Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2016"

Abstract: In this article, I offer a critical historical analysis of modernity, identifying tensions between logics of modernity that rely on premises of colonial and capitalist modernity as a universalizing project, and those that instead propose an alternative decolonial project. As part of the latter, I outline the contours of an emergent and distinct political project premised on deep relational ontologies between humans, and humans and nature. I develop the analysis in three interrelated parts. I begin by critically reconstructing the justifications for the universal project of colonial and capitalist modernity and the “method of rule” through which it has been realized. In part two, drawing on case examples primarily from Latin America, I identify and discuss the opening toward an alternative political project of negotiating between worlds with the potential to challenge fundamentally the logics of universal modernity. In part three, I conclude with some critical insights into the colonial logics of modernity, emphasizing that they have always been contested. I argue that, given the inequalities and crises of modernity, there is an urgent need to reflect critically on the concrete possibilities afforded through an alternative political project, at the core of which are struggles for social justice without nature–culture distinctions. Ultimately, this project fractures the international and, instead, aspires toward the pluriverse. In a beautiful essay entitled “Our Sea of Islands,” Hau‘ofa (1994, 152) stated that “there is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as a ‘sea of islands.’” The first perspective denotes “dry surfaces in a vast ocean” that are “far from the centers of power.” The second “is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” (Hau‘ofa 1994, 153). The first perspective, explains Hau‘ofa, was introduced by Europeans, and, …

Abstract: Luc Boltanski is one of the most important contemporary social theorists. Whether and how his sociology matters for International Relations (IR) theory has, so far, not been explored. Boltanski’s work, as this article demonstrates, can greatly advance international political sociology by further developing a practice theoretical account which reconciles Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology. Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology is mainly inspired by pragmatism and ethnomethodology, but it is still concerned with sociology as a critical project of emancipation. He aims to renew critical sociology by focusing on the ‘critical capacities’ ordinary actors use in disputes and controversies of political life. Practices of justification and critique as triggers of conflicts and sources of agreements are consequently the subjects of analysis. This implies, furthermore, a strong notion of normativity in practice, which reveals a blind spot in current debates in IR. Justification becomes a social practice through which diverging legitimacy claims are tested under conditions of uncertainty. Such a view is conceptually and methodologically relevant for IR scholars interested in contested norms, moral ambiguity, and the fragile character of political reality. Considering Boltanski’s work broadens the empirical scope of practice theory and provides promising new directions for IR theory.

Abstract: This article examines the political and social impact of elevating military values in society in a context of austerity. Centering on discussions around two British government “military ethos” initiatives, I consider the idea that military service instills desirable qualities and values in military personnel, making them well suited to educating and socializing children, to the advantage of both children and society. Arguing that these schemes primarily target boys from disadvantaged backgrounds in an effort to turn them into “productive” members of society, I suggest that military ethos initiatives contribute to not only the “raising” of working-class boys but the raising of a class-based army. Moreover, rather than focusing solely on the implications of the military ethos in the British context, I argue that its underlying assumptions about military socialization as a social good have significant geopolitical effects. Through characterizing the military as a core institution of society and its values as moral and good for children, these initiatives obscure the military’s core violent functions. Thus, by both normalizing violence and militarism in everyday life and targeting boys from disadvantaged backgrounds, “military ethos” initiatives engender the subjectivities that provide the very political, social economic, and indeed practical resources that make war possible.

Abstract: This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social at the same time and in equal measure. The power of this in-between approach is that it forces thinkers in IPS to constantly look at the horrors of our contemporary world without turning away. Through the ambivalent position of the “happy wreck,” this paper explores the need to do something about these horrors (e.g., diagnose, act, intervene) while fully acknowledging that such actions always produce new forms of violence and exclusion. To help thinkers in IPS inhabit this challenging space of inquiry more confidently, the paper makes four suggestions: (i) broadening our emotional responses to the horrors of the world; (ii) resisting resolution through non-cathartic dispositions; (iii) pursuing slow research to contest dominant rhetorics of crisis and emergency; and (iv) re-imagining shared conditions of vulnerability.

Abstract: The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication of international relations and politics. First, it proposes a way of conceptualizing big data that is broad enough to open fruitful investigations into the emerging use of big data in these contexts. This conceptualization includes the identification of three moments contained in any big data practice. Secondly, it suggests a research agenda built around a set of sub-themes that each deserve dedicated scrutiny when studying the interplay between big data and international relations along these moments. Through a combination of these moments and sub-themes, the paper suggests a roadmap for an international political sociology of the datafication of worlds.

Abstract: This article argues that critical International Political Economy (IPE) has used an undertheorized notion of everyday life and that Henri Lefebvre’s approach to everyday life, when augmented by attending to specifically colonial modes of domination, provides a necessary theoretical basis for IPE to engage with the everyday. It thus explores the connections between critical IPE, the critique of everyday life, and postcolonial thought. It begins by examining the “turn” to the everyday in IPE, examining the consequences of its reliance on an untheorized notion of the everyday. Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life is then examined to address these shortcomings. But Lefebvre’s provocation about the colonization of the everyday also requires greater conceptual clarity. Thus, the article goes on to examine the affinities between postcolonial thought and the critique of everyday life. This underscores the indispensability of Lefebvre’s critique in terms both of everyday life and of the international as constituted by colonization.

Abstract: What happens if we look at events like the 2007-2008 financial crisis not just as crises but also as failures? This shift is a productive one, opening up new ways of understanding the debates and policy responses that followed the recent crisis. For this was not just a crisis: it was also a spectacular failure. Moreover, it was a contested failure: the kind of failure that made key actors question the metrics through which they measured success and failure. Through a comparative analysis of recent failures in international development and international finance, this paper argues that looking at these crises as contested failures provides us with a better understanding of the epistemic underpinnings of certain crises and the politics of the responses to them. Focusing on failure also allows us to see that policymakers have become more preoccupied with the possibility of failure in the aftermath of these crises—and that they have become increasingly cautious in response. This paper concludes by exploring the implications of the increasing prevalence of “fail-safe” approaches to policy, a cautious approach to policymaking that may in fact increase the odds of future failures.

Abstract: IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates why something as low-tech as an improvised bomb is so significant to contemporary warfare. The article contends that, contrary to the effort to “beat” the IED by the US Department of Defense, the IED is not a thing. The IED, I argue, is a condition of possibility present in almost all of contemporary life. IEDs are native inhabitants of a world of global relations and things that hover on the edge between tool and weapon. IEDs are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life. IEDs are ambient, integrated, and distributed by methods that make it difficult to detect and combat. Unlike precision weapons, IEDs are neither smart nor dumb. They are, I argue, environmentally aware.

Abstract: This article examines an Australian-funded counter-smuggling campaign delivered in Indonesia from 2009 to 2014 as an example of the global regulatory regime known as Migration Management. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Indonesia among the fishing communities targeted by the campaign, we problematize the campaign’s purported success. The appearance of success, we argue, is linked to four interrelated rationalities of governance—security, humanitarianism, managerialism, and colonialism—that shape the terms of reference through which the campaign was conceived, designed, and evaluated. These rationalities “make sense” of a campaign that can otherwise be read as indicative of circular and misdirected strategies of border security. In a second move, we show how the techniques deployed in the campaign give rise to challenges to technocratic control. We argue, by extension, that Migration Management is subject to subtle disruptions and subversions that emanate from the very rationalities through which it is sustained. Our argument exposes the politics at stake in a regulatory regime that is represented as neutral and of benefit to all. It also shows what stands in the way of template reproduction of the Management agenda.

Abstract: Using a combination of migration studies, political sociology, and policy studies, this paper explores the contradictions and violence of immigration detention, its architectures, and its audiences. The concept of “detention-as-spectacle” is developed to make sense of detention’s hypervisible and obscured manifestations in the European Union. We focus particularly on two case studies, the United Kingdom and Malta, which occupy different geopolitical positions within the EU. Detention-as-spectacle demonstrates that detention is less related to deterrence and security than to displaying sovereign enforcement, control, and power. A central aspect of the sovereign spectacle is detention’s purported ability to order and even halt “crises” of irregular immigration, while simultaneously creating and reinforcing these crises. The paper concludes by examining recent disruptions to the spectacle, and their implications.

Abstract: The intimately local violence of torture is, simultaneously and increasingly, a global phenomenon. This paper explores a transnational convergence in the local morphologies of torture practices across time, space, and state-type through an inquiry into its global ontologies. Drawing on the insights of Actor-Network Theory, the papers introduces a material-semiotic mode of inquiry into violence in order to locate the (re)emergence and (re)convergence of torture practices within a hitherto unnoticed space of violence constituted by the circulation of violence- enabling knowledges, visual and textual inscriptions, human persons, and non-human material objects. This analysis is based on evidence gathered from interviews conducted with Syrian victims and perpetrators of torture, alongside primary and secondary sources detailing torture in other localities, which stresses the importance of tracing local instances of torture through to these material-semiotic networks of violence across borders. Concluding with a theory of the spatio-temporal oscillation of violent practices, which highlights the analytical limits of both the constructivist literature on norms and the decisionism of literatures on political exceptionalism, the paper argues that its mode of inquiry provides novel and important insights for comprehending the stubbornness of the “global crisis” in torture that Amnesty International has described for over forty years.

Abstract: This study develops and examines the concept of hegemonic religion and its relationship with democracy. A religion is hegemonic not only when the state grants that religion exclusive material and political privileges and benefits, but also when the religion is a core element of national identity and citizenship. We empirically examine the link between hegemonic religion and democracy using the Religion and State round 2 (RAS2), Polity, and CIRI datasets. We specifically use religious education policy, financing of religion, and religiously based laws as measures of the extent of religious hegemony in a state. We find that the presence of these religiously hegemonic traits, especially in combination, is strongly associated with a lack of democracy. However, it is possible for democracies to have some hegemonic features but not all of them.

Abstract: This article analyses the politics of “ground truth,” a premise central to the contemporary military dissent movement in the United States. Ground truth refers to the “truths” about war that soldiers who have experienced its realities can bring to bear on prevailing war narratives in order to disrupt them. The article identifies how the authority of ground truth is bound with accounts of gender and sexuality through which particular understandings of war (principally war as combat and violence) are reproduced. Examination of two prominent dissenting subject positions within the movement, the “(anti)war hero” and the “peace mom,” suggests that authority to oppose war is organized around the hegemonic military masculine figure of the warrior hero. Potentially more unruly war experiences, such as those of non-combat military personnel, remain obscured. I explore what perspectives and understandings of war might be revealed if we consider non-combat personnel as actively engaged in, and experiencing, war and discuss implications for dissent. The article therefore addresses how gendered power structures the ways in which war is known, understood, and also opposed through authenticity-based authority claims.

Abstract: This paper interrogates the emerging practices of narrative methods in research that focuses on mobility and migration. It seeks to understand how these methods enable a conceptualization of global politics that challenges the global/local divide, revealing instead complex entanglements through which the local and the global are mutually constituted. Focusing in particular on the primacy of narrative, and on the concept of “translation,” the paper argues that participants in research author narratives in ways that reveal alternative, powerful accounts of global politics that are meaning-making and demand an understanding of “local” knowledges as valid and important insights into how global politics is understood. Ultimately, these methods engage the heterogeneous, multiple, and ultimately fully relational narratives of individuals who are autonomous and creative, and the ways these accounts interrupt the dominant narratives of how the world is politically understood—and is politically practiced.

Abstract: In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectual project has stimulated debates about its contribution to international studies. With this issue we celebrate ten years of International Political Sociology. The journal was created in 2006, with the first issue published in 2007. It has been an intellectually fascinating ride. Since its beginnings, IPS sought to engage the “problem of the international” by questioning practices that delimit a realm with clear boundaries as grounds for making claims about world politics (Bigo and Walker 2007a,b). As such, it tried to articulate a strategy of openness and transversality that would circulate through, and connect, various intellectual terrains and could be filled in multiple ways (Lisle in this volume; Basaran et al. 2016; de Goede forthcoming; Guillaume and Bilgin forthcoming; Guzzini forthcoming; Leander 2016; Villumsen Berling 2015). In fact, IPS is not really an approach, let alone a school of thought, but more a signifier that connects people sharing a disposition toward traversing familiar, institutionalized repertoires of analysis; toward re-conceptualizing and displacing the questions that can be asked, the methods that can be used, the styles of arguing that are acceptable. The particular forms this disposition takes depend on the lineages one draws on to do such transversal research. While this disposition has produced a rich and diverse conversation around innovative themes and strategies, we try to resist the tendency, not uncommon in intellectual movements such as IPS, to a certain normalization around empirically grounded research inspired by the shift to sociological, analytical, and methodological practices (see Lisle in this volume). We therefore decided to use our introduction as a singular interference into the field rather than a state of the art of ten years of International Political Sociology . …

Abstract: We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time—in 1941–1942 and in 2009—the government staged an extensive exhibition in the United States. Each time, the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case, the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed to insert and communicate political claims that highlighted—against governmental intentions and policies at the time—the suppression of Indigenous rights and demands for sovereignty. In doing so, art challenged not only legal and political norms but also an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building that emerged out of colonialism. Art thus became political in the most fundamental way, for it directly interfered with what Jacques Ranciere called the distribution of the sensible: the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, is thinkable and unthinkable, and thus, can and cannot be debated in politics.

Abstract: This article seeks to discuss the emergence of transnational groups coming from the core of state bureaucracies and what has sometimes been called the “deep” or “right hand” of the state. In doing so, the article aims to explore the groups’ degree of autonomy in terms of elaboration of politics and their place within the different fields of power that irrigate the international. Are these groups exchanging information transnationally or not? Do they form a group, an elite of professionals, a guild, which has its own agenda and priorities? Have they a sense of solidarity provided by the sharing of a certain kind of know-how that enters into tension with the loyalty to a national agenda? And, if this exchange of information exists, as evidenced by the Snowden leaks, does it concur or not with the establishment of specific national security priorities? This article seeks to discuss the emergence of transnational groups based on a form of solidarity related to their daily work, their “artisanal craft,” or their “specific knowledge,” which often transcends differences in terms of national cultures. It will help to understand the complexity of forms of boundary-making in what has been called a “fracturing” world; the fracturing world being, here, a world full of transversal lines, of complex dynamics, yet not a disaggregated nor a broken world (Basaran et al. 2016). Certainly, for some researchers, it may appear so from the moment the image of state unity in decision-making is shaken; they fear the consequences of their empirical investigations and try to preserve the myth of nation-states alongside a level of rationality called the international society of states. However, if one pursues a more sociological and anthropological approach, the central element is then to understand how actors’ logic of practices in their everyday lives creates solidarity at …

Abstract: The authors in this collective discussion engage, disaggregate and unpack the triangulation of security, technology and architecture, across a range of contemporary spaces/places. Reflecting diverse interdisciplinary commitments and perspectives, the collective discussion considers security, technology and architecture in urban environments and global/local interfaces, borders, borderlands and ports of entry, and even the sensorium, from soundscapes of the airport to teargas laden environments. From quotidian to high-tech, these interventions tease out the increasing ferocity of architecture and/in its relationship with technology and security.

Abstract: The quantification of problems that actors decide to understand and fix has become central to policy-making. However, this article suggests that critics of this move miss the point if their critique is limited to inadequate methods or inaccurate results. Dialoguing with recent literature on governance by numbers, the article argues that errors are not the issue. Taking development policy-making as an illustration, the article suggests that numbers in policy are increasingly imbued with a reasoning according to which it is only necessary to find “enough” correlation. By looking at “good enough data/methods/governance” in the World Bank and OECD in the context of the “fragile states” agenda, the aim is to show how imperfect methods and objects become authoritative while their imperfection is anything but hidden. As the pursuit of better numbers moves the wheel, the article suggests the need to learn more about authority and power in these dynamics by looking at how errors are a practical, accepted, and ubiquitous element in donors’ practices.

Abstract: In this paper, I ask why constructivism in IR has slowed down as a theoretical project. One answer is that slowing down is normal (as in normal science); there is no problem. I propose a second answer, to the effect that constructivism has reached a crossroads. As the way ahead gets slower and slower, the temptation to turn off the road can only strengthen. The slowdown and the crossroads point to a central feature of constructivist thinking. As constructivists, we do systematically what ordinary people do routinely—we furnish our world with moderate-sized dry goods. By now we have plenty of furniture; there must be something else we can or should be doing.

Abstract: This paper focuses on a particular instance of migrant resistance: the hunger strike of three hundred irregular migrants in 2011 in Greece. It does not conceptualize the politics of migrant resistance as an isolated incidence of mobilization of irregular migrants against the government in support for their rights in existing institutions. By drawing on a set of fifty-two face-to-face semi-structured interviews with migrant protesters and organizers of the hunger strike, this paper rather argues that the politics of migrant resistance is performed in the daily lives and day-to-day activities of irregular migrants. It is performed by irregular migrants and those who stand in solidarity with them through the mundane production of information, tricks for survival, mutual care, social relations, services exchange, solidarity, and sociability, which challenge security policies and controls and establish an alternative form of life. The differential inclusion of irregular migrants in various social fields, and the leeway that this inclusion potentially creates in their daily lives and social relationships, enables irregular migrants to create ties with other agents/actors in dominated positions in their social fields, who possess and control the essential capital for the creation of these alternative modes of life.

Abstract: Rationalization, a core concept of Max Weber’s sociology, has so far largely been ignored in International Relations (IR) theory discussions, although his ideas about rationalization open new pathways for theorizing modernity and conflict. We revisit Weber’s concepts of rationalization and domination to show the limits of two key bodies of related knowledge in IR: scholarship on international organizations as bureaucracies and ideas on rationalization in the world polity approach. Rereading Weber’s approach to rationalization provides a distinct ground for our understanding of the current internationalization of rule. We illustrate the contribution our approach to rationalization makes by looking at budget support to sub-Saharan African states, and Mozambique in particular. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications that a critical rereading of Max Weber has for international politics.

Abstract: Decisions to deny asylum are often based on highly speculative credibility assessments Language barriers, trauma, and cultural misconceptions have all been shown to impact the perceptions examiners form about cases Yet, although contestable in principle, many negative rulings retain an aura of objectivity and are accepted as justified by the case’s lack of empirical support and legal fit This article examines how this aura of objectivity is accomplished How is it that the essentially contestable nature of credibility assessments gets downplayed, so that the decision to deny asylum appears to be dictated by law and evidence? To address this question, the article draws on a case encountered during ethnographic research on the work of status determination in Brazil: the decision to deny refugee status to the asylum seeker known as Mrs Z It is argued that maintaining the perception that there was a pivotal moment of definition is a central aspect of how the decision to deny Mrs Z’s request came across as warranted Talk of a pivotal moment of definition, the article shows, fosters the perception that the relevant sources of controversy “have been dealt with,” foreclosing the possibility of dissent Drawing on the work of American ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch, I adapt the notion of “phase-work” to refer to this discursive device

Abstract: Marriage is rarely accorded analytical attention by International Relations (IR) scholars. By contrast, feminist interrogators of marriage—as an institution and the site of lived experience—have exposed the reliance of militarists and militaries, and thus the conduct of international politics, on sustaining patriarchal marriage. By international political sociology taking those feminist interrogations seriously, we will be able to comprehend the significance of typically trivialized signals and gestures that otherwise fall through the nets of conventional international political analysis. “Military wives” (in all their national, racialized, and status diversity) prove worthy of serious international sociological attention. No military base, local or overseas, can be adequately understood without such attention. Attentiveness to gendered quotidian militarizing dynamics, in turn, will transform the IR narrative. “China’s current building of atoll bases in the South China Sea is escalating the militarization of the entire region.” The analytical assertion rolls easily off the conventional international politics expert’s tongue and is absorbed just as easily in the ears of most conventional listeners. Similarly: “Unheeded by most outside observers, US aid has helped militarize Mexico’s current politics.” While the content of this analytical assessment may be contested, its discursive form will also come easily to most conventional experts and appear unexceptional to most listeners. That is, these two analytical assertions will seem unexceptional to most of those speakers, and to their listeners, who have managed to remain unaffected by the past twenty years of feminist theorists’ intellectual interventions into the study of international politics. What is notable about both of these assertions is their narrative coherence. There is a sort of straightforward subject-object/cause-effect structure that gives force to such a narrative. It confers an aura of authority. The workings of international politics may be complex (were they not, there would not be a call for commentaries by “experts”), but …

Abstract: Since the economic crisis of the past decade, public development organizations have increasingly partnered with large private corporations to empower women through business. Existing feminist analyses focus on those public-private partnerships (PPPs) that are global, agenda-setting, benchmarking, and service initiatives. However, there are door-to-door initiatives that aim to empower women at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) by turning them into entrepreneurs in the global South. At the same time, and unconnected to these Southern initiatives, PPPs in the global North attempt to empower middle-income women to care for distant others by consuming ethically. While these two kinds of PPPs are each identified in their own literatures as new frontiers in development, thus far they have not been studied together. Using transnational feminist literacy practices as a methodology, this paper reanalyzes existing studies on PPPs in the global South and North that target women’s empowerment and have thus far been overlooked. It finds parallels and linkages between PPPs in the global South and North. The use of transnational feminist literacy practices deepens our understanding of the mechanisms by which market-led, corporate-sponsored, “smart economic” and “win-win-win” development approaches, justified in the name of women’s empowerment, obscure and/or transform structural inequalities.

Abstract: This article is a brief inquiry into the changing meaning of war in Western political thought, with special reference to its role in fracturing the contemporary international system. I argue that contemporary debates about the changing nature of war have failed to note what I take to be the most important change in our understanding of war in recent decades—the return of the long-suppressed view that regards war as a productive force in human affairs. I substantiate this argument by showing how war was long believed to be productive of sociopolitical order in general, and of the modern state and the international system in particular. I then proceed to show how similar conceptions of war inform contemporary practices of military intervention and nation-building, and how the acceptance of this view among scholars has made them complicit in its legitimization and reproduction.

Abstract: This paper examines the agency of Arab urban spaces in shaping local policing arrangements in Israel using a recent experiment with Combined Municipal Policing (CMP) in the city of Nazareth as a case study. Departing from prevailing analytical approaches to the study of local governance in Arab urban localities in Israel, it adopts a distributive notion of agency that addresses both the role of (uneven) arrangements of power in producing Arab-only urban spaces, as well as the role of (uneven) material assemblages and infrastructures of power—road networks, in particular—in generating, and frustrating, local policing arrangements within them. Building on a critique of ethnocratic theory as it relates to Arab-only localities in particular, it argues that changes in local policing arrangements should not be viewed simply as a sophistication of prevailing mechanisms of control, but rather as an interactional consequence of a more complex spatial regime of power that reveals the latent, unintended, and immanent political potency of the (Arab) city to talk to, with, and back to power.