Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2011"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the alternatives opened by Bourdieu in terms of a logic of practice and practical sense that refuses an opposition between general theory and empirical research, and show how the thinking tools of field and habitus resist some of the traps commonly found in political science in general and theorizations of international relations in particular.
Abstract: This article demonstrates how the work of Pierre Bourdieu offers a productive way to practice research in international relations. It especially explores the alternatives opened by Bourdieu in terms of a logic of practice and practical sense that refuses an opposition between general theory and empirical research. Bourdieu's preference for a relational approach, which destabilizes the different versions of the opposition between structure and agency, avoids some of the traps commonly found in political science in general and theorizations of international relations in particular: essentialization and ahistoricism; a false dualism between constructivism and empirical research; and an absolute opposition between the collective and the individual. The “thinking tools ” of field and habitus, which are both collective and individualized, are examined in order to see how they resist such traps. The article also engages with the question of whether the international itself challenges some of Bourdieu’s assumptions, especially when some authors identify a global field of power while others deny that such a field of power could be different from a system of different national fields of power. In this context, the analysis of transversal fields of power must be untied from state centrism in order to discuss the social transformations of power relations in ways that do not oppose a global/international level to a series of national and subnational levels.
204 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the ontology of war is such that it disrupts foundational claims of the kind necessary for conventional forms of academic disciplinarity, and that an analytical framework adequate to war requires a reflexive relation to truth claims.
Abstract: This paper approaches the ontology of war by asking why, despite its constitutive function for politics and society, has war never been made the object of an academic discipline? Through an analysis of the relationship between war and knowledge about war, we argue that the ontology of war is such that it disrupts foundational claims of the kind necessary for conventional forms of academic disciplinarity. At the center of the ontology of war is fighting, an idea we recover from Clausewitz. A moment of radical contingency, fighting both compromises knowledge about war and forces the unmaking and remaking of social and political orders. These generative powers of war operate through the production of systems of knowledge and their institutionalization in the academy, the state and wider society. Although of existential significance for political authority, these knowledges are vulnerable to the very contingency of war that produces them. This complex of relations between war, knowledge, and power we term War/Truth. As such, an analytical framework adequate to war requires a reflexive relation to truth claims. We clear the ground for such a “critical war studies.”
118 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that Bourdieu's thinking can be used as a basis for a non-structuralist staging of the international taking on board the critique raised by pragmatists and integrating many of the insights developed by them.
Abstract: The promise of Bourdieu-inspired analysts to provide a “different reading” of the international is receiving increasing attention in the academic discipline of international relations (IR). This attention also generates awareness and of problems inherent in the Bourdieuian approach and a desire to develop it further (or abandon it). These discussions have often focused on the difficulties that arise for IR as a consequence of the structuralism of Bourdieu's approach, and as such they dovetail with the discussions between Bourdieu's “critical sociology” and the “pragmatic school” in the French context. This article uses these discussions to clarify what it entails to paint a different picture—my picture—of the international using Bourdieu's thinking tools. More specifically, it argues that Bourdieu's thinking can be used as a basis for a non-structuralist staging of the international taking on board the critique raised by pragmatists and integrating many of the insights developed by them. Bourdieu often referred to his own thinking as a “structuralist constructivism,” so this article takes Bourdieu's thinking in a direction he may not have liked to go. However, it sticks closely to the spirit of his contention that one should never privilege scholastic theorizing for the sake of theorizing nor hesitate to “read a thinker against himself.”
111 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the ERC grant number 202 596 was used to support the work of the European Research Council, Political Economies of Democratisation (PEOD) project.
Abstract: Sponsorship: European Research Council, Political Economies of Democratisation, ERC grant number 202 596.
84 citations
[...]
TL;DR: For an embarrassingly long time, I didn't pay attention to the everyday and assumed that my task was to reveal the workings of power, and that those workings would manifest themselves by standing out from the mundane.
Abstract: By definition, the “everyday” appears inconsequential. How could paying attention to who makes breakfast add to our analytical powers? How could monitoring laundry take us deeper into causality? Surely, assigning weight to casual chats in the elevator or before meetings begin would be a waste of precious intellectual energy. The everyday is routine. It is what appears to be unexceptional. Devoid of decision making. Seemingly pre-political.
For an embarrassingly long time, I didn't pay attention to the everyday. I, of course, lived it. My relationships with others—parents, friends, colleagues, interviewees—depended on my everyday routines somehow meshing with theirs. But I didn't think to spell them out when I engaged in formal analytical efforts. I presumed that my task was to reveal the workings of—and consequences of—power, and that those workings would manifest themselves by standing out from the mundane. If this were true in my attempts to understand ethnic politics in Malaysia (my initial research), it would be, I imagined, all the more true when I began to investigate the causes and consequences of international politics.
I was wrong.
It was feminist analysts who opened my eyes to how wrong I was and what exactly I was missing in the dynamics of international politics by naively imagining that the everyday was pre-political, analytically trivial, and causally weightless.
The most famous late twentieth-century feminist theoretical pronouncement is, “The personal is political.” Its crafters were calling on women (and any men who had sufficient nerve) to look to the everyday dynamics in their lives to discover the causes of patriarchal social systems’ remarkable sustainability. This call would have profound implications, we gradually learned, for understanding the flows of causality, the constructions of political cultures and the inter-locked structures of relationships between those actors we so simplistically call “states.” The sites for research, …
82 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigates the political significance of the orientation of Western security relations around critical infrastructure (CI) and resilience planning and argues that resilient CIs are open, vulnerable, and often absurd systems that continually falter, backfire and often undermine themselves according to their own logic.
Abstract: This article investigates the political significance of the orientation of Western security relations around critical infrastructure (CI) and resilience planning. While the analysis is located in the International Political Sociology literature, it departs from recent biopolitical accounts of CIs and resilience. These accounts tend to present such apparatuses as closed, totalizing, and inevitably “successful” modes of governance. Rather, we argue that resilient CIs are open, vulnerable, and often absurd systems that continually falter, backfire, and often undermine themselves according to their own logic. By developing what we call a “molecular security” approach, we draw attention to the way in which life constantly evades capture. In this sense, we suggest, there is always an excess of “life” in biopolitics.
74 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that the most significant contribution Bourdieusian sociology can make to international and European studies is not achieved by adaptation or transplantation of key concepts (field, habitus, and so on) to a set of research objects that remain by and large predefined by other disciplines.
Abstract: Recent years have seen a surge of interest in applying the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in international studies as part of a more general sociological turn observable in both international and European studies. However, different from earlier attempts at deploying Bourdieusian sociology in the context of international law, economics, and politics, most of this new Bourdieu-inspired constructivist political science research only marginally addresses what in many ways was the cardinal point of Bourdieu's work: his attempt at devising a reflexive sociology. This article's basic claim is that the most significant contribution Bourdieusian sociology can make to international (and European) studies is not achieved by adaptation or transplantation of key concepts (field, habitus, and so on) to a set of research objects that remain by and large predefined by other disciplines. Instead, I contend that it is by deploying the underlying sociological practice of Bourdieusian sociology to international objects in terms of conducting a reflexive sociology of the international. To substantiate my claim, I make three more specific arguments. In the first section, I argue for the need for “objectivizing” the research object in terms of “double reflexivity” with respect to both object and researcher. In the second part, I suggest that key Bourdieusian notions are precisely tools for this scientific operation by providing a relational and integrative approach. In the third part, I compare this approach with a cross section of research on international human rights and thereby suggest how it provides a different reading of the international.
73 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw on research by the authors, especially in Latin America and Asia, to give concrete sociological meaning to the processes of globalization of governing expertise and the role of particular state elites as gatekeepers facilitating and moderating the imperial processes.
Abstract: This article draws on research by the authors, especially in Latin America and Asia, to give concrete sociological meaning to the processes of globalization of governing expertise. The article relates professional competition, competing discourses of universals, and imperial competition to the reproduction of state elites and the construction of fields of state and transnational power. The three parts of the discussion in the article involve first, the complexity of the North–South dimension in the import and export of governing expertise; second, the perennial role of imperial processes involving cosmopolitan elites acting as double agents; and third, the role of particular state elites as gatekeepers facilitating and moderating the imperial processes.
70 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the status of globalization as a causal factor in political mobilization and proposes a research agenda for diagnosing the impact of global socio-economic dynamics on ideological orientation in national polities.
Abstract: This article examines the status of globalization as a causal factor in political mobilization and proposes a research agenda for diagnosing the impact of global socio-economic dynamics on ideological orientation in national polities. Focusing on Europe's established democracies, the article outlines recent shifts in Europe's ideological landscape and explores the mechanisms generating a new pattern of political conflict and electoral competition. It advances the hypothesis that the knowledge economy of open borders has brought about a political cleavage intimately linked to citizens’ perceptions of the social impact of global economic integration. In this context, the polarization of life chances is determined by institutionally mediated exposure to both the economic opportunities and the hazards of globalization. Fostered by the increasing relevance of the international for state-bound publics, new fault-lines of social conflict are emerging, giving shape to a new, “opportunity-risk,” axis of political competition. As the novel political cleavage challenges the conventional left–right divide, it is likely to radically alter Europe's ideological geography.
69 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the symbolic logic of ranking lists in higher education, their uses, and the European Commission's initiative to create an alternative world university classification is analyzed, which represents a political move in a process of rapid restructuration of higher education at the global level.
Abstract: This article examines the intensification, since the creation of the so-called Shanghai list of world universities in June 2003, of a political struggle in which a variety of actors, universities, national governments, and, more recently, supranational institutions have sought to define global higher education. This competition over global higher education has highlighted issues such as the internationalization and denationalization of higher education, the international mobility of students, the role of English language as the language of science, and the privatization of higher education. In contrast to IPE or Marxist analyses, we analyze the symbolic logic of ranking lists in higher education, their uses, and the European Commission’s initiative to create an alternative world university classification (see World Social Science Report, UNESCO Publishing; Europa zwischen Fiktion und Realpolitik/L’Europe—Fictions et realites politiques, Transcript for analysis). This initiative represents a political move in a process of rapid restructuration of higher education at the global level.
61 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors deal with two contemporary issues: the return of "civilization" as a category of international power and the common refrain that war is now looking more and more like a police action.
Abstract: This article deals with two contemporary issues: the return of “civilization” as a category of international power and the common refrain that war is now looking more and more like a police action. The article shows that these two issues are deeply connected. They have their roots in the historical connection between “civilization” and “police.” Through an exercise the history of ideas as an essay in international political sociology, the article unravels the connection between these issues. In so doing, it suggests that a greater sensitivity to the broader police concept in the original police science might help us understand the war on terror as a civilizing offensive: as the violent conjunction of war and police.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored when, why, and how the Ecuadorian state has implemented programs and policies aimed at reaching out to its nationals living abroad, and found that the timing, motivation, and nature of those transnational policies do not exactly fit the assumptions and typologies of existing literature on the subject.
Abstract: This study explores when, why, and how the Ecuadorian state has implemented programs and policies aimed at reaching out to its nationals living abroad. The evidence shows an increasing activism on the part of the state that has intensified under Rafael Correa’s administration and acquired some innovative traits; it has also translated into foreign policy actions that have placed Ecuador in a leadership role in the Andean region. The timing, motivation, and nature of those transnational policies do not exactly fit the assumptions and typologies of existing literature on the subject. The characteristics of this case, as well as some contradictions and tensions in policy content and implementation, are better explained by domestic political factors such as the nature and internal dynamics of the coalition in government, the political discourse that helped to sell and give shape to Correa’s political project, and the serious institutional instability and fragility in which an ambitious new reform of the state has been launched.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate how key actors in the security assemblage at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport make sense of their roles in relation to public-private distinctions.
Abstract: The increasing privatization of security and the changing patterns of security governance call into question the foundational lines of demarcation between the “public” and “private.” This article investigates how key actors in the security assemblage at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport make sense of their roles in relation to public–private distinctions. While central to the ways in which security actors understand themselves and each other, closer inspection reveals that the drawing of these lines is also highly ambivalent and contested—in relation to questions of control and regulation, authority, as well as security rationalities. Further, “private–private” and “public–public” contestations also are informed by the obdurate public–private distinction.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that there is a need to consider power relations beyond the political and administrative sites of command and to consider the wider set of competing institutions, professions and resources in which power (forms of domination and types of legitimacy) is defined and actually operates.
Abstract: How does field theory unfold at the transnational level? How tailored is it to weakly differentiated international settings featured by limited statehood? By raising such questions, I do not wish to echo the analyses of those who consider that Pierre Bourdieu's work as quintessentially “franco-centric” and, as such, incapable of producing fruitful research hypotheses beyond its initial context of emergence. As Loic Wacquant has argued in his foreword to the English edition of The State Nobility , questioning in terms of “field of power” offers “a systematic research program on any national field of power provided that the American (British, Japanese, Brazilian, etc.) reader carries out the work of transposition” (Wacquant in Bourdieu 1996[1989]). In fact, the large range of usages of Bourdieu's theoretical toolbox suffices to prove its value when applied to or confronted with other cultures or other time periods. It may even be argued that such heuristic qualities are particularly relevant to the study of international affairs. Here, more than in any other research domain, there is a need to consider power relations beyond the political and administrative sites of command and to consider the wider set of competing institutions, professions, and resources in which power (forms of domination and types of legitimacy) is defined and actually operates. Here more than in any other research domain, there is a need to counter the effects of disembodied historical accounts of reified collectives (“states,” “NGOs,” “international courts,” “experts,” “politicians,” “civil servants”) colliding with one another. As field theory populates these institutions with competing actors and tracks their socialization, personal trajectories, and professional careers, it proves particularly suited to unveil transnational and cross-sector circulation of ideas and models. As such, it is a powerful research device when it comes to tracing the socio-genesis of transnational institutions and groups as …
TL;DR: The concept of the everyday is an emerging concept in the field of international studies that has made faint but repeated appearances in the literature for the past ten years (essentially through the medium of ethnographic or autobiographic accounts) and has become a key component of critical International Political Economy as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The concept of the everyday is an emerging concept in the field of international studies that has made faint but repeated appearances in the literature for the past ten years (essentially through the medium of ethnographic or autobiographic accounts) and has become a key component of critical International Political Economy. The idea of this forum is to offer a …
TL;DR: A different reading of the International Political Sociology as discussed by the authors was presented at the 2010 ISA Annual Conference in New Orleans, with the main claim being that the sociology of Bourdieu provides a different look at the international, one that is highly productive for further transforming international studies.
Abstract: This special issue of International Political Sociology consists of a symposium of papers that demonstrate the possibilities applying the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to international studies, both theoretically and empirically. The papers are all derived from a panel entitled “A Different Reading of the International” organized at the 2010 ISA Annual Conference in New Orleans. Correspondingly, the main claim of this special issue is that the sociology of Bourdieu provides a different look at the international, one that is highly productive for further transforming international studies. Our interest in developing this specific symposium has moreover been spurred by the general momentum which Bourdieusian sociology currently is experiencing with respect to both international and European studies (for references, please see the individual chapters). In this growing literature, one can now distinguish between a grouping of more sociologically informed studies and an emergent body of political science research which draws on Bourdieusian concepts.
This symposium has a more sociological orientation than is usual in international studies, which is still very much dominated by political science reasoning. It also insists on the need to conduct empirical research using a specific set of thinking tools derived from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology as a means for providing a new reading of the international. Our goal is, however, not to provide a history of Bourdieiusian ideas or to celebrate Pierre Bourdieu as yet another rising star in the pantheon of fashionable French thinkers for the IR market. We also resist treating Bourdieu as a philosopher cutoff from his empirical research on “examples” that seem irrelevant for IR specialists, or presenting a ready-made and condensed version of Bourdieu for an IR audience in search of minor adjustments in the division of labor between soft constructivism and mainstream realism.
We have closely worked together to put Bourdieusian concepts …
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the interplay of discipline and knowledge in the formation of geopolitical subjects at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MSIIR) and drew on Foucault to chart the ensemble of disciplinary practices producing "docile bodies" and objective knowledge and traces how these practices are bound up with the geopolitical discourse of Russia as a great power.
Abstract: Despite the crucial role of schools and universities in shaping the worldviews of their students, education has been a marginal topic in international relations. In a plea for more engagement with the power and effects of education, this paper analyzes the interplay of discipline and knowledge in the formation of geopolitical subjects. To this end, it employs material from ethnographic research at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the premier university for educating future Russian elites in the field of international relations. The paper draws on Foucault to chart the ensemble of disciplinary practices producing “docile bodies” and objective knowledge and traces how these practices are bound up with the geopolitical discourse of Russia as a great power: while they fashion the great power discourse with objectivity, disruptions in the discourse also disrupt disciplinary practices.
TL;DR: Bourdieu as mentioned in this paper characterized the field of power as the locus of the struggle for power between different types of power holders and defined it as a field of struggle between agents already holding dominant positions in their respective social fields in order to set the value of their initial capital and eventually convert part of this capital, thereby diversifying their portfolio of capitals in occupying dominant positions.
Abstract: Although Pierre Bourdieu himself never paid much attention to European integration, except for his late denunciation of the neoliberal offensive (Bourdieu 1998, 2001), the field theory he refined all along his life is probably the most powerful resource we have for understanding the genesis and structure of what can be termed the European field of power.
In one of his masterpieces, The State Nobility (1996), Bourdieu characterized the field of power as the locus of the struggle for power between different types of power holders. The emergence of a field of power is part of the process of the differentiation of society that leads to the formation of relatively autonomous social fields (economic, legal, bureaucratic, political, academic, artistic, and so forth), the present structure of the field of power of each society being therefore deeply path dependent and embedded in the past structuration of that society's social fields. Contrary to the economic or bureaucratic or academic field, in which agents struggle to accumulate a certain type of specific capital in order to access and occupy dominant positions, the field of power is a field of struggle between agents already holding dominant positions in their respective social field in order to set the value of their initial capital and eventually convert part of this capital, thereby diversifying their portfolio of capitals in occupying dominant positions in other social fields. As Pierre Bourdieu put it in a far-reaching reformulation of both Emile Durkheim (1997[1893]) and Max Weber (1978[1956]), this struggle over the “dominant principle of domination,” which determines the division of labor of domination in a society, is also a struggle over the “legitimate principle of legitimation,” which ultimately determines the reproduction of the elites (Bourdieu 1989:376)—particularly through the elites schools system, the main topic of the book.
Each …
TL;DR: The authors argue that Bourdieu provides us with sophisticated analytical tools for exploring the strength and limits of state authority beyond the national territory and claim that sovereign state interaction has developed into a metafield.
Abstract: How can Bourdieu help us grasp international politics today? How can the concept of “field,” originally coined for analyzing relations within states, provide an understanding of emerging patterns of transnational governance? I argue that Bourdieu provides us with sophisticated analytical tools for exploring the strength and limits of state authority—also beyond the national territory. Moreover, I claim that sovereign state interaction—diplomacy—has developed into a metafield. If we are to understand emerging challenges to state authority, from private companies to international organizations and global media, we need to study everyday activities, which both reproduce and challenge the sovereign state system as a meaningful reality. I illustrate this idea of competing articulations of political authority by focusing on the EU's new diplomatic service, which challenges the very idea of national diplomatic representation.
A Bourdieusian reading of “the international” turns traditional IR theory upside down. When neorealists claim that the international system is anarchical, Bourdieu insists that it is hierarchical. When the English School claims that “pariah states and failed states” can be seen as being somehow outside international society relegated to a more abstract international system “with less dense interaction” (Dunne 2010:148), a Bourdieu-inspired approach argues that processes of exclusion are intrinsic to international society. Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, for instance, only becomes a “pariah state” through interaction with the rest of the world.
While this might sound like a constructivist argument about the social character of international politics, Bourdieu is not an IR constructivist. Anarchy is not what states make of it because the international is already structured. States come with a history. The marginalization of some states, groups, or individuals can be explained by the changing patterns of cultural and symbolic forms of domination and the competition for power and prestige.
To Bourdieu, the particularity of the state as an organization, …
TL;DR: Guillaume et al. as discussed by the authors argued that the international should not solely be conceptualized and understood as an (artificially) delimited space, but as a processual phenomenon.
Abstract: The tryptic constituted by resistance, the everyday and the international does not readily fit the idealized images of the international: the realm of exceptional events conducted by states and states men , or their proxies (see Crane-Seeber in this forum). The international, as commonly conceptualized, was, and largely remains, not too distant from the ludic images conveyed by popular board games such as Risk or Diplomacy (see Salter in this forum). Yet, this tryptic has been at the center of a major shift in how some within the field of international studies have come to think about the international beyond reified delimitations such as inside/outside, low politics/high politics, unremarkable/remarkable, and the like. Yet, by looking at how the everyday works as a context of mobilization and as a locus of revendication and contestation in globalized domestic discursive or political economies (see Bleiker 2000; as well as Enloe and Seabrooke in this forum), scholars have put to the fore that the international should not solely be conceptualized and understood as an (artificially) delimited space, but as a processual phenomenon (Guillaume 2007).
Whether the everyday or resistance, or their linkage, however, are not as straightforward as concepts as often the literature assumes them to be (Brown 1996; Amoore 2005; Hviid Jacobsen 2009). Resistance, for instance, does not necessarily refer to experiences and acts that are “progressive” or, in intent, transformative. The everyday, for its part, has been at the source of several social and sociological “myths” such as the “unity of the social, of [the everyday's] inexhaustible vitality and [of] ineradicable capacities for resistance and renewal” (Crook 1998:537). In …
TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply a political sociology of knowledge to an EU social policy field and show that European social policy has found a raison d'etre alongside national social policies, feeding into EU member states' national policies and producing comparative policy-relevant knowledge based on a genuine set of resources.
Abstract: This article applies a political sociology of knowledge to an EU social policy field. Taking the case of poverty and social inclusion policy, it shows that European social policy has found a raison d'etre alongside national social policies, feeding into EU member states’ national policies and producing comparative policy-relevant knowledge based on a genuine set of resources. Going beyond constructivist approaches, this article contends that the establishment of these resources can be reconstructed productively as the establishment of a transnational field in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the term. In a process stretching over more than four decades, the EU's rudimentary policy for tackling poverty in the 1970s has evolved into a semi-autonomous field of social inclusion policy. This field encompasses monitoring capital, social capital, officializing capital, scientific capital, and informational capital, all of which EU-level actors use in different ways to position themselves against other actors in this transnational field. Thus, a complex and dynamic configuration arises that consists of actors, institutions, and ideas. The article concludes that while there are many affinities between constructivism and political sociology, the latter can go further in analyzing and theorizing phenomena such as ideas and discourses.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a phenomenological approach to the problem of theorizing war in the life-world, not least in "peace" by considering war as an "intentional object" (i.e., one "for me" and "for us".
Abstract: Little in social and political life goes untouched by war. From a phenomenological perspective, this raises an array of questions: How does war manifest itself in the life-world, not least in “peace”? How and to what effect is it occluded? Considered as an “intentional object”—one “for me” and “for us”—how might war lay claim? How might it constitute the “I,” the “We,” and the “Other” that provide our everyday sociality? How might phenomenological work on war in both its historical particularity and in general offer new insight? This paper offers three propositions. The first concerns the challenges of theorizing war. The others how war might be thought about as a generative force in ways that avoid the reactionary vitalism or aestheticization that might be associated with such a view.
Far from taking war as “the thing itself,” the central traditions in IR tend toward significant undertheorization. It is not unusual to see IR curricula and textbooks tracing the Twenty Years’ Crisis to its conclusion, to then resume with the emergence of the Cold War and UN system in 1945. Implicitly, beyond a general awareness of its result, what went on in between—the modality of this transformation—is not worthy of sustained pedagogic or theoretical attention. The discipline's central traditions meanwhile consistently reduce war to a consequence of supposedly more fundamental processes: political units competing under conditions of anarchy, contradictions of capital, extension of democratic norms and the disordering effects of undemocratic governance. In each, war is written out, appears as secondary or epiphenomenal. Undoubtedly more war-centered, the subfields of strategic and security studies are frequently constrained in their theorization of war through being policy-focused. Less concerned with the thing itself, they tend toward an instrumentalized account of war through which to prevail within or achieve security from it.
The reflections of …
TL;DR: A detailed genealogy of the problems and solutions that enabled Australia's Christmas Island to become an integral site for the reproduction of Australian society through practices of border protection is presented in this article.
Abstract: The interdiction and detention of irregular arrivals has become one of the key means by which wealthy states enforce and promote secure mobility. This article presents a detailed genealogy of the problems and solutions that enabled Australia’s Christmas Island to become an integral site for the reproduction of Australian society through practices of border protection. A close examination of Christmas Island reveals broader, deeper currents that follow the shifting shapes of state internationally, and the dreams and ruins such transformations produce in their wake.
TL;DR: In this article, an alternative model for explaining war is proposed, which focuses on the struggle for recognition, arguing that wars are not only motivated by a pursuit of utility maximization but also by the quest to gain recognition for the identities and norms of respect to which domestic and international lay claim.
Abstract: The outbreak of war is usually explained in terms of utility-maximizing behavior on the part of statesmen and states. In this article, I propose an alternative model for explaining war, which focuses on the struggle for recognition. As I will argue, wars are not only motivated by a pursuit of utility maximization but also by the quest to gain recognition for the identities and norms of respect to which domestic and international lay claim. As I will demonstrate in two case studies, peaceful management of international crises depends heavily on the capacity of actors to engage in politics of recognition.
TL;DR: Georgakakis and Weisben as mentioned in this paper argued that the study field of EU institutions, or the "Brussels complex", seems to have been so dominated for several decades by institutionalist scholars (old and neo) that most of the new sociologists of the European Union try to move out from this point to consider broader social spaces.
Abstract: The study-field of EU institutions, or the “Brussels complex” (according to the expression of Stone Sweet, Sandholtz, and Fligstein 2001), seems to have been so dominated for several decades by institutionalist scholars (old and neo) that most of the new sociologists of the European Union try to move out from this point to consider broader social spaces. Many different reasons clearly justify this turn. For instance, and as suggested in this symposium, the EU institutions' area cannot be completely confused with the power of the European Union; other more or less competitive transnational trends and the internal structure of member states are also important, and history and social mobilization can shape what happens with and within the European Union. It would thus be quite unsurprising if many political sociologists, rebuked by the epistemological distance and lack of interdisciplinary work between the social sciences and the dominant paradigms of EU studies, preferred to change the bath, so to speak. Changes are undoubtedly needed, but to move too quickly from studying the EU milieu may result in the baby (here the so-called Brussels Bubble) being thrown out with the bathwater.
As I have suggested in a recent collective research (Georgakakis 2011, forthcoming; see also Georgakakis 2010), constructing EU institutions as a social space in a manner inspired by the sociology of Bourdieu remains an empirical and theoretical challenge. On the European side of the European studies, there have been many calls to use Bourdieusan sociology for understanding EU processes and milieus (Guiraudon 2000; Favell 2006; Kauppi 2003, 2005; Cohen, Dezalay, and Marchetti 2007; Bigo 2007; Vauchez 2008; Georgakakis 2002, Georgakakis 2009; Georgakakis and Weisben 2010). The need to develop the field perspective has also been noted by US scholars (Stone Sweet et …
TL;DR: Human rights have become the property of states: a juridical right that is for the state to give, reversing the development of human rights from a set of political movements that protested unjust state power as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Human rights originated as a political claim made by movements contesting state power. Recently, they have become the property of states: a juridical right that is for the state to give. I track this transformation through changes in responses to humanitarian crises. Humanitarian crises are seen to issue from two sorts of states—rogue states and failed states—both of whom violate, by commission or omission, the rights of their subjects. Given the failure of these states to protect the rights of their citizens, policymakers and rights advocates call for external intervention, or state-building. In understandings of state-building, human rights are for the state; or more correctly the state-being-built; to give, reversing the development of human rights from a set of political movements that protested unjust state power.
TL;DR: In this article, a reading of three artistic texts (the photomontages of Martha Rosler, Paul Haggis's film In the Valley of Elah, and Annie Proulx's story, “Tits-Up in a Ditch”) is used to analyze the war front-home front relationship.
Abstract: After reviewing conceptual contributions that address the blurred boundary between the war and home fronts and the complexities of contemporary political topologies in general, I turn to a reading of three artistic texts—the photomontages of Martha Rosler, Paul Haggis’s film In the Valley of Elah, and Annie Proulx’s story, “Tits-Up in a Ditch”—to analyze the war front–home front relationship. I end with some reflections on the analytic contributions of montage techniques in terms of the way they establish equivalences that revalue our perspectives on the locations and actualities (presences) of war.
TL;DR: The concept of knowledge has been repeatedly at the receiving end of this dilemma as discussed by the authors, as it can be understood in an undogmatic fashion as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics.
Abstract: Since its arrival in IR about 20 years ago, the idea of “the social construction of reality” has firmly established itself in the discipline. While acknowledging that not everything was socially constructed “including, say, the taste of honey and the planet Mars” (Hacking 1999:25), the scholarly notion that “the social” is at the core of the (re-)production of order took center stage. With it, numerous innovative concepts like norms, ideas, and identities officially entered into our vocabulary along with the promise to enable a better study of “the political.” Yet, unfortunately, rather than embarking on new theoretical or empirical avenues, many scholars merely “poured the newly emerging patterns of thought into the old framework” (Wight 2002:40) and stalled any processual dimension inherent in the new vocabulary.
The concept of knowledge has been repeatedly at the receiving end of this dilemma. Quite frequently borrowed from phenomenologically primed sociologists and usual suspects for the legitimization of the constructivist turn, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the concept of knowledge features prominently as one access point to the study of the social dimension of international politics. To be sure, the upside of the turn with regards to this concept was the definite end to any rationalist illusions about “true knowledge.” Instead, today, knowledge can be understood in an undogmatic fashion “as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics” (Berger and Luckmann 1966:1). In fact, such a minimalist vantage point makes way for the rather fundamental question of “Who believes which knowledge to be true?” Knowledge thus becomes contingent on truth claims. Our attention is shifted to the social character and hence the social determination of knowledge. We can then understand knowledge as socially relevant, objectified, and distributed meaning. In other words, what is real is defined in the communities …
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the transnational security consultancy industry and its delivery of elite rescue services across the globe's most hostile regions, and chart the evolution of leading firms through successive strategic alliances, from initial collaborations with the kidnap and ransom insurance sector in Latin America to more recent ventures with international providers of emergency medical assistance.
Abstract: This article focuses on the transnational security consultancy industry and its delivery of elite rescue services across the globe's most hostile regions. It charts the evolution of leading firms through successive strategic alliances, from initial collaborations with the kidnap and ransom insurance sector in Latin America to more recent ventures with international providers of emergency medical assistance. While the accumulated rescue toolkit of these guardians of global mobility is primarily targeted toward protecting those affluent travelers who venture into the global south, it is increasingly also filtering back up into the global north, most specifically into the American homeland by a process of “neo-liberal (re)turn.” Acknowledging recent cross-disciplinary discourse on the securitized containment of “deviant” travel, increased research attention is drawn to the deployment of sophisticated security solutions and their facilitation of the globetrotting elite.