Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2018"

Saving the Saviors: Security Practices and Professional Struggles in the Humanitarian Space

Abstract: Tracing transformations in the way that humanitarian organizations respond to insecurity in the field, this article examines the bureaucratization and professionalization of security in relation to intraorganizational struggles between humanitarian professionals. Whereas some advocate for the triumph of remoteness and bunkerization as organizing principles of humanitarian action, others challenge the imposition of security as a humanitarian logic of practice through acts of nonconformity. These tensions are illustrative of professional struggles over how to do and think humanitarian action. In articulating a sociological and transversal reading, this article points to the heterogeneity and divisions structuring the humanitarian space. To provide empirical insights into the bureaucratic work practices of headquarters professionals and the everyday practices of frontline humanitarian professionals, this article draws upon an analysis of humanitarian security manuals, interviews with humanitarian professionals, and field observations in Port-au-Prince. The article sheds light on the development of the humanitarian profession and on the novelty of the work practices of humanitarian security professionals, while contributing to debates on bunkerization and the literature on transnational professionals.

Contested States, Hybrid Diplomatic Practices and the Everyday Quest for Recognition

Abstract: This article examines the diplomatic practices of contested states with the aim to challenge structural legal-institutional accounts of these actors’ international engagement, which are unsatisfactory in explaining change and acknowledging their agency. Considering contested states as liminal international actors, their diplomatic practices stand out for their hybridity in transcending the state versus nonstate diplomacy dichotomy, as well as for their structure-generating properties in enabling social forms of international recognition—absent legal recognition. The concept is empirically applied to examine the everyday interaction between the representatives of Palestine and Western Sahara and the European Union (EU)’s institutions in Brussels. It is argued that there has been a renewal and expansion of the Palestinian and Sahrawi repertoires of diplomatic practices vis-a-vis the EU, which has entailed growing hybridization. Innovation originated in more “transformative” diplomatic practices capitalizing on the contested states’ own political in-between-ness, which established relations that contributed to constituting and endogenously empowering them in the Brussels milieu. The way was thus paved for more “reproductive” diplomatic practices that mimic traditional state diplomacy to gain prominence. The impact achieved on “high politics” demonstrates how bottom-up practice-led change may allow contested states to compensate for their meagre material capabilities and punch above their structural weight in international politics.

Sending States and Diaspora Positionality in International Relations

Abstract: Diaspora politics is of growing interest to International Relations (IR), yet theorizing about sending states’ engagement of diasporas in different global contexts has been minimal. Central to this article is the question: How do challenges to postconflict statehood shape a sending state’s diaspora engagement? I provide a fresh socio-spatial perspective on “diaspora positionality,” the power diaspora political agents amass or are perceived to amass from their linkages to different global contexts, which speaks to utilitarian, constructivist, and governance rationales, and to emerging IR relational and positional theories. This power is relative to that of other actors in a transnational social field, in which sending states and diasporas operate globally: it is socio-spatial, defined by social relationships among diasporas across the globe, and by their linkages to specific spatial contexts. I argue that postconflict states view the positional empowerment of diasporas in distant locations as an asset to their statebuilding. Diasporas are not controlled, but involved in extraterritorial processes through partially rationalized, partially implicit governance practices. The article focuses on Kosovo as a postconflict de facto state, and brings evidence from extensive multi-sited fieldwork in Kosovo in 2013, and the UK, US, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland in 2009-2017.

Seeing like bureaucracies : rearranging knowledge and ignorance in Somalia.

Abstract: Development promotes bureaucratization, and bureaucracies are based on knowledge and produce knowledge. Failures of development are therefore regularly attributed to a lack of knowledge. The article argues that the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions. This rationality also structures the developmental knowledge field and thereby generates ignorance. The example of a state-building program in Somalia is used to empirically explore how the generation, administration, and transfer of knowledge was intertwined with ignorance. It shows what knowledge missed, obfuscated, ignored, or even hid and how knowledge and ignorance were arranged in the daily state-building practice. This approach sheds light on relations and mechanism of power exerted in development and helps to explain its effects. In Somalia, omission, silence, secrecy, and strategic and bureaucratic ignorance enabled the program to delineate the interventionist terrain as technical and to depoliticize state-building. They also helped to expand liberal modalities of government to “remote” and “unruly” Somali villages.

‘War Ink’: sense-making and curating war through military tattoos

Abstract: Veterans have long sought to make sense of and capture their wartime experiences through a variety of aesthetic means such as novels, memoirs, films, poetry and art. Increasingly, scholars of IR are turning to these sources as a means to study war experience. In this article we analyze one such sense-making practice that has, despite its long association with war, largely gone unnoticed: military tattoos. We argue that military tattoos and the experiences they capture can offer a novel entry point into understanding how wars are made sense of and captured on the body. Focusing on a web archive – ‘War Ink’ – curated and collected for and by US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, we analyze how tattoos perform an important ‘sense-making’ function for participating veterans. We focus on three recurring themes – loss and grief, guilt and anger, and transformation and hope – demonstrating how military tattoos offer important insights into how military and wartime experience is traced and narrated on and through the body. The web archive, however, not only enables a space for veterans to make sense of their war experience through their tattoos, the archive also does important political work in curating the broader meaning of war to the wider public.

Making Migration Knowable and Governable: Benchmarking Practices as Technologies of Global Migration Governance

Abstract: Using the theoretical toolkit of material-semiotics, this article theorizes global migration governance as a governing technology that constitutes migration as an object of global governance. Methodologically, the analysis draws on event observation of the International Organization for Migration’s International Dialogue on Migration. Empirically, the article uses the illustrative example of the International Organization for Migration’s Migration Governance Index to make the case for a material-semiotic account of global migration governance more concrete. Overall, the article seeks to examine and enhance the contribution that practice-theoretical approaches make to the analysis of global governance.

Technocratic Exceptionalism: Monetary Policy and the Fear of Democracy

Abstract: What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-to-day basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism or emergency-management and pay attention to the practices of technocratic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, I examine the ways in which economic theory and practice has sought to resolve some of the central tensions in liberalism by protecting the market from too much democracy—a kind of exceptionalism exemplified by the doctrine of central bank independence.

Professionalizing Protest: Scientific Capital and Advocacy in Trade Politics

Abstract: A range of socio-economic dislocations have spawned renewed interest in the capitalist system and its critiques. Within these trends, the politics of international trade has often been a flashpoint for civil society organisations (CSOs) concerned with social justice. This paper uncovers a neglected feature of this landscape: how, since the 1980s, certain CSOs have shifted from being ‘radical outsiders’ to ‘reformist insiders’ to protest the design and purpose of global trade. We know why CSOs have criticised the political economy of trade, but less about how they have historically struggled to gain admission into this policy milieu; their internal strategising and tensions; and what makes for effective protest. To understand such experimentation, this paper argues that literature on professionalisation offers a valuable lens for exploring the relationship between expertise and power. Dovetailing with other research in IPS, it adapts Bourdieu's comparatively underused concept of scientific capital to explicate how certain, prized dispositional qualities were acquired and practiced for the purpose of registering policy impact. This argument is developed through the case of Oxfam. When viewed historically, the paper suggests that a professionalised, activist subjectivity has emerged within certain CSOs, defined here under a new ideal-type notion of the ‘critical technician’.

Collective Discussion: Diagnosing the Present

Abstract: As students and scholars of global politics, we have been witnessing, participating in, and feeling the effects of recent global upheavals. These include specific events, such as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, but are better understood through their resulting political effects (e.g., pushing back on migration, hardening national borders, denying climate change, reneging on trade deals, gutting the welfare state, increasing resource extraction, and curtailing rights). Commentators refer to these upheavals in different ways: a rise in populism, reinvigorated nationalism, the new fascism, a polarization of Right and Left, the end of globalization, and posttruth politics. These labels have not only generated a great deal of scholarly debate, they have also helped generate multiple energies, including activism, protest, and politicization. Such developments feel at once totally unprecedented but also eerily familiar. More to the point, they have very different manifestations in different parts of the world; indeed, one of the difficulties of the present moment is the lack of analysis about the global ramifications of these upheavals. We want to intervene in this puzzle by tapping into an underlying anxiety about how we understand what is currently happening in the world. How do we talk about these present formations without lapsing into nostalgia, blind panic, or unhelpful predictions? This is not an exercise in mastery-as if that is even possible-but more a reflection on the difficulties of speaking about this strange contemporary collusion of power, disenfranchisement, and violence. In keeping with the open-ended ethos that characterizes International Political Sociology, we are interested in how to diagnose these forces in ways that do not singularize, homogenize, or reduce them to something that can be solved once and for all.

Grieving, Valuing and Viewing Differently : The Global War on Terror's American Toll

Abstract: In March 2003 (the eve of Iraq’s invasion) the George W. Bush Administration reissued, extended, and enforced a Directive prohibiting the publication and broadcast of images and videos capturing the ritual repatriation of America’s war dead. This Directive (known as the Dover Ban) is exemplary of a wider set of more subtle processes and practices of American statecraft working to move suffering and dead American soldiers out of the American public eye’s sight. This is due, I argue, to dominant (Government and Military) bodies knowing, valuing, and counting generic soldier material as but a “precious resource” with which to fuel the GWoT. However, my investigation into the (in)visibility of suffering and dead American soldiers since 9/11 reveals that subordinate yet challenging American bodies could not be stopped from knowing, valuing, and counting American soldiers differently—in life, injury, and death. Indeed, regarding American soldiers as grievable persons, the challenging actions discussed in this article demonstrate how Americans were moved to demand and take the right to count and account for soldiers’ suffering and deaths in public and the very face of dominant bodies that “don’t do body counts”.

Fatherhood, Gender, and Interventions in the Geopolitical: Analyzing Paternal Peace, Masculinities, and War

Abstract: War and peace are gendered and gendering geopolitical processes, constituting particular configurations of masculinity and femininity. When men are considered in relation to war and peace the majority of scholarly accounts focus on soldiers and perpetrators, typically observing their place in the gendered geopolitical solely through military/ized masculinities. In contrast, this article examines fatherhood as a masculine subjectivity, interacting in a nexus with other masculinities to produce an intelligible propeace intervention in war, and considers the implications for our understandings of gender and the geopolitical. To analyze this political subjectivity of what I term “paternal peace,” the article considers the case of Bob Bergdahl. Bergdahl’s son was a US soldier held by a Taliban-aligned group for five years until 2014. During this time Bergdahl was publically critical of US foreign policy, presenting his son’s release as part of a peace process that could end violence in Afghanistan. I unpack how Bergdahl’s public political subjectivity was the outcome of a “gender project” drawing on accounts of “valley” fatherhood in combination with particular forms of diplomatic and military masculinity. I consider how Bergdahl’s intervention was publically received, and how the geopolitical reach of it was pacified within gendered and racialized coding.

Crafting the “Well-Rounded Citizen”: Empowerment and the Government of Counterradicalization

Abstract: In recent years, counterradicalization work has come to focus on empowering vulnerable communities and individuals through programs implemented by local governments and welfare services. This article examines this new regime of counterradicalization, focusing on how such programs seek to immunize people allegedly susceptible to radicalization by making them "active citizens." In contrast to the stated ambitions of these programs and much scholarly work on prevention, we do not see counterradicalization by citizenship empowerment as a way of giving back power to the communities where terrorism emerges. Rather, these programs are set up to manage the self-image and behaviors of individuals perceived as "risky," which means that they operate by shaping subjects. Undertaking an in-depth analysis of two programs of prevention through empowerment, we outline the rationalities underpinning this new way of countering radicalization, showing how they make use of "citizenship" as a political technology. (Less)

Performing Rebellion: Karaoke as a Lens into Political Violence

Abstract: In explaining political violence, Conflict and Security Studies commonly focuses on the rational decision-making of elites. In contrast, this article considers the everyday aspirations of rebel grassroots. Understanding their lifeworlds is important as their interaction with rebel elites shapes the collective trajectories of revolutionary movements and, thus, wider dynamics of war and peace. This article analyzes the social practice of revolutionary karaoke music in Myanmar’s Kachin rebellion as a window into these hidden social dynamics of political violence. It does so by merging a relational reading of rebel figurations with a visual ethnographic methodology that moves beyond the textual study of propaganda lyrics. Instead, it analyzes the audio-visual aesthetics and social practices of revolutionary karaoke. This critical mode of enquiry reveals the emotional dimension of rebellion, i.e. its appeal to affect rather than reason. It also suggests that revolutionary cultural artefacts can be more than just instrumental propaganda vehicles for instilling elite ideologies into un-agential masses. Indeed, the article shows that many young Kachin are not just passive consumers of propaganda. In karaoke bars and music studios, they actively perform rebellion. In so doing, they co-produce their own rebel subjectivities and rebel political culture at large.

Transnational Clientelism, Global (Resource) Governance, and the Disciplining of Dissent

Abstract: Schemes for more responsible global governance have often come with new ways of thwarting meaningful voice, participation and dissent of those they are claimed to be beneficial for. This article argues that these processes extend beyond the more often criticized disciplinary effects of civil society promotion and community participation, which, despite a rhetoric of empowerment and emancipation, also contribute to containing protest within narrow confines of technocratic management. Using the case of transnational resource governance and examples from multinational mining companies in Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Africa, the article demonstrates that alongside the ‘air-conditioned’ politics of participatory development and corporate social responsibility operate the ‘veranda’ politics of transnational governance: practices of stabilizing order and containing dissent through transnational clientelist practices. These do not operate despite or outside liberal global governance but are an inherent part of it. The article contributes to understanding the manifold ways in which dissent is disciplined in global governance, pushing critical engagement with indirect technologies of government further and beyond the liberal self-image.

Transnational Citizenship Capacity-Building: Moving the Conversation in New Directions

Abstract: Challenging statist understandings of citizenship neglectful of their own ironies, we explore the literature on circulation to argue that political actors build citizenship capacities through the transfer of various technologies, ideas, and modes of organization and by enhancing selfunderstanding across and within borders. This work is largely conceptual. Although we focus on transnational activist engagement with and within the Middle East, the theoretical linkages we make here can be extended to other social and political actors that operate within and across multiple geographical locales. To make our case, we briefly examine the importance of transnational circulation for citizenship capacity-building through a review of the relevant literature and then discuss how theories related to liminality and rhizomatic action can move the theoretical discussion in new directions. Our central argument is that the circular flow of people, political ideas, and tools across nation-state borders—including activists’ affinities, identifications, loyalties, animosities, and hostilities—are transforming contemporary social and political relations, including how people see themselves as citizens and build civic capacities in others. Political actors who act purposefully in various sites and scales of struggle are transforming how political subjectivity and citizenship are negotiated, claimed, justified, and legitimated regardless of citizenship status.