Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2020"

Collective Discussion: Toward Critical Approaches to Intelligence as a Social Phenomenon

Abstract: This collective discussion proposes a novel understanding of intelligence as a social phenomenon, taking place in a social space that increasingly involves actors and professional fields not immediately seen as part of intelligence This discussion is a response to the inherent functionalism in Intelligence Studies (IS) that conceives of intelligence as a cycle serving policymakers Instead, our interventions seek to problematize and break with this notion of the cycle and show what an alternative study of intelligence would look like In the first part of the discussion, we situate our intervention in the broader fields of IS and International Political Sociology Espousing a transdisciplinary approach, we build our four interventions as transversal lines cutting through a social space in which agents with differing stakes participate and reframe the meaning and practice of intelligence Intelligence professionals not only have to reckon with policymakers, but also increasingly with law enforcement agents, representatives from the science and technology sector, judges, lawyers, activists, and Internet users themselves Each move takes a step further away from the intelligence cycle by introducing new empirical sites, actors, and stakes

Feminist Commodity Activism: The New Political Economy of Feminist Protest

Abstract: This article theorizes the commodification of the recent resurgence of feminist activism through the concept of “feminist commodity activism.” The focus is on the mass popularization of feminist-themed commodities, with T-shirts as a particular focus. First, I discuss how the mass marketing of feminist goods ties in with: (a) commodity feminism, by refetishizing commodities and consumption as empowering for women; (b) neoliberal feminism, through the construction of the feminist as an economic and choice-making subject; and (c) commodity activism, by entangling feminism with the discourses and practices of ethical consumption. Building on these concepts, I propose “feminist commodity activism” as a way to capture and further analyze the current commodification of feminism activism occurring at their intersection. I argue that feminist commodity activism instigates three further shifts: the commodification of the aesthetic experience of feminist street protest; the transfer of feminist activist agency to companies, charities, and entrepreneurs; and the branding of the feminist as a subject of value. Finally, the article considers the challenges that these shifts pose for feminist critique and politics.

Unfolding the Past, Proving the Present: Social Media Evidence in Terrorism Finance Court Cases

Abstract: During terrorism trials, social media activities such as tweeting, Facebook posts, and WhatsApp conversations have become an essential part of the evidence presented. Amidst the complexity of prosecuting crimes with limited possibilities for criminal investigations and evidence collection, social media interactions can provide valuable information to reconstruct events that occurred there-and-then, to prosecute in the here-and-now. This paper follows social media objects as evidentiary objects in different court judgments to research how security practices and knowledge interact with legal practices in the court room. I build on the notion of the folding object as described by Bruno Latour and Amade M'charek to research the practices and arguments of the judges through which they unfold some of the histories, interpretations, and politics inside the object as reliable evidence. This concept allows for an in-depth examination of how histories are entangled in the presentation of an evidentiary object and how these references to histories are made (in)visible during legal discussions on security and terrorism. The paper therefore contributes to the field of critical security studies by focusing on how security practices are mediated in the everyday legal settings of domestic court rooms.

The Cruel Optimism of Militarism: Feminist Curiosity, Affect, and Global Security

Abstract: This article asks: why do communities located at the periphery of the global security market continue to participate, even when they gain the least economically and politically? To answer this, we explore how militarism—an affectively felt logic that understands military service as desirable and/or inevitable—manifests through both affective relations and colonial structures. We focus on Gurkha communities in Nepal with a colonial military heritage of two hundred years with the British. Feminist and postcolonial research on militaries has demonstrated how war and global insecurity is framed through gendered colonial economies and discursive logics, shaping military systems and subjects. Yet what remains underexplored is the affective dimension of how militarism operates within, and in relation to, militarized communities outside the “West” whose identities and material conditions are structured through colonial histories. To address this gap, we operationalize Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of cruel optimism to capture why these communities stay attached to militarism when the costs abound. We argue that militarism within the Gurkha context is both affectively felt and structurally experienced in such a way that it renders a military pathway to a good life as natural and desirable, despite evidence of the fragility and impossibility of pursuing this path.

Requiem for Risk: Non-knowledge and Domination in the Governance of Weapons Circulation

Abstract: Analyses of risk in international political sociology and critical security studies have unpicked its operation as a preventive and pre-emptive political technology. This article examines the counter-case of the governance of weapons circulation, in which risk has been mobilised as a permissive technology. Examining UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen, I demonstrate how risk assessment constitutes a regime of recklessness in which risk is made not to matter in three main ways: systematic not-knowing about international humanitarian law violations; unintentional harm and practices of reputation management; and future-proofing the inherent temporality of risk. I argue that risk has served to facilitate arms exports despite the potential for harm: it has been mobilised as a mode of domination. This does not suggest a failure of risk as a governance strategy or a contradiction in its operation, however. Rather, it illustrates the generative character of risk as a regulatory technology in contexts marked by asymmetrical power dynamics. If the potential for domination is built in to the operation of risk, we need a requiem for risk and a search for alternative grounds of repoliticisation that can generate more adequate modes of regulation and accountability.

Interpreting the Uninterpretable: The Ethics of Opaqueness as an Approach to Moments of Inscrutability in Fieldwork

Abstract: This paper develops what I call “the ethics of opaqueness” as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In order to conceptualize the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. This results in a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference—that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretizes the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallize the double quality of “uninterpretable moments” in narrative practice. They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.

Reimagining EUrope through the Governance of Migration

Abstract: In its own tale, EUrope conceives of itself as a post-national and trans-border project, often through tropes of movement and the transgression of borders. In light of this imaginary, the recent mass migrations provoked a serious conundrum. How would this EUropean polity reconcile the dominant idea of itself with its desire to erect barriers to cross-border movements from the ‘Global South’? This article enquires into tensions between, first, Hungary and, second, Italy vis-a-vis the European Commission and other EU member states over the control and regulation of unauthorised migrations in 2015 and 2018. Both examples seem to allude to divergent and conflictual ways of governing migration, often associated with different levels of governance, particularly the supra-national and the national, and different values, particular those of tolerance and intolerance vis-a-vis the ‘migrant other’. While the illusion of ‘EUropean’ and ‘un-EUropean’ ways of governing migration is meant to be kept intact, not least through a recoding of anti-migrant violence, a closer look reveals the deep entanglement of forms of migration governance that has given rise to a thoroughly EUropean border regime. This article points to the need to develop a new conceptual vocabulary in order to capture the EUropeanness of the border.

Norms Are What Machines Make of Them: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Normative Implications of Human-Machine Interactions

Abstract: The emergence of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) is increasingly in the academic and public focus. Research largely focuses on the legal and ethical implications of AWS as a new weapons category set to revolutionise the use of force. However, the debate on AWS neglects the question what introducing these weapons systems could mean for how decisions are made. Pursuing this from a theoretical-conceptual perspective, the article critically analyses what impact AWS can have on norms as standards of appropriate action. The article draws on the Foucauldian "apparatus of security" to develop a concept that accommodates the role of security technologies for the conceptualisation of norms guiding the use of force. It discusses to what extent a technologically mediated construction of a normal reality emerges in the interplay of machinic and human agency and how this leads to the development of norms. The article argues that AWS provide a specific construction of reality in their operation and thereby define procedural norms that tend to replace the deliberative, normative-political decision on when, how, and why to use force. The article is a theoretical-conceptual contribution to the question of why AWS matter and why we should further consider the implications of new arrangements of human-machine interactions in IR.

“Supermaids”: Hyper-resilient Subjects in Neoliberal Migration Governance

Abstract: Resilience is a concept in world politics that emerged, in part, as a way to respond to the impossibility of guaranteeing security in an era of complexity. Absent a central authority that provides security, risk is devolved to the individual, and those who cannot secure themselves are enjoined to constantly adapt to the unknown. Where control over complex systems is now thought to be impossible, the path to managing risks is through self-control. This paper demonstrates how such a subject is produced, and indeed whose production, I argue, is crucial to the functioning of a global labor market that is governed ‘without government.’ Migrant domestic workers acutely instantiate the kind of human subjectivity called forth by neoliberalism – a ‘resilient subject.’ The paper describes how this ideal worker is produced through resilience training in various stages of the migration trajectory – during recruitment, training prior to deployment and while on their overseas residency. This paper demonstrates how managing the insecurities of migrant domestic work means working on the ‘self’ rather than addressing gaps in legal or regulatory mechanisms. In resilience training, the worker becomes the necessary component of neoliberalism as a governmental rationality, one that is enjoined to transform risk into opportunity. This paper draws from an eight-month multi-sited ethnography in the major migrant domestic worker sending and receiving in Southeast Asia – notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

Sociability in International Politics: Golf and ASEAN's Cold War Diplomacy

Abstract: Sociability or “the play form of association” appears in a range of interactions in world politics sited at banquets, drinking gatherings, golf courses, and even the sauna. Notwithstanding this salience, the form and effects of sociability are poorly understood in International Relations. This article fills this gap. It conceptualizes sociability—its distinct sociological structure; its variations along class, race, and gender; its effects on social interaction—and argues that sociability matters in world politics. Specifically, sociability contributes to identity formation and community maintenance, enables learning, produces social capital, and generates a “backstage” where actors can manage disagreement. I substantiate this argument by examining the sociability fostered from playing golf in the diplomacy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). I explain why golf emerged as a sociable practice in capitalist ASEAN's diplomacy in contrast to socialist and nonaligned circuits of Cold War Southeast Asia; examine the elite and male-homosocial character of this sociability; suggest how it influenced the Associations’ diplomacy; and outline the structural shifts that have led to its post–Cold War decline. This article contributes to the study of sociability in world politics, international practice theory, the political sociology of leisure, and the international politics of Southeast Asia.

Genocide in Sudan as colonial ecology

Abstract: This article presents a novel theoretical and empirical account of the genesis and constitution of genocide in Sudan. To do so, it brings developments in critical genocide studies, notably the colonial and international “turns” and renewed attention to the scholarship of Lemkin, into dialogue with theoretical arguments about processual ontologies, complexity theory, and assemblage thinking. The latter provide a conceptual vocabulary to rethink the kind of ontological phenomenon that genocide constitutes. Rather than a discrete outcome or temporally and geographically bounded “event,” genocide in Sudan is seen as a heterogeneous, process-based, systemic entity. Challenging conventional genocide models generally and dominant narratives about Sudan specifically, the article argues that genocide in Sudan should be conceptualized as an historical internal frontier-based pattern that is constituted by three intersecting colonial forms: postcolonialism, internal colonialism, and neocolonialism. In doing so, it suggests a new way of thinking about the genocide-colonialism nexus. Tracing these three colonialisms, genocide appears not as an aberrant breakdown, violent outburst, or top-down ideological “master plan.” Neither is it a single, linearly unfolding process. Rather, it is emergent from a colonial ecology, its logic and potentiality imbricated with, and incipient within, a temporally and geographically expansive web of actors, processes, structures, relations, discourses, practices, and global forces.

Aesthetic Elisions: The Ruins of Palmyra and the “Good Life” of Liberal Multiculturalism

Abstract: Palmyra's capture and destruction by ISIS resonated widely with an international audience. Drawing on Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and affect theory's key insights on object attachment, this article argues that the attachment to Palmyra manifests desire for a particular “good life” of an idealized liberal multiculturalism: a virtuous cycle of trade and tolerance represented by aesthetic flourishing. This widely circulated representation is grounded on excisions of power and inequality. I analyze the political stakes of such excision through the invisibility of Tadmor, positioned as a neighboring town rather than an afterlife of Palmyra in this representation. Through Tadmor, we see Palmyra as entangled in economic inequality and consolidation of power and complicit in their elision through its aesthetic representation as a multicultural haven. At stake is the question of what it means to attach the desire for coexistence to this representation of Palmyra at the detriment of places like Tadmor. While this paper makes its key intervention into the affective terrain and limits of a current global political moment, my argument also contributes to discussions of the global production and circulation of affect, bringing into view its attachment to sites and spaces.

Killing Reindeer: A Spatial Analysis of Nordic States and Nomadic Forms of Life in the Arctic

Abstract: To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than casting the spatial relationships between states and reindeer herders as “land use conflicts,” the article shifts the focus from competing activities to violence toward one form of life perpetrated by another. Tracing state efforts of bordering, rationalization of reindeer herding as an industry, infrastructure developments, and cultivation of selected predatory lines of flight, the article illuminates an indirect violence that is slowly eliminating nomadic forms of life. This loss highlights that in the sixth great extinction, the world is losing not only distinct biological species but also different forms of life within species. Ultimately, the striation activities of the biopolitical Nordic states, in their narrow focus on Western knowledge regimes, security, profit, and geopolitical positioning for an impending Arctic resource boom, enact a violent and destructive homogenization of what constitutes life.

Sovereign Wives? An Emotional Politics of Precarity and Resistance in the UK's Military Wives Choir

Abstract: This article provides a feminist analysis of the politics of vulnerability and resistance at work in the UK's Military Wives Choir. Military spouses represent vulnerable and “militarized subjects,” providing countless forms of unpaid labor in service of the military that range from the material labor of childcare to representational work in popular culture and everyday life. And yet as scholars of critical military studies and international politics, we so often fall short in our exploration of how military spouses engage with the militaristic processes in which they are embroiled. Indeed, work on the critical and resistant capacity of military wives as political agents is in particularly short supply. This article will use the example of the Military Wives Choir to argue that rather than seeing military wives simply as vulnerable militarized subjects without the capacity for resistance, it is in and through this vulnerability that the possibility of resistance can appear. As such, this work speaks to broader questions regarding the sites in which militarization occurs; even the most militarized of spaces and bodies do not necessarily only provide the preconditions for the emergence of military power. Rather, there is always the possibility for something more.

Cosmopolitanism beyond the Monolingual Vision

Abstract: This article examines how debates on language and democracy have been differently framed within multiculturalist and cosmopolitan frameworks, questioning some of their underlying assumptions and demonstrating a basic continuity with reference to what is approached as the monolingual vision. It then goes on to propose an alternative conception of the language of democracy based on plurilingualism, linguistic hospitality, and translation. Such a conception is not ignorant of the social role of language in the constitution of individual selves and of collective identities, nor does it avoid confronting the politics of language in a highly unequal global space. It recognizes that the grounds of a cosmopolitan democracy can only be built through generalized plurilingual exchanges and sees in the difficulties of understanding and the productive confrontation with the opacity of others and of ourselves the very substance of democracy amongst diversity. This approach also points in the direction of a cosmopolitan sociology that bridges political cosmopolitanism with forms of literary and artistic cosmopolitanism that have remained rather marginal in cosmopolitan thought.

The Nakba in a Livestream: Empathic Encounters and the Solidarity of Shared Precariousness

Abstract: Since the summer of 2015, hundreds of Arab Palestinians from Israel have joined the massive number of volunteers who flocked to Greece and other locations in Europe to assist refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. Based on their stories about their experiences of volunteering, this essay examines how the affective regime of humanitarian action in crises mutates when such action is practiced by ordinary people who are living through their own protracted political crisis. Focusing on the empathy that Palestinian volunteers have practiced in their encounters with refugees, I show that the Palestinian relief actions and the solidarity of shared precariousness they embody challenge the premises of Western humanitarianism but also complicate the picture sketched by studies on “other humanitarianisms” from beyond the Western and universalist frame. I claim that empathy—one of the main humanitarian resources the Palestinian helpers have mobilized—has prompted a composite sense of affinity in which the similarities between the helpers and the refugees were both stressed and qualified. This affinity, as I further show, draws not just on the helpers’ traumatic memories and cultural and ethnic affiliations but also on their fears of the future.

Things and Terms: Relations Between Materiality, Language, and Politics in Post-revolutionary Iran

Abstract: Departing from the canons of the cultural and material turns, this paper emphasizes the shortcomings that each body of work has shown in addressing political transformations. So doing, it argues that shifting relations between materiality and language occasion different kinds of politics. Specifically, the paper offers a new interpretation of one of the most critical epochs in the political history of modern Iran, by illustrating that the confluence of the material and linguistic worlds in the Islamic Republic during the 1980s, brought about a distinct political field in which relations between words and their material referents became fixed at the level of multitudes. This blocked public processes of performativity and resignification of signs in ways that might have threatened the centrality of the revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini. What developed was a social milieu in which Khomeini never faced the possibility of defeat in politics.

Decentering Responsibilization: Towards a Nomos of Governmentality in Mexico

Abstract: This paper charts the mechanics of civic responsibility in preventing violence. Attention centers on divergent practices of responsibilization in Puebla, Mexico, which emanate from both state rationales associated with citizen security initiatives and from community-based measures that confound such official logics. Situated in the workings of governmentality beyond advanced liberalism, the paper proposes a decentering of responsibilization. This requires two steps. First, analysis returns to governmentality as the intersection of technologies of domination and the self but locates the former in relation to nomos rather than logos. That is, responsibilization occurs not exclusively in relation to codes of conduct consistent with official determinations (logos) but also as a socially developed order that exceeds the political, economic, and rational dimensions of government (nomos). Second, it positions technologies of the self amid Michel Foucault's work on the empiricohistorical construction of care of the self. This is a situated care, wherein a responsible individual emerges from the constituent complexity of the social order and her interdependence with other living forms. Far from an art of government wherein individual participation becomes the corollary to the withdrawal of the state, civic responsibility in Puebla is socially embedded and, therefore, need not align with institutional power.