like to thank Daniel Nexon for taking the time to read, reflect, and comment on the article ‘Theorising the International System: Perspectives from Historical Sociology’. His comments are astute, pertinent and challenging. I would also like to thank the editors of the Review of International Studies for offering me space to reply to Nexon's comments. Nexon clearly wishes that I had written a different article. However, although I think that the article he has in mind is one that should be written, I had different intentions in mind. Nexon is clearly doing a big service to International Relations scholars by introducing them to relational sociology, but this was not what I set out to do. I will start therefore with some comments on my intentions in writing the article. I will then offer some points of clarification. Finally I will address Nexon's major criticisms of the article: my failure to acknowledge relational sociology and my critique of the analysis of international systems in the works of Tilly and Mann. My overall argument will be that the dichotomy that Nexon offers between neofunctionalism and relational sociology is not as straightforward as he suggests. He acknowledges this in his final footnote, and it is a point also conceded by Emirbayer in the article that Nexon primarily draws upon. Furthermore, on this point, I think that we share more common ground than Nexon would wish to acknowledge. However our positions on structures are radically different. On this point our differences are, I believe, irreconcilable. What I will attempt to argue is that there are fundamental differences between material and ideational structures which makes it difficult to analyse them cumulatively.

This article argues that current discourses on Turkish corruption are marked by a disproportionate emphasis on culture and can thus be understood as part of a broader relationship with Europe's perennial ‘other’. Having traced elements of this within European political elites' response to Turkey's prospective accession to the Union, the article goes on to suggest that the association of corruption with a different cultural orientation represents a useful means of legitimising the extraneous guidance of administrative and economic change. The ultimate aim of such reforms are, the article concludes, to extend the penetrative capacity of European capital, to reduce the transaction costs involved in acquiring Turkish assets and to disable domestic resistance to further marketisation.

If critical thought is to contribute to liberatory struggle, it arguably requires a general, even structural, theorisation of the nature and sources of power and oppression. This appears to be at odds with the critical project of questioning the immanence of truth to power, as famously framed by Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s philosophical project in fact hinged upon his own attempts to grapple with this tension. What is more, his ultimate failure to resolve it led to ambiguities that might be considered generative (especially in light of increased rapprochement between Foucauldian, Marxian, and decolonial International Relations [IR]). Reading Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals in tandem with Foucault, alongside the philosophy of science of one of his major influences – Gaston Bachelard – we advocate attentiveness to the ‘experimental’ way in which struggles against capitalist extraction and (neo)colonialism hold together dissonant theoretical – and ontological – commitments when putting forward structural accounts of power. This leads us to an ethos of inquiry that starts from lived thought, as well as to a non-linear approach to the relations between method, theory, and associated ontological commitments, from which scholars are traditionally trained away in social science.

Why do racialised states subscribe to the racial international hierarchy? While the critical scholarship in International Relations (IR) has meaningfully unsettled the discipline’s silence on race, it remains bound to the white versus non-white binary, neglecting the transmission and persistence of racism in international politics outside that divide. This article proposes a Lacanian reading of race as constitutive of state subjectivity in the modern world order to address this gap. Focusing on Lacan’s notion of the ‘lack in the Other’, I suggest that non-West/non-white racism is a fantasy that racialised states construct upon encountering the void of ‘Whiteness’ as a master signifier. I argue that racialised states appropriate racism in response to the anxiety induced by the collapse of the Other’s authority. Using the case of Japan’s transition to a modern nation-state, I mobilise the framework to examine Japan’s flirtation with Western racial theories and subsequent attempts to depart from the white racial order by creating its own racial hierarchy.

There is increasing recognition that Indigenous knowledges have considerable potential to enhance collective understandings of and improve responses to complex ecological threats, such as those to cultural heritage from climate change. At the same time, it appears that Indigenous peoples face structural barriers to participation in international organisations that advance knowledge about those problems. Using the conceptual framework of boundary organisations (BOs) theory and case studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UNESCO, I argue that the lack of meaningful Indigenous engagement in international knowledge institutions is not just an ethical problem; it also undermines the effectiveness of their assessments. The future success of their boundary work partly depends on further engagement with Indigenous stakeholders. At least at the heritage–climate change nexus, the salience, legitimacy, and credibility of IPCC and UNESCO assessments require substantive Indigenous representation alongside other state/non-state parties. Successful experiences in biodiversity governance indicate that incorporating the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) would enhance Indigenous engagement in UNESCO and the IPCC.

This article explores post-Soviet power hierarchies which constitute a unique system of vertical stratification in world politics. It does so by analysing relations between two former Soviet states, Tajikistan and Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The article investigates the underlying reasons for power asymmetries between the two countries, the ways hierarchies are sustained and enforced, as well as perceived and navigated at political and social levels. It is argued that Tajikistan’s relations with Russia are explicitly postcolonial without clear-cut colonial precedents in Soviet times. Postcolonialism did not automatically result from the Soviet breakdown. Rather, it has gradually emerged because of the two countries’ very different paths of integration into the global capitalist economy, which subordinated Tajikistan to Russia. In this way, new economic asymmetries exacerbated Soviet-era legacies and reinvented them in a new, hierarchical manner. Overall, the article contributes to the debate on the nature of post-Soviet legacies and what it means to be post-Soviet.

The Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.

Transitional justice (TJ) is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. While recent critical TJ scholarship has touted the transformative potential of locally rooted mechanisms as a possible means to emancipate TJ, this burgeoning literature rests on shaky assumptions about the purported benefits of local TJ and provides inadequate attention to local-national power dynamics. By taking these factors into consideration, this article contends that local TJ efforts can be used to deflect justice in manners that paradoxically allow ruling parties to avoid human rights accountability and to conceal the truth about wartime violations. It further argues that the principal method by which justice is subverted is not through overt manipulation by abusive governments, but rather, through subtle and indirect ‘distortional framing’ practices, which ruling parties use to set discursive limits around discussions of conflict-related events and to obfuscate their own serious crimes. After developing this argument theoretically, the case study of Cambodia is considered in detail to reveal and to trace the processes by which distortional framing has been used as a technique to deflect justice.

Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 prompted a major European crisis. This article applies the main theories of foreign policy analysis to the British Government's handling of this crisis. It argues that bureaucratic politics existed, but had little impact on outcomes. Domestic politics had more influence, but did not provide detailed instructions on how to act. The perceptions of key actors, informed by reasoned judgement, determined this. Fears of the threat posed by rival states coalesced with concerns about Britain's own military weakness, leading decision-makers to emphasise the need to act in tandem with France. British policy was therefore motivated by the tension between the public's desire to see action against Italy and the Government's wish to minimise any breach with her allies. These findings highlight the weaknesses of the bureaucratic politics model and show how domestic politics can affect foreign policy outcomes. They also demonstrate the interaction between rational analysis defined in terms of reasoned judgement, and actors' perceptions. It is thus argued that benefits are to be gleaned from combining these theories.

The greatest works of political and social theory are often the shortest, and none more so than the text of Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, written just over two hundred years ago in 1784: it is all of thirteen pages long, and advances a thesis that should concern us all. In essence, it argues that history can, and to some degree does, move in a progressive direction—one in which the domestic organisation of states on an increasingly legal, constitutional, basis will lead to greater cooperation between states and ultimately to some form of world government. Kant's hope was ‘that after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop’. There are many readings of Professor Kant, not least when this text is combined with others. Yet to put it in modern terms, not entirely traducing his meaning, his work can be read as envisaging a world of constitutional regimes and liberal democracies, one that will be without war. This is a bold thesis with many unproven assumptions: but it is not entirely implausible, on either theoretical or historical grounds. Abused as it may have been by the twin menaces of a modish post-1989 triumphalism, and a postmodernist pessimism, it nonetheless sets us a goal that can, and should, command attention. Two centuries later, the goals of Enlightenment, and a measured concept of progress, retain an, albeit chastened, validity in international as in domestic affairs.

This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

The Economic and Social Research Council recently published a Report commissioned from a committee chaired by Professor Edwards, a psychiatrist, so that the Council, and the social science community in general, might know what was good and bad in British social sciences, and where the promising future research opportunities lie over the next decade. Boldly called ‘Horizons and Opportunities in the Social Sciences’, the Report condensed the wisdom of social scientists, both British and foreign, and concludes with a broadly but not uncritically favourable picture of the British scene.

In the debate on the (de-)judicialisation of international affairs and the International Criminal Court (ICC) specifically, the distinctions between legality and politics and between state sovereignty and the international remain contested. While realist and legalist approaches discuss the transformation of international politics by international criminal law, sociological and critical-legal perspectives instead highlight the politics of international criminal law. In this contribution, we focus on how the distinctions between (international) law and politics matter, not as substantively opposed spheres, but as boundaries that the ICC itself contingently and flexibly draws when considering particular situations. These meta-politics of invoking and reproducing key boundaries in seemingly technical elaborations of the interest of justice, the scope of its jurisdiction, or the application of complementarity reflect the Court’s particular authority but also its predicament of pushing for an international criminal law serving humanity, rather than states, while reproducing the distinctions between (international) law and politics. We illustrate the Court’s meta-politics by revisiting three recent decisions of the ICC to (not) investigate alleged international crimes committed by British forces in Iraq, by the Taliban, governmental, and US forces in Afghanistan, and by Israeli authorities and Palestinian groups in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Realist and Marxist critiques of humanitarian intervention are distinctively materialistic in scope. The IR literature has already described this scepticism as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, a term associated with the work of Paul Ricoeur, which aims to unearth the intervenors’ material and geopolitical interests hypocritically hidden behind the pretext of humanitarianism. The article first notes the decontextualised misappropriations of the term as an iconic and omnipotent instrument of doubt, as well as the limitations of the social constructivist response on the matter. By contextualising Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as developed in his life work, the article then calls for an extension of critique from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of naïveté. Applied in the critique of the ideology of humanitarian intervention, the article thus calls for a shift of focus from the examination of the distorting (Marxism, realism) and legitimising (social constructivism) functions of this ideology to its integrating function that has allowed the evocation of humanitarian principles as international norms, and uncritically vindicates this arrangement. The article proposes that this hermeneutical detour could allow critique to proceed to a greater analytical depth, opening up a set of critical questions.

‘The constant intrusion, or potential intrusion, of power renders meaningless any conception of equality between members of the international community.’

When, in May 1945, the Allies finally defeated Nazi Germany and began their military occupation, no-one expected that within five years the country would be divided into two political halves, one tied to the West and the other to the Soviet Union. Germany, despite its defeat in 1918, had remained the most powerful state in central Europe and had been an undoubted great power since 1870. If anything, the fear was that Germany would revive quickly and become a menace to the peace again. That it did become divided between East and West was of course due to the start of the ‘Cold War’ after 1945, with the Americans and British on the one side and the Russians on the other seeing, not Germany, but each other as the post-war ‘enemy’. In 1946 Winston Churchill was already able to speak of an ‘iron curtain’ stretching from Trieste, on the Adriatic, to Stettin, on the Baltic. By 1949 each side had established control of its own bloc—the Russians predominating in the Eastern European ‘People's Republics’, the Americans drawing the West Europeans together with the Marshall Aid Programme and the North Atlantic Treaty.

The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the article sketches a brief genealogy of processual and relational thinking, with a focus on International Relations (IR) literature. On the other hand, the text seeks to move forward critical engagements with the entangled grand narrative. To this end, the article exposes a problematic ontological assumption often overlooked by both entanglement fetishists and their critics: entanglements are infallibly generative, that is to say, they deterministically precipitate further beings and events. In doing so, the text invites IR scholarship to explore non-generative encounters and hence to address the question of the possibility of being without being in relation. Drawing from an unorthodox line of research, the article unearths non-relational, or beyond-the-relational, instances, whose engagement with an entangled world can only be materialised through the logics of subjugation. For this mode of being, the texts hints, non-engagement, refusal, and withdrawal become a form of political resistance and survival, thus distorting the controversial association between political subjectivity and emancipation.