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785 views293 pages

Aalto Et Al Eds - International Studies, Interdisciplinary Approaches

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© © All Rights Reserved
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Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series

General Editors: Knud Erik Jørgensen, Department of Political Science,


University of Aarhus, Denmark
Audie Klotz, Department of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship
and Public Affairs Syracuse University, USA
Palgrave Studies in International Relations, produced in association with the
ECPR Standing Group for International Relations, will provide students and
scholars with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues
of our time. Edited by Knud Erik Jørgensen and Audie Klotz, this new book
series will comprise cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which
bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of
study.
Titles include:
Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle and Sami Moisio (editors)
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Interdisciplinary Approaches
Mathias Albert, Lars-Erik Cederman and Alexander Wendt (editors)
NEW SYSTEMS THEORIES OF WORLD POLITICS
Barry Buzan and Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (editors)
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY AND THE MIDDLE EAST
English School Theory at the Regional Level
Geir Hønneland
BORDERLAND RUSSIANS
Identity, Narrative and International Relations
Oliver Kessler, Rodney Bruce Hall, Cecelia Lynch and Nicholas G. Onuf (editors)
ON RULES, POLITICS AND KNOWLEDGE
Friedrich Kratochwil, International Relations, and Domestic Affairs
Pierre P. Lizee
A WHOLE NEW WORLD
Reinventing International Studies for the Post-Western World
Cornelia Navari (editor)
THEORISING INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
English School Methods
Dirk Peters
CONSTRAINED BALANCING: THE EU’S SECURITY POLICY
Simon F. Reich
GLOBAL NORMS, AMERICAN SPONSORSHIP AND THE EMERGING PATTERNS
OF WORLD POLITICS
Robbie Shilliam
GERMAN THOUGHT AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Project

9780230_282346_01_prexii.indd i 7/8/2011 3:53:33 PM


Daniel C. Thomas (editor)
MAKING EU FOREIGN POLICY
National Preferences, European Norms and Common Policies
Rens van Munster
SECURITIZING IMMIGRATION
The Politics of Risk in the EU

Palgrave Studies In International Relations Series


Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0230–20063–0 (hardback)
978–0230–24115–2 (paperback)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.
Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with
your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

9780230_282346_01_prexii.indd ii 7/8/2011 3:53:33 PM


International Studies
Interdisciplinary Approaches

Edited by

Pami Aalto
Jean Monnet Professor, University of Tampere, Finland

Vilho Harle
Professor (emeritus) of International Relations, University of Tampere, Finland

Sami Moisio
Professor of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland

9780230_282346_01_prexii.indd iii 7/8/2011 3:53:33 PM


Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle and
Sami Moisio 2011
Individual chapters © contributors 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries
ISBN 978–0–230–28234–6 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

List of Tables vii

List of Figures viii

List of Abbreviations ix

Acknowledgements x

List of Contributors xi

Part I General Perspectives

1 Introduction 3
Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

2 Interdisciplinarity and the Study of


International Relations 31
David Long

3 Organizing Interdisciplinary International Studies:


From Puzzlement to Research Programmes 66
Pami Aalto

4 Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes in


International Studies: The Frankfurt School,
the English School and Peace Research as Models 92
Vilho Harle

Part II Levels of Analysis

5 Geographies of the International System: Globalization,


Empire and the Anthropocene 125
Simon Dalby

6 Beyond the Domestic–International Divide:


State Spatial Transformation as Neo-liberal Geopolitics 149
Sami Moisio

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vi Contents

7 The Human Subject in International Studies:


An Outline for Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 178
Pami Aalto

Part III Concepts

8 Power in International Relations: An Interdisciplinary


Perspective 207
Tuomas Forsberg

9 War: From Disciplinarity to Multidisciplinarity and


Further to Transdisciplinarity 228
Petr Drulák

Part IV End Comment

10 End Comment: The Practices of Interdisciplinarity 257


Iver B. Neumann

Index 271

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Tables

6.1 From Keynesian to neoliberal geopolitics of state space 161


7.1 Research programmes and directions for studying
the human subject 198
9.1 Differences between theory and history 231
9.2 Metaphors of war in theory 241
9.3 Metaphors of war in the arts (I) 245
9.4 Metaphors of war in the arts (II) 246
9.5 Metaphors of war in the arts (III) 247
10.1 Ideal–typical styles of reasoning in anthropology
and political science 265

vii

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Figures

1.1 IR, IS, IP, world politics and interdisciplinarity 23


3.1 Heuristic model: positive heuristics in moving
towards interdisciplinary IS 79
3.2 Heuristic model: from IR paradigms towards
interdisciplinary IS programmes 83
9.1 Relationship between theory, history and art 234

viii

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Abbreviations

APSA American Political Science Association


CEO Chief Executive Officer
CT Critical theory
EIPE Everyday International Political Economy
ES English school
EU European Union
FS Frankfurt school
IP International politics
IPE International Political Economy
IR International relations (as a discipline)
IS International studies
ISA International Studies Association
ISC International Studies Conference
ISQ International Studies Quarterly
LSE London School of Economics and Political Science
NGO Nongovernmental organization
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
PR Peace research
RIPE Review of International Political Economy
TAPRI Tampere Peace Research Institute
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
US United States
ZfS Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

ix

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Acknowledgements

This book is part of ‘Interdisciplinarity in International Studies’, a project


conducted since 2007 in the Department of Political Science and
International Relations, University of Tampere (since January 2011, the
department’s activities continue as part of the University’s new School of
Management). The first event organized by the project took place at the
University of Tampere, 10 May 2007, on ‘Multidisciplinarity in
International Relations’, as an honorary seminar on the 60th birthday of
Professor Vilho Harle in recognition of his long career in interdisciplin-
ary international studies. The seminar helped to kick off two book
projects, with the present volume as the first. Of the seminar participants
we would specifically like to acknowledge Simon Dalby, who kindly gave
the keynote speech, and for those not involved in the present book, spe-
cial thanks are due to Mika Aaltola, Harto Hakovirta, Jorma Kalela, Pekka
Korhonen, Jyrki Käkönen, Unto Vesa and Raimo Väyrynen.
The second event was a panel in the International Studies Association
(ISA) annual conference in New York, 11–12 February, 2009, in which
Stefano Guzzini provided valuable feedback by acting as our discussant.
The third event was a book workshop in Hämeenlinna Castle,
Hämeenlinna, Finland, 11–12 September 2009. Our thanks will espe-
cially go to Sanjay Chaturvedi, Fred Chernoff, Anni Kangas, Dicle
Korkmaz, Paul-Erik Korvela, Raymond Miller, Tim Shaw and Saara
Särmä. For funding that event and some subsequent editorial work we
would like to acknowledge the Rector of the University of Tampere at
the time, Krista Varantola.
The University of Tampere offered commendable working facilities
for Pami Aalto and Vilho Harle, as did the Department of Geography at
the University of Oulu and the Department of Geography at the
University College London for Sami Moisio, during 2008–9. Moisio’s
work for this book has also been supported by the Academy of Finland
project ‘The Transformation of Finnish Regional Policies’ (No. 131392),
and Aalto’s by the Academy of Finland project ‘Energy Policy in
European Integration’ (no. 139686).
On a more personal note, the editors would like to thank warmly
those closest to them, especially Freja and Hugo (Aalto), and Anni and
Liisi (Moisio). Without them, work on interdisciplinarity, even with its
inherent richness, would be a lonely undertaking.

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Contributors

Pami Aalto is Jean Monnet Professor in the School of Management,


and Director of the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence,
University of Tampere, Finland. He received his PhD training in the
University of Bradford, UK, and has worked at the interface of IR, polit-
ical geography, psychology and sociology, and in interdisciplinary
fields, such as energy research, European studies and post-Soviet stud-
ies. He is editor of The EU – Russian Energy Dialogue: Europe’s Future
Energy Security (2007), and author of European Union and the Making of a
Wider Northern Europe (2006) and Constructing Post-Soviet Geopolitics in
Estonia (2003).

Simon Dalby is Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and


Political Economy at Carleton University, Ottawa. He was educated at
Trinity College, Dublin, University of Victoria, Canada and holds a PhD
from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada. His research work con-
cerns critical geopolitics, environmental security and political ecology,
empire, the war on terror and metropolitan insecurity. He is co-editor
of Rethinking Geopolitics (1998), The Geopolitics Reader (1998, 2006), of
the journal, Geopolitics; he is author of Creating the Second Cold War
(1990), Environmental Security (2002) and Security and Environmental
Change (2009).

Petr Drulák is Director of the Institute of International Relations in


Prague, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Charles University,
Prague and associate editor of the Journal of International Relations and
Development. His work has linked theories of international relations and
European integration with linguistic and other approaches in the wider
social sciences. He is the author of the first Czech textbook on theory of
international relations (2003) and research methodology (2008), and
editor of a series of books on Czech national interest (2010), as well as
author of articles in European Journal of International Relations, Journal of
European Public Policy, Geopolitics, Journal of International Relations and
Development and Osteuropa.

Tuomas Forsberg received his PhD at the University of Wales,


Aberystwyth, in 1998. He is Professor of International Politics at the
University of Tampere, Finland. He has also worked at the University of

xi

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xii Contributors

Helsinki, at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security


Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, and at the Finnish Institute
of International Affairs. His research has dealt with the interface of IR
and geography, including territoriality and border conflicts; and with
European security, focusing on the EU, Germany, Russia and Northern
Europe. His most recent (co-authored) book is Divided West: European
Security and the Transatlantic Relationship (2006).

Vilho Harle is Professor (emeritus) of International Relations in the


School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland. His research
interests vary from international theory to critical geopolitics, peace
research and Finnish foreign policy; also, he has edited collections on
identity politics, the political economy of food and nuclear weapons.
His main publications include Ideas of Social Order in the Ancient World
(1998) and The Enemy with a Thousand Faces (2000).

David Long was educated at Keele University, Staffordshire, UK, and


the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a professor
in the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton
University, Ottawa. His research has examined IR as a distinct discipline
with interdisciplinary connections to various cognate subjects across
the social sciences and humanities. His publications include (with Brian
Schmidt) Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International
Relations (2005); and (with Luke Ashworth) New Perspectives on
International Functionalism (1999).

Sami Moisio has a doctorate in geography and is a postgraduate in IR.


He has held positions in IR and geography, and is now Professor of
Geography at University of Oulu, Finland, having spent the 2008–9
academic year at University College London. He works on the interface
between geography and political science and has written on issues of
political geography, political economy, European integration and state
transformation. His work has been published in Geopolitics, Political
Geography, Eurasian Geography and Economics, World Political Science
Review, National Identities and Cooperation and Conflict.

Iver B. Neumann holds doctorates in politics (Oxford, 1992) and social


anthropology (Oslo, 2009) and is Director of Research at the Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs. His latest book, with Ole Jacob Sending,
is Governing the Global Polity (2010). He is currently completing an
ethnography of diplomats.

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Part I
General Perspectives

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1
Introduction
Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

From international relations to international studies

In this book we will propose new directions for the academic study of
international relations (IR). We will refer to these new directions with
the term International Studies (IS). This is an interdisciplinary field of
studies that is wider and more plural than IR, and which combines ele-
ments of past and present scholarship.
The term international studies has its roots in the scholarship conducted
in several disciplines from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Contemporary
IR has a lot to learn from that scholarship. Simultaneously, there is a
need to assess that scholarship critically and further develop its impor-
tant heritage, and to acknowledge how today ‘international studies’
appears in the titles of countless study programmes, just as several key
publications carry the same name. However, the meaning of IS and the
research agendas it opens up are rarely spelled out. Many of us seem to
think IS is somehow different from IR, and may have some intellectual
potential. Yet, until now we have not seriously asked ourselves what this
potential precisely is.
We want to assert that IS – as a wider field of studies than IR – must
necessarily be more interdisciplinary than IR ever was during its golden
era from the 1950s onwards. Our objective is to lay the foundations for IS
to emerge as a self-consciously interdisciplinary field of research and to
recast and open up some of the contemporary theoretical debates in IR.
Although launching the interdisciplinary field of IS implies taking
a critical attitude towards contemporary IR, the latter’s disciplinary
record and analytical capability need not be rejected entirely. We
agree that the traditional theories and approaches of IR remain useful
for problem-solving in certain contexts (cf., Ferguson and Mansbach,

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4 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

2007, p. 529). The task of IS, for its part, is to offer solutions for those
theoretical and practical problems when IR falls short or no longer
suffices.
This wider agenda of IS is addressed not only to the various IR schol-
ars who are unsatisfied with the analytical power and self-referential
nature of the current IR. It is also aimed at engaging those working on
‘international’, ‘foreign’, ‘global’, ‘interregional’ or ‘transnational’ issues
in other disciplines and fields of research. Today, such work is conducted
for example in social philosophy and social theory, sociology, anthro-
pology, political psychology, international law, international and global
history and political geography. International political economy (IPE),
peace research, strategic studies, as well as some currents in political
science, and some theoretically developed fields of area studies such as
European integration studies are parts of this wider field.
Why, then, do we wish to offer yet another addition to the many
reform calls put forth among the various groupings of IR scholars who
are unsatisfied with the state of their home discipline? Here we can
recall Kalevi Holsti’s image from the 1980s of IR being fragmented
into several mutually competing theoretical and methodological ori-
entations together accounting for a ‘dividing discipline’ (Holsti, 1985).
Revisiting his famous thesis in the new millennium, Holsti went on to
dismiss the status of IR as a discipline due to its lack of unique theory or
methodology, an unfortunate consequence of the flawed application of
natural scientific models of enquiry into IR during the 1950s and 1960s.
Furthermore, present-day IR scholars in fact ‘cannot even define under
a single rubric the phenomena to be described and explained!’ (Jones,
interviewing Holsti in 2002, pp. 621–2). Today, many IR scholars, when
setting similarly demanding criteria for the disciplinary status of IR,
continue to have similar concerns.
The lack of agreement on theories, methods and research objects does
not of course imply the absence of synthesizing efforts. Indeed, it is easy
to spot these efforts within the scope of each of the main theoretical ori-
entations of IR. Synthesizing efforts or new ‘middle-ground’ positions
have been proposed within the ‘neo-neo’ debate between neo-realism
and neo-liberalism; within constructivism; and within the revived
English school of IR.1 At the more critical edges of IR, similar moves
can be found. Marxism, critical realism and some currents of work
drawing upon the social and political theory of Michel Foucault sug-
gest an approach applicable across a wide range of international issues.
Further, some have suggested that the study of IR and its main theories

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Introduction 5

converge around analytical themes such as security. In traditional IR


this was about war among states, and today the security agenda is wider
(Lawson, 2003, pp. 5–9).
This is not the place to dwell on the relative merits of each syn-
thesizing effort. It suffices to note how none of them have been uni-
versally accepted within the discipline, and how they are unlikely to
emerge as such. If in social sciences, in general, theories and methods
are not universally accepted, why should they be in IR? In the social
sciences the accumulation of knowledge is not as straightforward as
it is in some disciplines and research programmes in the natural sci-
ences. There is no equivalent of a ‘human genome map’ project for IR
in which findings would be logically related to one another and the
next crucial tasks would be agreed among specialists. Yet, IR theories
do speak to each other. The fact that scholars are able to read, discuss
and understand a large share of their colleagues’ work – even if in prac-
tice some of them might not engage much beyond their own ‘camp’
(see Sylvester, 2007) – means that plurality is not an insurmountable
obstacle for learning and examining international issues. Any radical
incommensurability thesis can also be questioned at the more philo-
sophical level (Patomäki and Wight, 2000). Our point here is that great
syntheses can in principle aggregate a lot under their wings, but are
unlikely to assume hegemonic position. When aggressively pursued,
they are more likely to be harmful than useful. They may also be of
limited interest to non-IR scholars.
To put it briefly: it is inevitable that theoretical and methodological
pluralism will continue in IR. And, that is not a bad thing – indeed
quite the opposite can be argued. The fragmentation and plurality of
approaches, reflected in some of the new directions for IR that we pro-
pose herein, do not mean that IR will dissolve into an ‘amorphous col-
lection of issues under the general heading of “international studies” ’
(Lawson, 2003, pp. 13–14). Pluralism is a strength to be cultivated and
systematically developed. The subject matter of the ‘international’ is
just as complex as the various terms used to refer to its various aspects –
the ‘foreign’, ‘global’, ‘interregional’, ‘transnational’ and so on. Our
solution is to make the diversity an asset. As will be shown, interdis-
ciplinary approaches can help us to build open-ended research pro-
grammes, and enquire into new sets of puzzles that can also sharpen
the various meanings of the ‘international’. In that way, we wish to
start a systematic debate on what ‘international studies’ is and what it
can become.

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6 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

The ‘international’ in international studies

To develop IS as an interdisciplinary field, it is logical to start with


the origins and meanings of the term ‘international’, which provide
a shared point of gravity in the absence of agreement on theories and
methods. An interest in the ‘international’ represents a joint rubric
called for by Holsti, around which much research revolves, both within
IR and beyond. In other words, the term ‘international’ connotes the
central subject matter of IR, while it also has considerable interdisci-
plinary potential. Although a conceptual history or genealogy of the
term ‘international’ will not be pursued here, a brief excursion into its
historical emergence will be helpful.
The origin of the term ‘international’ is often traced to the British
utilitarian political and legal theorist, Jeremy Bentham, and his
work in 1780. Bentham was criticizing the English phrase ‘Law of
Nations’ – an imprecise misnomer used to refer to the law on the rela-
tions between sovereign states. He was interested in those aspects of
law that did not fall under the internal jurisdiction of states, and pro-
posed that in those instances speaking of the ‘international’ would
be more appropriate than of legal governance between ‘nations’.
In doing so, Bentham reserved the term international for relations
between sovereigns. Relations including private individuals, either
between each other or between a state and a private individual from
another state, were concerns of internal jurisprudence (Suganami,
1978, pp. 230–1).
Since Bentham’s time, the idea of the ‘international’ has for example
been criticized as conflating sovereign states – which was Bentham’s
concern, and remains a chief concern for current IR – and nations, which
for its part is a crucial concern for historians and for cultural studies (see
Lawson, 2003, p. 15). For his contemporary Law of Nations theorists,
like Emmerich de Vattel, these two seemed to be the same: ‘A nation
or a state is . . . [a] body politic, or a society of men united together for
the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by their
combined strength’ (Vattel, 2005 [1758]). In present-day usage, nation
refers to ‘a people’ and state, to a legal-institutional unit. However, their
mutual match, or lack thereof either theoretically or practically, has
been subject to much debate in IR and political theory (Lawson, 2003,
p. 15). These debates that are springing from the Law of Nations tradi-
tion are difficult to settle for good. What is clear vis-à-vis international
studies is that it must refer both to inter-state relations and to relations
among nations, and without prior bias for either one. And in addition

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Introduction 7

to these two core areas, it must also take into account inter-human ties
as a natural part of its agenda (see Chapter 7).
Approaching the ‘international’ in this manner becomes a matter of
making theoretical and methodological choices. The ‘international’ can
be defined in different ways, as can concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘nation’,
and ‘agency’ and ‘actor’. With this we mean how frequently appearing
concepts such as international system, hegemony, international society,
empire and global governance are all predicated upon different assump-
tions of what the ‘international’ is, and which actors populate that
domain. Hence, for practical reasons it will be helpful to keep open the
links between the ‘international’ and state. In place of essentialist defi-
nitions, the state needs to be conceptualized as a historical process with
no fixed finalities. In this way we can overcome the methodological
problems built into concept of the international system as an anarchical
setting wherein supposedly similar states operate, and which is qualita-
tively distinct from the supposedly more ordered domestic sphere. Such
a narrow understanding of ‘international relations’ as ‘inter-state’, ‘inter-
territorial’ and ‘inter-sovereign’ relations constrains the research efforts
chiefly to the political and military interactions between states. This is
unwarranted in a situation in which states, themselves, have become
‘internationalized’ alongside the ‘national’ and ‘local’, as argued in new
interdisciplinary literatures (see Chapter 6).
The multifarious nature of the ‘international’ becomes evident upon
examining the interface between the ‘international’ and ‘foreign’.
Foreign affairs are today conducted using corporate concepts derived
from transnational business language. As both the local and national
levels become internationalized and opened for the movement of peo-
ple, goods and capital – on the basis of almost universally accepted
rules of the marketplace – the ‘transnational’ domain of business and
other flows becomes built into the conduct of inter-state relations. At
the same time, huge political efforts are invested in ‘nationalizing the
international’ when we habitually speak of ‘our national interests’ and
of the ‘foreign affairs’ of concern to us.
In short, the term international is best understood as a dynamic
social and political process (see also Millennium, 2007). It has deep
historical origins and today remains politically contested, appearing
in political campaigns with different epithets and meanings. Think,
for instance, of the contemporary use of the concept of ‘international
community’. During the past twenty years, this term has been actively
exploited in political processes to justify a range of actions: for example,
in the context of the North Korean nuclear programme, the military

9780230_282346_02_ch01.indd 7 6/16/2011 1:38:04 PM


8 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

operations in Afghanistan and most recently combating the financial


turmoil that started in Greece in the winter of 2010. The political use of
such terms would easily constitute a fruitful research programme of its
own, but naturally there are various other research agendas under the
joint reference point of the ‘international’ that deserve serious study.
Interdisciplinarity, we argue, is a natural part of these efforts, and
should be brought into the centre of the field.

Interdisciplinarity in international studies

Interdisciplinarity is a much more central part of the intellectual tradi-


tion of IR than we often tend to recognize. First it will be useful to take
a look at that interdisciplinarity so that we can assess to what further
interdisciplinary directions we should extend the wider agenda of IS
(Moran, 2002, p. 2).
The historiography of IR is often told from the perspective of ‘great
debates’ (e.g., Wæver, 2007). Even if this image can be contested (Schmidt,
2002, pp. 10–11) we continue to act as if the debates have actually taken
place. The so-called ‘first debate’ of IR was conducted in the 1930s and
1940s. Within it realists, who borrowed from the history of diplomacy
and political philosophy, were pitted against liberals borrowing, in turn,
from rival strands of political philosophy alongside international law. In
the second debate since the 1950s, what by then were counted as ‘tradi-
tionalist’ realists encountered ‘scientific’ behaviouralists who were draw-
ing upon positivist methods in behavioural and natural sciences that were
expected to improve IR as a science. In the third so-called ‘inter-paradigm’
debate in the 1970s, realists faced liberals who by now were revamped as
transnationalists, as well as Marxists and structuralists. These challengers
drew upon diverse literatures in economics and political economy. To the
extent that a fourth debate has existed since the late 1980s, we witness a
cacophony of various types of more or less ‘scientific’ positivists taking
on post-positivists. Some of the latter wish to relate IR to the other social
sciences and the humanities, including questions of philosophy, espe-
cially of epistemological and normative type. The knowledge traffic from
other disciplines to IR seems perpetually recurring.
As for IR’s main theoretical orientations influential today, the neo-
classical variants of realism maintain at least a weak association with
the history of diplomacy and political philosophy, even if realism is
‘the IR theory’, especially if seen by representatives of other disciplines.
Liberalism borrows from economics and, to a lesser extent, psychol-
ogy; constructivism from sociology and analogies taken from cognitive

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Introduction 9

science; and the English school from international history, international


law and political theory. IPE is an internally diverse, explicitly interdis-
ciplinary field of research with links to economics, on one hand, and
philosophy of science on the other, with historical institutionalist per-
spectives falling between those two.
Although each debate and theoretical orientation contains interdis-
ciplinary influences, it is possible to detect some aggregate trends of
interdisciplinary movement. From the 1930s to the 1950s we witnessed
a wave of interdisciplinary reflection, as we will discuss below. In the
1970s came another. And a new phase of interdisciplinarity is currently
building. These are instances of disciplinary crises wherein scholars
are resorting to other disciplines and fields when existing IR tools are
failing them. However, one disturbing feature is that IR scholars have
neither supported interdisciplinarity at the programmatic level, nor
carefully considered what interdisciplinarity might be, and mean, for
IR. The major works on interdisciplinarity in IR are from the 1950s!
By now it should be evident that we do not side with those who lament
the fact that IR has borrowed heavily from other disciplines during the
process of its institutional consolidation; how it has failed to feed much
back to them, and that this has meant that prominent IR scholars are
virtually unknown in other fields (see Buzan and Little, 2001). While
the claim of major IR figures being peripheral to other disciplines is
largely true, even if possibly a little overblown,2 the concern for us is
to develop approaches with which IR scholars could fruitfully study
aspects of the ‘international’ together with representatives from other
fields. From this perspective the great debates of IR are puzzling. On the
one hand they are interdisciplinary; on the other, they have assumed
introverted, IR-specific features. As a result scholars within each theo-
retical coterie engage with ever more narrow topics, writing more and
more about less and less. The ‘international’ is, in short, a more varied
problem than any individual IR debate or theory can have it be. For us,
it is an interdisciplinary problem.
Interdisciplinarity is again re-emerging as a fashionable catchword for
social and other sciences, as well as for research funding agencies. It is
often expected to hold great promise for problem-solving (Klein, 1990).
The interdisciplinary problems we deal with in this book are mainly
theoretical and conceptual; they concern exchanging theories, models
and concepts from various disciplines in order to study international
issues; examination of various synthesizing schools or theoretical aggre-
gates such as realism, Marxism or the English school from an interdisci-
plinary perspective; and disaggregation and rebuilding of key concepts

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10 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

in international studies with the help of interdisciplinary approaches.


Importantly, we attach no intrinsic or abstract value to interdisciplinar-
ity, and therefore do not see sharing and merging disciplinary practices
as valuable, per se. By contrast, sharing questions, ideas on how to start
responding to them and conceptualizations are pivotal.
Even an agenda that we, in this book, delimit mostly to theoretical
and conceptual questions, is too grand to be realized in a single text.
But it can at least be signposted. For practical reasons we also leave
out the wider empirical task of applying interdisciplinary approaches
to issue-specific, case level research on the complex problems and
dilemmas of the contemporary policy agenda, as is mostly called for
by the literatures on globalization and ‘post-international politics’ (e.g.,
Hobbs, 2000; Ferguson and Mansbach, 2007; Krishna-Hensel, 2000).
That practical agenda is addressed in a related title (Aalto, Harle and
Moisio, 2011). Clearly, IS cannot remain one more esoteric body of writ-
ing by pure theorists if it is to realize its full potential. But it will have
to proceed first from interdisciplinary theoretical criticism and concep-
tualizations. To that end, this book:

(1) revisits the interdisciplinary origins of the study of ‘international’


issues, and assesses the contemporary applicability of some of these
approaches to the multifaceted communication between IR and
related disciplines and fields of study;
(2) discusses what types of interdisciplinary approaches are available
for IS;
(3) elaborates how some of them can be developed into well defined
and systematic joint endeavours, ranging from accommodative and
open-ended research programmes, to various smaller puzzle-sets
linking scholars from different fields; and
(4) demonstrates how conventional levels of analysis and central
concepts of IR are redefined and new, expanded research agendas
opened up with the help of interdisciplinary approaches.

We will next briefly look at the interdisciplinary origins of IR before


returning to its subsequent enclosure in a more disciplinary direction.
From there we move to a critical examination of the recent (if still
imperfectly structured and coordinated) reopenings in IR, and offer
interdisciplinary IS as a more accommodative option for studying a
multitude of international problems and ‘international’, itself. In the
final section of this introduction the interdisciplinary approaches we
offer are summarized.

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Introduction 11

The interdisciplinary origins of international studies

The origins of the study of IR can on some level be traced as far back in
time as ancient political philosophy. In a more instrumental manner, a
starting point is often related to the founding of a chair in international
politics in 1919 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. What we wish
to pick from this contested historiography is how from there onward,
until the Second World War, there were few programmes dedicated to
the training of ‘IR scholars’. The study of diplomatic history, interna-
tional law and organization, as well as political philosophy, geography
and economics offered the basis for examining ‘international’ matters.
IR as a discipline did not exist in the form we know it today. The field
consisted of the joint interdisciplinary interests and undertakings of
diverse pockets of scholars. Some of them did use the term IR, but their
joint activity is better summed up as international studies.
This foundational era lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s. From this
era it is possible to find several examples of interdisciplinarity in prac-
tice and theory. Of these we will pick three to demonstrate the impor-
tance of taking lessons from past interdisciplinary efforts (cf., Jacobs
and Frickel, 2009, p. 48; see Chapter 4 in this volume).

The plural interdisciplinarity of the International


Studies Conference
An influential early attempt to organize the burgeoning field of IR
took place under the auspices of the League of Nations International
Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. Through the 1930s this body
held several International Studies Conferences (ISC) that involved
scholars from a number of different countries and disciplines. The
work of the ISC had a decisive effect on how interdisciplinarity was
to be later on conceived of and discussed in IR. The initial aim was
simply to enhance the international exchange between academics
studying international issues, with a view to improving knowledge of
international politics and of the League’s agenda within it in particu-
lar. As the various meetings grew in size through the 1930s, it became
clear that a more coherent programme of work was required. The
ISC’s work culminated before the Second World War in the volume,
edited by Alfred Zimmern, University Teaching of International Relations
(Zimmern, 1939; Long, 2006).
Zimmern’s views on the academic study of international relations are
indicative of the challenge of interdisciplinarity. According to Zimmern,

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12 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

‘the study of international relations extends from the natural sciences at


one end to moral philosophy, or even further, at the other’ (ibid., p. 7):

So regarded, the study of international relations would be practically


identical with the study of Sociology in its widest extent. The only
difference would be one of emphasis. Sociology lays the stress on the
unity of human society, whereas International Relations lay it upon
the diversity of various human groups and the necessity for studying
their interaction. It would also be practically identical with the study
of history, if History is regarded . . . as the record of the rise and fall,
growth, development and interaction of civilizations. (ibid., pp. 7–8)

And so he concludes that

International Relations . . . is clearly not a subject in the ordinary sense


of the word. It does not provide a single coherent body of teaching
material. It is impossible to compress its elements within a textbook
or within the limits of an examination syllabus. It is not a single sub-
ject but a bundle of subjects. . . . Of what is this bundle composed? Of
law, economics, political science, geography, and so on – but not the
whole range of each of these subjects. (ibid., p. 9)

Since then dozens of scholars have resisted Zimmern’s advice not to


try to compress IR into a single textbook. Those textbooks are widely
used to teach IR. In the North American market, while they cover IR
theory in some detail, some restrict themselves to an overview of major
theories and some concentrate on the history or phenomena of interna-
tional politics (Smith, 2003, pp. 421–4). The textbooks in the European
market tend to structure the complex field by reproducing the discipli-
nary image of great debates among theories. As for Zimmern’s idea of
a bundle of subjects comprising IR, the challenge now is to take that
multiplicity seriously. Since its founding in 1959, the North American
based International Studies Association (ISA) has pledged to do pre-
cisely this. The mission statement of the ISA, as it appears on the cover
of International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) begins:

The International Studies Association is a multidisciplinary organiza-


tion that promotes collaboration among specialists whose interests are
focused on international, cross-national, or transnational phenom-
ena. It promotes interdisciplinary approaches to problems that cannot
fruitfully be examined within the confines of a single discipline.

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Introduction 13

Rhetorically, at least, the ISA was founded as an academic association


reflecting the diverse multiplicity of international studies, a meeting
point for specialists from various academic backgrounds. However, it
is clear that it has been dominated by political scientists, only some
of whom regard themselves distinctly and foremost as IR scholars. In
a study of the articles published in three leading North American IR
journals, one of which was the ISQ, ISA’s flagship publication, 89 per
cent of the first listed authors were affiliated with a political science
department and 4 per cent with an IR department (Breuning et al,.
2005, pp. 456–7).3 In a 2004 survey in the US, 93 per cent of political
science department staff members held a degree in politics or IR (Jacobs
and Frickel, 2009, p. 59). In short, these raw examples suffice to demon-
strate the strong association of IR scholars with the political science dis-
cipline, especially in the US. Of the main sites of IR, practically only in
the UK are there specialized IR departments. In the US, key IR scholars
regularly attend the American Political Science Association (APSA) con-
ference and associate themselves with political science. For example, for
a good deal of its existence, the programme of the ISA conference was
planned at a special meeting at the APSA conference (Miller, 2010).
The key point here is that, of the plural interdisciplinarity of the
International Studies Conference and the founding rhetoric of the ISA,
only little remains today. The bi- or subdisciplinarity of ‘political sci-
ence IR’ falls well short of the original intentions.

Quincy Wright’s discipline-centred, yet synthetic,


interdisciplinarity
Some years before the founding of the ISA, Quincy Wright, a scholar in
peace research, IR, political science and international law, and who had
been involved in the ISC, published his lengthy volume, The Study of
International Relations (1955). Although the book’s title refers to ‘interna-
tional relations’, it actually focuses on the relationship of some twenty
different disciplines or fields of research largely drawn from the inter-
war study of international issues.
Wright initially counts eight disciplines contributing to IR – interna-
tional law, diplomatic history, military science, international politics,
international organization, international trade, colonial government
and the conduct of foreign relations (ibid., p. 33; see chapter 5). But he
then adds disciplines with a ‘world’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ point of view.
These include world history, world geography, pacifism, the psychol-
ogy and sociology of international relations, humanistic, social and

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14 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

biological disciplines, regional studies, operational research and group


dynamics (ibid., p. 45; see chapter 6).
Wright’s interdisciplinary approach is built around a method of
classification of the disciplines along various criteria. Nonetheless, he
ultimately keeps disciplines in the centre of everything. His first classifi-
cation redivides the listed subjects into four broad approaches – history
(the empirical record), the arts (practice), philosophy (normative analy-
sis), and science (positive analysis). Cross-cutting these approaches, he
finds the dimension of practical versus theoretical analyses.4
To maintain coherence into this multiplicity of approaches, Wright
argues in favour of synthesizing the contributions of all these different
disciplines, ultimately seeking the unity of all knowledge (ibid., pp. 59;
481). A similar idea was implicated in behaviouralism and later became
taken to extremes in Edward Wilson’s Consilience: the Unity of All Knowledge
(1998). For Wright, approaches to synthesis can be empirical or they can
be conceptual, beginning with a key concept or concepts (ibid., chap-
ter 31). The empirical approach leads him to re-classify the disciplines
one more time, this time into abstract and deductive versus concrete and
descriptive (ibid., p. 502). He then reconsiders how to apply all this to IR
and puts geography and psychology as the focus because ‘International
relations has to do with man and the physical world’ (ibid., p. 504).5
Wright’s ambition for mastering the field, his capacity to cover very
diverse literatures coupled with his efforts to synthesize, are breathtak-
ing and look impossible to repeat from the perspective of the further
fragmentation and exponential growth of IR scholarship since his time.
Today, one experienced researcher cannot normally expect to master
more than a handful of sub-fields of IR. For the purposes of an individ-
ual research project or programme, the end result of Wright’s work may
well appear a confusing mess of subjects. However, for him the syn-
thetic interdisciplinarity was only a toolkit containing tools relevant
for tackling different aspects of international relations. No individual
researcher would be expected to master them all. Wright wrote his book
on the basis of decades of teaching international relations; however, it
ended up having little or no impact on the teaching of international
relations either in the US or elsewhere.
If we were to follow Wright, it seems that IS would end up, as Stanley
Hoffman suggests in a different context, like ‘an overcrowded shopping
center, much like political science in the days when departments of gov-
ernment were characterized by an accumulation of unrelated courses’
(Hoffmann, 1960, v).6 We are well aware of how the number of interdis-
ciplinary directions one already then could opt for was very large. Today,

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Introduction 15

it is no smaller. Therefore, rather than trying to list them all, we will con-
centrate on outlining some of the theoretical, conceptual and program-
matic means by which such encounters can be usefully conducted.

C.A.W. Manning’s hierarchic interdisciplinarity


C.A.W. Manning’s approach to IR involved a disciplinary tone critical
of Wright’s work and of Zimmern’s notion that international relations
was nothing more than a bundle of studies. Manning was more closely
associated with the ISC than was Wright (see Manning 1954), and he
stressed interdisciplinary links and orientation, especially for the teach-
ing of IR. In a fashion now familiar as the English school, Manning was
interested in the prospects and reality of international society among
states (Manning, 1962, pp. 9–10). In its wider manifestation, IR is inter-
disciplinary since it touches on the subject matter of many other discip-
lines and, as a consequence, must draw on aspects of those disciplines.
But this does not mean IR is simply a synthesis as suggested by Wright.
Manning’s understanding of IR generates a hierarchy of studies
within and outside the discipline:

The field of studies which I am concerned to recommend can be


represented by three concentric circles. In the innermost circle we
have the subject International Relations, including several distinct
‘approaches.’ One of these is the geographic and strategic approach;
another is the psychological and socio-psychological approach;
another is the approach through the study of international institu-
tions; and there may be several more. That is the innermost circle.
Then, in the next circle, come the closely associated ‘international
studies,’ of which so much has been said: International History,
International Economics, International Law – and it is possible one
could think of some more. Then, in the outermost circle, come the
‘underpinning disciplines.’ (Goodwin, 1951, pp. 70–1)

As a result, IR is ‘a subject to be studied concurrently with other sub-


jects’. It is interesting that Manning leaves political science out of this
description. His second circle includes the international dimensions of
social sciences that have their own distinct methodologies. The setting
of these disciplines seems to have as much to do with methodology as
their substantive focus putting them outside the study of IR proper.
Finally, the outer circle is an indication of how seriously Manning
believed that a student of international relations required broader aca-
demic training than simply in IR, with one or more underpinning

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16 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

disciplines that would include geography, political science, economics,


history, law and so on.
With the problematization of interdisciplinary training, Manning
makes an important opening. Most study programmes in the US bearing
the name ‘international studies’ address the interdisciplinary challenge
by merely assembling staff from various disciplines to teach, without
much effort at theoretical integration of knowledge (Brown et al., 2006,
p. 281). And although Manning’s first circle includes IR orientations
drawing upon external influences, it is also important to note that, for
him, interdisciplinary training is not necessarily required for working
with some questions in the remit of traditional IR. We have, above,
adopted the same view and refused to label interdisciplinary knowl-
edge inherently superior to disciplinary knowledge (Jacobs and Frickel,
2009, pp. 46; 60). However, traditional IR simply is not usually enough
for working with very complex questions. In those instances function-
ality suggests importing approaches from Manning’s second and third
circles – for example when dealing with difficult concepts or with issues
such as economic globalization, new technologies and identity politics
(Whitehall and Brickner, 2009, p. 217).
In sum, both disciplinary (IR) and interdisciplinary (IS) modes of
scholarship are needed but for different ends. Our concern is to develop
the latter. Today, disciplinary IR is saturated with mainstream discipli-
narily narrow treatises and textbooks. We will next outline how we got
to this point, and specifically the nature of the disciplining mode of IR
since the 1950s before considering the more recent emergence of new
challenges to it.

The disciplinary turn in IR scholarship

In the 1950s, the interdisciplinary approaches of the ISC, Wright and


Manning faced two powerful rivals with a more disciplinary orienta-
tion. These were the politically and practically oriented study of foreign
policy, and the behaviouristic, or quantitative study of international
politics (for a combination of these two, see Holsti, 1967). Both of these
North American approaches reduced the study of IR into that of inter-
national politics (IP). This, for its part, linked the thusly formed IR + IP
approach with political science, just short of making IR its subdiscipline.
This disciplinary turn, and the broad following it attracted everywhere
mainstream IR was taught, is often narrated in the historiography of IR,
but it has not been very well explained.
To arrive at a better explanation of why IR turned into the more disci-
plinary mode we must first recognize the different origins of IR and IP.

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Introduction 17

Modern IR rose in the aftermath of the First World War, and then again
after the Second World War, as an academic response to the problem of
war and peace, with the aim of moving towards a more peaceful world
(Holsti, 1985, p. 11). By contrast, IP emerged as a more practical and nar-
row study of the political wisdom needed by the sovereign in order to pro-
mote the interests and survival of his state (nation) in the midst of power
struggles. This approach is often related to Hans Morgenthau’s work.
Morgenthau was at the forefront of a group of political scientists
whose concern was to secure a (sub)disciplinary status for IP by means
of restricting it mostly to the study of political power. For Morgenthau,
the core of international relations cohered not around a wider idea of
the international, but around power and the struggle for power among
individuals and collectivities, including the state. The study of the
‘international’ for Morgenthau, hence, referred to the struggle for politi-
cal power as an inter-state phenomenon (Morgenthau, 1952, p. 655).
This narrowing of the international to politics among states can,
somewhat surprisingly, be explained by looking at Morgenthau’s inter-
disciplinary intellectual development. His doctoral thesis was in inter-
national law (1929), a discipline in which legal regulation was weak and
subject to politics. In addition, he had a keen interest in several other
disciplines. For example, Herman Oncken, professor of political history,
stimulated Morgenthau’s interest in Germany’s unifier, Bismarck, and
his Realpolitik that gave foreign policy priority over domestic politics in
the context of the nineteenth-century European system of states (Primat
der Aussenpolitik). From Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenthau
further took the idea of actors struggling for power to accomplish their
aims against the wills of others, and the idea of will to power. From these
influences Morgenthau assumed his mission: to educate wise leaders in
the conduct of foreign policy (Korhonen, 1983; see also Neumann and
Sending, 2007, pp. 678–83). Remarkably, Morgenthau’s means to real-
izing his mission were interdisciplinary – combining political theory
with history, international law, psychology and other fields – but his
idea of the international was state-centric.
In the 1930s, Morgenthau first put his mission into practice when
he taught international law in Madrid to future diplomats of Franco’s
government. After arriving in the US in 1937, Morgenthau became an
‘instructor in Government’ at Brooklyn College, and later a profes-
sor of political science and history at the University of Chicago. Also,
from 1951, he was the director of the Center for the Study of American
Foreign Policy in the University of Chicago. But much more than a clas-
sical advisor to the prince, Morgenthau was an educator speaking truth
to power (Morgenthau, 1970, esp. pp. 13–28). He criticized American

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18 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

policy in Vietnam and became quickly sidelined from any direct policy
influence. His best known work was to be the comprehensive textbook
Politics among Nations (1955 [1948]), in which he summarized and trans-
lated his European production on international relations, international
law and political theory, inspired by the political work of Bismarck.
However, Morgenthau was not the first or only scholar advocating a
narrow American model of IP. For example, already in 1947 Grayson
Kirk had suggested that IR was at essence international politics. And
international politics was power politics for Kirk (see Kirk, 1947, p. 12).
Other European-originated realists – like John Herz, Arnold Wolfers
and Henry Kissinger – made essentially the same point (Griffiths et al.
1999, pp. 16–20; 25–31). But Morgenthau’s work was of a more general
nature compared to the fairly specific nature of the other works of the
same genre. It was persuasive to conclude from his work that, while
international relations is interdisciplinary, comprehensive knowledge
of it can only be fragmentary owing to the multifaceted and multilay-
ered nature of the political practice and its study. The only reasonable
approach, then, is to select the most important subdisciplinary compo-
nent as the core: international relations is international politics, which
for its part is power politics among states. This simplified reading of
Morgenthau’s otherwise nuanced message of political wisdom and pro-
motion of national interests in power struggles was part of the cold war
context where it (alongside many other works) was used to justify facets
of American power politics (see also Harle, 2000, pp. 79; 88–90).
Behaviouralist social science and the quantitative revolution in IR
shared, somewhat surprisingly, the same logic of serving national for-
eign policies. This is easier to understand if we recall how that revo-
lution had already started during the Second World War. Systematic,
quantitative studies of social and political behaviour were required
for planning American foreign policy and military operations. Many
leading social scientists were ready to assist in defeating Hitler (e.g.,
Wiggerhaus, 1994). The behaviourists were critical of aspects of
Morgenthau’s work. Nevertheless they accepted his premises of politi-
cal realism (see Vasquez, 1983), while simultaneously envisioning IR as
a clear-cut discipline in the sense of some theoretically advanced social
sciences, like economics and psychology. This latter project relied on
the idea of a shared research object of power politics among states, just
as economics is the study of the economy and psychology is the study
of psychological disorders.
Morgenthau’s IP, and the behavioural study of foreign policy and IR,
paved the way for development towards a narrow, monodisciplinary

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Introduction 19

field of IP. The political economy of this movement was such that
both strove to become politically relevant in order to obtain financial
resources from the state and other sources supporting the American
effort in the cold war. Interdisciplinary models of IR were far less suc-
cessful in selling themselves within the university and to relevant inter-
est groups. This all supports Ole Wæver’s extrapolation of Foucault’s
(1969) thesis on how disciplines do not mirror a pre-given domain –
they constitute, or are constituted together with, these domains. There
is a demand for people competent on a given domain; hence, we need
people with a PhD, for example, in IR. Study fields seek status and rec-
ognition within the university system, and an obvious way is to estab-
lish their own discipline. Funding poured into those aims sustains the
movement, and securing the career prospects of graduates requires dis-
ciplines to be maintained. A self-reinforcing disciplinary development
is created in this way, and as a consequence disciplines do not die away
easily (Wæver, 2007, pp. 290–2).
The disciplinary turn in IR has made it an attractive subject for gradu-
ates. Today, career diplomats also are produced in political science depart-
ments, in their IR programmes in particular. This complements the
traditional entry route through studies in international law and history.
But the relative successes of IR have come at a price of ‘disciplinary nar-
rowing’ to mostly American theories and concepts (Wæver and Tickner
2009, p. 5; Tickner and Wæver, 2009, p. 335; Biersteker, 2009, p. 320).
The non-American successes have included the high rankings of British-
based book series, such as the Cambridge Studies in International Relations
(under the auspices of the British International Studies Association), the
establishment of an English school section into the ISA, the founding
of the World International Studies Committee (WISC) and the volumes
introducing and promoting distinctly European and further global con-
tributions to IR theory (Friedrichs, 2004; Jørgensen and Knudsen, 2006;
Wæver and Tickner, 2009). The major point here is, however, that none
of these reform movements has really striven to rid IR from its discipli-
nary status that originates in the intellectual heritage of the 1950s.

The re-emergence of interdisciplinarity

From our perspective, in the disciplining projects since the 1950s, IR’s
autonomy was bought at too high a price. IR was cut off from currents
in other disciplines. It was partly self-marginalized in the splendid iso-
lation of its own great debates, and partly became a subfield of political
science. These moves towards introverted disciplinarity coupled with

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20 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

asymmetrical bi- or subdisciplinarity of ‘political science IR’ have, how-


ever, been recently subjected to critical scrutiny from several angles.
Most efforts for reopening IR have so far been limited to explor-
ing the territory between IR and a related single discipline. Examples
include the (re-)established linkages between contemporary IR and
philosophy (Beardsworth, 2005), international relations and world his-
tory (Buzan and Little, 2001); IR and technology (Herrera, 2003) and
IR and religion (Rengger, 2003). There is also strong interest in IR and
economics through IPE (Strange, 1994) and a renewed interest in link-
ages between international law and IR (e.g., Koskenniemi, 2002). Some
works develop interdisciplinary middle-range approaches to the study
of problems such as democratic peace (Mousseau, 2003), globalization
(Krishna-Hensel, 2000) or energy policy (Aalto, 2011).
As for training, there is a renewed interest in study programmes bear-
ing the term ‘international studies’ in their name. One study surveyed
140 programmes mostly with an IS major – in some cases ‘Global Studies’
or ‘Global and International studies’ – in 38 American states. Slightly
less than half of them required an interdisciplinary introductory course
specifically designed for IS majors, wherein the extra IR components
usually included political science, economics and history (each more
than half); anthropology and/or geography figured in around one third.
A larger share of programmes prefers to offer an introductory course in
one of the subdisciplines. Political science is nearly always offered, and
the next popular ones are again economics, history, anthropology and
geography (Brown et al., 2006, pp. 267–71). However, these programmes
usually represent a relatively weak sense of interdisciplinarity in which
multiple perspectives on a particular topic are drawn from different
disciplines in order to fully account for that topic, without aiming for
epistemic integration (see below and Chapter 2).
The textbook industry has largely failed to support these programmes.
A lone example is International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to
Global Issues (Anderson et al., 2007). This book introduces the standard
set of perspectives from political science, history, geography, economics
and anthropology; it surveys various topics of area studies and some of
the current global issues such as terrorism and violence. Its title not-
withstanding, it does not discuss the various meanings and uses of
interdisciplinarity in any detail. Nor does it address IR and its successes
and failures as a discipline of the ‘international’. By contrast, Stephanie
Lawson’s International Relations does engage in a brief discussion of what
the ‘international’ is, and notes that IS as an interdisciplinary area of
study which has ‘much relevance for contemporary IR but, many would

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Introduction 21

argue, do[es] not necessarily lie at the core of its concerns, which must
retain a focus on the international or world political concerns’ (Lawson,
2003, p. 14). She concludes by saying:

For the student of IR, although the focus will remain on the political,
thereby retaining an identity that is distinct from the more diffuse
interdisciplinary field of international studies, an appreciation of
what other fields of study have to offer and an ability to incorporate
their insights is essential (ibid., p. 140).

Lawson does not attempt to specify the role and import of IS at the
theoretical or conceptual level, but hints that it could lie in clarify-
ing the empirical substance by cultivating links with area studies (p.
14). Her stress for IR to be centred on the ‘political’ sphere does not
refer explicitly to Morgenthau’s or anyone else’s conception of politics.
But at the terminological level, it is interestingly linked to the loosely
emerging literature on world politics – to which we wish to offer a wider
and more accommodative alternative, while also reconnecting with the
interdisciplinary roots of IR. World politics is a term often used without
much programmatic intent.7 At its most primitive, it connotes a vague
idea of ‘geopolitics’, or a great power struggle on a global scale. The
journal World Politics situates itself close to the political science subfield
of comparative politics. In Lawson’s usage, world politics is deployed
in a fairly typical way to refer to the political relations among a wider
continuum of actors than is allowed for in the state-centric view of IR
(ibid.).
For R.B.J. Walker (1993), world politics involves ‘a claim to historical
and structural transformation that throw historically derived concepts
and disciplinary divisions into rather serious doubt’ (p. 103). He is criti-
cal of the distinction between domestic and international politics, or
‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the state as he puts it. His perspective is, from
the outset, pluralist in respecting the import of structural realist theo-
ries, analyses of interdependence, regimes and institutions, while also
commending a more historically sensitive stance. Nevertheless, he ends
up accentuating the centrality of questioning our fundamental assump-
tions in the study of these problems through philosophical analysis of
ontology and epistemology, while relying heavily on political theory.
He explicitly agrees with Robert Keohane in that ‘contemporary world
politics is . . . a matter of wealth and poverty, life and death’. Yet he goes
on to insist that these questions ‘should only be understood in rela-
tion to the possibility of thinking about political life at all in the late

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22 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

twentieth century’ (p. 101). One is left doubtful as to whether this pro-
gramme ultimately is at all intended to examine the issues mentioned
by Keohane on the empirical level.
Overall, Walker’s account of world politics is better suited for pur-
poses of deconstruction than reconstruction. It shows a programmatic
intent of relating, if not anchoring, IR to political theory and, thereby,
to some currents in political science. But it does not specify the precise
building blocks of its programme, let alone the working methods. Yet it
has been eye-opening for many scholars who started their careers at the
turn of the cold war and after. However, only a few of them have ended
up holding a chair in world politics. These seem to concentrate on the
Nordic region, which has been a site for alternative and experimental
interdisciplinary theorizing for a long time (Friedrichs, 2004, p. 82).
For example, Pekka Korhonen (2011) has offered world politics as a rhe-
torical perspective that draws upon political theory and examines the
whole world as a site for political communication and struggles among
various types of subjects. Heikki Patomäki’s (2002) variant of world
politics adopts a critical realist philosophy of science to understand and
explain world scale transformations, with the ultimate objective of bet-
tering the world and promoting our emancipation.
The various proposals on world politics speak for a wider intellec-
tual movement at the critical edges of IR and globalization studies in
particular. These proposals do not necessarily appear fundamentally
incompatible with interdisciplinary IS. Yet they each draw attention
to a particular direction – either towards political science (for exam-
ple, Lawson); or as its special aspect, political theory in its Continental
form (Walker, Korhonen); or towards a normative social science that
would draw more rigour upon currents in the philosophy of science
(Patomäki).
In summary, the cited research agendas of world politics remain
much more narrow than those afforded by interdisciplinary IS, which
builds on the interdisciplinary origins of IR and attempts to re-estab-
lish its linkages with several other fields interested in studying the
various images of the ‘international’ – be they classical ‘inter-state’,
‘foreign’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’, or ‘world’ points of view, or others.
Interdisciplinary IS has no one discipline from which to draw its inspi-
ration; no favoured theory or method, nor one undisputed normative
goal. It is an effort to systematically expand IR research towards a large
number of disciplines and fields of study while building on past inter-
disciplinary approaches and accepting the coterminous presence of
disciplinary IR (Figure 1.1).

9780230_282346_02_ch01.indd 22 6/16/2011 1:38:05 PM


Introduction 23

Philosophy?

World
Geography? politics The humanities?
Political
theory
Sociology?

History? Political
Theology?
science
IS IR IP
Social
psychology?
Linguistics?
Organization
Psychology? theory

Economics?

Law?

Figure 1.1 IR, IS, IP, world politics and interdisciplinarity.

Our interdisciplinary approaches

In this book we address some of the linkages between IR and philosophy,


peace research, aspects of history, political and environmental geogra-
phy, globalization studies, IPE, political psychology, sociology and social
theory, linguistics, strategic or war studies and anthropology.
Chapter 2 by David Long discusses in more detail what can be
meant by the idea of discipline and what is the status of IR and IS
on this plane. IR is found to be a mixed-status discipline, depending
on whether loose or tight criteria of disciplinarity are adopted. IS, by
contrast, is offered as a more open-ended field. In order to grasp its
nature and connections to other domains of knowledge, it is taken
as an essentially interdisciplinary field. To comprehend what this
umbrella concept of interdisciplinarity means, a distinction is made
among multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neodisciplinarity.
Multidisciplinarity refers to the variety of disciplines through which
the ‘international’ can be studied, but makes little effort at theoretical
integration. Transdisciplinarity involves the application of theories and
methods across disciplines or, ultimately, supersession of disciplinary
practices. Neodisciplinarity tries to institutionalize a certain practice,

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24 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

profession or dimension of social life in order to produce interdisci-


plinary knowledge that is not easily acquired in traditional discipli-
nary contexts. The chapter concludes by arguing that IS has the best
prospect of producing theoretically insightful and useful knowledge
by understanding itself as a novel interdiscipline or neodiscipline. This
means that it should not merely try to combine existing disciplines,
or transgress them, but come to grips with its connections to various
other fields of research.
Chapter 3 by Pami Aalto enquires how interdisciplinary engagement
can be better organized in the wide field of international studies by
considering the import of the philosophy of science, primarily in light
of the work of Thomas Kuhn on puzzles and ‘paradigms’, Imre Lakatos
on ‘research programmes’ and Larry Laudan’s commentary on their
work. In particular, the focus is on how Lakatos’s methodology of sci-
entific research programmes can be adapted for the purpose of organ-
izing interdisciplinary IS. Lakatos’s idea of ‘positive heuristics’ is taken
as a useful analogy for expanding research outwards from the confines
of IR. Research programmes can open up towards related disciplines
without losing their ‘core’, so doing in order to maintain their vital-
ity and ultimately help us to explain, understand and envision more
phenomena, problems, as well as to formulate and solve more puzzles.
Paradigmatic, empirical and conceptual types of research programmes
are discerned. In each case the impetus for interdisciplinary research
springs from open-ended and open-minded ‘puzzlement’ when disci-
plinary means fail to help us solving our problems. The programmes are
then developed as methodological means by which to organize research
into sets of better defined puzzles. With such methodological solutions,
interdisciplinary IS would be built around a series of open-ended inter-
disciplinary research programmes.
Chapter 4 by Vilho Harle examines the import of the Frankfurt
school, the English school of IR, and peace research as models for
producing interdisciplinary research programmes in IS. The interdis-
ciplinary materialism of the Frankfurt school of the 1930s represents
a core-discipline oriented multidisciplinary mode in which the task of
social philosophy was to draw together knowledge compiled in sepa-
rate disciplines. The English school, for its part, in its classical format
is a programme coloured by theoretical and methodological pluralism.
It covers all forms of interdisciplinarity and, in analogous thinking,
represents a progressive research programme that can study all aspects
and levels of the ‘international’ through its open-ended and overlap-
ping concepts of international system, international society and world

9780230_282346_02_ch01.indd 24 6/16/2011 1:38:05 PM


Introduction 25

society; and its idea of informal and formal international institutions.


In peace research, as suggested by Galtung and practised in the Nordic
states in particular, is found a problem-oriented study organized mostly
along the neodisciplinary model. However, it has left existing disci-
plines and their deficiencies untouched.
Chapters 5 to 7 examine the traditional levels of analysis of IR from
various interdisciplinary perspectives and expand them in new direc-
tions. In Chapter 5 Simon Dalby recasts the traditional core concept of
IR, the international system, by using critical geopolitics approaches
that draw upon political geography, poststructuralist philosophy and
critical theory. The concepts of geopolitics, globalization and empire
are introduced to expose the weaknesses of traditional IR conceptualiza-
tions of the international system. Instead, the notion of Anthropocene
is suggested as a wider spatial category through which we should instead
understand our current and future existence on the planet – an exist-
ence human activities have rendered endangered. Among those human
activities have been preoccupations encouraged by traditional IR think-
ing and acting.
In Chapter 6 Sami Moisio examines the transformation of statehood
under neoliberalism; he utilizes literatures on geography, geopolitics,
historical materialism and other critical IPE, as well as on governmen-
tality. The challenges of globalization, internationalization and tran-
snationalization prompt states to strengthen their competitiveness and
erode the domestic/international divide. These transdisciplinary litera-
tures together with a case study on Finland exemplify the theoretical
and empirical challenges to our traditional understanding of states and
their mutual relations as a pivotal level of analysis in IR.
In Chapter 7 Aalto introduces three different types of research pro-
grammes through which the study of the human subject in IR can be
expanded in order to uncover a wider range of roles (wider than IR is
capable of providing) that human beings perform in the international
domain. The first programme extends, to the humanities, research on
states–peoples’ roles, doing so by linking some elements of Morgenthau’s
classical realist IR theory with the study of diplomatic history. The
second programme reaches towards the (natural) sciences by starting
from James Rosenau’s liberal IR theory, and extending to political psy-
chology, cognitive science and the economic-formal modelling of our
choices (as has been done in prospect theory). The third programme
connects Barry Buzan’s English school theory with the active resistance
of bottom-up actors as examined in everyday international political
economy (EIPE), building a wider social scientific programme. Finally,

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26 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

while ‘reflectivist’ studies drawing upon, for example, post-colonialism


and feminism, represent less close-knit literatures, they offer further
research options for covering in more detail the disadvantaged and
marginalized faces of human subjects in international studies.
Chapters 8 and 9 examine some of the main concepts in IR from an
interdisciplinary perspective. In Chapter 8 Tuomas Forsberg widens the
study of power in IR towards philosophical, linguistic, conceptual and
sociological or social theoretical directions. He argues that the taxono-
mies of power in IR and other disciplines are currently not sufficiently
connected. Therefore, too much is currently assumed about power and
its various forms in IR when those assumptions could also be studied
empirically. Other disciplines, for their part, do not discuss what might
be specific about power in international relations. Interdisciplinary tax-
onomies of power should include ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, ‘hard’ and
‘soft’, as well as sector-based approaches, and elaborate on the different
facets of power, such as power as symbolic power and other forms of
‘capital’; relational power; power through communication and ration-
alities, and linguistic or discursive power.
In Chapter 9 Petr Drulák moves beyond traditional conceptualiza-
tions of war in realist IR and strategic studies. He takes stock of the
study of war in what he calls theoretical disciplines, including IR in
particular; history; and the arts, in particular artistic representations of
war. In order to overcome the theoretical problems ensuing from this
diversity of approaches, Drulák argues that they all represent abstract
concepts of war. Because they are not normally part of our immediate
experience, we understand them through metaphors such as combat,
game, production, accident, law or storm. Therefore the study of the
metaphors of war offers us a common ground or metalanguage that
facilitates their mutual comparisons, helping us to identify conceptual
overlaps and establish genuine differences. Eventually this amounts to
a transdisciplinary approach.
Chapter 10 is a closing commentary, which the editors invited Iver
Neumann to write, on how to move on in light of the theoretical, meth-
odological and conceptual issues discussed in this book. In Neumann’s
perspective, the field of international studies emerging out of this book
and related literatures is held together by powers of fusion and common
subject matter, or the problem posed by the term international. As for a
further cohesive force, he proposes a focus on social theory. From this,
he moves on to outline one direction afforded by social theory – that
is the practice turn in the social sciences to study what actually hap-
pens as a result of interdisciplinary interaction. Illustrating one such

9780230_282346_02_ch01.indd 26 6/16/2011 1:38:06 PM


Introduction 27

transition by means of personal experience, he demonstrates how his


switch from the political sciences and IR to social anthropology was
coloured by differences in focus on outcomes versus processes, and dif-
ferent writing styles.
Neumann’s closing commentary represents one possible response to
the wide agenda of international studies we have sketched and reintro-
duced in this book. We hope there will be many other such responses,
as we are under no illusion of having exhausted the rich possibilities
of interdisciplinary IS. We see its evolvement as a long and dialogical
process, but one that is urgently needed in both the theoretical and the
practical senses.

Notes
1. In the ‘neo-neo’ debate, both theories borrow heavily from economic rational
choice models. This apparent synthesis between them, however, ultimately
fails to include a wider consensus on the basic question of what best explains
state behaviour in the international arena – whether states are driven by
‘relative’ or ‘absolute’ gains (see e.g., Wæver, 2007, p. 303). Among the con-
structivist camp, Alexander Wendt and many others have sought for a ‘mid-
dle-ground’ position which would be able to appeal to realists and liberals
(e.g., Adler, 1997; Wendt, 1995). The most recent effort is Barry Buzan’s offer
of the revived ‘English school’ of IR as capable of immersing into itself many
of the central concerns of realism, liberalism and more radical traditions of
international theory (Buzan, 2001).
2. The Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 went to Elinor Ostrom, a professor of
political science, who works on environmental governance issues that could
also be related to the IR discipline. The political scientist Robert Putnam,
whose work is frequently used in IR, is reportedly well cited in a number of
fields in the social sciences and humanities, thus on a par with the histori-
cal sociology of Charles Tilly, or the philosophical and social theory work of
Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida (Jacobs and Frickel, 2009,
p. 51).
3. The other two were International Organization and World Politics.
4. The practical analyses include international politics, art of war, art of diplo-
macy, conduct of foreign relations, colonial government, international
organization, international law, international economics, international
communication and international education; and the theoretical analyses
include political geography, political demography, and the technology, soci-
ology and psychology of IR, as well as international ethics.
5. Wright’s view of geography is narrow from the contemporary perspective,
especially in contrast to the burgeoning literature on human, cultural and
political geography since then.
6. At the same time Hoffmann cites Wright approvingly (p. 1).
7. The same concerns the term ‘global politics’. A recent textbook (Edkins and
Zehfuss, 2009) on that subject adopts the compelling format of presenting a

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28 Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle, David Long and Sami Moisio

set of questions ‘that puzzle all of us’ (p. 1), such as: Why is the world divided
up territorially? Or: Can we move beyond conflict?. For each of the some
twenty questions posed, illustrative examples are outlined and the assump-
tions necessary for comprehending those questions critically are analysed.
Apart from loose commitment to some philosophical thinkers like Antonio
Gramsci and Michel Foucault, the book quite self-consciously declines to
define its agenda or elaborate the notion of global politics itself.

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2
Interdisciplinarity and the Study of
International Relations
David Long

Introduction1

In this chapter I argue that the study of international relations (IR)


is interdisciplinary in three distinct ways, corresponding to three
variants of interdisciplinarity that I call multidisciplinarity, transdis-
ciplinarity and neodisciplinarity. Identifying the ways in which IR is
interdisciplinary highlights the broad and diverse character of our sub-
ject, helps to identify and specify the oft-neglected contrast between
international relations and international politics, and relocates the
academic study of international relations within a wider milieu of
international studies (IS).
There is now a long list of interdisciplinary scholarship and interven-
tions in international relations spanning the decades of its existence as
an academic study, such as Susan Strange’s call for an end to the mutual
neglect of international politics and international economics as well as
her collaborative work with business studies, the proposal for collabo-
ration with international lawyers under the rubric of the legalization
of world politics, historical sociologists’ analyses of the international
system, and those working on the social and political psychology of
foreign policy decision-making or conflict resolution, to name just a
few (Strange, 1970; Stopford and Strange, 1991; Goldstein et al., 2000;
Hobson, 1998; 2002; Hudson, 2005; Fischer, 2007).
However, interdisciplinary academic practice and discourse has
rarely engaged the theory and concept of interdisciplinarity (cf.,
Ashworth, 2009). There have been, and continue to be, ritualistic
nods towards the notion that the study of international relations is
in some way interdisciplinary. Yet, there have been few attempts to
think through what that might mean. Instead, along with a recent

31

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32 David Long

rise in the awareness of interdisciplinarity in international relations


has come an unease with the term itself and a proliferation of neolo-
gisms, like antidisciplinary and supradisciplinary (Rosow, 2002; Beier
and Arnold, 2005). There is also understandable scepticism of the
value of meta-theoretical discussions of such things as disciplines and
interdisciplinarity. The concept of discipline can appear to be of little
use to most researchers because it is too general, too abstract and – as
it concerns the sociology of knowledge – too remote from interests
in the real world of international relations. This has prompted the
retort that IR scholars should instead ‘get on with empirical research’
(Moravscik, 2003).
The under-theorization of interdisciplinarity in international rela-
tions has itself been the product of mutual neglect. Research into the
meaning and practice of interdisciplinarity has tended to focus on the
humanities, in areas such as education, women’s studies and English.
But even when the focus is on the social sciences, interdisciplinarity
has been a marginal activity, often portrayed as a subaltern or self-
consciously critical endeavour and, partly as a consequence of this,
discussion has barely affected IR at all.2 For example, Julie Thompson
Klein’s Crossing Boundaries (1996) deploys the metaphor of geopolitics
to describe the relations of disciplines and interdisciplinarity, yet the
reading, which reduces geopolitics to war and territory, is simplistic and
without very much consideration of IR scholarship.3
Yet, the conception and construction of (inter)disciplinarity matters
very much to knowledge production and academic organization in IR
as elsewhere because it is the unstated premise upon which research
is conducted, the standards upon which it is judged and to evaluate
who is considered qualified to conduct it and to teach it to the next
generation of scholars. The discourse of interdisciplinarity is sometimes
deliberately deployed as a denial of disciplinary status, marginalizing
ways of knowing and fields of expertise. At the same time, it is also
often used a rationale for wider academic cooperation – and particularly
interdepartmental cooperation. Despite the occasional bad rap intimat-
ing eclecticism, incoherence and/or redundancy, interdisciplinarity
continues to be encouraged: by universities to develop academic teach-
ing programmes and by government and private foundations to further
innovative research.4 While the implications will be abundantly clear
to anyone who has recently applied for a job or for a grant, or submit-
ted an article to a journal, whether an academic study such as interna-
tional relations is conceived in disciplinary or interdisciplinary terms

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 33

has significant implications for the way that it is viewed, how theory is
developed, and the direction that theory takes. Individual scholars may
not always apprehend or appreciate the constructions and constraints
of disciplinary codes, but nonetheless they are there, persistently, in the
background (and sometimes foreground).
This chapter attempts a conceptualization of interdisciplinarity to
sort through its manifold manifestations in international relations
scholarship. I begin with a discussion of disciplines and interdiscipli-
narity, and then briefly consider the disciplinary status of international
relations today. It has been observed that interdisciplinarity is paradoxi-
cal, in that it conceptually derives from that which at the outset it seeks
to transcend (Klein, 1990; Moran, 2002). The reliance on disciplinarity
means that any understanding of interdisciplinarity must engage with
the notion of academic discipline.
In the three sections that follow, I outline the modes of interdisci-
plinarity – multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and neodiscipli-
narity – and examine the way that each appears in, and shapes, the
study of international relations. Two points need to be made by way of
a preface to these sections. First, in this chapter, interdisciplinar(it)y
becomes an umbrella concept, a descriptor of a variety of academic
moves that cross, add to, or otherwise challenge the field of study, the
appropriate concepts, methods and theories, and the institutionaliza-
tion of previously secure disciplinary boundaries. Each of the modes is
both interdisciplinary yet, at the same time, only a partial representa-
tion of interdisciplinary discourse and practice. Second, in subdivid-
ing interdisciplinarity and using different labels, I am partaking of a
now well-trodden course of stipulating new terms. As Klein (1990) has
noted, there has been a proliferation, indeed maybe even a surfeit, of
new words to redescribe, redefine or subdivide interdisciplinarity. Both
multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are terms in widespread use
today, though their meaning is not stable or generally agreed upon.
My definition of multidisciplinarity is uncontroversial. By contrast,
my interpretation of transdisciplinarity is particular and I argue for my
definition below. On the other hand, neodisciplinary and neodiscipli-
narity are neologisms entirely of my own creation.5 They are needed
because, as with some other academic subjects, the interdisciplinar-
ity of international relations is not captured by multidisciplinary or
transdisciplinary modes.
I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for the
academic organization of IR and international studies.

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34 David Long

Social science disciplines and the study of


international relations

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word discipline has for
hundreds of years related to the instruction of disciples, to a branch
of education, or to chastisement with the purpose of training. It is the
second of these related notions that interests us here, but what consti-
tutes a discipline in the social sciences is not without controversy. For
William Robson (1972) discipline ‘suggests a rigorous mode of thought,
a specialized language, and a common set of assumptions shared by
those claiming to understand or exercise the discipline’. Morton Kaplan
(1971, p. 6) presents three criteria that must be met: a discipline implies
‘a set of techniques; a body of theory and propositions; and a subject
matter’. For the purposes of this chapter I consider a discipline any
distinct, organized body of learning with an agreed core-set of knowl-
edge and involving a programme of teaching/learning and research: in
other words, systematic training in a coherent set of theories, concepts
and methods, and their application. As such, a discipline involves three
things: a discrete field of study; an agreed approach or set of approaches
to method and to explanation; and a measure of institutionalization,
in terms of university departments, academic associations, teaching
and research programmes, journals and books reflecting the first two
elements.
The definition of the word discipline is more demanding and precise
than that of academic field, subject or study, as it adds technique and
institutionalization. Yet, it has a certain unreality about it and hardly
seems to reflect the character of actual, existing social science disci-
plines. The definition seems to assume that, to qualify as a discipline,
there must be an agreed body of concepts, theory and method in the
form of a single coherent paradigm. In fact, actually existing disci-
plines are less cohesive, less unitary and less similar than the attempts
at definition suggest. Disciplines differ: some are effectively unitary,
hierarchical and paradigmatic; others are more plural in terms of the
range of accepted methods and theories. Conceptual, methodological
or theoretical consensus within disciplines can be anything from a sin-
gle model to a widely divergent set of approaches. For many established
academic departments, administrative and bureaucratic power as well
as social and economic forces beyond the walls of academia, have been
key factors in disciplinary consolidation.
Furthermore, the definition also seems to suggest that those dis-
ciplines that are not unitary should become, or are becoming, so. It

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 35

does not take into account disciplinary history, the process of forma-
tion and decline of disciplines, disciplinary development, consolida-
tion and crisis. Instead, the attempts at definition tend to contribute to
the mythological histories of disciplines that emphasize and highlight
coherence and unity, histories in which disciplines emerge as distinct
specialisms serving an intellectual, as well as a wider, social purpose.
These myths present an atomistic, ahistorical view of disciplinarity,
a view in which disciplines are separate, functionally homogeneous,
specialized (that is, largely internally focused in terms of theory devel-
opment), and essentially unchanging in the demarcation of one from
the other. In this view, the social sciences can be divided into discrete
packets of knowledge.
These mythical understandings and their unstated assumptions of
coherence and distinctness among the traditional social science disci-
plines have not gone unchallenged. It is beyond the scope of this paper
to explain the evolution, specialization and demarcation of disciplines,
and the particular division among them that has unfolded.6 For our
purposes, though, the definition of discipline (unrealistic as it might
appear) has had important ramifications for the conceptualization of
interdisciplinarity and, more particularly, for the status of international
relations.
The unrealistic nature of the definition of discipline immediately
poses a problem for the study of international relations. International
relations has a distinct subject matter: the social, political, economic
and other relations, forces and structures reaching beyond the national
state.7 It has a set of techniques, methods and theories, although it is
a very wide-ranging list; and there has been discord over which are
legitimate as well as a good deal of mutual incomprehension, largely as
a result (Hermann, 1998). While international relations is all too rarely
taught and studied in dedicated departments of international relations,
there are journals, associations and other indicators of institutional
establishment and distinctness. It would seem, then, that as long as con-
sensus on methods and theories is relatively open-ended and permis-
sive, IR would certainly qualify as a discipline, and it resembles plural
disciplines like geography, political science and sociology. On the other
hand, a definition of discipline that entails a single coherent paradigm
and consequent hierarchical organization suggests IR is not a discipline,
though the same could be said of plural disciplines like political science.
(Warleigh-Lack and Cini, 2009; cf., Guzzini, 1998)
If we focus on institutionalization rather than technique as the key
element of the definition, however, we get a sense of the real problem

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36 David Long

with the disciplinary status of international relations. The growth of


the academic study of international relations has been conditioned by
wider developments in the social sciences. The established disciplines
today are those academic subjects that have subdivided social science
since roughly the turn of the twentieth century, but more particularly
since the Second World War. While there is no consensus on a definitive
listing, these disciplines generally include psychology, sociology, eco-
nomics and political science (and, depending on the definition of social
science, geography, anthropology, history and/or law).8 International
relations is not on this list, and whatever else one might say about the
nature of academic IR, it is obvious that it does not have the discipli-
nary status that these social sciences do – in terms of university depart-
ments, academic associations, the organization of government funding
for teaching and research, library categorization and so on. Though this
should not conclusively mean that IR is not a discipline, it certainly
indicates that it is generally not considered to be a discipline like eco-
nomics, psychology, sociology or political science.9 In practice, the defi-
nition and configuration of social science disciplines has meant that IR
either has to be a discipline like the others or it is not a discipline at all.
Though the mythical history of the academic study of international
relations has been challenged of late (Schmidt, 1998), one odd aspect
of the disciplinary history of IR is generally neglected. It is commonly
assumed to be a relatively new subject, even though, in institutional
terms, in most countries of the world it is barely newer than most other
social sciences (Ashworth, 2009; Hoffmann, 1977). Indeed, institution-
ally one might better describe it as stunted. There was an early develop-
ment of chairs and institutes after the First World War, and then rapid
growth after the Second World War. However, this post-war growth of
academic IR was almost entirely within political science departments –
and thus the institutional distinctiveness of international relations was
subsumed within what was thought to be a wider, yet still coherent,
discipline.
We live with this history today. The prevalent and widely accepted
usage of international relations is as the conventional name for a sub-
discipline, or subfield, within political science, one that would more
accurately be titled ‘international politics’. The consequences of this
labelling are serious because the discourse of discipline and interdis-
ciplinarity figure prominently in the categorization of what counts as
‘academic international relations’ and what does not. In what Jordan
et al. (2009, p. 3) call a survey of international relations faculty in ten
countries, the authors include not only those who self-identified as IR

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 37

scholars – most of whom were political scientists to begin with – but


also ‘any scholar who taught or did research on trans-border issues as
they relate to some aspect of politics’, including political scientists, spe-
cializing in American politics, who study trade and immigration, and
specialists of comparative politics ‘who happen to teach IR courses’.
Apparently all sorts of political scientists count as international rela-
tions scholars, while the potentially relevant contributions of scholars
from any other discipline can be ignored.
The discourse of interdisciplinarity persists and recurs because the
subject of international relations is, in fact, much more than just inter-
national politics. Of course, to begin with, the international is studied
in various ways in other disciplines such as law, economics and history.
But even within political science itself there is resistance to the subdis-
ciplinary discourse, which is a result of the perceived need to consider
more than international politics, that is, to consider areas covered by
other disciplines – international law, international economics, interna-
tional history – but without adherence to their respective disciplinary
conceptions, theories and methods. An intradisciplinary agenda like
this invariably bursts its disciplinary bounds, as it becomes clear that
political science is not the only disciplinary lens through which to view
international relations: there are other international studies that have a
contribution to make in terms of concepts, methods and theories.
Even at this point, however, the discourse of disciplinarity channels
the alternatives. Allowing that international relations are studied in
numerous academic locations, a dichotomy is imposed: to be discipli-
nary, IR must be encompassed by one of the established disciplines – for
example, political science. Then, the multiple sites together encompass
the interdisciplinary domain of international studies. The problem in
the latter context is incoherence and lack of focus (a.k.a. lack of disci-
plinarity), which itself engenders consideration of the need for a disci-
plinary core to the interdisciplinary realm (Morgenthau, 1952). But this
only rehearses the dichotomy, producing a tension between collapsing
to the narrower subdiscipline versus expanding with the inevitably cen-
trifugal forces of interdisciplinarity.
In point of fact, interdisciplinarity in the study of international rela-
tions is not nearly so clear-cut. Interdisciplinarity is not simply the polar
opposite of disciplinarity, but rather is something much more complex
and amorphous. Interestingly, the conceptual problems affecting inter-
disciplinarity are akin to those afflicting the term international. As
with international, the ‘inter’ in interdisciplinarity manifests division
and multitude, yet at the same time it expresses the imperative to join

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38 David Long

together and (re)unite. Like international relations, the subject matter


linked to the prefix is itself contested: national or state, discipline or
department? And as a result, like international, the interdisciplinary is
subject to various interpretations.10
Interdisciplinarity can represent a challenge to any of the three
aspects of disciplinarity noted above: subject matter; concepts, methods
and theories; or institutionalization. As a consequence, there is not one
single interdisciplinarity, but rather three variants: multidisciplinarity,
transdisciplinarity and neodisciplinarity. These terms indicate ideal
types, and as such they overlap in the practice of scholarship. They
are analytically distinct, however, responding to different disciplinary
deficiencies.
Identifying a distinct field or area of study, multidisciplinarity sug-
gests that more than one discipline is needed to understand some topics,
research problems or subject matter. Contrary to the disciplinary view,
the division of knowledge into subject matters by discipline is imper-
fectly aligned; there are both overlaps and gaps. Where there is an issue
or problem of common concern or interest to a number of disciplines,
multidisciplinarity means that each in parallel applies its concepts,
methods and theories to their particular dimension with regard to the
subject matter. By contrast, transdisciplinarity rejects the parallelism
of established disciplinary methods, theories and paradigms, and calls
instead for an alternative or novel approach at odds with one or more of
the established disciplines. Finally, neodisciplinarity argues for new and
differently conceived disciplinary demarcation because certain persist-
ent and prevalent social practices do not fit within disciplinary fields,
and coherent explanation demands specialist institutionalization. As
we will see, each of these modes of interdisciplinarity has appeared in
the study of international relations, but with rather different results and
potential for future teaching and research.

The multidisciplinarity of international studies

The multidisciplinary challenge emerges because disciplinary subject


matters are in fact not clearly separate and distinct; there are overlap-
ping issues or new concerns, patterns of behaviour, configurations of
power. Multidisciplinarity does not challenge disciplinary paradigms,
dominant theories and methods, but simply adds them to one another.
Thus, it involves parallel study or studies: for example, inter alia, the
political analysis of politics, the economic analysis of economics, legal
analysis of the law, of a subject, field or topic. A multidisciplinary

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 39

examination of, or project on, an issue in public health, for instance,


would involve not only experts in human physiology and medicine but
also psychologists, sociologists, economists, lawyers and so on (Kelly,
2009). In multidisciplinarity there is no attempt at integrated analysis,
nor is there a sense that there is anything enduring or specific to the
object of study that would require more than aggregated analyses of
various disciplines. Recognizing the analytical power of multiple spe-
cialist perspectives, multidisciplinary research involves coordination
and ranking of those perspectives rather than integration into a single,
coherent approach.
In terms of academic organization, multidisciplinarity is often indi-
cated by the name ‘studies’ as in the case of aboriginal studies, conflict
and peace studies, development studies, environmental studies, gender
studies, sexuality studies, urban studies, cultural studies, diplomatic
studies, European studies, policy studies, refugee studies, strategic stud-
ies, security studies, legal studies, political studies and, of course, inter-
national studies. The plural ‘studies’ suggests the multiple and disparate
sites of disciplinary knowledge, though the collective aggregation and
coordination may indicate a more cohesive development, as I will show
in the section below on neodisciplinarity.
The plural, international studies, invites us to consider that there is
more than one way to study international relations. IS is ordinarily
associated with a particular selection of disciplinary fragments, such
as international economics, international law, international (or diplo-
matic) history, but also includes area or regional studies, comparative
cultural studies and languages.11 So comprehended, international stud-
ies does not so much constitute a discipline, as a variety of subjects with
a common theme.
Multidisciplinary international studies approaches international rela-
tions from a number of disciplinary perspectives to give a more complete
picture, or comprehensive outlook. Because international relations as a
subject matter comprises international political relations, international
economic relations, international legal relations, international cultural
relations and so on, various disciplines might be able to comprehend
their respective aspects of the international – economics can address
the international economy, for example – but to understand interna-
tional relations as a whole requires a multiangular combination of
studies (including international economics). The study conventionally
called international relations (that is, international politics or the politi-
cal science of international relations) is just one of these many stud-
ies. In order to understand international relations, a multidisciplinary

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40 David Long

approach counsels an expansion beyond the theories and methods of


political science, and beyond the field of international politics, to con-
sider a range of studies including, inter alia, legal perspectives on inter-
national law, economic analysis of the global economy, sociological
examination of world society and so on through various international
studies.
Multidisciplinarity has the advantage of breadth of interest, flexibil-
ity, and plurality of approaches. It is favoured by academic bureaucra-
cies and foundations, for whom interdisciplinarity means combining
scholars from different departments, and for whom academic coopera-
tion is a good in itself. For example, under the heading ‘Contribution
to Interdisciplinarity’, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council
(2009, p. 3) claims of its ‘Rising Powers, Global Challenges and Social
Change’ project that ‘contributions can be expected from a wide range
of disciplines, including but not limited to: economics, political science,
sociology, anthropology, development studies, management, demog-
raphy and area studies.’12 Similarly, in the call for papers for its 2010
conference, the Council for European Studies claims that it ‘fosters and
recognizes outstanding, multidisciplinary research in European studies’,
and that they ‘encourage proposals in the widest range of disciplines; in
particular, we welcome panels that combine disciplines, nationalities,
and generations.’ The Council’s hope is that this multidisciplinary con-
figuration will be the basis for what it calls interdisciplinary exchange.

Transdisciplinary studies of international relations

If multidisciplinarity is the preferred mode of interdisciplinarity for aca-


demic bureaucrats, for academic researchers transdisciplinarity is the
most salient mode. Transdisciplinary scholarship involves, among other
things, borrowing concepts and theories from other disciplines and the
creation of ‘invisible colleges’ of like-minded scholars from a variety of
disciplines ‘straddling the world, where ideas are tossed around through
new conferences and seminars and, above all, through new communi-
cations’ (RIPE, 1994, p. 1). It moves beyond the addition, aggregation or
coordination of disciplinary knowledge to cross-fertilization and possi-
bly transformation of disciplinary paradigms. In contrast to the parallel-
ism and relativism of multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinary approaches
seek to transcend methods and theories in the established disciplines.
According to some advocates of transdisciplinarity, disciplines reflect
congealed practices of specialization generating knowledge that is use-
lessly narrow and baroque. Such specialized knowledge may once have

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 41

been useful but it is no longer. At best, disciplines are too narrow, out of
date or of limited utility. At their worst, specialized disciplines are bas-
tions and reflections of ideological privilege and bureaucratic power.
In some corners of the literature on interdisciplinarity, transdiscipli-
narity has been given a specific meaning, associating it with a criti-
cal, transformative undertaking undermining all academic hierarchies
and the established disciplinary configuration. For the advocates of this
understanding of transdisciplinarity, it entails a significant transforma-
tion that challenges the order of knowledge produced and reproduced
by the dominant disciplinary theories and approaches.
The order of knowledge reflected within and among disciplines, it is
argued, manifest dominant forms of knowledge that, broadly stated,
reflect the positivist approach to social science, marginalizing other (usu-
ally non- or post-positivist) approaches, theories and methods within
some or many of the disciplines (Klein, 2001). In upending the social sci-
ence disciplines, this transdisciplinarity explicitly brings to the fore those
previously marginalized approaches, such as neo-Marxism, postmodern-
ism, variants of systems theory or some complex assortment of these.
There are, however, a number of problems with this particular defi-
nition of transdisciplinarity. As an approach, it is rather better under-
stood as a call to resistance against disciplinary oppression than as a
conception of interdisciplinarity. Its ambitious objective hides a narrow
focus. In stipulating transdisciplinarity as entailing the overthrow of
established disciplines, indeed of the very bases of scientific and social
scientific knowledge, it obfuscates a more general notion of transdis-
ciplinary exchange as any engagement prompted by the perceived
overlap of a limited number of disciplines. Transdisciplinary cross-ferti-
lization simply involves the merging of disciplinary approaches and/or
the development of novel approaches within a specific domain, gener-
ally at the margins of the discipline, which overlap with others (Dogan
and Pahre, 1990). It is a partial transformation, with a wide range of
potential implications for the adjacent established disciplines, some-
times leaving them relatively unaffected, sometimes being a good deal
more subversive. Such transdisciplinary projects are readily identified
in the combination of the names of disciplines, such as social psychol-
ogy, political economy and historical sociology. The radical conception
of transdisciplinarity is but one extreme variant of this notion, encom-
passing all disciplines entirely.
In both these definitions of transdisciplinarity, however, the concepts,
methods and theories of the discipline(s) that are being transformed are
either rejected outright or are unseated from their disciplinary hierarchy

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42 David Long

and contextualized among a wider set of approaches. As a result, from


the perspective of a paradigmatic discipline and its understanding
of the unity of disciplinary knowledge, this transformation will be
received, not so much as the incorporation of innovative approaches,
but as an antidisciplinary assault on academic standards and agreed
procedures. This suggests yet more problems with the radical interpreta-
tion of transdisciplinarity with regard to the newness of the approaches
and also to their counter-hegemonic character. The newness of theories
and approaches seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder. That
is, while the hope is for new theory, in most instances transdisciplinary
exchange involves the application of theory from one discipline onto
the field of another, or the borrowing of concepts from one by another.
So, the theories and methods may be new in what might be described
as the receiving discipline, but are likely well known and established
in the other discipline. Similarly, the methods and concepts may chal-
lenge the disciplinary hierarchy of the receiving discipline but be a part
of the recognized mix of approaches of the other.
Transdisciplinarity is better understood, then, as a spectrum of pos-
sible interdisciplinary interventions. The form it takes will depend
significantly on the character of the disciplines themselves, whether
paradigmatic or plural, and on the relationship between them. As a
result, the form can range from a radical transformation to a more
marginal cross-fertilization of disciplinary approaches, from a critical
assault on dominant paradigms to an imperial takeover by a dominant
approach, from the creation of genuinely novel approaches and con-
cepts to the application of old disciplinary knowledge to new interdis-
ciplinary domains.
In IR, the radical transdisciplinary agenda is exemplified by Immanuel
Wallerstein (1974, p. 11), who in describing his approach to the study of
modern world system argues that, ‘When one studies a social system,
the classical lines of division within the social sciences are meaningless.
Anthropology, economics, political science, sociology – and history –
are divisions of the discipline anchored in a liberal conception of the
state and its relation to functional and geographical sectors of the social
order. . . . I am not calling for a multidisciplinary approach to the study
of social systems, but for a unidisciplinary approach’. Wallerstein’s
call for a single overarching approach to supersede separate, narrow
and ideologically biased disciplinary paradigms, is an example of the
transdisciplinary impulse to integrate, to cross disciplinary bridges,
which impulse when taken to an extreme seeks to end the division and
plurality of disciplines entirely.

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 43

Apparently, at the other end of the transdisciplinary spectrum lies


disciplinary imperialism, which has sometimes been more neutrally
called crossdisciplinarity. This is the application of paradigmatic meth-
ods and theories of one discipline on the field of another, such as the
application of neoclassical economic models to explain a variety of
social behaviour and outcomes very far from the typical concerns with
the economy, or in the case of historical sociology, in which sociology
provides the methods and theories and history, is the data set/subject
matter. With the direct transfer of concepts or methods from one disci-
pline to another, disciplinary imperialism seems the antithesis of meth-
odological and theoretical pluralism. This may be a good thing – after
all, commensurability is valuable and, ultimately, there are some who
hope for a unity of all science, and in disciplinary imperialism we may
be seeing the steps towards this in the social sciences.
But from the point of view of interdisciplinarity, there is obviously
a problem. The assertion of superior methodology and theory means
that the only question for the imperial discipline is its scope – eco-
nomics no longer is only concerned with markets and firms, but can
explain everything from international conflict to marital relationships.
Postmodernism becomes a superordinate critical study of everything
from the local to the global. By contrast, invaded disciplines provide lit-
tle more than data sets, issue areas, or context – the empirical domain,
the field, on which the theoretical paradigm operates. There is little or
no sense of sharing of disciplinary insights or approaches – rather a con-
notation of epistemological warfare and conquest. Though disciplinary
imperialism is usually associated with the application of paradigmatic
disciplinary approaches beyond their traditional disciplinary bounds,
insofar as critical transdisciplinarity is founded on a particular theoreti-
cal tradition, such as neo-Marxism or post-colonialism, the pretensions
to being a marginalized discourse, or intimations of the pluralism of
perspectives from multiple disciplines, seem more apparent than real;
the purported critical and counter-hegemonic move seems very much
like disciplinary imperialism.
Any form of transdisciplinarity will appear as being heterodox within
traditional disciplines, however, and so they can expect to be the subject
of rigorous critique from proponents of orthodox methods and theo-
ries. In the end, the (inter)disciplinary character of disciplinary imperi-
alism, and indeed of transdisciplinarity more generally, depends on the
outcome of the exchange between disciplines. If it tends towards the
ascendance or reinforcement of a paradigmatic disciplinary hierarchy,
it is hard to see this as legitimately interdisciplinary. If, on the other

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44 David Long

hand, the result is more plural (or multidisciplinary), then it is more


akin to interdisciplinarity: in short, if there are new theories, methods,
and concepts, not simply the application of already established disci-
plinary approaches, or if there is a tolerance of a variety of approaches
within a domain as a result of transdisciplinary exchange.
The emergence of feminist economics illustrates some of the travails
of transdisciplinarity, even in the context of a more limited agenda. In
institutional terms, feminist economics is the encounter of multidis-
ciplinary gender studies with economics, and which has pretensions
to being a paradigmatic discipline. In economics departments, femi-
nist research has been accused of not being economics. This is because,
methodologically, feminist economics challenges the dominant neo-
classical approach and does not rely solely on mathematical models
and/or statistical testing, but also involves the use of the qualitative
research and case methods. In addition, feminist economics poses con-
ceptual, even ontological, challenges to the discipline. In mainstream
neoclassical economics, when it is considered at all, gender is conceived
as a dichotomous variable of individual physiological identity and the
household is commonly ‘black-boxed’ (Woolley, 1993). Adherents to
the paradigm of individual choice subject to material constraints have a
difficult time comprehending gender as a social structure or as a social
relation of inequality, and they have little time for theorizing about this
key concept, let alone considering the notion that its meaning might
be contested.
Unsurprisingly, transdisciplinarity is rather easier to incorporate
within plural disciplines, as they are more flexibly constituted and
more open to new approaches or new uses for established theories.
Disciplines like sociology or political science have been more accommo-
dating to feminist economics, not only because the forms of knowledge
of each are not at odds with it (as appears to be the case with neoclas-
sical economics), but also because there are already multiple paradigms
and competing perspectives within them rather than a single dominant
hierarchy.
The resistance of the disciplinary paradigm of neoclassical economics
to the feminist challenge and its acceptance in sociology and political
science has had an unfortunate consequence. While feminist econom-
ics began as an intradisciplinary challenge to dominant approaches
and concerns within economics which drew upon other disciplines for
innovative concepts and methods, it has come to be dominated by soci-
ologists, political scientists, and scholars from other disciplines address-
ing political economy (Woolley, 2005). This not only has institutional

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 45

implications – feminist economics is associated with departments of


sociology and political science and institutes of political economy or
gender studies, not economics – but it has also affected the nature of the
study. The methods and theories of economics have progressively been
excluded as feminist economics has shifted to feminist political econ-
omy. As a result the challenge is effectively marginalized in economics
and is channelled into the same limited range of approaches in political
science and sociology. A similar pattern can be discerned in interna-
tional relations and international studies – resistance to transdiscipli-
narity in paradigmatic disciplines, acceptance in plural ones, with the
same unfortunate methodological and theoretical limitations as a con-
sequence.
It is clear that transdisciplinarity is implicated not only in the question
of what and whose approaches, but also in who uses them. Disciplinary
imperialism is the application by economists of economic models to the
domains of other disciplines. By contrast, Klein (1990, p. 85) and many
others have applauded interdisciplinary borrowing, the use of concepts
from other disciplines to help explain one’s own discipline’s research
questions, as we see with the original purposes of feminist economics
in which concepts of gender and sociological methods are used by econ-
omists to explain economic outcomes and some economic phenomena
commonly neglected in the mainstream of the discipline.13
A number of IR scholars have borrowed concepts from disciplines
other than their own (usually political science), for example, in their
different ways, Robert Keohane (1984), Stephen Hobden (1998), and
Alexander Wendt (1992). A conceptual, methodological and/or theoreti-
cal tolerance and openness are the keys to transdisciplinarity as opposed
to (cross)disciplinary imperialism. At the same time we need to look
beyond the individual researcher or research group to the departmental
and wider academic context. The origin of each of these IR scholars in
political science is not insignificant, nor without implications for this
mode of interdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary projects in which all the
participants derive their training from one discipline should make us
extremely wary, because the theoretical agenda is being set by that dis-
cipline, and no amount of borrowing will undo the disciplinary imposi-
tion this implies.
There have been many transdisciplinary interventions in inter-
national relations. Here I consider one example, international politi-
cal economy (IPE).14 The exact nature of the transdisciplinary study
of political economy is far from settled, and this lack of consensus is
reflected in IR. Despite its historiographical origins as the forerunner

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46 David Long

of economics,15 political economy today often has a connotation of


being a critical, radical and perhaps even subversive approach in eco-
nomics and political science, as well as in sociology, geography and
public policy. This radical interpretation is explicit in the neo-Marxian
and critical approaches advanced in Studies in Political Economy, a jour-
nal that bills itself as ‘an interdisciplinary journal committed to the
publication of original work in the various traditions of socialist politi-
cal economy. Researchers and analysts within these traditions seek to
understand how political, economic and cultural processes and strug-
gles interact to shape and reshape the conditions of people’s lives.’ This
transdisciplinary political economy is not tied to economic analysis of
the economy and political analysis of politics and polities, or some sort
of merger of the two, because disciplinary paradigms fail to account for
the interpenetrated and intrinsically interconnected political economy.
Instead, a new synthesis, or rather a newly prominent set of approaches,
is required, overtly seeking the overthrow of traditional disciplinary
paradigms.
For economists, however, contemporary political economy is some-
thing else completely, as it commonly conveys to them the applica-
tion of economic models, theories and methods to politics and other
domains of the social sciences besides economics. According to
Eichengreen (1998, p. 353), ‘Economists are notorious for their intel-
lectual imperialism, feeling no compulsion about applying their kit of
tools to everything from dental hygiene to nuclear war’. In Hodgson’s
(1994) admittedly critical view, ‘ “economic imperialism” implies that
the core assumptions of neoclassical economics can and should be
applied to a wide variety of fields of study, including politics, interna-
tional relations, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and even
biology, as well as economics itself. It is based on the belief that the idea
of “rational economic man” is appropriate to social science as a whole.’
Examples include economic models of democracy and applications of
rational choice as explanations of social and political behaviour (Downs,
1957), Krugman’s assertion of the importance of economic modelling
in economic geography (Fujita, Krugman and Venables, 1999), and the
best-selling book, Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, 2005), an exemplar
of the Chicago School approach that applies economic methods and
theory to explain a wide range of social phenomena.
The editors of Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) (1994,
p. 1) acknowledge that outside international relations, political economy
has a number of meanings, and they note the contributions to political
economy from institutionalist economics, development economics and

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 47

neo-Marxist political economy (1994, pp. 5–11). Yet, they identify IPE as
initially an offshoot of and response to the narrowness of the political
science of international relations, a challenge to the narrow discipli-
nary focus on high political and diplomatic concerns, particularly the
use of military force and the influence or otherwise of various intergov-
ernmental organizations. IPE begins, in this view, as an intradiscipli-
nary undertaking looking to borrow concepts from other disciplines to
improve explanation in academic international relations.
In a classic early statement of the mainstream American political
science conception of IPE, Robert Gilpin (1987, p. 3) suggests that ‘an
understanding of trade, monetary affairs, and economic development
requires the integration of the theoretical insights of the disciplines
of economics and political science. Too often policy issues are ana-
lyzed as if the realms of economics and politics can be isolated from
one another. . . . ’ While recognizing the importance of specialization,
he argues for ‘a larger and integrated theoretical framework of political
economy. . . . ’ (Gilpin, 1987, p. 5) because ‘[t]ransformations in the real
world have made economics and politics more relevant to one another
than in the past and have forced the recognition that our theoretical
understanding of their interactions has always been inadequate, over-
simplified, and arbitrarily limited by disciplinary boundaries’ (1987, p.
3). This transdisciplinary agenda starts from the perspective of the dis-
ciplines, allows them their special place insofar as their theory works,
identifies an area of overlap (primarily in policy), and suggests an inte-
gration based to some degree on each discipline.16
In applying their models and theories, by contrast, economists not
only manifest a sense of theoretical and methodological superiority but
also express a frustration with, or dismiss, theory and methods from
other disciplines. Barry Eichengreen (1999, p. 354) summarizes this
nicely when he argues that ‘the strength of economics is the comple-
mentary and mutually-supporting character of theoretical and empirical
work. The . . . assumptions and models that have survived and become
part of this common theoretical core are those which deliver testable
propositions that find systematic support in the data. . . . [Whereas in
IR, t]heory-based propositions do not lend themselves comfortably to
empirical verification and refutation. . . . As a consequence, research in
international relations has not converged on a core of common theo-
retical assumptions and an arsenal of commonly-accepted empirical
techniques’. Among the many examples of economists’ work in interna-
tional relations are those by Todd Sandler (1980; 2001), such as Enders
and Sandler (2006), The Political Economy of Terrorism, and Sandler and

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48 David Long

Hartley, (1999) The Political Economy of NATO, by Barry Eichengreen


(1996; 1997) on international political economy and economic history;
and that of Paul Collier on a variety of topics concerning development,
conflict and issues in the political economy of international relations
(Bannon and Collier, 2003; Collier and Sambanis, 2005).
Rational choice is not, however, the only example of the transdiscipli-
nary use of economic concepts in international relations. In developing
the idea of global public goods, Kaul and her colleagues (1999, p. xxiv)
apply a concept from public economics to policy questions in global
governance, on the way drawing on insights from political science and
development studies. The transdisciplinary aspect of their undertak-
ing is the borrowing of concepts and theories, not simply bilaterally,
so to speak, among politics and economics, but multilaterally, across
a number of disciplines. ‘Without all of these different literatures . . . ’,
they write, ‘it would not have been possible to undertake the multidisci-
plinary and multilevel analysis we are attempting here. We are seeking
to combine these literatures because the different issues they address
have begun to intersect. Today’s global challenges cannot be adequately
understood by relying on any one strand of literature’.
In sum, IPE reflects the diverse and even contradictory aspects of
transdisciplinarity. It includes everything from academic imperialist –
and effectively disciplinary rather than interdisciplinary discourses –
to the more open and plural model advanced by those who combine
transdisciplinary exchange with multidisciplinary context. In all the
examples, transdisciplinarity is coloured by the nature of the disci-
plines, whether paradigmatic or plural, and by the substance of the
fields. The aspiration to new theory and the replacement of discipli-
nary paradigms is often embraced in plural disciplines and resisted in
paradigmatic ones. Where it is accepted in paradigmatic disciplines,
it generally takes the form of the application of disciplinary concepts,
methods and theory onto other fields, as is the case of applications of
rational choice.
We should nevertheless be cautious regarding claims to transdisci-
plinary novelty or critique, since newness and subaltern character are
hardly reflected in the disciplinary origin of most of this work. Even the
plural model advocated by RIPE appears to omit (or deliberately exclude)
economic analysis, a fact abundantly clear not only in RIPE but other
political economy journals with the notable exception of the Journal
of Political Economy, a disciplinary economics journal in which para-
digmatic dominance is evident. RIPE is to be ‘a point of convergence
for political economists, international relations scholars, geographers,

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 49

and sociologists’. That is, for political scientists, geographers, histori-


ans, and sociologists, political economy means the use of any theory or
disciplinary approach other than the traditional neoclassical economic
paradigm for explanation of economic outcomes, as well as the deploy-
ment of heterodox economic theory. When it entails the application of
knowledge/theories from many disciplines other than the established
discipline, this transdisciplinarity is of course deliberately counter-
hegemonic (Gill and Law, 1988). Yet, excluding certain disciplines is
far from innocent, being instead tantamount to what might be called
antidisciplinarity, the conceptual twin of disciplinary imperialism, the
notion that any approach other than disciplinarily dominant ones are
valid.
All too often, the rhetoric of inclusiveness and integration can mask
the exclusion or marginalization of paradigmatic disciplinary knowl-
edge. For the journal Global Society, the ‘multitude of disciplines’
includes ‘international relations, political science, political philosophy,
international political economy, international law, international con-
flict analysis and sociology’, while seemingly excluding economics and
history, among other subjects. In this light, multidisciplinarity, for all
its relativism, is more tolerant, accommodating and, ultimately, more
interdisciplinary.
Once we shift our focus from the individual researcher, research
project or group, and concentrate on the disciplinary contexts, it is
evident that a multiple and genuinely inclusive character is vital for
transdisciplinary exchange. Thus, though transdisciplinarity typically
begins as an intradisciplinary problematic that draws upon other dis-
ciplines, to be transdisciplinary entails not only theoretical and meth-
odological pluralism of the research but of the researchers. Ultimately,
a project entirely populated by, say, political scientists is purportedly
interdisciplinary because no amount of disciplinary boundary crossing
constitutes interdisciplinarity when all participants start from the same
disciplinary beginnings (Warleigh-Lack and Cini, 2009). Borrowing
concepts and theories may be good for individual researchers and
research projects. In institutional terms, if one discipline predomi-
nates, the agenda of that discipline will lead, whether that discipline
is itself paradigmatic or plural (though it is more likely to be plural
since, as observed earlier, paradigmatic disciplines tend to be resistant
to borrowing).
For instance, Merelman (1979) argues that political psychology has
been hampered by its lack of integration and institutionalization, in
good part because its agenda is framed by political science. While

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50 David Long

rather underestimating the influence of its own relatively paradigmatic


disciplinary context on the limited engagement by psychologists, he
observes the political science driven theoretical problematic ‘has dis-
couraged us from employing certain methodologies (experimentation,
participant observation, psychophysiological research, clinical investi-
gation, family therapy) which apparently lack political “payoff” ’. He
suggests that ‘political psychology will come of age only when we ask
of political science as much as political science has asked of us, and
what we must ask is that political science recognize the full range of
psychological life as a legitimate object of investigation by political sci-
entists’ (Merelman, 1979, pp. 107–8). Despite its more plural character,
the disciplinary limits of political science render this a rather unlikely
prospect (Ross, 2009).
Invariably, transdisciplinarity in IR has been dominated and led by
scholars from one discipline. Indeed, even the trends in IR toward either
disciplinarity or interdisciplinarity, the issues raised and suggestions for
what needs to change – whether it be dealing with the overly narrow
concerns of core scholarship, paradigmatic hierarchies, or the uncivil
and oft-times mistranslated bickering among disputing factions – have
reflected norms and debates within political science since IR was effec-
tively subsumed within it in the 1940s and 1950s (for example, see
Caporaso, 1997). As a result, many of the so-called interdisciplinary
initiatives are either entirely intradisciplinary, that is, in fact simply
collaborations of political scientists, or are serial and largely discon-
nected calls for closer bilateral relations between political science and
another established discipline, be it history, law or economics. Global
Society is again a good example of the first: it bills itself as an interdisci-
plinary journal of international relations, yet all the editors are politi-
cal scientists; numerous purportedly interdisciplinary special issues of
IR journals reflect the latter, such as the special issue of International
Organization on the legalization of world politics, that is, how interna-
tional law has become more relevant for the latter.
Transdisciplinarity is ultimately a methodological and theoretical
move based on challenges to established disciplines. As a consequence,
within IR transdisciplinary scholarship tends to be oriented to aca-
demic disciplinary concerns. Applied to the wider context of academic
IR, however, it problematizes the relationship among the various stud-
ies of international relations and challenges the traditional disciplinary
selection. International studies need not, and probably should not, be
founded simply on learning about law, economics, political science,
sociology and their respective approaches applied to IR, but rather may,

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 51

and probably should, draw on political economy, historical sociology,


or social psychology, among others.
But though it promises different transdisciplinary combinations and
novel methodological or theoretical approaches, the agenda is still
shaped by the current academic administrative structures, as we see
in IR with the continued dominance of political science and political
scientists. In the social sciences, this has been manifested in the reas-
sertion of disciplinarity, as transdisciplinary projects are reincorporated
into one or both of the component disciplines, to a large part the fate
of social psychology. This is not so much the consequence of a persist-
ent reliance on adjacent disciplines as it is a result of the lack of focus,
or uncertainty, in terms of a field. The same is true in IR: international
relations is not the theoretical focus or problem of transdisciplinary
projects, and because of this, transdisciplinarity cannot take us to the
heart of what IR is or to the relationship of international relations and
international studies.
The limits of transdisciplinarity in IR are the reason that the pro-
posal made by Margaret Hermann (1998) must perforce fail. Hermann’s
careful diagnosis of international relations considers the wide range of
approaches, schools of thought and disciplinary outlooks in interna-
tional studies. She is concerned that the cacophony and mutual incom-
prehension are inimical to the development of theory and the advance
of policy-relevant and effective analysis. She hopes, instead, to build
dialogue among the various schools of thought in international rela-
tions through a transdisciplinary focus on specific problems in IR. With
a background in political psychology, it is not surprising that her focus
is on decision-making and the basis of cooperation. Her proposal can-
not resolve the difficulties that she identifies, however, since it does not
address what international relations is and how it relates to the wider
constellation of subjects making up international studies.
According to the editors of RIPE, IPE should have multidisciplinary
scope, be moved by an interdisciplinary spirit and use transdisciplinary
methodologies. This could be a template for interdisciplinary interna-
tional relations as well. But what is interdisciplinary spirit? The stimu-
lus to interdisciplinary exchange and borrowing is a sense that there
are problems with the current ordering and structuring of the social
sciences. Multidisciplinary international studies together add specific
perspectives on international relations but provide no integrated pic-
ture. Transdisciplinary approaches challenge the content of interna-
tional studies but, in integrating and transforming disciplines, these
approaches fail to address international relations as such.

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52 David Long

These two variants of interdisciplinarity appear to be not only differ-


ent from each other, but at odds: one accepts established disciplines and
their boundaries, the other rejects them; one embraces methodological
pluralism, the other either modifies or rejects disciplines of established
disciplines. Yet, both multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity begin
with established disciplines rather than with international relations;
they are academic responses and, thus, institutionally constrained. As
a result, neither provides a basis for understanding international rela-
tions, nor for understanding the relationship of international relations
and international studies. What is missing from both is a sense that
interdisciplinarity is not simply the opposite of disciplinarity, but that
interdisciplinarity changes disciplinarity. What is needed is to collapse
the (inter)disciplinary dichotomy and embrace the dynamic of learning
and change.

International relations as a (failed?) neodiscipline

A neodiscipline appears when there is a coherent field of study, but it


crosses traditional disciplinary lines and, so, does not fit comfortably
within an established discipline. Unlike multidisciplinarity, a study is
neodisciplinary inasmuch as: it adds a new discipline to those already
established; it represents a new conception of discipline; and it chal-
lenges the demarcation of disciplines and interdisciplinary studies.
While multidisciplinarity helps us understand the character of inter-
national studies, and transdisciplinarity addresses the need for novel
theory and methods, neodisciplinarity goes to the heart of the study of
international relations. It is implicated in the debates as to whether IR
exists as a discipline at all, to what extent it is autonomous with regard
to other social science disciplines, what constitutes its subject matter,
and whether there is a core to international studies.
There are two sources of neodisciplinarity. Neodisciplinarity is first
of all the product of practice. It is a response to the imperative to sys-
tematization, routinization and professionalization of a particular and
arguably distinct social practice. Insofar as there is a perceived need for
more specialized investigation or for training in a field of study, neodis-
ciplinary research and teaching programs have emerged. Because the
study of the practice overlaps established academic divisions, a neodis-
cipline takes the institutional form of a discipline nested within a series
of multidisciplinary satellites. For example, business, with (neo)discipli-
nary studies in accounting, auditing, and management, also involves
studies such as finance, industrial organization, and marketing, which

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 53

are related to economics, sociology, and communications and media


studies, respectively. Other examples in the social sciences could be
argued to include journalism and media studies, criminology and legal
studies and, as we will see, IR and international studies, as well as any
number of professional programs.
Neodisciplinarity, secondly, derives from a realization that there are
enduring and persistent aspects of social life that are not adequately
addressed in the traditional disciplines, but rather fall between the
gaps among them. Because it crosses a number of them, transdisci-
plinarity is insufficient; since it requires a focus, multidisciplinarity
does not suffice.17 Neodisciplines emerge as a result of the sustained
interrogation and conceptualization of those inadequately addressed
aspects. Examples of such neodisciplines include feminism/gen-
der studies, ecology/environmental studies, criminology, peace and
conflict studies, and international relations. Each involves a core of
studies around which there are a variety of other disciplinary contri-
butions. For example, gender studies centres on conceptions of gen-
der as a social institution, practice, identity and/or inequality. While
such conceptions can be explored in part in departments of sociol-
ogy, psychology, or history, as well as departments in the humanities,
neodisciplinary gender studies requires more than those disciplinary
fragments in order to be understood comprehensively and holisti-
cally, an approach that is impossible in line departments. Both of
these forms derive from the imperative to teach, to establish a pro-
gram of learning, rather than simply conduct research, and this is the
source of the perceived need for a core study around which teaching/
learning will cohere.
Neodisciplinarity challenges the mythical histories, identities and
securities of disciplines because it insists on different criteria for the
division and creation of disciplines, suggests the possibility of the emer-
gence of novel intellectual configurations and posits the potentially
limitless proliferation of disciplines. Lest this be considered an idealis-
tic mandate that will lead to academic anarchy, it is worth considering
the natural sciences. It is commonly believed that the model for the
development of paradigmatic disciplines in the social sciences derives
from a particular reading of specialization in the natural sciences: the
disciplines of economics, sociology, psychology, political science mir-
ror those of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. Yet, such a
view of the natural sciences is breathtakingly unrealistic and indeed
mythical. The history and development of the natural sciences in fact
illustrates the emergence of neodisciplines in the form of the so-called

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54 David Long

applied disciplines, engineering, medicine, architecture, archaeology,


palaeontology, the forensic sciences and so on.
The history of the social sciences also shows that the disciplines that
we take for granted today originated from a concern with an aspect
of social life. For example, both politics and economics were consid-
ered professions and distinct fields of study before separate disciplinary
institutions were founded. In this respect, the emergence of today’s
neodisciplines is no different from this earlier disciplinary develop-
ment. Simply thought of as new disciplines, then, neodisciplinarity
perhaps seems unremarkable. Yet, insofar as neodisciplines refuse the
dichotomy of inter/disciplinarity, it is considerably more radical than
it might at first sight appear. Because the basis of their disciplinary
foundations transgresses the distinctions of established disciplines, and
because these new disciplines have not completely supplanted the old
ones but rather have simply overlaid them, these are not in fact just new
disciplines, they are interdisciplines both in their internal constitution
and in their relations with other disciplines.
Internally, there is generally some measure of methodological plural-
ism, whether it is in interrogating the concept or explicating the prac-
tice, though in the latter case it must be admitted that this will depend
on the extent of professionalization. In terms of their methodological
and theoretical pluralism, neodisciplines based on conceptualization
rather than practice do not seem to differ greatly from plural disciplines
such as political science, geography, or sociology. Externally, neodisci-
plines are a set within a multidisciplinary complex of related studies.
Neodisciplinarity entails both intellectual and institutional integra-
tion and development. Whether in the end it does institutionalize into
separate fora, departments, associations, and so forth, depends on a
number of factors: whether the field is indeed distinguishable as a sepa-
rate study, the extent to which it cannot simply be subsumed within
an already existing discipline (that is, if subdisciplinary status results
in marginalization), whether multidisciplinary study would be an ade-
quate approach and, in the case of neodisciplines based on practice,
the salience and socio-economic power of the profession. Some stud-
ies do not in fact consolidate or concentrate. Instead they remain sub-
disciplinary and/or multidisciplinary, whether or not this involves any
core disciplinary study. This has been the fate of many of the studies
conceptualized around location and/or identity, such as urban studies,
American studies, European studies, or even the catch-all, area studies,
as well as population studies/demography, and in a different way, the
study of industrial relations (overtaken, to a large extent, by another

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 55

neodisciplinary configuration, business). The current predominantly


subdisciplinary locus of the study of international relations noted
above, as the conventional term for a subfield of political science, sug-
gests that it has also failed to cohere as a neodiscipline.
The two variants of neodisciplinarity have significant but different
implications for the academic organization of IR and what that study
entails. For some, the status of international relations as a discipline and/
or as the core to the broader complex of international studies stands or
falls on the identification of a discernable social practice that required
dedicated study in its own institutional context because otherwise it
would be insufficiently accommodated under the present organization
of the social sciences. According to Aron (cited in Hoffmann, 1977),
international relations was the business of soldiers and diplomats. Thus
diplomatic and/or military practice must be the core of international
relations scholarship. This appears to be the familiar realist refrain and
as a result vulnerable to accusations of narrowness. Yet, a neodiscipli-
nary view of IR need not accept this particular view of the relevant
practice – who it is that is engaged in that practice and what that prac-
tice entails.
C.A.W. Manning (1962), for instance, believed that the study of inter-
national relations must begin with and be centred on an understanding
of international society, for him a society of states. This led Manning to
argue for an IR discipline that focused on diplomatic relations set in the
context of an international system constituted by not only power but
also by understandings of law (1951; 1954; 1955). On the one hand, this
generated a rather narrow study that Manning idiosyncratically called
diplomatics. But it also had wider implications, first in this study’s the
relationship with and dependence upon other disciplines, that is, inter-
national studies – to understand international (aka diplomatic) rela-
tions one needed to understand, for example, international economics,
among other things (Manning, 1954; Long, 2005), Second, Manning’s
conception of IR as a discipline also entailed reflection upon the fun-
damental characteristics of the international, what he called social cos-
mology (Long, 2010).
Reflection on the practice of international relations moves us towards
concept-oriented neodisciplinarity. The neodisciplinary study of IR
implies a holistic conception of the international, a core set of concepts
and methods, considering not just those relations among agents in the
world beyond nation-states but the nature of the divided global social
system as a totality. Instead, at present the order of knowledge precisely
marginalizes the international. Though it is a feature of a number of

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56 David Long

disciplines, it is considered outside the normal in each of them: it dis-


appears completely in some, such as psychology and sociology; it is
rendered in a narrowly technical way in others, such as law, economics,
and to some extent history; and it is understood in terms of what it is
not in political science – that is, IR is the political discourse of anarchy,
the absence of political order. Always at the margin of the social science
disciplines, the international is at the centre of none of them. Therefore,
multidisciplinarity is no solution to this marginalization because many
margins do not equal one centre in intellectual terms.
By contrast, a neodiscipline of IR makes the international the essen-
tial background to, or focal point of, analysis. For example, Quincy
Wright (1955) argues for reflection on the international and the need to
synthesize the contributions from the diversity of international studies,
suggesting fields as a concept to meld together diverse lessons from vari-
ous disciplinary locations. Alternatively, Buzan and Little (2000; 2001)
have proposed the concept of international system as the intellectual
focus, and they explicitly call for the development of interdisciplinary
theory in order to explain developments therein.
Neodisciplinarity implies some measure of institutionalization as well.
And as such it is primarily the concern of those involved in instruction
in IR; neodisciplinarity is a concern for those who have to teach or have
to construct academic programs around a theme that does not sit eas-
ily within the traditional disciplinary allocation. Because disciplinary
institutionalization influences the production of theory and analysis,
it is at least arguable that the appearance of a few departments of inter-
national relations in the UK was a key factor in the specific shape and
focus of the English school, as also the presence of graduate schools of
international affairs and policy institutes shapes the professional and
foreign policy oriented study in the US.18 However, as Ashworth (2009)
notes, IR has hardly become institutionalized separately, despite the
growth of specialized journals and the success of academic associations.
In terms of academic departments, as noted earlier, IR has been subdis-
ciplinary (see also Strange, 1995). This failed, or failing, neodisciplinar-
ity suggests an explanation of the paucity and poverty of international
theory that is rather different to the explanation given by Wight (1960),
but it nevertheless reflects a distinction between international theory
similar to the one he suggested, or the reflection on what international
relations is, and the more disciplinary theory of international relations,
where its explanatory frameworks account for what occurs internation-
ally. The former will be a focus of a neodisciplinary study, whereas it
will be of marginal interest to a subfield of a wider discipline. Its content

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 57

need not, indeed it should not, reflect the disciplinary norms of any
traditional discipline, but should be constructed to address questions
regarding the international. It is also linked to a variety of other disci-
plines and studies because it is a cross-cutting practice and/or concept.
A neodisciplinary IR re-raises its pretensions as an autonomous dis-
cipline and, thus, the spectre of an isolated discipline cut off from
wider theoretical currents in the social sciences, especially since inter-
national relations has frequently been criticized for being theoreti-
cally underdeveloped and backward (Brown, 1992). One element of the
present so-called crisis of IR is the dissatisfaction with the narrowness
of the grounds upon which IR is based, namely, the traditional view of
international relations specifically as diplomacy, foreign policy, trade
and war.
Previous neodisciplinary projects – such as those similar to Manning’s –
have been accused of isolating the study of international relations. Such
a view is based on a misunderstanding, it seems to me. Conceiving inter-
national relations as a neodiscipline has implications for not just what is
in the field but what is out, for not just the internal constitution of the
subject but its external relations. A neodisciplinary IR should simultane-
ously encourage wider (as in different disciplinary connections) and yet
more focused analysis of the international. For some this will certainly
appear as a narrowing of the agenda, but this is because the agenda
of the subdiscipline rests on a blurred reflection or a distant echo of
political science, a very different agenda from that of a study of inter-
national relations set within the wider context of international studies.
A neodiscipline would be open to global sociology and international
law, not just world politics.19 By contrast, given departmental structures,
the currently established subdiscipline of IR/international politics must
perforce be linked to studies of national politics, political theory and so
on, thus isolating the study from wider currents related to the interna-
tional in the social sciences. In this setting, openings to economics or
even political economy may be less obvious; so, too, are connections to
international law or diplomatic history or even anthropology and cul-
tural studies. In short, the problem of isolation is a product, not of IR’s
disciplinarity, but of its subdisciplinarity.
The neodiscipline of international relations might be associated with
a narrowly state-centric perspective, but it need not be. It might be asso-
ciated with official and public practice, but it need not be. An updated
version of traditional realism would focus on international public pol-
icy, for instance, examining not just the traditional elements of the
foreign policies of states but the international dimensions of health,

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58 David Long

environment, citizenship and so on. However, reflection on the inter-


national might go much further than that. If we shift the view of the
practice of international relations from the centre and the state to the
borders of communities and the crossing of those borders by people,
goods and ideas, then international relations takes on an altogether dif-
ferent look.
With respect to international studies as a whole, neodisciplinarity
puts a new discipline at the centre; it provides coherence and focus as
opposed to multidisciplinary diversity and plurality. At its best, neodis-
ciplinarity means an escape from the endless and fruitless pendulum
swings between disciplinary concentration and interdisciplinary diver-
sity. It addresses the lack of focus and the loose eclecticism that afflicts
multidisciplinarity, while avoiding the criticisms of the isolation of dis-
ciplinary autonomy. However, it does not settle what that core study
should be. From the broader perspective of international studies, the
centre could be any number of already established disciplinary or neo-
disciplinary configurations.
The different perspectives from international studies and interna-
tional relations is just one problem that neodisciplinarity poses for aca-
demic IR. The practical and conceptual bases of neodisciplinary IR are
in tension, and this is implicated in the debate about the scope and
character of international relations. The practical/professional vari-
ant, reflected in public policy institutes and realist scholarship, takes
for granted the very concepts, and in particular the international, that
the conceptually oriented neodisciplinarity seeks to reflect upon and
problematize.
There are concerns that neodisciplinary IR would be redundant in
any case as it can adequately be encompassed in some subdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary configuration – that is, specifically, with interna-
tional politics as the core study. How different, it might be asked, would
a separate international relations possibly be? Whatever the academic
study of international relations is, it must begin with reflection upon
the international in theory and practice. If this concern is regarded as
unimportant or incoherent, say because it is believed in some quarters
that globalization renders international relations marginal to negligi-
ble, then neodisciplinary international relations will fail. Given the
history of disciplinary institutionalization and academic development,
we might agree with Buzan and Little that IR has thus far failed as an
intellectual project. However, I would argue that the logic of their argu-
ment suggests that this is a consequence of the failure of neodiscipli-
narity thus far. Institutionalized as a neodisciplinary study, by contrast,

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 59

international relations need not fail, but it must be interdisciplinary


to flourish. IR’s interdisciplinary future is not simply in the embrace
of multiple international studies nor of the transdisciplinary challenge
to established disciplines, it is in understanding what it means to be a
novel interdiscipline.

Interdisciplinarities in international relations

This chapter has been motivated by a conviction that the structure of


academic knowledge shapes and limits the possibilities of knowledge
production in IR; that is, it matters whether or not a subject is consid-
ered a discipline in its own right, and the manner in which a subject
is or is not (inter)disciplinary. Ideally, teaching and research should be
curiosity driven and problem led, not directed by structures of, or the
trends in, academic organization. Disciplines are not carved in stone,
nor is interdisciplinarity a good in and of itself. Still, disciplinarity and,
to a lesser degree, interdisciplinarity influence the way research ques-
tions are asked, delimit appropriate answers to research anomalies and
social problems, and give shape to teaching programmes in terms of
curriculum development and determining what is suitable for graduate
education only, or at the undergraduate level, and why. Each of these
impacts international relations as an academic pursuit.
Interdisciplinarity is going to impinge upon and be interpreted differ-
ently depending on academic context; that is, it has different implica-
tions depending on whether the disciplines involved are relatively more
paradigmatic or plural. In addition, interdisciplinarity in general and
the particular modes affect individual researchers and research groups
differently from the way they impact disciplines and departments or
the overall setting of academic organization and resourcing. The three
modes reflect different reactions to current disciplinary establishment:
multidisciplinarity accepts and builds on disciplinary divisions and
specialization; transdisciplinarity integrates and/or transcends the divi-
sions; and neodisciplinarity represents the changing terms on which
disciplines are divided, and the developing character of (disciplinary)
knowledge.
Interdisciplinarity is primarily about academic organization, and
as such it directs our attention as much toward teaching, to academic
bureaucracy and resourcing, as to the intellectual focus and direction of
research. The different forms of interdisciplinarity are favoured by dif-
ferent constituencies in the academic world. Multidisciplinarity appeals
to academic bureaucracies, funding organizations (both public and

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60 David Long

private) as well as university administrations and conference organizers


(Moran, 2006). For bureaucrats, interdisciplinarity equates to the bring-
ing together of a number of disciplines and perspectives, and the conse-
quent dispersal or dilution of disciplinary power. Transdisciplinarity is
the approach most often taken by researchers who may advocate dispens-
ing with disciplinary straitjackets in addressing a research problem.
Neodisciplinarity is especially a concern of those involved in teach-
ing, and for whom there is an evident felt need to organize studies and
present them as a coherent whole. Produced by professions or a felt need
to examine an aspect of social life that transgresses disciplinary cat-
egories, neodisciplinarity rejects subdisciplinary marginalization and is
dissatisfied with multidisciplinary institutional cooperation that sim-
ply maintains established disciplinary division and hierarchy. Instead,
a new and different academic institutionalization is required to provide
for focused and specialized (inter)disciplinary knowledge. Unlike multi-
disciplinary programs where the integration, such as it is, takes place
in upper level undergraduate or graduate courses or programmes, neo-
disciplinary programmes unfold alongside the traditional disciplines.
As a result, the development of undergraduate programs, in particular,
is a pedagogical indicator of the emergence and coherence of neodis-
ciplines. In any event, without some measure of institutionalization,
interdisciplinary studies are the academic equivalent of a mule, unable
to reproduce itself and only the product of the component disciplines.
The discourse of interdisciplinarity has been a bulwark of the com-
mon belief that IR is not a discipline. At the same time, it is commonly
assumed, because of the departmental circumstances of many IR schol-
ars, that political science is a discipline. My dissection and categorization
of (inter)disciplinarity suggests that this is untenable, and indeed that
the opposite may be true. Political science as a plural discipline is tan-
tamount to interdisciplinary studies – as are, for instance, other social
sciences that eschew a paradigmatic form, such as sociology and geogra-
phy. International relations, inasmuch as it lends itself to being a more
focused study, may be a neodiscipline, a multifaceted yet clearly defined
study drawing on a number of different subjects and approaches.

Notes
1. This is an amended version of a paper presented at the International Studies
Association Annual Convention, New Orleans, 24–7 March 2002, and at
the University of Tampere workshop, Tampere, Finland, 11–12 September
2009. It draws on work for a wider project with Frances Woolley on

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Interdisciplinarity and International Relations 61

interdisciplinarity across the social sciences funded by the Social Sciences


and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
2. For example, in their very different ways, Bourdieu (1988), Bulick (1982),
Lattuca (2001), Repko (2008) and Messer-Davidow, Shumway and Sylvan
(1993).
3. An irony, given that IR is often accused of importing rather than exporting
concepts and theories.
4. In Canada, for instance, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council.
5. It might also be called interdisciplinarity properly understood, but given
the discussion in this chapter, it seemed better to distinguish the concept
from the overarching umbrella concept of interdisciplinarity.
6. See the account in Dogan and Pahre (1990), and also the discussion of the
tribal character of academia in Becher and Trowler (1989).
7. This is not to say that distinct means exclusive; other disciplines might
address parts or aspects of the field of study of international relations.
8. Shortly after the Second World War, the UNESCO Bureau of Social Sciences
decided on Political Science, Sociology, Law and Economics.
9. And this is exemplified by the fact that International Relations is not repre-
sented by a disciplinary organization in UNESCO’s Bureau of Social Sciences
(cf. to the International Economic Association, the International Political
Science Association, and so on).
10. It is not the place to consider the multiple, contradictory meanings of the
international, but suffice it to say that it is understood as foreign, world/glo-
bal, and/or intergovernmental/interstate/multilateral (see also Chapter 1).
11. Understood as the subject of international education, international studies
might not even be about the traditional focus of international relations at
all – the crossing of national boundaries – but instead is interpreted as the
study of the variety of human experience around the world as a route to
mutual understanding. For an early discussion, see Riggs (1971).
12. Though it also insists on the creation of ‘networks’ that add value by ‘creat-
ing new cross-disciplinary (sic) research communities addressing selected
topics’, a potentially more integrative mode.
13. The same is true in some historical sociology.
14. Space limitations do not permit a more extensive discussion that could
include historical sociology and social and political psychology, as well as
the literature on legalization and the social construction of international
norms. For an example of the former, see Skocpol (1984).
15. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy.
16. But see the special issue of New Political Economy (2009) addressing Benjamin
Cohen’s categorization of divergent American and British approaches to IPE
(Cohen, 2008). Weaver (2009) argues that ‘British’ IPE is more open to a
variety of disciplines and methodologies outside the American positivist
mainstream.
17. But neodisciplines can also be understood in terms of the evolution of disci-
plines in the social sciences. The history of the development of the social sci-
ences shows that there is nothing sacrosanct about the present disciplinary
division of labour. The disciplines that are currently established were once
new, and emerged, as did political science, from history and law, and all of

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62 David Long

the social sciences from philosophy. To argue that no new disciplines are pos-
sible is curious and demands justification. A hundred or so years ago, in eco-
nomics, and more recently, in business studies, disciplinary qualities became
more marked as their field was more clearly delimited, agreed upon method-
ologies were specified, and the academic study was institutionalized.
18. Playing a thought experiment, Dogan and Pahre (1990) contend that the
only thing that would result from the elimination of departments of soci-
ology would be the demise of courses on the history of sociology and on
sociological theory; other than that, the subject matter of sociology would
likely be taught and researched in other departments. By analogy, inter-
national theory has been relatively held back, or at least has not followed
certain theoretical opportunities, by the absence of dedicated departments
of international relations and its wider institutionalization as an academic
discipline.
19. But note, nevertheless, the difficulties that interdisciplinary exchange
might face as outlined in Hurrell (2001).

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3
Organizing Interdisciplinary
International Studies: From
Puzzlement to Research
Programmes
Pami Aalto

Introduction1

In this chapter I will elaborate on some of the major questions per-


taining to the organization of our research efforts when we attempt
to move from international relations (IR) towards the wider and more
plural field of interdisciplinary international studies (IS). When con-
sciously moving towards the wider research directions afforded by IS,
we will inevitably be faced with choices regarding the methodological
means by which to open up the various aspects of the ‘international’,
while drawing upon various forms of interdisciplinarity – including the
multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and neodisciplinary forms of schol-
arship (see Chapter 2).
Such methodological questions are important if and when we main-
tain – as we do in this book – that interdisciplinary IS will benefit
from the development of systematic, well-structured approaches (see
Chapter 1). Many of us have conducted interdisciplinary work out of
personal interest or curiosity without thinking about the matter very
thoroughly, and in some cases ended up wondering whether all the
effort invested in reading and learning new literatures and techniques
was leading towards something bigger. Simultaneously, for various rea-
sons, we often fail to appreciate the interdisciplinary possibilities avail-
able for enriching our understanding of a given international problem,
especially when it comes to (questions on) how to practically proceed
and organize our efforts.

66

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Organizing International Studies 67

Motivated by such practical methodological considerations, in this


chapter I seek some tentative answers to the following broad questions:
How can we move from the disciplinary modes of enquiry in IR towards
making fruitful interdisciplinary connections? How can such individ-
ual and collective endeavours in interdisciplinary research link up and
benefit from each other? What organizational formats are available for
that purpose?
These questions are crucial; interdisciplinary training and develop-
ing of a practical ability to conduct advanced interdisciplinary research
frequently takes more time and is more demanding than monodiscipli-
nary research (cf., Galtung, 1985). Owing to the complexity frequently
involved, this may also entail collaborative work with its own organi-
zational challenges (cf., Molteberg et al., 2000). And, although we do
not posit interdisciplinarity as something inherently good in the sense
of always automatically yielding something better, we see it as very
necessary in order to better grasp the theory and substance of IS (see
Chapter 1). For all these reasons it is useful to elaborate on the meth-
odological means available for organizing interdisciplinary IS.
In this chapter I will seek such methodological guidance from certain
strands in the philosophy of science. In particular I will focus on how
these have been incorporated into IR and, on that basis, discuss their
import for interdisciplinary IS. Philosophical perspectives will, hence,
function as a ‘yardstick’ by which to assess the character of IR as one
possible entry point into interdisciplinary research. As philosophical
concepts and debates are pervasive in IR, it follows that any efforts to
re-examine IR must encounter them head-on (see Wight, 2002, p. 26).
In the same way, philosophical concepts ought to be part of our efforts
to develop interdisciplinary IS.2
Before proceeding further, an important caveat is appropriate. As
developing IS is my main concern here, I will not attempt to contrib-
ute to the philosophy of science in general, nor to the philosophical
debates in IR. My take on the philosophy of science is purely instru-
mental. It is used to bolster and critically examine the methodologi-
cal armour of IS, but because of its predominant focus on (natural)
science it cannot suggest any single methodological blueprint for the
rich totality of interdisciplinary IS. The bulk of IS includes studies in
the social sciences, while (natural) sciences and the humanities present
powerful options to enrich and expand that agenda. In the context of
IS, no a priori barriers should be erected between these three bodies of
knowledge, even though they can be separated for analytical purposes
(cf. Kagan, 2009; see also Chapter 7). For this reason the broad term

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68 Pami Aalto

‘studies’ is here suggested as a neutral arbiter between the different


knowledge bases IS can draw upon, while no permanent bias for any
one of them is advocated.3 In importing perspectives from the philoso-
phy of science their differences must be taken into account.
In the next section, I will first consider the open-ended nature of IS
together with the concomitant need to organize knowledge production.
In particular I will discuss how to move from what I will call ‘puz-
zlement’ to formulating better defined ‘puzzles’ as termed in Thomas
Kuhn’s (1970 [1962]) well-known account of the history of (natural) sci-
ence. Second, to conceptualize in more detail the ways in which such
puzzles can be formulated to organize interdisciplinary IS, I will weigh
up the import of the methodology of scientific research programmes of
Imre Lakatos (1970).
Third, to further scale down towards practical needs, I draw some influ-
ences from Larry Laudan’s (1977) philosophy of science – which contin-
ued from Kuhn and Lakatos – to make distinctions among paradigmatic,
empirical and conceptual research programmes. Each of these programmes
represents different options to move from IR to interdisciplinary IS. In
the concluding discussion, I summarize my argument and contrast it to
the concomitant possibility of looser formats of organization.
In taking on these selected works in the history and philosophy of
science, we must take account of their origins. Kuhn proposed that
during periods of ‘normal science’ scholars hold on to ‘paradigms’ to
organize scientific activities into a puzzle format, until these paradigms
are seriously challenged and subsequently thrown away in scientific
revolutions. Lakatos, instead, pointed out how persistently scholars
may cling to their theories and how this may, in fact, be useful. At
the same time Lakatos re-examined the wider debate on Karl Popper’s
(1959) work on the conditions of falsifying theories. The contributions
of Kuhn, Lakatos and later of Laudan were important for introducing
a more historical or naturalist perspective to the study of knowledge
formation wherein, in contrast to Popper’s positivism, the interest is
in ascertaining what scientists actually do rather than assuming what
they do.4 Although by the 1990s they were overtaken by other trends in
the philosophy of science, their work has subsequently become pivotal
to IR and many other fields with which IS has natural ties (see e.g., Hess,
1997, pp. 23–30). In each context the philosophical imports must be
adapted to the local conditions whereby their role becomes that of an
external yardstick, critic or sparring partner. Their functions are simi-
larly limited here to the methods of organizing research intending to
reach out from IR to IS.

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Organizing International Studies 69

Open-ended IS: from puzzlement to puzzles

Interdisciplinary IS has a flexible and open-ended character and


extends towards the social sciences, natural sciences and the humani-
ties. Therefore we must have several different methodological means
at our disposal for envisioning, achieving hands-on, and ultimately
organizing the realization of different interdisciplinary research tasks.
Our methodological means must lend themselves to research problems
of different magnitudes, and vary from more rigorous to looser for-
mats of organization. Organization refers to the patterning of knowl-
edge claims and findings into a more comparable format in which the
novelty and import of observations, findings and arguments is better
discerned and possible synergies identified. When moving towards the
looser end of organization, by contrast, we will risk pursuing atomistic
efforts with potentially negative consequences for relating our work to
more disciplinary modes of research and for arranging collaboration
across disciplines. Meticulous attention should be paid to striking a bal-
ance between highly organized and freer, or more casual, experimenta-
tion with new literatures, concepts, theories and approaches.
The idea for a balance between more and less organization is implicit
in Kuhn’s work (1970 [1962]). On the one hand, in the absence of organi-
zation, ‘all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of
a given science are likely to seem equally relevant’ (p. 15). This is hardly
the best context for reliably evincing novelties or innovations, and espe-
cially in the usual conditions of limited time resources where we must
in any case make choices – just as, for example, applications of pragma-
tist philosophy to IR have rightly pointed out (Kratochwil, 2009, p. 13).
On the other hand, in the case of the highly developed organization
referred to by Kuhn as ‘paradigm’, knowledge is arranged in relatively
‘inflexible boxes’ wherein scholars have a ‘restricted vision’ (p. 24). Such
periods of ‘normal science’ can distract scholars even from seeing other
socially important problems (p. 37). Yet, this has the advantage of forc-
ing us ‘to investigate some parts of nature in a detail and depth that
would otherwise be unimaginable’ (p. 24). In the end, there is no magic
formula for balancing between higher and lesser degrees of organiza-
tion. Kuhn also declined to offer much guidance on the grounds of
which form of organization would be preferred (Laudan, 1977, p. 3).
For Kuhn, periods of ‘normal science’ evolve into revolutionary par-
adigm shifts when a distinctively large number of anomalies emerges
contradicting the fundamental laws and assumptions of the dominant
paradigm – not just the individual theories within it. In a nonrational,

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70 Pami Aalto

sociological or even psychological process of conversion, the scholarly


community adopts a new paradigm fairly soon (Kuhn, 1970 [1962],
pp. 52–91; Elman and Elman, 2003b, pp. 19–21). Due to their mutual
incommensurability, the new paradigm superseding the old one is not
necessarily superior by any measurable criteria. Although Kuhn recog-
nized the successes of modern (natural) science, he clearly professed
some relativist inclinations (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], p. 198; see also Chalmers
1999, pp. 122–4), which he, himself, nonetheless, put aside (p. 206).
The empirical value of Kuhn’s argument with regard to what scientists
actually do continues to be debated in science studies. And, as I argue
below, it is even more unclear as to what extent the paradigmatic nor-
mal science model he introduced is applicable to fields such as IS. What
is of interest in this instance, however, is Kuhn’s hesitation regarding
the nature of ‘progress’ in the natural sciences, which has some inter-
esting repercussions in the context of IS. He actually challenges the
straightforward, or naïve, view of the accumulation of knowledge. In
the natural sciences it is often easier to hold variables constant in order
to examine which of them most decisively impacts the research objects,
which for their part can also more conveniently be treated as constants.
In the social sciences and the humanities, both the variables and the
social, cultural and political research objects are constantly changing.
This means that practitioners of social sciences and the humanities
have a special duty to reflect critically on their research. IS must take
this duty seriously, but it must also strive to produce useful knowledge –
in the same way as the natural sciences have been able to do – without
resorting exclusively to the safety of endless meta-theoretical reflection
that is characteristic of parts of IR.
With an eye on these practical tasks, Kuhn also usefully pointed out
how the paradigms of natural science are organized around sets of ‘puz-
zles’. Speaking of puzzles in the ‘standard meaning’, Kuhn argued that
it is not the outcome of the puzzle that is of intrinsic interest but rather
the fact that the puzzle is solvable. Paradigm defines a known set of
puzzles that can be solved if the right measurements and approxima-
tions can be performed. Puzzles can be instrumental, conceptual and so
on. A high degree of organization connotes agreement on the puzzles to
be solved, and that they can indeed be solved; and on the methods by
which to do so. At the same time problems that cannot be solved in a
foreseeable manner using known methods do not make up puzzles and
remain outside the paradigm (pp. 36–7).
Some of the problems to be studied within the broad scope of IS
can be organized into a puzzle format. For example, let us consider a

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Organizing International Studies 71

situation in which a problem can no longer be analysed or solved success-


fully within ‘normal’ disciplinary constraints – in which, in Kuhn’s terms,
significant anomalies start to emerge, questioning the prevailing para-
digm. Then, an interdisciplinary approach can be proposed to outline bet-
ter the scope and characteristics of the problem. On this basis the problem
can be reformulated into a ‘puzzle’ format and become more amenable
to solution than the original cognitive state that I will call ‘puzzlement’.
In the process the problem may also be merely recast to the extent that
new phenomena and problems emerge instead of a new solvable puzzle.
In such cases puzzlement returns, but it now concerns a different matter.
In fact, many research questions and problems on the agenda of IS are at
the ‘pre-puzzle’, or ‘pre-paradigmatic’ stage characterized by puzzlement.
Kuhn assumed this situation to prevail in most of the social science of his
time (p. 15). Regarding the humanities he declined to say much.
Because most studies on the broad agenda of IS are in practice con-
fined to pre-paradigmatic puzzlement – while formulating better
defined puzzles is the preferred goal here – puzzlement is a logical meth-
odological starting point, and the very start to any process of posing
novel questions. To grasp what puzzlement and puzzles actually convey
in the context of IS, it first will be useful to examine their manifesta-
tions in IR. In this instance James Rosenau’s ‘post-international’ work
is pioneering (see e.g., Hobbs, 2000). For him puzzlement is not sim-
ply a relentless capacity for asking questions or merely being in awe of
the complexities and various aspects of the international. Puzzlement
needs to be confronted with a degree of ‘discipline’: we must specify
what observable outcomes make our existing explanations seem errone-
ous or insufficient. More specifically, Rosenau (1996) calls upon us to
focus on huge puzzling outcomes encompassing most of humankind,
which for him constitute ‘genuine puzzles’ (p. 311).
Rosenau’s suggestion about bravely coming to grips with the biggest
challenges of our times is laudable. It must be part of the agenda of inter-
disciplinary IS, too, but at the same time it is unnecessarily and unrealis-
tically restrictive in this context. As Kuhn noted, many pressing problems
are not easily solvable, if at all (1970 [1962], pp. 36–7). Therefore, today
many scholars are working on much smaller questions than those found
on the large canvas of the international. We must, thus, allow for less
grandiose puzzles as well. For Dina Zinnes (1980), puzzles imply

pieces of information, the belief that the pieces fit together into a
meaningful picture – but the inability to fit the pieces together ini-
tially. When we attempt to understand international phenomena, we

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72 Pami Aalto

typically do not have these ingredients. We ask broad, open-ended


questions. We do not use pieces of information, and we do not see
our problems as fitting the pieces together. Perhaps if we thought in
terms of puzzles – not general questions – we would think theoreti-
cally more naturally. (p. 316)

She, hence, takes a position reminiscent of Kuhn’s understanding of


puzzles being solvable, and she also accentuates the role of prior knowl-
edge in generating the puzzlement in the first place. To become puzzled
we need to observe things as not going as anticipated. Therefore:

[I]f to become truly puzzled we need to know something, then it is


obvious that we must expand our research horizons to look beyond
the confines of specific research questions. We need to become more
aware of how our research fits with the work of others. And we need
to do this without being constrained by subject matter or methodol-
ogy. . . . To become puzzled, then, requires that we search for relation-
ships across studies, that we broaden the scope of a problem being
analyzed. (p. 338)

Zinnes’s call for searching linkages and discontinuities has potent


consequences for wider interdisciplinary work which she did not antici-
pate. When we are puzzled, favourable conditions obtain for finding
new directions. In these moments, as implied by Kuhn, the social,
political and psychological dimensions play important roles with
regard to where we decide to look and probe. Importantly, there are
such choices to be made regardless of whether we opt for a ‘natural
scientific’, ‘social scientific’ or ‘humanistic’ route in seeking to advance
knowledge. Kuhn’s major contribution was specifically to highlight the
‘nonrational’ features in the development of new concepts, theories and
approaches that he lumped under his elusive term ‘paradigms’ (see e.g.,
Kuhn, 1970 [1962], pp. 175–82).
Such moments require curiosity, creativity and intuitive thinking
from the researcher and the wider scholarly community. Such quali-
ties are not easily trained, or are something that the universities of the
present moment, with all their assessment procedures and expectations
of steady output, would necessarily favour. Fortunately, the formats by
which such open-ended processes can get underway are more readily
communicable and reproducible.
In a straw-man image of a disciplinary mode of enquiry, we have
a question and an approach at hand to help solve it, as described by

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Organizing International Studies 73

Kuhn. By contrast, as indicated above, in the simplest form of inter-


disciplinarity – multidisciplinarity – we combine or juxtapose two
or more approaches from different disciplines (see Chapter 2). This
may make us puzzled as to why the two perspectives differ (if they
do indeed differ). Thus the original (disciplinary) problem definition
is replaced by an interdisciplinary move reintroducing puzzlement.
Think, for example, what approaches from geopolitics, economics or
environmental politics would suggest vis-à-vis a given oil or natural
gas pipeline project, or what nutrition scientists and Marxist devel-
opment researchers might say about the problem of hunger. To pro-
pose such combinations we need a decisive degree of openness and
open-mindedness helping us become puzzled anew, or addressing our
puzzlement by means of interdisciplinary experimentation. These
simple examples show the basic idea of open-ended and open-minded
puzzlement: knowing that we should know better and being ready to
remedy the situation by means of interdisciplinary learning. In the
absence of these conditions we may well confine ourselves to discipli-
nary modes of enquiry. In all probability that would mean working
on more limited problems and on a narrower range of subjects and
solutions.
Expanding the scope of actions required for responding to puzzle-
ment beyond disciplinary divides does not mean that any perspectives
from anywhere can be successfully combined at will, and it would
be equally futile to suggest a comprehensive list of criteria for mak-
ing interdisciplinary interconnections. To judge what new disciplines,
fields of study, theories within them, and literatures need to be con-
sulted in order to alleviate our puzzlement, we need a degree of organi-
zation of knowledge production. Yet such organization should surpass
the hierarchic model which postulates a common root to all knowledge.
In this tree-like model, more distinct specializations called disciplines
evolve from the root. These disciplines are likely only to have close
connections with those in the same branch. The disciplines supposedly
respond better to the highly specialized knowledge demands of mod-
ern society than did the original all-encompassing discipline of phi-
losophy in the Age of Antiquity. By contrast, operating with a rhizome
model, the assumed boundaries between the specializations of the hier-
archic model are turned upside down. Disciplines themselves are linked
instead to multidimensional networks lacking any clearly separable
core (see e.g., Bruun et al., 2005, pp. 34–5; 49–50; Klein, 2001, p. 49). In
this instance the task of interdisciplinary research is to identify which
disciplines can be usefully conjoined in given contexts, and to develop

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74 Pami Aalto

the organization for enabling this in practice. To this end I will consider
the import of Lakatos’s methodology of research programmes.

Organizing puzzles: Lakatosian methodology of


research programmes

To refer to the work of Lakatos in order to help interconnect relevant


disciplines and, in the process, transform our puzzlement into a better
organized format may at first appear an unlikely move for advancing IS.
The works of Lakatos are often criticized for using standards of natural
science to label social sciences as ‘deficient’, and his views are thus seen
as obstructing interdisciplinary dialogue (e.g., Hess, 1997, pp. 28–9).5 At
the same time his methodology is discussed in the context of interdis-
ciplinary enquiry (e.g., Huyssteen, 1999, pp. 90–1). It is also routinely
applied, albeit in various ways, in a plethora of disciplines from math-
ematics to theology.
Mainstream IR is one of the fields where Lakatos’s model is popular
and represents perhaps the most widely quoted method of organization.
Many scholars working within the main theoretical orientations of IR
are comfortable utilizing aspects of Lakatos’s methodology as a useful
tool for theory choice; some utilize it, albeit with varying orthodoxy, to
assess whether novel facts resulting in ‘progress’ are generated; and some
take it as a useful analogy for how research efforts should be organized
(see Chernoff, 2005, pp. 173–6; cf., Elman and Elman, 2003a, pp. 5–8).
In the context of IS, various ways of applying Lakatos must also be
acknowledged and tolerated. This flexibility also translates into a pref-
erence for only exploiting certain concepts proposed by him. In other
words, I support the view that philosophical models such as Lakatos’s
need not be adopted in their totality but can be applied partly (cf.,
Keohane, 1986). This is because these models were never intended for
examining fields like IR or IS. Hence seeking a one-to-one correspond-
ence is problematic unless we think these fields are indeed primarily
reminiscent of some models of natural science. Taking a cue from
these models can be useful for better understanding the ‘state of the
art’ and development needs of these fields, but one must be mindful
of the limitations of the models (cf., Vasquez, 2003, p. 423). Flexible
and open-ended IS must also take the warnings of a ‘sweet shop error’ –
partial applications of philosophical models (see Elman and Elman,
2003, p. 59) – as carrying less weight than they do in the case of dis-
ciplinary enquiry. I will next briefly contrast Lakatos’s methodology

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Organizing International Studies 75

with Kuhn’s and then discuss the conceptual import Lakatos’s meth-
odology offers for organizing IS.

Sharpening up Kuhn’s model of organization


Lakatos wanted to avoid the relativistic implications of Kuhn’s work
on how science progresses in big, ‘revolutionary’ paradigm-changes.
Moreover, for Lakatos, Kuhn clung too tightly to the idea of a single
dominant paradigm, an idea which does not bear empirical scrutiny –
although he allowed for the possibility of the temporary co-existence of
paradigms (Kuhn, 1970 [1962], pp. 18–19; 177). On this score Lakatos’s
idea of several co-existing large theoretical aggregates is superior
(Laudan 1977, pp. 73–6). This is especially so considering the wide and
plural nature of IS.
Lakatos further suggested that not all scientific efforts are on a par.
Some concepts and findings are more fundamental than others. In this
way, research can be seen as the programmatic development of impli-
cations of the fundamental choices made when building a theory or
developing an approach (Chalmers, 1999, pp. 131; 137–8). The most
fundamental choices are called the ‘hard core’ of the research pro-
gramme. This means that research programmes are characterized by
the gradual generation of ideas and continuity rather than Kuhnian
radical scientific revolutions. For Lakatos, Kuhn’s idea that the scientific
community simply functioned as the highest authority in maintaining
or abandoning a research paradigm, and that a leap of faith or ‘Gestalt
switch’ was needed to adopt a new one, represented irrational ‘mob psy-
chology’ in place of the rational development of research programmes
(Lakatos, 1970, p. 178).

The conceptual basis for organizing research programmes


The research programmes of Lakatos represent a series of theories on
a domain of interest. For him, the hard core of a programme comprises
some of the most basic hypotheses regarding that domain – the features
that the protagonists of the programme will under virtually no circum-
stances relinquish, positing these in the methodological sense as ‘irref-
utable’ (pp. 133–4). In the context of IS, which connects to this natural
scientific agenda only through some of its wide scope of approaches,
we could add to Lakatos’s ‘hypotheses’ several other categories capable
of constituting a hard core: for example, the major ontological, epis-
temological and normative assumptions that are fundamental to the
programme (see below).

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76 Pami Aalto

For Lakatos, actual research work within any programme would con-
sist of (a) negative heuristics, which, taken to extremes, tell us ‘what paths
of research to avoid’. Effectively, this means believing in the productive
power of the hard core even when the programme encounters diffi-
culties or ‘temporarily’ enters a dormant state. The hard core and the
related negative heuristics, thus, through an internal logic, keep the
programme going. In the case of IS, one way of defining the hard core
would be to commit to a given set of disciplinary core assumptions.
On top of this one would seek interdisciplinary connections not fun-
damentally contradicting these commitments (multidisciplinarity). Or,
alternatively, the hard core would be defined anew upon combining
two or more disciplines (multidisciplinarity) and/or when disciplines
are merged partly or fully (transdisciplinarity) (see Chapter 2).
However, for our purposes the more interesting, progressive and
outward-looking element in Lakatos’s methodology is the (b) positive
heuristics that tell us ‘what paths to pursue’. Thus positive heuristics in
a different, more open-minded way, partly protects and partly supports
the programme by guiding the development of new assumptions and
hypotheses that expand the theoretical or empirical content of the pro-
gramme (Lakatos, 1970, p. 132). In the case of IS, alongside assumptions
and hypotheses we should again mention several other features of the
programme defining its external interfaces: on the ontological level we
speak of openness for conceptual development; on the epistemological
level, of the ability to identify new phenomena; and on the normative
level, of new goals and visions.
For Lakatos, programmes in which a strong positive heuristics may
lead to explaining empirical facts and phenomena, or to making theo-
retical claims previously thought to lie outside the remit of the theory,
are progressive. In the case of IS, alongside explanations one should also
look for new understandings reached, new meanings defined and nor-
mative goals specified. But programmes that repeatedly have to resort
to different types of ad hoc measures to accommodate new observa-
tions, merely defending the theory without generating novel empiri-
cal or theoretical facts, are degenerating (Chernoff, 2005, p. 174). This
does not, however, mean that degenerating programmes may not also
produce useful scholarship. Yet the expectation is that in the long run
they will lose out to more progressive programmes (Elman and Elman,
2003a, p. 48).
On progressive and, thus, successful, research programmes, anomalies
incongruous with the major claims made within the programme only
lead to the refutation of auxiliary hypotheses in the ‘protective belt’ of

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Organizing International Studies 77

the hard core. Many of Lakatos’s critics concentrate on this protective


function of the belt guarding the fixity of the hard core (e.g., Laudan,
1977, p. 78). This fixity is taken to imply problems of empirical com-
patibility between different research programmes. But such fixity of the
hard core does not prevail in disciplines like IR (Jackson and Nexon,
2009), and may also be an unsustainable proposition in the case of many
other disciplines. In fact, often the core develops slowly and is, therefore,
at least to an extent historically changing. Extending this point to the
wider context of IS, I suggest taking the hard core as a starting point,
while more is likely to be gained by looking at how the belt’s ‘positive
heuristics’ provides autonomous, generative possibilities. The positive
heuristics enables the research programme to develop, adjust and grow.6
Positive heuristics thus implies openness that can help to point out
auxiliary assumptions and hypotheses with regard to more natural sci-
entific applications. In the case of applications encompassing or relying
on the social sciences and the humanities, we also speak of scholars
pointing at little explored empirical phenomena and problems, or indeed
problems we did not previously perceive as such; and on the normative
plane, we may mention new ideas on aspects of international organiza-
tion. Ultimately, we are concerned with the building of new models and
theories yielding new empirical and theoretical facts, even when severely
challenged by rival programmes (see Lakatos, 1970, pp. 134–75). Before
further expanding on the types of programmes that can be built, I will
briefly consider the limitations of the Lakatosian methodology.

Limitations of the Lakatosian methodology


In the wide field of IS we usually start from social scientific considera-
tions, of which Lakatos had scant knowledge. His main case study was
physics, and he only made some passing references to psychoanalysis,
sociology and Marxism, without being very well informed. Of the sev-
eral limitations ensuing from the context of his work, we can here take
up three that help us to further tailor the research programmatic meth-
odology to the needs of IS.
First, Lakatos has been criticized for proposing mostly empirical cri-
teria for evaluating the progress of research programmes (Laudan, 1997,
pp. 77–8). However, we should not forget his notion of the importance
of the ‘autonomy of theoretical science’ (Lakatos, 1970, p. 139). This
notion has considerable bearing on the social sciences and on IS. These
fields must be heavily theoretical, philosophical and normative – and
here I also include social and political theory – in the usual absence of
fully controlled experimentation and testing facilities in which indi-

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78 Pami Aalto

vidual variables would be neatly separable from each other and where
the experiment itself would not impact the research object. But in IS the
theories typically are not as strong in the predictive sense as are those
of physics. They do, however, function as basic research in this field.
Even though they are not routinely subjected to empirical tests in the
natural scientific manner, they are applicable to the study of empirical
and normative problems of varying magnitudes (Aalto et al., 2011). The
predictive weaknesses notwithstanding, research programmatic meth-
odologies can produce new theoretical models, new empirical facts and
normative claims enabling us better to explain, understand and envision
the international.
Second, from the noted dearth of natural scientific testing facilities in
fields such as IS it must follow that falsification is not at issue in the same
way as it was for Lakatos. Even in the ‘sophisticated’ form he developed,
falsification is not something that is often explicitly attempted or actu-
ally accomplished (at least not in an indisputable manner) in most fields
within the remit of IS. This follows from the plural nature of the field,
where different theories frequently help us illuminate different phenom-
ena or different facets of the same phenomenon, or different historical
episodes, even when superficially operating within the same domain.
Another limitation of a falsificationist view is that to the extent science is
about problem-solving – including both empirical and conceptual prob-
lems – falsificationism jumps the gun in suggesting as the primary task
the evaluation of whether our theories are true, corroborated, tested or
well-confirmed, while logically this only follows the process of first estab-
lishing the problems and questions and then addressing and answering
them (see Laudan, 1977, pp. 14–24; 45–50). The theories around which
puzzles can be formulated in IS may have uncertain verity, yet they can
frequently offer useful guidance, help us to pose good questions and ade-
quately approximate the empirical realities of interest.
Third, as for Lakatos’s concern for judging the progress and degenera-
tion of research programmes, this can only be done retrospectively. And
it may take decades in the cases of dormant programmes being revived
(see Chalmers, 1999, pp. 146–7). This circumstance offers very little prac-
tical advice to scholars for whom the problems are at hand, here and
now. Moreover, here we run into the different timelines in the develop-
ment of natural sciences and social sciences. For example, in IR none
of what I below call paradigmatic research programmes are exactly dor-
mant, and most of them are only a few decades old in their modern form.
Furthermore, it is important to stress that while assessing the progress of
research programmes is an important business in IR, and must concern IS

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Organizing International Studies 79

in due course, my aims here are not to appraise progress but rather to elab-
orate some (pre-) conditions for programmatic, better organized work.

Types of interdisciplinary research programmes

I have so far suggested that Lakatos’s notion of positive heuristics is par-


ticularly relevant for moving from disciplinary concerns such as those
of IR towards outward-looking interdisciplinary research programmes.
Positive heuristics helps to address and order our puzzlement into bet-
ter organized puzzles by means of pointing at relevant and productive
interdisciplinary connections linking up with other disciplines and/
or theories within them. By developing coherent sets of such puzzles,
interdisciplinary research programmes can be created. As for the rest of
the concepts of Lakatos, the hard core and its negative heuristics help to
formulate the core focus of each programme (figure 3.1).

Discipline/theory b

Positive
heuristics 3:
interdisciplinary Discipline/
connections 3 theory c
Discipline/
theory a

Positive Hard core of Positive


heuristics1: research heuristics 2:
interdisciplinary programme A: interdisciplinary
connections x negative heuristics connections y

Figure 3.1 The block arrows in the figure depict interdisciplinary learning at
the interface of research programme A and other disciplines or theories a, b
and c, enabled and conditioned by positive heuristics x, y and z possessed by
research programme A.

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80 Pami Aalto

The resulting research programmes may be multiple and competing.


There are several types of these, as suggested by the work of Lakatos and
Laudan. I will first take up the case of what I call paradigmatic research
programmes with a view to moving from IR to IS.

Paradigmatic research programmes


In thinking of the types of possible research programmes it is a good
idea to start from the grand or, paraphrasing Kuhn, paradigmatic level.
By this term I refer to the largest scale in the aggregation of knowl-
edge connoting a wide domain of interest or several such interrelated
domains, families of theories and concepts, and shared beliefs on the
overall direction of the research effort by the community of scholars
subscribing to that paradigm.7
Without knowing where our existing paradigms may lead us, and
consequently being unable to competently assess whether or not that
may suffice, we remain utterly unable to make a reasonable choice
regarding which new direction to take and why (cf., Laudan 1977,
p. 107; Moran, 2002). Although paradigms are often associated with
disciplines, they also offer starting points for interdisciplinary work.
To illustrate this point let me take up the case of IR. Its major theo-
retical orientations are often referred to – paying lip service to Kuhn –
as ‘paradigms’. But do IR paradigms translate into competing research
programmes? Or, should we understand the term research programmes
in a narrower sense and reserve it for individual theories that are formu-
lated within each paradigm (Harrison, 2003, pp. 357–8)?
Because IR is plural – as is IS, which also must be flexible – it makes
sense to accept both paradigmatic and theory level research programmes
(see Vasquez, 2003). Debate rages on whether speaking of paradigms and
the associated great debates between them is appropriate in the context
of IR. The majority of IR textbooks speak of paradigms (Smith, 2003).
Many scholars deem paradigms a useful level of theoretical aggregation
for evaluating IR (Elman and Elman, 2003a, pp. 43–4). In a sociology of
science interpretation, paradigmatic debates are seen as the only hope
for the disciplinary status of IR given its internal fragmentation (see
Chapter 1; Wæver, 2007). By contrast, others note how IR paradigms
are mostly substantial empirical categories pertaining to differences
in the substantial assumptions on the nature of research objects and
to consequent questions asked. IR paradigms are not differentiated by
means of second-order, meta-theoretical or methodological criteria as is
assumed in the philosophical approaches of Lakatos or Kuhn (Jackson

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Organizing International Studies 81

and Nexon, 2009; cf., Wight, 2002, pp. 26; 30–2). Finally, some have
suggested we focus on the work of individual scholars instead of on
abstract paradigms, where the individual scholars might sit uneasily
(Neumann and Wæver, 1997).
In the face of this ambiguity, the paradigmatic level can be quali-
fied as mostly a substantial rather than meta-theoretical category, and
accepted as a de facto influential organizational category in IR, which
we need to know in order to see the way beyond it. But simultaneously
we must acknowledge the resilience of these paradigms. As stated, it is
difficult to name a clear example of a fully collapsed paradigm in IR.
In practice we witness a plurality of partial competition and overlap
between them. A pattern of competition and co-existence among ‘para-
digmatic research programmes’ is actually expected and tolerated by
Lakatos (Elman and Elman, 2003a, p. 48). In Laudan’s view, too, it is a
normal state of affairs (1977, ch.3), and some subsequent philosophies
of science have accentuated its usefulness (e.g., Kitcher, 1995).
Each of the paradigmatic programmes of IR has its own ‘hard core’,
which is partly distinct, but also partly overlapping with the hard cores
of other programmes. As Laudan (1977, pp. 81–92) implies, paradig-
matic programmes do not in general have clearly fixed hard cores. They
are not explanatory, predictive or testable on their own. Their organi-
zational utility lies in offering directions for developing the associated
individual theories and in their ability to help in solving empirical and
conceptual problems.
Many, especially in North American contexts, would name realism,
liberalism and constructivism as the paradigmatic research programmes
of IR.8 Briefly, we can say that the hard core of realism pertains to the
absolutely central role of states; to a separation between domestic and
international spheres; and to obstacles to cooperation between states
owing to the anarchic nature of the international system and states’
endeavours to maximize their political and military power (e.g., Elman
and Elman 2003, p. 26; Schmidt, 2002, p. 9; also James, 2002). In origi-
nally developing this hard core, classical realism drew on diplomatic
history, international law and political theory. Since then imports from
economics have helped to harden the neo-realist hard core.
Liberalism’s hard core also assigns a central role to states, although it
does not view this role through the same absolutist lens as does real-
ism. Liberalism looks at the prospects of cooperation among states under
anarchic conditions, where, however, other actors can also be found, as
well as regimes and formal institutions regulating their conduct. The idea
of economic interests – as opposed to the political or military interests

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82 Pami Aalto

espoused by realism – as a driving force of cooperation has been bor-


rowed from economics. Even though liberalism is often portrayed as the
antithesis of realism, the hard cores of the two paradigms do in fact over-
lap. This is evident in the debate on the extent to which a rationalist
synthesis exists between the ‘neo’ modes of realism and liberalism (e.g.,
Schmidt 2002, p. 15; Wæver, 2007).
The hard core of constructivism pertains to sociological imports plac-
ing the role of identity, norms and rules at the centre in the formation of
constellations of conflict and cooperation among states. Yet, constructiv-
ism simultaneously overlaps with the rationalist ‘neo-neo’ debate. Both of
them deal with common knowledge: rationalism at the level of assump-
tions shared by the actors examined, and constructivism with regard
to the formation of that knowledge (Katzenstein et al., 1998, pp. 647–8;
680–2). Alexander Wendt’s constructivism is duly offered as a bridge
between these traditions (Wendt, 1995, pp. 71–81; see also Adler, 1997).
Many in Britain would mention the English school as the fourth para-
digmatic research programme. And here, too, we find a claim of the
school being able to synthesize, in this case bringing the three other
main theoretical orientations under the same umbrella, and speak to
each of them (Buzan, 2004, ch.1). This claim is not entirely unfounded
given the nature of the school as grand theory and its assumption of
a simultaneous presence of international system, international society
and world society. That assumption of copresence addresses at least
some aspects of realism, liberalism and constructivism. It arguably also
constitutes the hard core of the programme in which the role of interna-
tional society is crucial (see Chapter 4). Naturally, this breadth makes the
school a broad church, and the unifying claim remains to be accepted
by the other orientations. In fact none of the synthesizing efforts of the
four programmes is widely accepted within the discipline.9
Acknowledging a British/European bias, realism, liberalism, construc-
tivism and the English school can be treated as paradigmatic research
programmes in contemporary IR.10 This is natural, as the key works
within these four theoretical orientations have generated a large body
of secondary debate and research. Many of the big organizing ideas and
concepts can be attributed to them. Without much exaggeration, any-
one aiming to re-examine IR seriously and become noted needs to posi-
tion his or her ideas against the big theoretical debates that these four
orientations are commonly held to have shaped (cf., Wæver, 2007).11
This also applies to interdisciplinary challenges.
With considerable – and perhaps uncomfortable – simplification,
it can be said that the most obvious Lakatosian ‘negative heuristics’

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Organizing International Studies 83

which the four main paradigmatic programmes so defined share is the


centrality of the state both as a remedy and challenge for international
theory and practical policy problems.12 In other words: more than any-
thing else, a theory of the state – from relatively conservative accounts
to those acknowledging its historically changing nature – remains the
centrepiece of all main IR orientations. Not a single one of these orien-
tations wants to explain it away or ignore it. In this sense IR paradigms
have some family resemblance.
This understanding of four partly competing and partly commen-
surable paradigmatic research programmes structuring IR can now be
taken as a heuristic point of departure for elaborating what is the posi-
tive heuristics each of these programmes may offer to function as a
basis for moving towards new connections with other disciplines and
fields of study (Figure 3.2).
Accepting the heterogeneity of these broad programmes, it follows that
each one of them may offer several different starting points – that is, pos-
itive heuristics for interdisciplinary work. Realism in its various guises
makes references, for example, to human nature (psychology), diplomatic
history and, in its neo-realist format, to economics. The connection of

Interdisciplinary
research programme a:
disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn

English
school Interdisciplinary
research programme b:
disciplines/fields
Realism D1, D2, Dn
Constructivism

The State

Interdisciplinary Interdisciplinary
research programme n: Liberalism research programme c:
disciplines/fields disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn
D1, D2, Dn

Figure 3.2 The joint ‘’hard core’ of the paradigmatic IR research programmes
is marked by dark gray colour. The ‘’hard core’ of each individual paradigmatic
programme is marked by medium gray and the ‘’positive heuristics’ by striped
lines. The arrows point at hypothetical interdisciplinary research programmes
a, b, c, n and so on, in disciplines/fields D1, D2, Dn, and so on, linking the
paradigmatic research programmes of IR with other disciplines and fields.

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84 Pami Aalto

liberalism to economics and political science is obvious, while psychology


could also be mentioned. Constructivism links up with sociology, social
theory and cognitive science but has not exhausted those rich deposito-
ries. The English school has natural positive heuristics vis-à-vis history,
international law and political philosophy (see also Chapters 4 and 7).
The idea of paradigmatic disciplinary structure is useful for the simple
reason that it reflects the way in which IR is structured as a discipline
and is intelligible to most IR scholars. Acknowledging these character-
istics, and maintaining a sufficiently integral connection with the con-
cerns of IR, new interdisciplinary research programmes with impact
can be built. Indeed, here we encounter the fact that moving in new
directions presupposes the a priori presence of knowledge. For exam-
ple, we need to know that the disciplines or fields to be connected are
meaningfully connectable. A possible checklist for ensuring this could
well include some standard criteria from the philosophy of science.
The primary task would be to ensure sufficient compatibility along the
ontological dimension (what entities exist?). This would entail ensuring suf-
ficient compatibility of the objects examined and their status. This should
be viewed as the decisive criterion (see Wight, 2006). In the case of IR,
scholars often agree on the existence of a given phenomenon and the mer-
its of studying it. Or, they may agree that their explanations for its exist-
ence are commensurable even when coming from different theoretical
orientations (Jackson and Nexon, 2009, pp. 916–18). That ontological defi-
nitions should be primary when thinking of the aggregation of knowledge
is supported by Laudan (1977, pp. 79–81). Assigning primary importance
to the ontological dimension is not to belittle the epistemological dimen-
sion (how can we know about those entities?), but is proposed to avoid
drifting into excessive (self-)reflection on what we can possibly know. IR
already has enough self-serving epistemological debate without much to
say about the international. IS should not fall into the same trap.
Finally, normative grounds and premises (what is desirable?) represent
a possible common ground, too, but may easily lead us towards the
weakest forms of interdisciplinarity. These translate into multidisciplin-
ary research – as is evident in the record of peace research – which
merely combines perspectives from different disciplines and fields.
Such an approach in which each discipline adds its own perspective
to an issue held as being of normative importance (such as peace) does
not easily integrate those perspectives well into anything resembling
research programmes, however loosely defined (see Chapter 4). For this
reason shared normative considerations usually best lend themselves
to looser forms of organization rather than better defined research

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Organizing International Studies 85

programmes where analytical utility is of primary value (cf., Snyder,


2003; Simowitz, 2003).
In summary, at the level of paradigmatic research programmes it
is possible to enrich existing IR paradigms and to build new ones by
means of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary imports from other
disciplines and fields (see Chapter 2). As indicated, this is in fact
how, for example, neoliberalism and constructivism were created in
IR – by borrowing respectively from economics and sociology. More
loosely organized directions of research in IR that are often lumped
under the ‘reflectivist’ label have instead borrowed from the humani-
ties – for example, from cultural studies and late-modern philosophy
(Rosenau, P., 1990; see also Chapter 7). Before contrasting these more
loosely organized bodies of literature with our discussion of research
programmes we need to consider the possibility of programme types
other than paradigmatic research programmes. These are constructed
by also observing the same basic philosophical criteria.

Other types of research programmes


The paradigmatic programmes of IR constitute an example of a wider
class of programmes on empirical puzzles. However, such empirically
focused programmes are also found at lower levels of aggregation. The
focus in these programmes is on empirical units in which two or more
related fields have a shared interest. As discussed above, the puzzles
related to those empirical units and to their relations with one another
are ‘first-order’ problems for which the task then becomes to design
suitable theories offering satisfactory solutions to render them more
comprehensible. The problems are empirical because the adequacy of
the theoretical solution proposed is judged against empirical evidence.
Again, we confront the issue of knowledge. Empirical problems become
problems only when we know enough so as to deem them problems
worthy of study. There are many empirical facts ‘out there’ which we
do not treat in this way for the simple reason that we have no relevant
information to prompt us to do so (Laudan, 1977, pp. 14–17).
We can generate such a sufficient awareness that would help to convert
facts into knowledge: for example, by observing anomalies or recurrent
patterns (Rosenau, J., 1996, p. 311). Yet, in generating that knowledge
it is often unclear to which discipline or field the emerging problem
belongs (Laudan, 1977, p. 19). On the agenda of IS, with the advent of
neoliberal capitalism, this has been the case with new problems such
as globalization and transformation of statehood (see Chapters 5 and

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86 Pami Aalto

6). Global climate change and energy shortages are further concrete
examples prompting IR scholars to ponder an appropriate division of
labour with other disciplines (see Aalto and Korkmaz, 2011; Chaturvedi,
2011).
Puzzles requiring interdisciplinary programmatic work may also
be conceptual. Conceptual puzzles differ from empirical ones. Some
theoretical constructs may be internally inconsistent or incoherent,
or in conflict with other theories or doctrines. Yet, they can simulta-
neously pave the way for meaningful empirical findings and be use-
ful in problem-solving. For the purposes of interdisciplinary research,
internal conceptual ambiguity may not, in fact, be as dangerous as
excessively rigid conceptualizations can make theories less applicable
to new domains. Conceptual debate removing those inconsistencies
is historically an important indicator of progress. The conflicts with
external theories, for their part, re-evoke the inherent ambiguity in the
division of labour between disciplines. Different disciplines and fields
of research frequently overlap (Laudan, 1977, pp. 45–54). The cases
in which their respective problem definitions and proposed solutions
differ are particularly promising and important with regard to our con-
cern for developing interdisciplinary IS.

Conclusion

I have suggested in this chapter that to develop interdisciplinary IS we


need to pay adequate attention to the methodological means by which
it is actualized as a scholarly enterprise producing new findings and
results helping us to better understand, explain and envision the inter-
national. To this end I have advocated better organization for the meet-
ing of, and mutual learning between, studies in different disciplines
and fields than has so far been seen in the study of the international.
Kuhn’s idea of puzzles that are better addressed and ultimately expected
to be solvable in contrast to what I called ‘mere’ puzzlement that often
characterizes interdisciplinary wondering, offers one possible organi-
zational format. Yet, on the part of the scholar the cognitive state of
puzzlement in an open-ended and open-minded form is a crucial pre-
requisite for any interdisciplinary meeting to materialize at all; well for-
mulated puzzles are normally the property of disciplines.
As for the more detailed conceptual tools helping us to conceive of
how to turn our puzzlement into better organized puzzles and sets
thereof, I considered Lakatos’s idea of research programmes and sought
to adapt it to the context of IS. The hard core and the associated nega-

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Organizing International Studies 87

tive heuristics define the domain of interest or scope of the programme.


Being a wide and plural undertaking, IS can be (re)built around several
partly competing and partly commensurable hard cores. For its part,
positive heuristics enables locating overlapping domains of interest
between disciplines and fields of study so as to meet, learn from, and
mutually enrich each other. These encounters continue from where
the hard core leaves off. To this end the available positive heuristics
must be examined carefully to ensure sufficient compatibility most
pronouncedly on the ontological level. Epistemological and normative
considerations may also play a role.
Drawing upon Laudan, I then considered several types of research pro-
grammes. Most of my attention was devoted to the case of large, paradig-
matic research programmes reaching out from IR to IS, each with its own
hard core and varying degrees of positive heuristics pointing in different
interdisciplinary directions. Importantly, the same method of identify-
ing the nature and degree of positive heuristics according to ontologi-
cal and other philosophical criteria (if applicable), could very well be
performed to extend any other large-scale theoretical orientation in any
other discipline in pertinent interdisciplinary directions. Alternatively,
interdisciplinary programmes can be built according to the same philo-
sophical criteria in the case of empirical and conceptual problems.
Even though my examples have mostly concerned the development
needs of IR, accepting that IR must be an important component of inter-
disciplinary IS, it is entirely possible to envision research programmes,
paradigmatic and others, in which IR is not involved in the study of the
international. We already have such programmes, as is well seen in the
marriage of sociology, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy
in the study of globalization.
Taken together, the organizational formats sketched in this chap-
ter represent the more structured end of the continuum of options for
organizing IS. The research programmatic methodology outlined is
obviously at ease with natural-scientific type approaches seeking gen-
eralizable knowledge, but the option of building smaller scale empiri-
cal or conceptual programmes also remains open for what IR scholars
commonly lump together as ‘reflectivist’ approaches in pursuit of more
local knowledge. These may include work within less close-knit research
directions with less of a grand, or ‘architectonic’, intent (e.g., Hobson
and Seabrooke, 2007, pp. 3–4), and work on individual research prob-
lems from an interdisciplinary perspective. However, it is important to
note that one aspect, or moment of puzzlement, is a situation of little

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88 Pami Aalto

or no organization. This in fact results when contemplating most of the


scholarly activities that could today be counted as being part of IS.
To avert the dangers of atomistic research efforts, my preference is
for interdisciplinary international studies to become a dynamic field of
research programmes debating with and learning from each other, and
opening up towards other disciplines and fields of study. The intention
is that the international become understood in multifarious ways, as is
also the case in the history of IR. In conditions of little organization,
history so far suggests that such goals are difficult to achieve.

Notes
1. For useful and critical comments crucial in finalizing this initial probe, I
thank Tuomas Forsberg, Vilho Harle, Hiski Haukkala, Sami Moisio and Petri
Ylikoski. The responsibility for the instances where I should have listened to
more carefully their advice, as well as for any remaining problems, is mine
alone.
2. Other literatures that can be consulted for purposes of re-examining IR and
developing IS include, for example, the philosophy of social science (see
e.g., Winch, 2008; Hollis and Smith, 1990; Kurki and Wight, 2007); the
sociology of science (Wæver, 2007), and the more general methodological
reflection commonly conducted within the social and cultural sciences.
These possibilities are not addressed here.
3. In place of ‘studies’, ‘arts’ would be an alternative term, but it is biased
towards the humanities which I take to be an unnecessarily limited per-
spective for IS.
4. However, it has been claimed that Kuhn’s naturalist approach retained some
positivistic elements (see Bird, 2004).
5. At the same time the empirical validity of Lakatos’s model in the context of
natural sciences is debatable. On the part of economists, his model initially
won a wide following in setting standards for research (see Backhouse, 1994).
6. For a very different, and most likely more frequently found, solution that
instead accentuates the centrality of the hard core in differentiating pro-
grammes from one another, and which has very different implications for
mutual learning, see Haukkala (2010, pp. 17–21).
7. In other words, this broad definition is closer to Kuhn’s first meaning of the
term paradigm as ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and
so on shared by the members of a given community’. His second meaning of
the term paradigm defines it as a set of examples or models helping to solve
the remaining puzzles within normal science (see Kuhn, 1970 [1962], p. 175).
8. Brian Schmidt (2002, pp. 9–10) surveys the claims for a paradigm status in
IR and finds references to realism, idealism, world politics, global society
and neo-Marxist paradigms and the vaguer categories of ‘pluralism’ and
‘behaviorism’ (probably referring to behaviouralism).
9. For example, most IR textbooks continue to discuss realism and liberalism
separately (for an exception, see Baylis et al., 2005).

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Organizing International Studies 89

10. As also implied by Schmidt (see note 8), Marxism or post-Marxism might
qualify as a further paradigmatic programme, especially with the rising
popularity of international political economy (IPE). At the core of Marxism
is a strong normative concern with the exploitative nature of capitalism and
the mechanism with which it operates.
11. For a critical view, see Schmidt (2002, pp. 10–12), who observes very differ-
ent controversies being claimed to constitute the debates, and who doubts
whether all the alleged debates have actually taken place. Yet, the important
point here is that IR scholars often act as if they had.
12. Another, not completely unrelated, candidate for a joint ‘hard core’ among
them would be a tendency towards positing the nexus of the international
structure and the state as central to IR. However, for example, here liberal-
ism splits into two. Of its two main strands, the neoliberal mode chiefly
examines the evolving of international structure from the point of view of
predominantly rationalistically conceptualized state actors (see e.g., Martin,
2007). The pluralist variant of liberalism pays more attention to bureau-
cratic politics within the state and other domestic sources of foreign policy
(see e.g., Panke and Risse, 2007).

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Future for IR Theory’ in S. Smith, K. Booth and M. Zalewski (eds) International
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M.F. Elman (eds) Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field
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71–81.
Wight, C. (2002) ‘Philosophy of Social Science and International Relations’
in W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse and B.A. Simmons (eds) Handbook of International
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4
Towards Interdisciplinary Research
Programmes in International
Studies: The Frankfurt School,
the English School and Peace
Research as Models
Vilho Harle

Introduction

All social activities may have an international aspect. Therefore, in aca-


demia ‘the international’ is not a monopoly of international relations
(IR). Any discipline in the social sciences may, and when needed must,
encounter the international. This constitutes a serious challenge to IR.
Without denying the value of IR and its potentially powerful role in
the study of the international (see e.g., Millennium, 3/2007), I claim
that the international can best be studied via various interdisciplinary
perspectives by making it a key element of interdisciplinary interna-
tional studies (IS).1 In so doing, however, one must fully recognize
the thousand faces of the international and beware of focusing exclu-
sively on conventional, narrow concepts of the international as the
‘inter-state’.
I maintain that the proposed expanded understanding of the inter-
national opens up new vistas for interdisciplinary international stud-
ies. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity is a valuable asset enabling us to
identify new issues and questions that deserve scholarly attention. If
an academic field fails to tackle new issues its intellectual thrust will
expire. Interdisciplinary orientations enable us to follow and learn from
innovative developments in scientific and philosophical debates within
social sciences and in social philosophy.

92

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 93

However, the positive features of interdisciplinarity notwithstanding,


it is likely to reproduce the problem of contending divisions and never-
ending scholarly debates between the ardent representatives of various
schools within IS – familiar in the image of the ‘dividing discipline’ of
IR (Holsti, 1987). Interdisciplinarity is, or could be, a source of innova-
tive ideas and fruitful cross-fertilization, but it can also be a burden.
Therefore, there is a positive need to retain the interdisciplinary nature
of IS while also giving this interdisciplinarity a function in order to
make it an asset – a means of recognizing and covering the changing
and expanding international in a holistic way. Therefore, we must ask
how to do this in practice. What is required in order to turn interdisci-
plinarity from a divisive force into an integrating element in IS?
Instead of attempting to give an abstract or final answer, I suggest
that something might be learned from interdisciplinary efforts past
and present. There are various ways of organizing interdisciplinarity in
practice, among them different research programmatic methodologies
(see Chapter 3). We must look at what ideas and approaches have been
applied on the practical level in relevant fields in order to make inter-
disciplinarity a well-functioning approach. Interdisciplinarity must be
operationalized in and through practice, and there are several ways of
doing it.
I will discuss three examples of organizing interdisciplinarity: (a)
core field-oriented multidisciplinarity, where separate disciplines are
drawn together by a sort of active force of gravity of the core science;
(b) research programme-oriented multidisciplinarity, where a given
research programme itself is multidisciplinary; and (c) problem-oriented
neodisciplinarity, where certain social and political problem(s) define
the field (for the interdisciplinary terminology, see also Chapter 2).
They will be here represented, respectively, by (a) the interdiscipli-
nary materialism of the Frankfurt school (FS) during the 1930s; (b) the
theoretical and methodological pluralism of the English school (ES);
and (c) the Galtungian (i.e., Nordic/Scandinavian) approach to peace
research (PR) (see note 7). The FS represents an interdisciplinary philo-
sophical orientation; the ES is based on an interdisciplinary conceptual
framework; and PR is focused on the normative study of peace and vio-
lence. This case selection is justified by their academic visibility and
prominence, and by the fact that in their various ways they challenge
the inter-state meaning of the international.
This chapter proceeds in four sections. In the following section, the
Frankfurt school gives us a benchmark for discussing and evaluating the
cases of the English school in section 2 and peace research in section 3.

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94 Vilho Harle

Both ES and PR will be discussed as projects discernible in current inter-


national studies with a significant potential to contribute to the study
of the international if both return to their original interdisciplinary
roots. The promise of such a return will be briefly elaborated upon in
the final discussion.

The Frankfurt school

The early history2 of the Frankfurt school dates back to 1923, when
Felix J. Weil, a student of Marxist political economy – with academic
help from economist Kurt Gerlach – launched a Marxist-oriented Institut
für Sozialforschung (The Institute of Social Research) in Frankfurt am
Main. At the beginning of the 1930s its scholars – most of whom were
Jews – had to leave Germany for Geneva, Paris and London. Finally they
moved to the US, where in 1934 Columbia University became the home
of the Institute. In 1949 a reduced group of key members – Horkheimer,
Adorno and Pollock – returned to, now, West Germany. The Institute
was re-opened in 1951 in Frankfurt (e.g., Jay, 1973, p. 283; Tar, 1977,
p. 133; Wiggershaus, 1994).
Carl Grünberg, professor of law and politics, became the first director
of the Institute. Grünberg emphasized ‘the need for a research-oriented
academy in opposition to the then current trend in German higher
education towards teaching at the expense of scholarship’; the aim was
‘to avoid becoming a training school for mandarins prepared only to
function in the service of the status quo’. Marxism as a scientific meth-
odology was to be the guiding principle at the Institute (Jay 1973, p.
11.). However, the disappointment caused by the failure of the German
working class to participate in a Marxist world revolution led to a seri-
ous dilemma among young German Marxist intellectuals: they might
(a) support the moderate Social Democrats (SDP); (b) accept the leader-
ship of Moscow (the Communist Party); or, as the FS scholars actually
did, (c) radically overturn Marxist assumptions through a re-examina-
tion of the very foundations of that theory (Jay, 1973, p. 3).3
The first members of the Institute included Max Horkheimer, Friedrich
Pollock, Henryk Grossman, Richard Sorge, and Karl and Rose Wittfogel;
later, in the 1930s, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm,
Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and Theodor Wisengrund-Adorno
joined in the Institute’s work. The Institute’s core group consisted of
Horkheimer, Pollock, Löwenthal, Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm: ‘It is
their work, rooted in the tradition of European philosophy, open to
contemporary empirical techniques, and addressed to current social

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 95

questions, that formed the core of the Institute’s achievement’ (Jay,


1973, p. 31; see also pp. xv; 31).
The history of the original Institute can be divided into four peri-
ods: (a) 1923–30, when the Institute produced Marxist analyses of bour-
geois society’s socio-economic substructure; (b) 1931–9; when its prime
interest was in its cultural superstructure (Jay, 1973, p. 21); (c) 1940–50,
when Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on the challenge of fas-
cism; and (d) 1950 and after, when the theory of society was formulated
(Tar, 1977, p. 9; Jay, 1973, p. 21). In this chapter, I exclusively discuss the
second phase, the 1930s, since it best represents interdisciplinarity. The
other aspects of the FS will not be examined here (see also Tar, 1977,
p. 174).
Max Horkheimer started as the Institute’s director in January 1931
(formally as professor of social philosophy). Some ten papers by him,
including his inaugural lecture on the nature and role of social philoso-
phy and the task of the Institute (Horkheimer, 1988), and his papers on
science and crisis, and traditional and critical theory (CT) (Horkheimer,
1972), originally published in the Institute’s journal Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung (ZfS) in 1933–40, suggested a research programme which
subsequently became known as critical theory (Tar, 1977, p. 28), or as I
prefer to call it here, interdisciplinary materialism.
Due to the well-known historical situation in the world economy,
and economic and political problems in European societies since the
end of the 1920s, the FS scholars maintained that society was not meet-
ing basic human needs or making a full human life possible. Instead,
the suffering of individuals had become obvious. Human beings were
unable to wield power to their own advantage, to educate and develop
themselves. They were subjected to passive tools or atomized objects in
the hands of economic and other elites. The solution to the problem
was not to be found in the overthrow of political and economic power
structures in a violent revolution, but in criticism of the existing ideol-
ogy and false consciousness of individual human beings. As Tar (1977,
p. ix) puts it, ‘the struggle [against the oppressive systems of power]
could not be limited to the real sphere: it must be extended to the
changing of consciousness’. The goal was to be found in man’s eman-
cipation from the ‘slavery of false consciousness’ (Tar, 1977, p. 175; see
also Fay, 1987; Leonard, 1990).
In considering the political and economic crisis, the Institute’s atten-
tion focused mainly on the role of science (Wissenschaft). Following the
Marxist theory of society, science was regarded as one of man’s produc-
tive powers. Horkheimer maintained that social science (Sozialforschung)

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96 Vilho Harle

must not neglect its own social role, for only by becoming conscious
of its function in the present critical situation could it contribute to
the forces that would bring about the necessary changes (Horkheimer,
1972, p. 4). He emphasized that, in the context of the economic crisis,
science was one of the numerous elements not fulfilling its function:

Insofar as we can rightly speak of a crisis in science, that crisis is


inseparable from the general crisis. The historical process has
imposed limitations on science as a productive force, and these show
in the various sectors of science, in their content and form, in their
subject matter and method. . . . Understanding of the crisis of science
depends on a correct theory of the present social situation; for sci-
ence as a social function reflects at present the contradictions with
society (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 9).

Horkheimer maintained that reason had been diluted into ‘a useful


instrument only for purposes of everyday life’, and it ‘must fall silent in
face of the great problems’ (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 4). That is, reason and
science were invoked to help to solve practical problems, not to ponder
fundamental issues of society as a whole:

At the present time, scientific effort mirrors an economy filled


with contradictions. The economy is in large measure dominated
by monopolies, and yet on the world scale it is disorganized and
chaotic. . . . Science too shows a double contradiction. First, science
accepts as a principle that its every step has a critical basis, yet the
most important step of all, the setting of [fundamental social] tasks,
lacks a theoretical grounding and seems to be taken arbitrarily.
Second, science has to do with knowledge of [a] comprehensible rela-
tionship upon which its own existence and the direction of its work
depend, namely, society. (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 8)

Critical theory, proposed by Horkheimer as an alternative to tradi-


tional theory, constitutes a critique of the latter from an ethical stand-
point. CT is concerned with a radical transformation of existing social
arrangements; it is permeated by the idea of a future society as a com-
munity of human beings (Tar, 1977, pp. 29; 31; see Horkheimer, 1972,
188ff.).
The school’s critical theory not only analysed the social and aca-
demic crisis (ideological criticism), but it also suggested how to get out
of that crisis, how to solve the basic problems of the social crisis/false

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 97

consciousness, and how to emancipate human beings from their bond-


age. The proposal was based on the idea of (social) totality (Jay, 1984;
see also Tar, 1977, p. 145; cf., Wendt, 1999). Critical theory had to deal
with not only the parts or elements of society (see Adorno in Jay, 1973,
p. xii; Tar, 1977, pp. x; 23), but with society as a totality, as a whole.
Social research had to pay attention to the whole of society, its current
condition of social crisis, aiming at its abolition. Social science could
not remain outside society, studying society from the outside, suppos-
edly as an impartial observer with a neutral view (see Tar, 1977, p. 31).
It had to acknowledge its place within that society and, therefore, it
had to be self-reflective. Social science, like any form of social activity,
could never be value-free. Social science alone could rid itself of its own
particular crisis: fragmentation and irrelevance (Horkeimer, 1972).
Scientific objectivity and the study of detached, narrow problems had
led to a fragmentation of social science into independent academic dis-
ciplines interested only in establishing and defending their academic
borderlines. Such a fragmented social science could not serve society
and humankind. Fragmentation, instead, was conducive to the oppres-
sion and exploitation of human beings. Instead of emancipating human
beings, social science exacerbated oppression and control of human
beings, offering up the results of its work on the altar of the self-seeking
economic interests of the owners of capital (Horkeimer, 1972, pp. 3–9).
Horkheimer saw a connection between the current fragmentation of
knowledge and the social conditions that helped to produce that frag-
mentation. A global economic structure, both monopolistic and anar-
chic, had promoted a state of knowledge that best could be described as
confused. The crisis could be overcome only by overcoming the fetish-
ist grounding of knowledge in pure consciousness, and by recogniz-
ing the concrete historical circumstances that conditioned all thought
(Horkeimer, 1972, pp 3–9).
To this end, Horkeimer introduced the idea of interdisciplinary mate-
rialism. As Jay suggests, this represented a return to the concerns of
the leftist Hegelians of the 1840s. The FS members were interested in
the ‘integration of philosophy and social analysis’, and particularly ‘in
exploring the possibilities of transforming the social order through
human praxis’ (Jay, 1973, p. 42).
Horkheimer claimed that ‘the present state of knowledge requires a
continuing fusion of philosophy and the various branches of science’
(Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 38; see also Tar, 1977, p. 26.). Social philosophy
would not be a single Wissenschaft (science) in search of immutable truth.
It was understood as a materialist theory enriched and supplemented by

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98 Vilho Harle

empirical work, in the same way as natural philosophy was dialectically


related to individual scientific disciplines. The Institute would therefore
continue to diversify its energies without losing sight of its interdisci-
plinary, synthetic goals. To this end, Horkheimer reinstated Grünberg’s
noncollegial ‘dictatorship of the director’ (Jay, 1973, p. 23.).
In practice, this implied a systematic organization of the Institute
as an interdisciplinary community in which the role of social philoso-
phy, above the specialized disciplines, and Horkheimer’s role, above his
colleagues, were interchangeable. Horkeimer aimed to set up ‘a regime
of planned work on the juxtaposition of philosophical construct and
empiricism in social theory’. This necessitated a serious approach to
organizing enquiry on the basis of current philosophical questions,
in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians and psy-
chologists pooled their efforts to produce sustainable cooperation
(Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 39).
The Institute’s Sozialforschung differed from the sociology practised by
more traditional German academics. The preface to the first volume of
the ZfS expressed this:

Social research [Sozialforschung] is research in special areas at differ-


ent levels of abstraction intended to promote the theory of contem-
porary society in its totality. Its aim was the grasping of the societal
process in its totality and presumed the possibility of comprehend-
ing forces active underneath the chaotic surface of historical events.
History may appear arbitrary, but its dynamics are dominated by
laws. Therefore, its cognition is a science. (Tar, 1977, p. 27)

Horkheimer stressed the synoptic, interdisciplinary nature of the


Institute’s work and the role of social psychology in bridging the gap
between individual and society. The first issue of the Institute’s journal
(ZfS) reflected the diversity of the topics to which the school was paying
attention: Marx and the problem of the collapse of capitalism; planned
economy within a capitalist system; sociology of literature; music;
and psychological dimensions of social research (Jay, 1973, p. 27). The
editions of the ZfS reveal the broad interdisciplinary spectrum of the
attempted grand programme (Tar, 1977, p. 28).4
The FS scholars emphasized the inseparability of philosophy and
sociology (Tar, 1977, p. 137). They insisted on the use of key philosoph-
ical concepts such as totality and on the incorporation of elements of
Dilthey’s philosophical psychology and Freud’s metapsychology (Jay,
1973, p. 26). Adhering to academic compartmentalization would have
signified the acceptance of the division of labour of capitalist society

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 99

and negated CT’s aim to transcend this division of labour (Tar 1977,
p. 137; also p. 138).
The school was eager to develop individual disciplines, and it achieved
high prominence especially in sociology and social psychology. It
expected individual social disciplines to collect and analyse specific data.
The effort to study the various aspects of social totality had, by definition,
to be multidisciplinary. No single discipline could cover everything.
The main point, however, was that individual disciplines, alone, were
incapable of mastering social totality, and could not do so even through
technical cooperation. Simply studying some social issues and collect-
ing the results into an edited book would not suffice. Disciplines were
not to be left alone to realize the mission. A connecting factor between
the various disciplines was needed. Someone had to assume the task of
collecting fragmented pieces of knowledge and data to produce a com-
prehensive picture of the social totality.
This collecting-and-combining work was not understood in a techni-
cal sense. Totality was to be something more than the sum of its com-
ponent parts. Technically, it might have been a fairly simple task to
summarize the various findings, but in addition to, or actually instead
of this, synthesizing interpretation was required. This was a serious the-
oretical task in the fundamental sense of the word. It was to present a
holistic image or theory of the crisis of society. The challenge was given,
as we have seen, to social philosophy, understood as a general, theoreti-
cal social science above others.
The idea of interdisciplinary materialism is plausible, even if its prac-
tical realization does not always fully correspond to the suggested
ideals of critical theory or interdisciplinary materialism (see Tar, 1977,
pp. 203–4; Fay, 1987; Leonard, 1990):

The idea of interdisciplinary research was present throughout the


50-year history of the Institute, yet it remained programmatic. Its
logic and detailed mechanism were never worked out, nor was a thor-
ough integration of monographs produced by individual members of
the Institute, or a theoretical codification of knowledge gained from
them, ever accomplished, perhaps because Horkheimer and Adorno
had neither the training nor the interest to investigate socioeco-
nomic bases empirically. They detested empirical research, which in
their view deals with its essence. (Tar, 1977, p. 202.)

* * *
In spite of the harsh criticism levelled at the FS, its ideal of interdisci-
plinary materialism – that is, its proposed division of labour between

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100 Vilho Harle

specific disciplines and social philosophy (the latter actively combining


knowledge to the analysis and theory of the social totality) – makes the
FS a shining star for any interdisciplinary effort to emulate.
However, the model cannot be adapted as such to IS by assigning IR
a role comparable to that of social philosophy in the FS. IR, whether
multidisciplinary or not, is just one of the social sciences. IR cannot be
elevated above any other fields within international studies. Such an
arrangement would imply undue academic imperialism in favour of IR.
Any potential application of the idea must, hence, be aired only for the
heuristic purposes of further elaboration and debate.
Contemplating such an idea in light of these reservations, there would
be two possibilities: IR would assume the role of combining the various
‘international’ aspects uncovered by the other social sciences and the
humanities, and so on, into a coherent whole; or, someone or some
school within IR would assume the role of combining the various sub-
disciplinary elements within IR into a coherent whole. The first option
is to date best represented by Quincy Wright’s The Study of International
Relations (1955). Some examples of the second option can be found in
textbooks (e.g., Hudson, 2007; Smith et al., 2008; see also Webel, 2007).
The first option, when concentrating on the various aspects of the inter-
national, might be worth attempting, but only with the dangers of aca-
demic imperialism and the re-emergence of (mono)disciplinarity firmly
in mind. It is more important and interesting to note, however, that the
second option would presuppose a research programmatic orientation
and take place at the level of concrete research projects (see Chapter 3).
In other words, it would be possible to realize interdisciplinarity in its
multidisciplinary form.
Again, we have every reason to highlight the international. In the
first option the international is studied by various disciplines as one of
their research problems, but more or less as a mere subordinate topic.
The major interest lies elsewhere, with the international gaining prom-
inence only as a practical consequence of globalization, for instance.
The international permeates every science, from the social sciences to
all others, including the humanities and, for example, medical, tech-
nical and natural sciences. The international becomes a challenge and
an opportunity for them all. IR would then ponder the knowledge so
accessed, attempting to develop a theory or philosophy of the interna-
tional. But, then, IR should become something else than it is now. Instead
of the ‘inter-state’ aspect of the international, IR should become open
to a variety of its constituent aspects by returning to interdisciplinary

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 101

international studies. This might in fact be gradually taking place (see


e.g., Buzan, 2004; Millennium, 3/2007). The FS has something to con-
tribute to this effort, but only if we acknowledge its relevance for the
study of the international.
If one shares – as most IR scholars continue to do – the inter-state
understanding of the international, one may wonder if the FS is rel-
evant to IR or even to IS. The FS represents ‘social research’ wherein
IR or political science has no specific role. Only one of the outer-circle
members, Franz Neumann, was a political scientist (see Wiggershaus,
1994, pp. 223–6; 470). The Institute’s emphasis on political economy
included some international aspects, but the international as such was
never examined. By contrast, it is another matter that the idea of criti-
cal theory has become familiar and occasionally followed up in IR, for
example by the Wales school of critical security studies (see Wyn Jones,
1999; cf., RIS, 2/2005).
However, I would suggest that the FS offers an approach to the study
of international problems – conflicts, war and peace, as well as inter-
national political economy – as an element of the social totality, the
school’s chief interest. Horkheimer was a pacifist concerned with social
justice and the emancipation of humans from the capitalist economic
and social system, in order to approach a more peaceful world (see
Horkheimer, 1972, p. v; Jay, 1973, pp. 45; 283; Tar, 1977, pp. 19–20; 24;
44; 49–51; 176; Wiggershaus, 1994, pp. 42–3). Indeed, the concept of the
international cannot be tied only to the inter-state. The international
in the globalized world or world society (Buzan, 2004), or international
political economy, subsumes much more (see Chapter 6). Space does
not permit further elaboration of the social theory of the international
inspired by the FS.5 Here, I would merely mention the idea of combin-
ing interdisciplinary materialism with the study of the international
along the lines of FS critical theory. This would merit serious attention
in IS (see Reid and Yanarella, 1976).

The English school: from IR to the study of the


international?

According to Tim Dunne (1998), the origin of the English school dates
back to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics,
launched by Herbert Butterfield in January 1959. However, Linklater
and Suganami (2006) do not accredit the committee similar status but
suggest that the orientation started in the London School of Economics

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102 Vilho Harle

earlier in the 1950s (see also Jones, 1981). The two alternative narratives
suggest slightly different lists of names as representing the ES, espe-
cially as regards E.H. Carr and C.A.W. Manning, who were active in the
field before the ES was actually born, irrespective of which narrative we
consider. Unfortunately, both lists mostly ignore the multidisciplinary
history of the ES by concentrating on prominent representatives of IR
and exclusively on their contributions to IR.
The committee participants were interested in, or at least expected
to elaborate upon, the theory of international politics. This theory was
understood not as a behaviouralist or empirical theory of international
interactions, but rather in the words of prominent ES writer Martin
Wight (1960) as ‘international theory’ – that is, theory of, or specula-
tion concerning the international. International theory thus represents
speculation on the international in the same sense as political theory
represents speculation on the political. While political theory asks ‘how
can (selfish and violent) men live together in society?’, international
theory asks ‘how can (selfish and violent) states live together in the
anarchical international society?’
The key interest for ES scholars is expressed by the idea of interna-
tional society: just as individual human beings, in certain situations,
form political communities, states, in certain situations, also form soci-
eties of which they are members. ES scholars mainly deal with struc-
tural, functional and historical investigations considering, respectively,
the structure of the world political stage (system, society and world
society); the functions of international society and its institutions; and
the historical development of international societies, both from system
to society and from one society to another (Linklater and Suganami,
2006, p. 43).
The ES gives a wide variety of meanings to the international, although
originally it primarily paid attention to the state or the states-system.
However, even then this did not imply exclusive attention to inter-state
relations. On the contrary, those aspects were excluded in the sense
of what today is called the neo-realist idea of international system.
International institutions played the key role in international society,
so the ‘relations’ occurred between states and institutions, rather than
between states. This relegated the international, understood as the ‘inter-
state’, to the background. I, therefore, claim that the key tenets of the ES
are not impossible to read in the light of the idea of ‘unlimited’ aspects
of the international (see also Buzan, 2004; Buzan and Little, 2000).
Martin Wight typologized international theory into realist
(Machiavellian or Hobbesian), rationalist (Grotian/Kantian) and

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 103

revolutionist (represented by revolutionary and anti-revolutionary ideolo-


gies) orientations (see Linklater and Suganami, 2006, pp. 160–8). The
realist tradition denies the existence of international society. Realists
maintain that states are in interaction with each other according to
their needs and immediate situations, but this interaction forms no per-
manent relationships between them. The rationalist tradition – going
beyond this conventional inter-state international towards a more com-
plicated image of the international in which the relationships occur
between the state and the norms/institutions of the international
society – maintains that states form a society in the sense,

[t]hat they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of


rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of
common institutions. (Bull, 1955[1977], p. 13; see also Linklater and
Suganami, 2006, p. 53)

The revolutionist tradition rejects the ontological existence of the


state, and maintains that human beings form a community at the level
of humanity. The state as an organizational structure of this humanity
is merely a temporal element without any real role above human beings
and humanity. In this tradition, international activities take place
between human subjects. The agenda of the international becomes
even more complicated owing to the role of various organizational
actors (e.g., the UN and the EU) and transnational companies that also
come into the picture.
For the realist, world politics or the ‘world political stage’ consists of
states. Their interaction can be called the international system. This
inter-state system is anarchical, and each state takes care of its own
security. The only difference between the states is found in their mili-
tary or geo-economic capacities. Kenneth Waltz (1979), the leading
proponent of this orientation, argues that one can describe, explain
and predict international politics by understanding the nature of the
international system and its anarchical character, which makes states
struggle with each other both in peace and at war in order to maintain
their security.
For the rationalists, states in their relations have conflicts but also
aspects of cooperation. The rationalist is interested in explaining the
prospects and occurrence of cooperation in the anarchical international
system. The rationalist notes that states often follow and respect norms
and rules in their interaction, even in wartime. Indeed, states have
established and committed themselves to international institutions

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104 Vilho Harle

(like diplomacy, war, etc.) upon which international society is built. In


Martin Wight’s words: ‘Although there is no political superior, [states]
nevertheless recognize that the multiplicity of sovereign states forms a
moral and cultural whole, which imposes certain moral and psycholog-
ical and possibly even legal . . . obligations – even if not political ones’
(Wight, 1991, p. 7).
For the revolutionist, international politics in terms of relations among
states is transient. At the deeper level it is about relations among human
beings; the ultimate reality is called the community of mankind. The
revolutionists appeal to international morality (as do the rationalists)
but that morality is understood as composed of revolutionary impera-
tives that require all men to work for a brotherhood of man. The world
is divided between the elect, who form the community of mankind (or
civitas maxima), and the heretics, who stand in its way (Bull, 1991, p.
xii). Or, in Wight’s words: ‘[the revolutionists] believe so passionately
in the moral unity of the society of states or international society that
they identify themselves with it, and therefore they . . . claim to speak
in the name of this unity. . . . For them, the whole of international soci-
ety transcends its parts; they are cosmopolitan rather than “interna-
tionalist”, and their international theory . . . has a missionary character’
(Wight, 1991, p. 8).
The original, classical international theory of (mainly) Martin Wight
was known to a relatively small group of the committee and Wight’s
students at the LSE (Bull, 1991). In 1981 Roy Jones proclaimed the death
of the ES – at the same time, however, giving the orientation its name
(Jones, 1981). Towards the end of the 1990s the English school switched
from the study of international theory and historical analysis of interna-
tional society to a more empirical study of current international issues
(e.g., Buzan, 2004). This switch made it increasingly popular among
those IR scholars who are at best distantly interested in political/inter-
national theory. During the first decade of the twenty-first century the
English school grew into one of the major orientations in IR in Western
Europe.6
This chapter is not, however, an appropriate place in which to discuss
and evaluate the English school as an approach to the study of inter-
national relations. Here, I am interested in its multidisciplinary nature
which, in my view, suggests an open research programme. My thesis is:
the expanding concept of the international makes interdisciplinarity a
major element of the ES, justifying the theoretical and methodological
pluralism of the school. (cf., Linklater and Suganami, 2006, pp. 81–4).
But, in addition, I claim that the ES has not fully acknowledged this.

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 105

Instead, it has distanced itself rapidly from interdisciplinary IS, moving


towards a fairly monodisciplinary IR.
Indeed, the most interesting element from our point of view is the
fact that the original idea and group of scholars was in many ways inter-
disciplinary, or rather, multidisciplinary. Indeed, the original ES was
not a school within IR; the ES rather was clearly outside it. During both
its first and second phases, IR scholars constituted a minority within
the school, albeit a significant one. More recent lists of ES scholars
almost exclusively contain IR names (see Dunne, 1998; Linklater and
Suganami, 2006). Unfortunately, as an expression of the monodiscipli-
narity of IR, the literature dealing with ES narratives (written by IR
scholars) is not interested to note, even in passing, the non-IR contribu-
tors to the school, failing to discuss their ideas of the international.
The British committee was launched and organized by historian
Herbert Butterfield. Martin Wight, who eventually became a professor
of history, was an assistant to Arnold Toynbee at the Chatham House for
the Study of History Project, taught IR, or better, international theory
– which for him was located somewhere in the history of ideas, or politi-
cal theory as well as history. Hedley Bull was originally an historian
who was invited by Manning to join the Department of International
Relations at LSE – on the explicit understanding that Bull was not an
IR scholar. It was Manning who advised Bull to participate in Wight’s
lectures on international theory. Adam Watson was originally a diplo-
mat invited to join the committee, subsequently becoming a prominent
history-oriented scholar in IR. In considering other figures – ones whose
membership in the ES is debatable, but who in any case have been often
mentioned in the literature of the ES story – we can find similar multi-
disciplinarily oriented figures. E.H. Carr was originally a journalist who
became professor of international relations, but who left the field and
became a prominent historian. C.A.W. Manning was professor of IR and
also an international lawyer (Dunne, 1998, pp. 12; 185; Linklater and
Suganami, 2006, pp. 5; 15; 22).
In addition to history and international law, the ES’s interdiscipli-
narity and its conceptual framework were based on sociology and the
sociological concepts of society and institutions, as well as norms, rules
and principles. This being so, it is quite surprising to find that the com-
mittee did not include any international lawyers or sociologists. The
sociological elements, however, were fully recognized later, but still
exclusively through IR lenses (e.g., Buzan, 2004; see also Wendt 1999).
As a case in point, the classical ES emphasized close relations between
IR and history. International society and its institutions had to be

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106 Vilho Harle

understood as historically developing phenomena. International soci-


ety is never an abstract or permanent structure (as is Waltz’s interna-
tional system); historical change is inherent in international society.
Institutions like diplomacy have their histories and undergo historical
changes (Linklater and Suganami, 2007, pp. 84–97; see also Watson,
1992; Wight, 1977; Bull and Watson, 1984; and R. Holsti, 1913; Numelin,
1950). And changing international institutions imply different interna-
tional societies in different historical periods (and different cultures).
History was also an important source of experience and a basis for polit-
ical wisdom and judgement.
Indeed, during the rebirth of the ES in the 1990s, the school degen-
erated into a major orientation within IR, in the process ignoring
the many faces of the international. It has included a rising number
of scholars from countries outside the United Kingdom or the British
Commonwealth, but they come exclusively from international rela-
tions. The connections to history (see, however, Buzan and Little, 1998),
international law, and even to political theory, have become almost
non-existent. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of Wight’s inter-
national theory, Buzan’s (2004) programmatic declaration to detach the
ES from political/normative theory and make it an empirical theory
of globalization is a major step from multidisciplinarity towards bar-
ren monodisciplinarity. At the same time, fortunately, Buzan’s hostility
towards classical international theory is not shared by many other repre-
sentatives of the ES (e.g., Ole Wæver, Iver Neumann or Robert Jackson).

****

What makes the ES an open research programme is its theoretical and


methodological pluralism. The school is not exclusive in its orienta-
tion; it declines to make a choice between realism and idealism (liberal-
ism) by introducing the third way of rationalism to make the picture
more flexible. Furthermore, the ES does not make a final choice among
realism, rationalism and revolutionism. And, finally, the ES introduces
an international theory (embracing realism, rationalism and revolu-
tionism) on the one hand, and a three-layered international practice
(including system, society and world society), on the other. It portrays
international theory and world politics as interconnected areas and
takes all three elements in both cases as aspects, not as the exclusive
essence, of the theory or practice.
We can note that the ES’s attempt to break up the dichotomy of real-
ism and liberalism of the first debate of IR constituted a blow to another,

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 107

more ignored dichotomy: that between the inter-state international and


inter-human international. For the ES, it was not an either-or issue. The
international, for the ES, has many faces and is a complex phenome-
non when world society, or human beings and transnational actors,
are taken into consideration (see e.g., Buzan, 2004, chapter 4; see also
Chapter 7 in this book.)
The ES rejects the idea of discussing just one aspect of world politics,
for example, the inter-state international or international system, as
Waltz does. Instead, it maintains that one must pay attention to all three
aspects of world politics: the inter-state system, inter-state society, and
inter-human world society – as well as to the transnational system of
international organizations and companies (Buzan, 2004.) This means
looking at the international in its widest sense.
It is not only the multidisciplinary history of the ES that makes it rel-
evant to us as a model for interdisciplinary international studies. The ES
represents a holistic orientation covering all aspects of the international
on all potential geographical scales, in light of theoretical and meth-
odological pluralism. It represents, perhaps, the best working model of
interdisciplinarity by covering all of its forms and being, both poten-
tially and practically, a progressive research programme in the sense
suggested by Lakatos (see Chapter 3). Indeed, referring back to my dis-
cussion of the FS, I wish to suggest that the interdisciplinary English
school would be a serious candidate to assume the role of social philoso-
phy of the FS and become a core field located somewhere between the
various disciplines contributing to the study of the international. This
field might occupy a lot of IR, but not all of it. It should also represent a
common interest to several disciplines.
Simultaneously, through the open-ended concepts of international
society and international institutions, the ES offers a solid core for
this effort. The approach can be seen as a multidisciplinary model
wherein the research programme (Lakatos, 1970 pp. 48–9) consists
of the hard core (international society) and its protective belt (types
of international society, and its changing institutions). It combines
negative heuristics (a programmatic tendency to reject the neo-
realist idea of the billiard ball model of the inter-state system) and
positive heuristics (suggesting, fruitfully and continuously, new
questions and applications). In this, the ES implies a progressive and
innovative problem-shift required to make a research programme
successful. Therefore, the ES can be an integrating model of interdis-
ciplinarity promising open and flexible coherence to the study of the
international.

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108 Vilho Harle

The realization of this promise will, of course, depend on how the ES


effort continues and expands in the future. Any research programme,
including the ES, may degenerate. Therefore, the dangers of ES/IR
orthodoxy, loss of interdisciplinarity, and fragmentation must be con-
sidered carefully now and in the future. Should the ES be a theory of
international politics (or possibly, the study of globalization) or should
it be kept as a theory of the international? Should it be just an empirical
theory or remain close to classical (or political) theory? Should the ES
reject classical theory and political/social philosophy or maintain its
connection to them?

Peace research

Peace research (PR)7 was born in the 1950s in North America and
Western/Northern Europe (Dunn, 2005, ch. 3, esp. pp. 46 ff.). Its
founding fathers – like the father of PR, Theodore Lenz (psychology
and education), as well as Quincy Wright (international law), Lewis Fry
Richardson (meteorology), and Herbert Kelman (social psychology) –
came from various fields to launch PR (Dunn, 2005, pp. 44–9; see also
JCR, 1957; Wright, 1955).
In Scandinavia, Johan Galtung, originally a mathematician and later
a sociologist – with academic degrees in both (1956 and 1957 respec-
tively) – became the leading figure. His first important published work
was co-authored with the philosopher Arne Næess, and introduced
strategies of non-violent action adopted from Mohandas Gandhi (Næess
and Galtung, 1955).
PR emerged as criticism of the traditional study of foreign policy
where realist scholars advocated the use of military force in guarding
the national interests of states (actually, their own states: ‘my coun-
try, right or wrong’). For peace researchers, IR had degenerated into an
uncritical pandering to national interests, and a military approach to
conflict management. PR introduced itself as a social study with ‘the
commitment . . . to a less violent world, violence being broadly con-
ceived’ (Galtung, 1975, p. 15). It emerged as a critical study of open and
structural violence, serving the needs of human security, universal jus-
tice and equality, and common international security instead of state-
centric national security; or the common interests of humanity in place
of particular and national(istic) interests. In brief, PR challenged the
concept of the international as an exclusively inter-state phenomenon.
Therefore, PR actually implied that IR (or, better, international politics)
had to be replaced by interdisciplinary PR in order to cover all aspects of

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 109

the international – excluding nothing but domestic or private inter- and


intra-personal levels (Galtung, 1975, p. 245).
The origin of PR represented an idealistic and profound belief in the
possibilities and power of science (see JCR, 1957). It promised to solve
the problems of war and peace8 just as science had solved other prob-
lems. In order to achieve peace tomorrow, one had to do peace research
today. War was presented as a disease for which PR and its wise and edu-
cated doctors promised to prescribe the appropriate remedy (Galtung,
1969, pp. 12–21; 50–6; Vesa, 1995). The goal was to produce knowledge
and ideas for removing obstacles on the road to peace (JPR, 1964).
PR claimed to represent an applied and normative science interested
in values in addition to facts. Instead of confining its attention to cor-
respondence between theories and facts, PR also sought to discuss the
correspondence (or better: absence of correspondence) between facts
and values, and values and theories. The task was not to find invari-
ances – social scientific laws – but to break them in order to let facts and
theories serve humanity (Galtung, 1977; Dunn, 2005, pp. 1–6; 35–9; see
also Schmid, 1968).
In criticizing traditional, nationalistic and military-oriented state-
centric foreign policy, and in suggesting value-orientation and norma-
tivity as alternatives (JPR, 1964; Galtung, 1975, p. 153; Galtung, 2007,
pp. 14–15), Johan Galtung wished to abolish the ivory tower model of
science. Peace research, for him, consisted of research, education and
action (Galtung, 1975; 1978; see also Wiberg, 1988; cf., Schmid, 1968).
Merely producing knowledge was not enough. It had to be accompanied
by education and action based on that knowledge.
Galtung maintained that PR had to be international and interdisci-
plinary. (Galtung, 1975, pp. 159–60; 229; 245–6.) Traditional IR had
looked at problems from a narrow national point of view. PR was to
offer a more comprehensive picture. This would be achieved by inviting
scholars from all parties to a given conflict to produce a balanced analy-
sis of the conflict. Interdisciplinarity was a key element in the effort: to
achieve an unbiased overall picture of the problem (conflict), various
disciplines had to be combined (Galtung, 1969).
The suggested interdisciplinarity was formed around a given research
problem of war and violence. However, research problems were not
derived from academic theories or debates; the problems had to include
real human life and human suffering. The list of relevant research prob-
lems, reflecting the social responsibility of social scientist and PR, was
indefinite and soon expanded from the issues of war and other cases of
open violence to structural violence, poverty, inequality and injustice.

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110 Vilho Harle

The Galtungian ethos of PR as a normative, international and inter-


disciplinary effort reflecting a comprehensive understanding of social
responsibility gave PR a major boost in the Nordic countries. It was
academically and socially motivating, representing the most advanced
and relevant studies in IR and other social sciences and suggesting an
important social task for (peace) scholars. Since then peace research
has been successful and influential in many ways: the number of peace
studies programmes in universities has grown; new PR institutes have
been established (while some of them have also died); the number of PR
journals and publications has risen high (Webel, 2007; Dunn, 2005, ch.
4). The ideals introduced by PR in the 1950s and 1960s – such as the crit-
ical study of social problems, interdisciplinarity, internationality, appli-
cability, and even normativity – are nowadays widely shared ideals.
However, the original enthusiasm surrounding the critical and crea-
tive spirit of PR disappeared soon after it became an established field
of study within the academic community. As Jutila, Pehkonen and
Väyrynen (2008; see also Patomäki, 2001) correctly maintain, PR soon
turned from a critical to a normal science. Other research movements
picked up the baton of critical research orientation. Among such fields
are, for instance, post-colonialist and feminist studies, political and
critical geopolitics, and environmental and climate change studies.
Indeed, the ‘neighboring disciplines of Critical Security Studies and
critical IR’ have taken over the role previously held by PR. In this light,
a somewhat ironic suggestion of the resuscitation of PR by revitalizing
it as critical peace research is well justified (Jutila et al., 2008; Patomäki,
2001).
While essentially agreeing with the suggested image of the fall of
criticism in PR, I assign the demise of the interdisciplinarity within it at
least as important a role in the process. In fact, I claim that the demise
of criticism and interdisciplinarity has much to do with each other:
the term ‘critical’ implies interdisciplinary, and vice versa. That is, PR
pursued interdisciplinarity because it wished to be a critical science – to
challenge the existing borderlines between disciplines, and to be based
on critical thought.
Therefore, when PR started to look like a normal science, it simulta-
neously turned from interdisciplinarity to (neo)disciplinarity. But PR
remained, then, a fragmented field. Indeed, concerning the proclaimed
promise of interdisciplinarity, PR is far from being a success. In PR, inter-
disciplinarity has become taken for granted – in other words, almost
ignored! Its revitalization as a critical social science must be based on
the revitalization of its interdisciplinary nature. In order to elaborate

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 111

on this thesis, I discuss five interrelated and overlapping trends reveal-


ing how interdisciplinarity needs serious self-reflective (re)thinking in
PR. Considering those trends would serve as a basis for reorganizing
interdisciplinarity (and criticism) in PR, thereby giving its cooperation
with other, critical and normal, academic disciplines a new lease of life.
My thesis is: instead of pontificating on what PR is or is not in order to
define it as a neodisciplinary field, we must pay major attention to the
PR-relevant aspects of all (social) sciences in order to give interdiscipli-
narity a solid and wide enough basis in peace research.
First, PR has not integrated around a common task, common concepts
or theories. Even the key concepts, such as peace, violence, justice, and
so forth, have remained highly contested concepts with disintegrat-
ing rather than integrating power (e.g., Boulding, 1977). Aggravating
this problem, PR has not paid sufficient attention to interdisciplinar-
ity from the perspective of philosophy or sociology of science. Instead
of fulfilling such a fundamental need, self-reflection in PR has either
disappeared or become rare (see, however, Jutila et al., 2008). Without
any systematic organization of multidisciplinary efforts into a coher-
ent whole, interdisciplinarity has remained in the air without any solid
basis. Since the early years of the 1960s and up to around 1974 – when
Johan Galtung and others discussed and debated peace research – vir-
tually no one has continued to problematize the further development
needs of PR. Peace researchers have concentrated their activity on mere
practical research. It is not surprising to find, therefore, how more
recent discussion of interdisciplinarity in PR simply reiterates what was
said decades ago (Alger, 2007).
Therefore, peace researchers have not become peace researchers, but
remain(ed) representatives of their original fields (e.g., IR, history, geog-
raphy, etc.). Practically no common interdisciplinary research efforts
have been attempted. Some peace researchers – like Galtung himself –
have become well versed in several (social) sciences9 – thereby making
a transdisciplinary attempt to break free from the borderlines of disci-
plines. Yet, his example has not been followed up by many other peace
researchers. Furthermore, there was and is nobody to draw together the
different arguments and findings. Efforts have remained fragmented
and multidisciplinary: each scholar studies the problem(s) exclusively
from her own disciplinary point of view. If the effort is, in the best
case, collected into an edited book or a volume of a journal, each con-
tribution represents different academic fields and interests without any
debate, collaboration or even communication among them.

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112 Vilho Harle

Second, PR has not introduced any working model for integrating


interdisciplinary efforts. It has achieved some features of neodisciplinar-
ity through research institutes and publications, but that development
has represented an unfortunate move away from interdisciplinarity
towards disciplinarity. PR has not fully recognized the potential revital-
izing power of peace research outside PR. Here, a key mission given by
Johan Galtung (1975, p. 15; emphasis V.H.) to PR has been ignored:

PR was conceived of as an approach rather than a discipline, as com-


mitted social science with no respect for any disciplinary or scholas-
tic borderline in social analysis.

In this sentence, Galtung articulates, more explicitly than anywhere


else in his works, that PR is or should be an aspect of all (social) sci-
ences. This proposal for what could be called an aspectual (see and cf.
Palonen, 1993) approach to PR, is something more demanding than are
transdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity. These are both indeed invalu-
able, but the aspectual perspective calls our attention to peace research,
as it were, outside PR. In such a case, at least in its pure and extreme
form, a scholar – for example, an historian or sociologist – is dealing
with issues of war and peace without interest in or communication with
scholars and studies in other academic fields, or even with those who
identify themselves as peace researchers. This is not, as such, a prob-
lem for the goals of PR. The more scholars there are within various
fields carrying out peace research, the better! Indeed, such an aspectual
organization for peace research provides the widest possible basis for
promoting peace. It would be claimed – as did one of my professors so
correctly during the planning and establishment of the Tampere Peace
Research Institute (TAPRI) in Finland in 1969 – that PR should remain
an aspect in as many fields as possible in order to make peace and peace
research a social responsibility and duty of all scholars. To establish a
specific department (or institute) would, he warned, endanger the PR
project by making peace research a monopoly of the ‘priests’ and the
‘holy church’ of PR and so excluding those who do not wish to declare
themselves peace researchers.
However, the potential contribution of the aspectual form of peace
research outside PR must be based on interdisciplinary integration. This
task should be taken seriously by PR. In this way, PR should encourage
aspectual peace research – where nothing is peace research by defini-
tion, but where any piece of work (most often in social sciences and the
humanities) can be read as peace research or at least be held relevant to

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 113

PR – and improve communication between scholars willing to under-


take such research. The point is that no totality of peace knowledge
emerges without the conscious and systematic efforts of peace research-
ers (see Galtung, 2007).
Third, expansion of PR to new issues has not always been positive and
unproblematic. Security studies is a case in point here, as represented
by the Copenhagen school. It emerged within the Copenhagen Peace
Research Institute (COPRI) and soon obtained a prominent place in IR
(sic!).10 The school represented critical orientation and its speech act
theory was introduced as a criticism of traditional military thought and
attempts to move security out of, or above, open political deliberation.
In this, the school was much based on the tradition of (Nordic) PR.
However, it also gave ‘security’ a key role, and indirectly contributed to
the securitization of everything: ‘this and that security’ became a gen-
eral expression providing a ‘scientific’ basis for military interests to find
new threats everywhere to justify the continuation of military means to
eliminate all types of alleged threats (cf., Jutila et al., 2008).
Fourth, we might speak of a displacement of PR (see, and cf., Beck,
1997; Hänninen and Vähämäki, 2000). Many scholars dealing with
peace issues – some of them close to the classical realism of IR (Holsti,
1987, pp. 7–8) or even Hans J. Morgenthau himself – have for various
reasons been reluctant to identify themselves as peace researchers.
In the 1960s the reason was ideological; there was either a true or an
alleged connection between peace research – and the idea of peace – and
communist/leftist parties or left-oriented peace movements (see Schmid,
1968). In a weaker form this suspicion concerned the normativity of PR
that claimed to have peace as its guiding value (JPR, 1964; Galtung, 1975,
esp. pp. 224–43; see also Patomäki, 2009). More recently, the reason has
been more academic: PR has not been able to maintain its role among
the most developing and innovative areas in critical social sciences
(Jutila et al., 2008; Patomäki, 2001). Therefore, some scholars dealing
with issues of war and peace no longer need PR. In short, one might say
that conventional or mainstream peace research has declined or is even
dead, but ‘true’ peace research (JPR, 1/1964; Galtung, 1975) now resides
elsewhere, under a different title of ‘critical thinking’ (Reid, 2003):

I don’t mourn the death of peace studies, but the closing of the space
for critical thinking . . . is worrying. (Reid, 2010)

In other words, scholars and students in IR/IS read contributions from


more innovative and more critical fields, such as social philosophy,

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114 Vilho Harle

feminist studies, critical geopolitics and others – but not from PR.
Such scholars and students associate themselves with innovative areas
of social philosophy and social studies – not with PR. This is exacer-
bated by the fact that PR has failed to recognize how in many ways IR
has reverted to its ‘roots’ in the study of war and peace, and that the
national interest studies of the realist school of the 1950s and 1960s
are decidedly passé. In short, today’s IR is not the same as it was in the
1950s. While conventional realist security studies still form a main-
stream in Anglo-American and Western European IR, it seems pointless
to just repeat the anti-realist criticism of inter-state IR that justified the
introduction of PR in the 1950s and 1960s, and ignore the fact that
PR can and must find friends and collaborators within IR, too (see e.g.,
Jutila et al., 2008).
Indeed, it appears that the most fruitful and theoretically and meth-
odologically innovative peace research can nowadays be found within
critical IR and recent social philosophy. One example is the critical
study of war and globalization, or to put it under a new rubric, ‘resist-
ance studies’. These studies address the nature of modern war and struc-
tures of power in the international, global and ‘domestic’ systems; and,
instead of speaking in general universalistic terms, discuss the histori-
cal situation of the here-and-now without attempting to find a uni-
versal solution to the problem of war in general. Now the aim is to
find options to resist the current power structures and the American
hegemony in today’s world (e.g., Dillon, 1996; Dillon and Reid, 2009;
Prozorov, 2007; Reid, 2003; 2006; 2009[2006]). Conventional IR is chal-
lenged again, even in its constructivist (Wendtian) form – just as PR
was in the 1950s and 1960s (Galtung, 1975, pp. 244, 247–8) – by openly
dissenting or rebellious IR scholars. And, what is really important,
such studies are based on the social/political theory and philosophy
of continental scholars – mainly French, Italian and German – such as
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Agamben, Nietzsche and
Schmitt. While in this direction, Foucault at least has been recognized
earlier in PR (e.g., Dunn, 2005, p. 57), peace researchers have seldom
applied perspectives from Foucault or other critical social philosophers
(see, however, Reid and Yanarella, 1976).11
Last but not least, attempts to pass on PR tradition(s) to new gen-
erations have been somewhat feeble and unsystematic because of the
organization of PR outside university departments concentrating on
research rather than education (see, and cf., Galtung, 1975, p. 281; Lopez,
1989).12 There were, originally, good reasons to organize PR in indepen-
dent research institutes outside departments of political science/IR that

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 115

uncritically served national interests and foreign policies based on mil-


itary power. Unfortunately, the result is that today not many young
students receive academic basic training in peace research. Instead, the
education is given in IR, history, geography, and so on. The university
departments are there to pass on traditions of their own. Lacking such
a socializing system of transferring knowledge to new generations, few
young scholars identify themselves nowadays as peace researchers, nor
are they very well aware of the earlier key exponents of PR or their
works. For example, Johan Galtung, who has been productive up to this
day, is little known among younger peace researchers – both his earlier
and more recent works are seldom found in the bibliographies of youn-
ger scholars. Even those working in PR institutes, rarely make reference
to his or any other classical PR works. If younger ‘peace researchers’
come together in a research project or in a PR institute, it is not likely
that they find something common among themselves as peace research-
ers.13 Without regarding self-identification as a peace researcher – possi-
ble only through sharing the tradition of PR – such scholars are not too
interested in promoting PR as a field. Such peace researchers are more
interested in specific issues (e.g., conflict resolution, migration studies,
or the like), which they actually understand as a research problem in
their original field (e.g., IR or geography), not in PR.

Discussion

When the three examples of organizing interdisciplinary work in prac-


tice are compared against each other in light of the fragmentation/inte-
gration of international studies, it is obvious that the Frankfurt school
model fares best. In the FS model the active force of a core science inte-
grates the efforts of separate disciplines to arrive at a coherent theory
of the totality. The application of the FS model in IS is problematic,
however, for it is not easy to see what discipline would assume the role
of social philosophy as in the model of interdisciplinary materialism in
international studies. This model, however, positively rejects the core
role of IR in international studies, which, instead, calls for a philosophy
of the international, or international theory, to endow international stud-
ies with purpose and structure.
This may imply a quest for the English school, but only in its original,
classical version, wherein international theory was the central concern.
Furthermore, following the FS model, the empirical study of problems
of international and world society should be put to the service of inter-
national theory. Otherwise, there is a danger that the ES – while an

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116 Vilho Harle

undeniably progressive and expanding research programme – would


represent a narrowing road away from the FS model, and from the idea
of interdisciplinarity in general.
In this comparison, PR stands for interdisciplinarity in words but not
in deeds. The PR model has (unfortunately) remained an example of a
disintegrative approach. PR does not fully understand its role in peace
research and peace studies. It does not attempt to produce self-identity
for peace researchers through continuous and critical self-reflection. PR
even ignores its role as a bridge-builder between scholars conducting
PR-relevant studies. Therefore, the PR model makes for disintegration
rather than fruitful integration in international studies. While the ES
moves from interdisciplinarity towards increasingly conventional IR,
PR moves away from interdisciplinarity to nowhere, as it were, not rec-
ognizing what the open and comprehensive conception of the interna-
tional might impart to it. By paying more attention to the international
and the ensuing interdisciplinarity, PR might, however, revert to, or
perhaps for the first time in its history become, a truly critical interdis-
ciplinary orientation.
In conclusion, both the ES and PR should be aware of the dangers
of ignoring the problems of interdisciplinarity. Both should address
their main attention to the elaboration of interdisciplinarity, making
it their guiding star – with a close connection to a critical orientation.
Because interdisciplinarity and critical orientation are two sides of the
same coin, it would be logical for the ES and PR to cooperate to give
new impetus to critical – that is, interdisciplinary – international and
peace studies.
Finally, it is time to add that none of the three models discussed in
this chapter is perfect: interdisciplinarity is easy in theory but in prac-
tice difficult to achieve. In spite of this unsolvable problem, the three
cases give us insights and ideas on how to apply interdisciplinarity as an
aid to the study of the international. Four lessons can be learned here.
First, the Frankfurt school, the English school, and peace research, are
not competing models from which we should choose one. There is no
final solution to the problem of practising interdisciplinarity; there can
only be alternative roads in this direction. Each of the three examples
tells us something. They tell about the magic of interdisciplinarity:
interdisciplinarity is an exhortation to think in new and innovative
ways. Second, we need to study the international by addressing big
social issues and questions, like war, peace and the international itself
– not simply engage in academic or methodological debates. Third,
this means that normativity is a core aspect of any serious attempt to

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Towards Interdisciplinary Research Programmes 117

study the international. Fourth, all three examples reveal that a fruitful
research programme – in our case, the study of the international – must
be open, flexible, and innovative.

Notes
1. On the various forms of interdisciplinarity, see Chapter 2. For other vocabu-
laries of interdisciplinarity, see for example, Galtung (1975, pp. 245–6).
2. Recounted in more detail by, for example, Wiggershaus (1994); Jay (1973); Tar
(1977); and O.P. Moisio (1999); see also Wyn Jones (1999, pp. 10–15).
3. In spite of having its roots the German tradition of critical social science
(see Leonard, 1990), the FS’s critical theory never fully approximated Marx’s
model of critical studies (Fay, 1987). Furthermore, Marxism was abandoned
by the FS scholars after the 1920s, when ‘CT dissociated itself from the basic
tenet of Marxism: the unity of theory, empirical research, and revolutionary
praxis’ (Tar, 1977, pp. 202–3).
4. O.P. Moisio (1999, p. 26), referring to Alex Honneth, suggests that the FS
studies of the 1930s can be divided into three groups: (a) economic studies on
post-liberalist capitalism; (b) social-psychological studies on social integra-
tion and family; and (c) study of mass culture. Moisio adds that Horkheimer
himself applied six categories for the papers published in ZfS in 1932–8: (a)
philosophical studies on methodology and social philosophy; (b) economic
studies on the current economic problems of capitalism; (c) sociological
studies on Chinese society; (d) historical studies on the background of cur-
rent social relations; (e) psychological studies on the relation between the
individual and the economic/cultural structures, and (f) legal studies on the
change in law from liberal to totalitarian society.
5. With later generations of the FS (especially Habermas and Honneth), connec-
tions to the international (even international relations) have become more
explicit (see Deitelhoff and Müller, 2005; Haacke, 2005; Hutchins, 2005;
Weber, 2005; and also Millennium, 2007). Similarly, Gramsci (see Morton,
2007) has often been discussed in the study of the international, for instance
by Robert Cox and Stephen Gill (see also Agnew, 2005).
6. A selective list of ES publications can be found at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/
polis/englishschool/documents.htm, date accessed 15 November 2010.
7. Note that the term ‘peace research’ (peace and conflict research) represents
the Nordic tradition wherein ‘peace studies’ is seldom used. I must point out
that while consulting and referring to some non-Nordic pieces of PR/Peace
Studies (e.g., Dunn, 2005; Evangelista, 2005; Journal of Conflict Resolution,
volumes 1957–73; Lopez, 1989), the present text is based exclusively on the
Nordic debates in PR (mainly Galtung’s early papers) and a perusal of two
sources: Journal of Peace Research (JPR, 1964–2009), and Kosmopolis (2000–9).
JPR is the journal of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO),
established by Johan Galtung. Kosmopolis is published by the Finnish Peace
Research Association. Furthermore, I draw upon my personal experience in
Nordic PR since the end of the 1960s.
8. If the task of PR is defined narrowly, as is often done (e.g., Dunn 2005, p. 7;
Evangelista, 2005, p. 1; see also JPR 1/1964), the definition repeats that of IR.

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118 Vilho Harle

As Holsti (1987, pp. 7–8) maintains, IR’s key question, ‘the absolutely essen-
tial, the raison d’étre of the field’, originally was: ‘the causes of war and the
conditions of peace/security/order’. True, the early IR can be understood as
a predecessor to PR (Dunn, 2005, ch. 2); neither it is erroneous to maintain
that PR was an attempt to revert to the early interdisciplinary international
studies by replacing the national interest with a normative value of peace.
9. Galtung (1978, p. 15) put this personal multidisciplinarity (or better, a
scholar’s transdisciplinary challenge to the borderlines of his/her discipline)
this way: ‘The research effort [by Galtung] was spread over many fields and
resulted in many articles rather than a few books with a more concentrated
focus’.
10. Some present PR and critical security studies synonymously (e.g., Guzzini,
2009), while others speak of CSS as a ‘neighbouring discipline’ (Jutila et al.,
2008; see also Jutila, 2008).
11. As Leonard (1990) maintains, critical social science consists of various tra-
ditions. The Frankfurt school represents the German tradition, while the
French names in the list belong to the French tradition. Galtung’s concept
of critical studies is perhaps closer to the German tradition, but it also rep-
resents a unique approach somewhat different from the other two, sharing
some elements (education and action) of the third persuasion, the ‘critical
theory in political practice’.
12. The number of peace research/studies programmes in universities and col-
leges throughout the world is fairly high and has grown over the decades
(Dunn, 2005; Lopez, 1986; Webel, 2007). In Scandinavia, university educa-
tion in peace studies is offered in one place: the Department of Peace and
Conflict Studies, University of Uppsala. PR education is usually provided in
IR departments as an element of IR, or as an area of specialization within it.
13. A group of young Finnish scholars working at TAPRI, discussing what it is to
be a peace researcher and what characteristics such researchers have in com-
mon, speak in extremely positive terms of open debate, innovative ideas,
mutual encouragement and support, and feeling and being together, and so
on. Surprisingly enough, PR as an (interdisciplinary) field as a/the common
nominator is not included at all! (Curticapean et al., 2007).

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Part II
Levels of Analysis

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5
Geographies of the International
System: Globalization, Empire and
the Anthropocene
Simon Dalby

Disciplining international relations

In the latter stages of the cold war, and through the early decades of the
age of globalization, political scientists dominated the study of interna-
tional relations. Notions of global politics were frequently presumed to
be a matter of inter-state relations, and the study of international poli-
tics was frequently just the study of relations between territorial states.
Other scholars made contributions, but the discussions of the pursuit
of peace and power, to borrow Hans Morgenthau’s (1948) canonical for-
mulation, was both a political science question in the academy, and to a
substantial extent also an American scholarly preoccupation. Examining
this in light of concerns about interdisciplinarity, and the contribution
that other disciplines might make to the discussion implicitly raises the
question of why the other disciplines might be largely missing in the
first place. As Raymond Miller (2010) suggests, international relations
has been dominated by political science for a very long time. Attempts
at interdisciplinarity, while long part of the history of international
studies, have not altered this hegemony (see Chapter 2).
Perhaps not so obvious, but crucial to the argument in this chap-
ter, is the related concern of how the fields of study of international
studies and international relations are defined. Such definitions are
crucial because, as Bradley Klein (1994) has made very clear, the schol-
arly field of strategic studies and the larger investigations of ‘security’
are not unrelated to the operation of American hegemony in the cold
war period and its aftermath. How the world is specified in these dis-
courses matters politically. If states are territorial entities in an anarchic

125

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126 Simon Dalby

arrangement, struggling for peace and power, and that is apparently


humanity’s given situation, then all sorts of other political arrange-
ments are implicitly foreclosed. When viewed through the lenses of
contemporary geography, and the debate about scale on the one hand
(Keil and Mahon, 2009; Sjoberg, 2008), or more specifically through
the discussions of critical geopolitics on the other (Ingram and Dodds,
2009), this assumption of an agreed upon terrain for analysis is not at
all obvious. It is not at all clear that authority, territory and matters of
sovereignty can be adequately mapped in the categories of either the
nation state or the international system.
Power seems to transcend many boundaries (Elden, 2009) and
appear in multiple authority configurations summarized by Ronnie
Lipschutz (2009) simply as Imperium. The state system remains very
important but, as John Agnew (2009) suggests, this is within a system
of ‘regimes of sovereignty’ in which states are very far from equal
and in many places only some boundaries matter some of the time.
If interdisciplinarity is to work in international studies, then presum-
ably some agreement on the ontological categories that structure the
investigation is needed, but the intense discussions of globalization,
empire and other related phenomena are intense precisely because
the present circumstances do not lend themselves to easy analysis in
the terms long taken for granted in international relations. Hence,
the great difficulty with these discussions and, ironically it seems,
the impetus to calls for greater interdisciplinarity to tackle difficult
contemporary questions.
The rest of this chapter teases out the themes that suggest the con-
temporary crisis in international studies – a crisis that might require
interdisciplinary studies or interdisciplinary cooperation – exists, in
part, precisely because the taken-for-granted mappings of the world are
of territorial states, and that, following John Agnew’s (2003) terms, the
discipline of international relations is stuck in a ‘territorial trap’. In the
literature now called ‘critical geopolitics’, the crucial role of studies in
geography is to challenge how this territorial trap has come about and
to investigate what other mappings of social and political phenomena
on the big scale might have to say about contemporary transformations
(Ó Tuathail, 1996; Kuus, 2007). This chapter suggests that the most
important contribution the discipline can bring to the task is this geo-
graphical interrogation of the implicit cartographic categories in inter-
national studies.
Drawing inspiration from Rob Walker’s (2010) powerful challenge
to the ontological categories of modern political thought, the chapter

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Geographies of the International System 127

points to the usually unremarked-upon spatial assumptions that struc-


ture political discussions and scholarly analysis as key to understanding
how hegemony functions, and how international relations as a disci-
pline has perpetuated such modes of intellectual inquiry. Ironically, in
the age of globalization strategic studies and the military dimensions
of international relations have been reasserted in the ‘global’ war on
terror. In the process it has become clear just how inappropriate these
geopolitical premises are for dealing effectively with either political
violence or the larger questions of accelerating environmental change
(Dalby, 2009a). The problems of peace and war that had long concerned
international relations as a discipline, have once again become a matter
of concern for the social sciences, but are such in different geopolitical
circumstances now.
Looking to the discussions of empire and globalization, and then in
the conclusion to the discussions of environmental change and the new
artificial circumstances of humanity in the geological era now called
the ‘Anthropocene’, the rest of this chapter emphasizes the crucial role
of implicit mappings in structuring how contemporary political life
is understood. Critical geopolitics cannot provide a definitive correc-
tion to the lacunae in the contemporary discussion of the nature of
the international system, but this approach does pose questions about
both how the world is currently mapped, and how tackling the geog-
raphies of empire, globalization and the Anthropocene allows for a
critical interrogation of the supposed verities of our times. As such it
reflects back on the ontological precepts of contemporary politics in a
way that transcends at least some disciplinary limits. In the process it
suggests that interdisciplinary efforts, or interdisciplinary cooperation
in international studies, require persistent scepticism about the taken-
for-granted categories of ‘the international’ as well as ‘levels of analysis’
in a ‘global’ world.

Inter-national ‘system’

Faced in the late 1940s with a new and vast pattern of distant com-
mitments and a very new world order, Americans turned to political
science and to the amorphous literature of ‘area studies’ for knowledge
of the world that might facilitate managing the far-flung commitments
that had been acquired by the simple fact of victory in a worldwide
military struggle. As the cold war was institutionalized both in mili-
tary doctrines and in the practices for studying such important matters,
international relations as a predominantly American enterprise focused

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128 Simon Dalby

on matters of security and strategic studies (Klein, 1994). These terms


dominated understandings within international relations and did so
within a geopolitical invention, divided into two blocs of fairly stable
states, with a ‘third world’ in between of mostly less capable states.
Military force was understood as the ultimate arbiter in human affairs,
but territorial states were the entities that mattered in the exercise of
that force.
Extending American influence (effectively as an informal empire
in many parts of the world) was not a matter of territorial expansion
(Smith, 2003). Dismantling former European empires and opening up
markets to newly independent states were matters of influence and
trading arrangements backed up by military power in alliance systems
constructed with other, at least putatively sovereign, states. As such it
was not a matter of geographical knowledge needed for direct adminis-
tration, but loosely it was about knowledge of cultures and other politi-
cal systems that might be much more useful than surveys, grids and
practical local administration which geography might then have had
to offer. Likewise, boundaries were mostly fixed, and there were no
longer demands for expertise in matters of surveys, demarcations and
appropriate line drawing exercises on the large scale. Although the finer
points of many boundaries remained in contention, these were techni-
cal exercises not nation-constructing divisions of prior polities.
As with many of the other disciplinary options Quincy Wright (1955)
considered in his reflections on the appropriate scholarly tools for inter-
national relations, geography did not end up having much influence
in mainstream research. Due both to intellectual and institutional
developments in the decade after the Second World War, international
relations became a predominantly American discipline shaped by polit-
ical science (Long, 2006). States are apparently the only entities that
really matter, and political science is the discipline that studies states.
Ipso facto, political science is the intellectual tool kit that is needed.
This limited attention to states and the tools of political science only
is seriously complicated by the corollary that politics is what happens
within states, and mere relations happen between these supposedly
autonomous geometric spaces (Walker, 1993). With this simple cartog-
raphy clearly understood, geographers would seem to have little to say
about matters of the international. The post-war ‘territorial covenant’
whereby recognition of permanent state boundaries is coupled with the
agreement that intervention across borders is forbidden provided an
international system that specified sovereign territorial states as the key
organizing principle (Jackson, 2000; Zacher, 2001).

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Geographies of the International System 129

While this system of states is, as Walker (2010) repeatedly reminds us,
a very elegant resolution to many modern political problems, it fails to
grapple with numerous structural transformations in contemporary life.
States frequently do not neatly contain ‘nations’ within their borders,
despite the legitimization of their authority in terms of their being the
political expression of national identity. Sociologists in particular seem
to be unhappy with the field of international studies, as Saskia Sassen’s
(2008) Territory, Authority, Rights suggests, and indeed the International
Studies Association has recently launched a new journal simply titled
International Political Sociology. In the introduction to the first edition of
the journal, the editors Didier Bigo and Rob Walker note the contem-
porary convergence of sociology and international relations in terms of
a cultural turn in international relations, on the one hand, and on the
other a growing concern among sociologists with matters of the global
constitution of politics. ‘More recent trends have seen some significant
convergences between sociological and political analysis, especially in
work on refugees, migrants, diasporas, protection, security, multina-
tional enterprises, and advocacy networks’ (Bigo and Walker, 2007, p. 4;
see also Chapter 7)
All of which suggests that the prior intellectual apparatus of interna-
tional relations is not the appropriate mode of inquiry for the analysis
of these issues. Bigo and Walker suggest that in part this was because the
formulations in international relations were frequently shaped by the
formulations of the levels of analysis schema. But, clearly, this codifica-
tion of the problematic of international relations is no longer adequate
(if it ever was) to understand contemporary political developments or
conduct serious scholarly inquiry into the human condition.

Geopolitics and international relations

Robert Vitalis (2006), in reflecting on the discipline and its hegemony,


implies a particularly interesting suggestion concerning the ‘spatial
framing’ of politics in the twentieth century. He notes that prior to
the First World War interracial relations were a major concern of schol-
ars. Larger concerns with history and race were part of the intellec-
tual milieu before the war changed numerous things. After the war the
Council on Foreign Relations, and its flagship journal Foreign Affairs,
formalized a new situation in which the League of Nations and inter-
national relations were more explicitly understood in terms of the rela-
tions of sovereign states. The long dividing lines of trench warfare in
the First World War were followed by a period in which international

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130 Simon Dalby

frontiers were more obviously policed; migration was more difficult,


passports became the norm – simultaneously fixing citizen identities
and formalizing the practicalities of cross border travel. Protectionist
policies emphasized new modes of commercial restriction on top of the
earlier patterns of imperial preferences and trading restrictions in terms
of the nationalities of ships.
All this could be understood as a result of what Halford Mackinder
(1904) called the closure of political space at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, when Europeans effectively ran out of additional terri-
tories that could usefully be claimed. European empires had carved up
Africa and parts of Asia; the US reached the Pacific and had already
purchased Alaska. The results were likely to be ominous in Mackinder’s
terms: ‘Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in
a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be
sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in
the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in
consequence’. Clearly, here is the suggestion that the spatial framing
had changed and, while not exactly a prediction of the world war that
came a decade after Mackinder’s words were published, clearly a sugges-
tion that the Columbian age was over and that a new arrangement of
world power had arrived (Kearns, 2009).
While the international lawyers were obviously busy thinking in terms
of structures that followed from the League of Nations, in Aberystwyth
historian E.H. Carr (1946) was working on a book that was subsequently
to be claimed as one of the founding realist texts in international rela-
tions. In his discussions of great powers, revisionist struggles and the
larger canvas of inter-state rivalry, Carr tells a cautionary tale about the
dangers of misplaced utopian schemes and the necessity of thinking
carefully and clearly about rivalries. But most of the great powers of
that time were not by any stretch of the imagination nation states; they
were mostly empires. Even Germany, the cause of so much anguish, was
in some crucial ways still better understood as an empire rather than
a unitary nation state. This matters because the logic of realism and
the arguments that states exist in rivalry and compete for power and
influence appears to be much more a matter of inter-imperial struggles
than rivalries between nation states, most of whom coexist in relative
peacefulness with each other most of the time.
In simple empirical terms, the most naïve claim about realism – and
the rejection of the Nazi notions of Lebensraum and pseudo Darwinian
invocations of the struggle of the fittest – is simply: if realism really was
about struggles to maximize security by growing in power and influence,

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Geographies of the International System 131

why does the international system now have nearly four times as many
states as it did when Carr (1946) and Morgenthau (1948) published the
texts which are now taken as canonical realist tracts? In contemporary
times much more than the basic attempt to gain territory and maximize
control over resources is obviously going on. Indeed, expanding terri-
torial control is increasingly passé as a mode of political life, not least
because a changing political economy means wealth is now much less
about territory than about capital (Nitzan and Bichler, 2009).
In part, territorial disputes are less prevalent because the territorial
covenant involves common agreement among states that the exist-
ing boundaries are no longer to be substantially moved, even if many
disputes remain about the finer points of delimitation and demarca-
tion. However irrational in cultural, economic or environmental terms,
these lines have become the agreed upon designation of administra-
tive spaces, and as such part of the reason why wars are apparently less
frequent than in earlier times. This confirms the simple but important
assertion that the UN has effectively ended the previous patterns of
territorial change as the result of warfare (Zacher, 2001). Geographical
status quo ante is now the norm. Precisely where the boundaries are
not agreed, in for example the Palestine–Israel case and in the Kashmir
dispute, violence is always an imminent possibility. Inter-state competi-
tion is apparently causing division, not amalgamation, forced or other-
wise; old nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geopolitical notions
of states (read, empires) that either grow or die are obviously irrelevant
to these considerations.

International relations/dis-united states

Nonetheless, the assumption of competing spatial entities provides the


ontological categories from which much else in the discipline of inter-
national relations is derived. If in fact this geographical sleight of hand
is a valid claim, might this not explain many things about international
relations? Might this also explain part of the legitimatizing strategy by
which American official documents and statements frequently invoke
formulations such as ‘states like the United States’ when it is patently
obvious that there are no states like the United States? This ability to
evoke commonality, where singularity is obviously much more appro-
priate, is a powerful rhetorical device that draws on the presupposi-
tions that structure international relations thinking to be efficacious.
Obviously, hegemony is about much more than this, the global market
society being key to much of it (Agnew, 2005), but the spatial categories

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132 Simon Dalby

of the Westphalian state are a key part precisely because they simulta-
neously constrain the political imagination and facilitate all sorts of
political arrangements that obscure how power works.
On the face of it, the geography of contemporary international rela-
tions is a very strange arrangement indeed. Without paying attention
to the historical evolution of the international system, how could any
remotely sensible scholarly classification of entities lump what we now
call, say China, Luxembourg, Tuvalu and Uruguay, into the same cat-
egory? Implying an ideal type, some sort of Weberian territorial monop-
oly of legitimate violence on the one hand, and a claim to a single
national identity on the other, makes very little sense in considering
these cases. Clearly, the insistence on this powerful foundational fic-
tion is immensely efficacious for many of the privileged in this world.
It structures the institutions of the ‘United Nations’ especially well,
although empirical observation of much of the activity of this organi-
sation suggests that ‘disunited states’ might be a more accurate name
for the institution.
But it is precisely these entities and the assumptions that this is how
power works that have also long-structured international relations as
a discipline. Clearly, there have been numerous problems constraining
the analysis within such thinking. Economics clearly crosses bounda-
ries easily, and the rise of international political economy in the last
few decades is clear evidence that international relations focused on
states, power and security is not enough to gain traction on the major
shifts in global politics. But here, too, as the discussion of the dif-
ferences between schools in the pages of the Review of International
Political Economy recently has indicated, the ontological presupposi-
tions in what is rather unhelpfully labelled the ‘American school’ rein-
force the hegemonic specification of what it is that is to be studied and
how (Cohen, 2007). In contrasting the American formulations (with
their emphasis on economics and rational choice, presuppositions of
rational actors, markets, struggles for primacy and so on) with the
more historical and sociologically influenced ‘British school’, Higgott
and Watson (2008) suggest that disciplinary preoccupations matter,
and that the social context from within which scholarly questions are
posed matter even more.
Simply looking to states and markets as the key ingredients of what
is in need of explanation reproduces the cultural logic of contemporary
hegemony of what is now simply once again called capitalism. The pre-
supposition that economic wealth, as conventionally measured in mon-
etary terms, is the key to the human endeavour, but that it is unevenly

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Geographies of the International System 133

distributed and administered by a multiplicity of states with different


styles of management, mirrors the dominant discourses of politics
(Strange, 1994). Or at least it did until 2008, when a major ‘correction’
in the financial sector of what is called the global economy clearly indi-
cated that many of these measurements were fictitious. In challeng-
ing the logic of markets, the economic crisis of 2008 emphasizes the
importance of states once again. Economics is a political matter as Niall
Ferguson (2008) has recently reiterated in his historical reconstruction
of previous economic calamities. The contemporary problems with the
‘global’ economy now play out in geographic terms, where fiscal crises
in ‘Mexico’ or ‘Argentina’ or ‘Greece’ are suddenly nonetheless matters
of great concern to ‘global’ markets.
Ironically, while the territorial lines on the maps are fixed, many
political problems elude the cartography. Problems supposedly result
from globalization where the inadequacies of states as political contain-
ers are repeatedly asserted by politicians concerned to reassert control
in the face of apparently foreign threats. But all this only makes sense
if the prior division of the world into such properties and territories
is taken as the ontological given for analysis and policy formulation,
not to mention the premise for political community, the supposed
sine qua non for modern subjects. The taken-for-granted specifications
of how and where politics happens are frequently precisely that: sim-
ply assumed as the given context. As such these specifications have
a powerful hegemonic effect in defining how politics is understood.
Geography, and critical geopolitics in particular, focuses on these con-
textualizations, stagings and representations of the world as the place
in which politics occurs (Sparke, 2005). As such, it acts to challenge
the hegemonic scripting of global politics and the geopolitical imagina-
tion of multiple competing spatial entities as the topic for international
studies. But this very obvious point is what is crucial to any geopolitical
engagement with the literature of international relations, and the dis-
cussions of globalization that so frequently fail to reflect on precisely
what is supposedly novel about recent developments.

Globalization

Four decades after the establishment of international relations as the


hegemonic specification of global political possibilities in the cold war
period, the transition from that cold war to the post–cold war era dra-
matically changed the geopolitical cartography. No longer did assump-
tions about front lines, battlefields, blocs and superpower rivalry overly

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134 Simon Dalby

determine patterns of military confrontation. But the cold war armies


left over from plans for old-fashioned tank battles in Germany were
slow to adapt to the new circumstances, not least because with their
upgraded technological innovations the American, British and French
forces had apparently proven their worth in Iraq in 1991. While George
H.W. Bush celebrated a new world order after the demise of the Berlin
Wall, many more sanguine commentators were less convinced about
claims to either order or novelty.
In the aftermath of the cold war the appropriate designations of
political reality were thrown into doubt with the demise of the bloc
division of the world. Fairly quickly, Western triumphalist arguments
turned what was interpreted into a victory for the West into narratives
of global business, democracy, markets, development and environment,
too. Tropes of management and marketization of practically everything
assured the rich and powerful, and increasingly highly mobile tourists,
that the world was a single place, or soon would be as the market logic
of global capital took over. Emerging markets were good investment
opportunities, or at least they were until an economic crisis in a vaguely
defined ‘Asia’ caused some volatility in such things. The new technolo-
gies of data administration, Internet, computers and digital commu-
nication suggested a new ‘information age’. Manuel Castells (1996–8)
called his huge trilogy on the new circumstances just that. It took some
years for pundits to decide that we did not just live in a post–cold war
era, but in one best specified by the term globalization.
It took much longer for the strategic geographies of all this to get
much attention. Clearly ‘humanitarian interventions’ were in order
in a way that they had not been during the cold war as Somalia, the
Balkans, Kurdistan, East Timor and other examples suggested. But only
some maps were destroyed; the larger Westphalian assumptions of a
world order of equal states remained, even as international practice
suggested that in many key areas this assumption was highly dubious
(Williams, 2008). The new geographies of conflict, and the emergence
of what Mary Kaldor (2007) terms the political economy of organized
violence in the so-called ‘new wars’, remained underspecified until
it became clear that they too were tied into the circuits of the glo-
bal economy. Where territorial claims were so frequently a casus belli
in the past, the UN’s norm of territorial fixity has been established
and widely respected in the last half century. This innovation might
well be key to the decline in major inter-state warfare (Zacher, 2001).
Ironically, of course, where nationalist zeal is whipped up to justify
inter-ethnic violence, it has led to situations in which, if the border

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Geographies of the International System 135

cannot be moved, then clearly people must be ethnically cleansed to


adjust the population to the cartography rather than the other way
round.
In terms of the discipline of international relations the neat spatial
divisions of blocs and the logic of states suddenly became a problem;
turbulence, in Jim Roseneau’s (1997) terms, in the global system was
matched by similar unpredictable intellectual storms within the disci-
pline. John Mearsheimer became positively nostalgic for the lost verities
of the earlier period, although he recovered quickly to produce a major
text that reinserted great powers into the discipline’s narratives, despite
the stormy discursive times (2001). The term globalization emerged as
the defining term of the 1990s, neatly encompassing the recognition
that – at least for capital, and those tourists, and a new generation of
graduate students in search of exotic locales for research – processes of
transformation were remaking the experiential world while universal-
izing many aspects of capitalist culture. Corporations became global,
and so did culture and fashion and later the Internet, cellphones, digital
media, iPods and virtual communities.
All this was much easier to deal with in anthropology, economics,
sociology and, yes, geography, in that in some ways they were less
wedded to the state than was international relations, or at least as was
the core security studies and strategy part of the discipline. What is
interesting in the discussion of security and geopolitics in the 1990s is
how frequently the focus on states remains. Of particular concern in
the light of subsequent events is the focus by the neoconservatives on
state threats to the US, threats that turned out to be irrelevant to the
attack that did actually materialize on 9/11 (Dalby, 2006). The focus
on states sat very uneasily with the themes of the war on terror, but its
specification as a global war subsequently incorporated discussions of
globalization into the specification of the terrain of conflict. The links
to economic modernization and neoliberal strategies of state manage-
ment were direct, the assumption being that this mode of economy
would ensure peace once it had been spread round the globe one way
or another (Dalby, 2007a). When linked to the discussion of network-
centric warfare, and discussions of both orbital space and cyberspace as
terrains of conflict, the spatial imagination of the cold war state-system
evaporated.
Insofar as there is a crisis within the field of international studies
requiring interdisciplinary approaches, it is surely in part because the
field’s ability to proscribe the appropriate ordering of conventional poli-
tics has been transcended, only most obviously by the real-world events

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136 Simon Dalby

of 9/11 and the subsequent attempts to use military power to reassert a


hegemony that was so spectacularly thwarted by al-Qaeda’s suicidal fly-
ers. The importance of international relations as the conceptual infra-
structure of American hegemony was shaken by the events of 9/11, not
least because once again, just as in 1989, the scholarly practices that sup-
posedly understood the world in such detail failed to predict the event
or to provide anything close to an agreed upon interpretation of how
to respond to it. Improvisation on the part of the CIA in Afghanistan
followed; a much more deliberate military campaign in Iraq in turn fol-
lowed that; both had tragic, if predictable, consequences when attempts
were made to change regimes and impose local rulers more favourably
disposed to their foreign masters.

Empire and order

The war on terror, with troops in distant places, including Afghanistan,


and with obvious connections to the extraction of resources in the
Middle East for consumption elsewhere, quickly stirred up discussions
of matters in imperial tropes. The invasions of Afghanistan and in par-
ticular Iraq looked imperial. In 2003 the British were back in Basra for
the fourth time in less than a century – notwithstanding decisions in
the 1960s to abandon military commitments east of Suez. This looked
like empire, even as George W. Bush flatly denied that the US was in
the empire business. But once again the categories of inter-state rela-
tions seemed singularly inappropriate to designate what was happen-
ing. While some of the gunships might now be airborne, they were still
imposing a mode of order on peripheral places, and obviously doing so
to ensure the continued supply of commodities for the metropolises.
Imperial history is more helpful here, surely, rather than rational actor
models or game theory?
In attempting to fit politics into the territorial boxes of states, the
premise for international relations thinking which assumes that inter-
state interactions are its subject, and the appropriate set of categories
for understanding the causes of wars, other geopolitical possibilities
have been occluded. But of late they have once again intruded force-
fully into discussions of war and peace, violence and order, and in
doing so suggest the limitations of the conventional international
relations imagination. This is nowhere more apparent than in the
hasty formulations of the Bush Doctrine (wherein states that harbour
terrorists are declared the enemy), given the apparent inability of
American forces to tackle al-Qaeda directly or in any other manner.

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Geographies of the International System 137

Not surprisingly, the military violence unleashed, and the intense


political coercion used in Asia, suggested to many commentators the
appropriateness of metaphors of empire (Kaplan, 2005). US action cer-
tainly looked imperial, even if George W. Bush insisted, as he put it
in the 2003 State of the Union speech, that America is not an empire
because it does not conquer territory. Once again historical analo-
gies were dusted off and used to reinterpret contemporary politics
in ways that suggested imperial geographies, rather than sovereign
states, were most important.
This in turn suggests the necessity for interdisciplinary approaches to
what is not now so easily discussed as a matter of strictly international
relations. Globalization has made all these issues more pressing; the
political cartography of spatial exclusion in the face of threats has been
reinforced in the US by the initiatives of homeland security and the
increased emphasis on surveillance and security. But given the fact that
the 9/11 hijackers had entered the country legally in the first place, and
not crossed the land frontier, this frequently looks like not just a matter
of slamming the proverbial barn door after the horse has bolted, but
doing so on the wrong barn altogether!
Such is the persistence of an outdated geopolitical imagination tied to
the weight of state institutional inertia. The spatial ordering of security
is now much more important than being merely a matter of homeland
security. The lines of insecurity, to use Rob Walker’s (2006a) phrasing,
run through numerous political dilemmas concerning the spatialities
of power. Quite how they are drawn to link sovereignty and security
to concerns with imperial power is the key question of order. It is also
directly related to the formulation of others, and their potential to
become enemies. Indeed, precisely because of the attempts to impose
security, numerous others have become potential enemies in the cat-
egories of homeland security, extraordinary rendition and the global
war on terror.
The remilitarization of international politics has, however, required a
redrawing of the cartographies of order, with the metropolitan powers
reasserting their rights to intervene in the peripheries to ensure order
there and prevent the chaos of non-modern humanity intruding dis-
ruptively on the affluence of the global economy and its cities. In the
rhetoric of the Bush administration Pentagon’s planning documents,
US foreign policy was designed to bring modernity to all the world, by
force if necessary (Dalby, 2009a). No wonder the analogy with Rome
is frequently invoked (James, 2006). But this is part of a larger pattern
of thinking: of the excluded as key to the security of a political order,

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138 Simon Dalby

defined in part against the identity of the threatening external antago-


nist, a matter of cities surrounded by dangerous wilderness.
Insofar as the war on terror is then understood in these terms as the
pacification of the wild zones distant from the metropolises, then the
questions of development, nation building and international coopera-
tion would seem to come to the fore. They might yet do so if the inno-
vations in American strategic thinking had not reinvented classical
counter-insurgency doctrine (Kilcullen, 2010). Looking to population
protection as the primary task of the troops on the ground in far flung
regions suggests an imperial task, and an understanding that empire is
what is happening however much the official ideology of the American
state denies this is the case and rearticulates matters in the standard
Westphalian formulation.
To put matters in Michael Ignatieff’s (2003, p. 79) blunt formulation
of American policy (in the Mazar area of Afghanistan):

Call it peacekeeping or nation-building, call it what you like, impe-


rial policing is what is going on in Mazar. In fact, America’s entire
war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock
to Americans, who don’t like to think of their country as an empire.
But what else can you call America’s legions of soldiers, spooks and
Special Forces straddling the globe?
These garrisons are by no means temporary. Terror can’t be con-
trolled unless order is built in the anarchic zones where terrorists
find shelter. In Afghanistan, this means nation-building, creating a
state strong enough to keep al-Queda from returning. But the Bush
administration wants to do this on the cheap, at the lowest level of
investment and risk. In Washington they call this nation-building
lite. But empires don’t come lite. They come heavy, or they do not
last. And neither does the peace they are meant to preserve.

Empire lite is the formulation because America is supposedly not really


an empire; it is one state among others that are supposedly its putative
equals. Thus politics is a matter of international relations between ter-
ritorial states, not a matter of one state controlling the internal affairs
of another. But the imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are
finally, surely, putting an end to this geopolitical fiction and forcing
scholars from numerous other fields to pay attention to the categories
of politics that this supposedly post-colonial exercise of power is now
suggesting are no longer appropriate. Again, imperial history may be
much more useful here (Bayly and Harper, 2008). Political economists

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Geographies of the International System 139

might also have something to say; sociologists and anthropologists,


too. Certainly, world historians do matter, as Buzan and Little (2001)
note in their call for IR to shake off its ‘Westphalian straightjacket’.
Perhaps even a few geographers, too, to contemplate the appropriate
contextualizations?

Bringing geography back in

In light of all the contemporary contradictions of sovereignty, lines


and cartographic practices, stepping outside the disciplinary con-
straints of political science and asking questions about the emergence
of a field of study, known in the twentieth century as international
relations, suggests that perhaps globalization is not the problem at
all. Rather, it has been the geographical condition of humanity for
some considerable time. The problem may begin with the drawing
of lines across the map, both in the colonial scramble for Africa and
the subsequent introduction of spatial strategies, of the front in war,
passports and economic protections, subsequently. None of these is
an ontological condition, but a series of administrative practices that
reinforce a geographical designation in terms of territorial entities.
Post-colonial elites of former European colonies subsequently dis-
covered these practices had very considerable uses. Their adoption
by these elites suggested a permanence that reinforced the initial
assumption. This is not to overlook the immense power of territorial
strategies as modes of control for administrators and security func-
tionaries (Ripsman and Paul, 2010). Nonetheless, to confuse these
strategies with eternal geographies is to fail to reflect on the spatiali-
ties of power in a crucial sense.
Pushed a little further, this line of argument can be taken to suggest
that the spatial categories of the cold war have so shaped international
political thinking that the challenge supposedly presented by globali-
zation might be better understood simply as a matter of inadequate
spatial categories rather than a matter of novelty and threat (Dalby,
2005). While the Second World War changed many things, it tempo-
rarily reinforced the spatial divisions of the world as the predominant
form of order. But only temporarily; these categories are not the onto-
logical givens for political analysis. International relations became
institutionalized in these circumstances, taking the political order of
the nation state as its benchmark, as the category from which analy-
sis should start, rather as a novelty, and one that in light of history
was likely transitory. Viewed from outside the West, why might these

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140 Simon Dalby

arrangements, imposed in very recent history, be understood as the


permanent categories?
Globalization in this sense suggests that the twentieth century was
the century of lines, divisions and spatial images so hegemonic that
they did not need the skills of geographers to describe, delineate and
demarcate. The coloured maps of here and there, distinct spaces and
precise limitations of authority, are now giving way to a more com-
plicated world of interaction and interconnection; cities may now be
the most important sites of security (Graham, 2010). Perhaps the fear
of new boundary crossings that animated some of the initial concerns
about globalization revealed more about the autistic spatial imagina-
tion of the social sciences than it did about the uniqueness of circum-
stances after the demise of the Soviet Union. Business had been crossing
the boundaries of the world for a very long time; these transactions had
been accelerating since the 1940s, when trade had consistently been
expanding at a more rapid rate than average national economic growth.
Likewise, international alliances and troop movements were common,
and travel in general had rapidly grown as jet airliners became ubiqui-
tous in the 1970s. None of this was new, but the difficulty of dealing
with all these things emphasized the importance of territorial states as
the given category in analysis.
The focus on economy, business and the transformative effects of
international investment in the 1990s suggested, however, that while
capital was free to move, people looking for work were not. The dis-
cussion of global apartheid likewise tried to grapple with the huge
inequalities of global wealth and link them to the policies of spatial
control whereby the wealthy used state boundaries to administer the
inequities. Contemporary boundary fence building exercises are an
ominous extension of this logic (Jones, 2009). Access to international
funds, and the control of many states by distant banks and the disci-
plining strategies of fund managers, suggested that capitalism was well
and truly global, even if the population of the planet was mostly still
in particular places. The rapid expansion of media, both in terms of
television stations and the Internet, has made this assumption more
suspect in recent years. Al Jazeera is a particularly high profile exam-
ple of how and why media escaping national markets matters, but the
dreams of universal free access to either television signals or Internet
traffic remain caught in struggles by states to either censor or buy off
media corporations.
Ironically, territorial strategies of security were powerfully re-imposed
by the strategies of the war on terror, among the most obvious being

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Geographies of the International System 141

border control in the Department of Homeland Security and the


increasing attempts to police movements by using territorial strate-
gies. Migration became a fraught terrain of political contest in the US,
as in Europe, India and elsewhere in the aftermath of 9/11, but the
migrants continued to come, driven by economic inequities and the
simple fact that globalization is in many ways simply urbanization on
the global scale, a process which, from the migrants’ perspective, is
hampered by fences, guards and unintelligible bureaucratic procedures
related to passports, visas and permits. This contradiction goes to the
heart of the peculiar geographies of a war on terror that was finally
officially called off by a new American president in 2009, one who
apparently understood the folly of lumping diverse peoples and states
into simplistic geopolitical categories and invoking threats of military
force to attempt to discipline those who disagree with the operation of
American ‘globalization’.

Interdisciplinarity?

At least part of the impetus towards interdisciplinarity in present times


is the recognition that the human condition is not being adequately
understood by the modes of scholarship currently on offer. The risky
strategies of neoconservatives and neoliberalism have come to an abrupt
end, as political economy scholars predicted they would (Pieterse,
2007), but the crash in the global economic markets and the eradication
of monetary wealth is not a new phenomenon. What the discussion of
globalization, the newly revived discussion of empire and its perils for
various forms of politics (Bacevich, 2008), as well as the larger concern
with our collective ecological predicament suggests is, in part, a wider
crisis of intellectual activity. The objects of knowledge that have tradi-
tionally been understood with academic disciplines seem to be flowing
over the boundaries of these academic structures. Hence, the apparent
need for multiple disciplinary perspectives and accounts of reality and
the human condition that do not fit neatly into any discussion of con-
ventional international relations.
Looking back to the early part of the twentieth century and the dis-
cussion of matters of empire, interracial relations and related matters
suggest that the most important point of all is perhaps the most obvi-
ous matter of the changing geopolitical ordering of the century (Vitalis,
2006). These imperial motifs are back in some interesting ways, not
least the discussions in many places of multiculturalism, which try to
deal with matters of globalization, urbanization and migration – once

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142 Simon Dalby

again within the spatial imaginary of nation states (Sparke, 2005). None
of these things fit the Westphalian straightjacket no matter how elabo-
rate the patterns contemporary intellectual tailors use to adjust the gar-
ment. The revival of concerns about immigration, intercultural politics,
relativism, post-colonial scholarship and the overarching American
fascination with race, suggests that Vitalis’s (2006) observation about
interracial relations becoming international relations in the period of
the First World War, might now be reverting to the old pattern with
less concern given to the sovereign state as the political matter of prime
consideration. In retrospect it now seems that the institutionalization
of international relations, and the premise of a world primarily con-
sisting of precisely defined nation states, might be seen as an artefact
of the twentieth century and of American dominance in that period
(Smith, 2003). The triumph of the autonomous actor, calculating inter-
ests and arbitrating disagreements by technological force if necessary,
the basic ontological assumptions of Americanism, are written into the
assumptions of the disciplinary enterprise established to understand
this world.
Institutional inertia tends to perpetuate disciplinary traditions, and
insofar as it stifles innovation it, too, reproduces intellectual divisions
of labour that may not be useful in new circumstances. Added to that
is the key point that Rob Walker (1993) made in Inside/Outside as he
noted that, in terms of politics, a methodological convenience whereby
distinctions were made between domestic and international long ago
turned into an ontological category. Methodological nationalism is
reinforced by the construction of subjects, citizens and economies in
terms of national registrations, enumerations and statistical measures
of numerous phenomena. This tendency is frequently compounded by
the ‘Willie Sutton syndrome’ in the social sciences, where research is
done the way it is ‘because that is where the data is’ – paraphrasing
the famous bank robber who targeted banks because ‘that’s where the
money is’ (Dalby, 2007b). Territory is a juridical notion, one that hugely
simplifies the tasks of making distinctions and dictating appropriate
modes of conduct in particular places. But recognizing these practices
as contingent strategies that are convenient, rather than as the ontolog-
ical givens that are merely to be worked with in some search for perfect
administration, is now a political necessity as well as a useful starting
point for academic study.
The necessity of tackling these matters from within many disci-
plinary procedures is also clear, because the human condition is not
solely amenable to the fine-tuning of nation states and the detailed

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Geographies of the International System 143

documentation of its citizens. Such matters are not a problem that is


confined to international relations; numerous other disciplines have
difficulties with the limitations of their topics and appropriate methods
in a world in which the verities of the nineteenth century division of
academic labour do not fit the contemporary categories of human expe-
rience. The collapse of the distinctions between humanity and nature
and the growing recognition of the importance of processes, systems,
information and codes in contemporary explanations suggest a world
in which the traditional disciplines do not fit; the geographical contri-
bution is useful in that it insists on the necessity of reflection on the
spatial categories that structure academic contextualizations.

Anthropocene studies?

The importance of thinking carefully about context as a way of facili-


tating intellectual inquiry across disciplinary boundaries is emphasized
by the growing discussion of the new geological circumstances within
which humanity now lives in the Anthropocene age (Brauch, Dalby and
Oswald Spring, 2011). The natural sciences are making it increasingly
clear that we are remaking that world as we become an urban species
and the networks of interconnection between the nodes in that global
economy more accurately summarize the organization of the planet’s
peoples than do the cartographies of division so favoured by the social
sciences (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008). This is not a new observation,
either; scholars suggested in the 1970s that environmental matters
were changing the context of international politics (Pirages, 1978). But
these concerns were swept aside in the remilitarization of the 1980s
and the revival of the cold war. Now the earth system science analyses
are making these insights ever more pressing (Steffen et al., 2007); sci-
ence is making it clear that we are literally remaking the biosphere, and
the forces we have set in motion will shape the living conditions for
humanity and the other biota of the planet for many millennia. The
global political agenda for the twenty-first century will be about how to
live in the Anthropocene.
As climate change accelerates and the vulnerability of populations
to increasingly ‘artificial’ hazards mounts, all these concerns with the
appropriate contextualization of insecurity further challenge the carto-
graphic imagination of the social sciences. Just as the division between
nature and humanity is now understood as untenable while we do not
seem to be able to think without the distinction (Walker, 2006b), so
too is the now impossible division between people and citizens in the

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144 Simon Dalby

imagination of international studies (see Chapter 7). The boundaries so


carefully tended in the twentieth century are crumbling both in the
world and in the academy and, given the violence of twentieth-century
geopolitics, that is not necessarily a bad thing! Nonetheless, territorial
boundaries to the migrations of the poor and marginal are being dan-
gerously reasserted just as the interconnections of global change are
becoming unavoidable.
While the war on terror temporarily diverted attention from loom-
ing environmental matters, these too have transcended the neat cat-
egorizations of international relations theory. As the old saying has
it, environmental problems are no respecter of state boundaries. The
debate about global warming, and the consequent phenomena of cli-
mate change, make the point about this very clearly. And, yet, the
attempts to develop responses to greenhouse gas emissions remain
caught in the administrative categories of the nation state, and inter-
state bargaining seems to be the key focus in analyses dealing with
how climate regimes are to be established (Newell, 2008). Climate
change is still largely understood as a pollution problem, not as one
that requires more large-scale transformations of how people produce
things and live so as to make life possible for future generations. Insofar
as it remains a matter for government negotiation, and the matter will
in part always be about this, then the terms of international relations
will continue to offer interpretations and strategies. But so far the IR
terms have proved incapable of grappling with the scale and speed of
contemporary transformations.
The larger context of all this, caught in the terminology of the
Anthropocene, suggests new circumstances for humanity, circum-
stances that require a more comprehensive understanding of the global
condition than that provided by the categories found in international
relations, or for that matter in state-focused social sciences in general.
Thinking about humanity as a new ‘force of nature’, as a novel ecologi-
cal arrangement, and one that has begun to destabilize the biosphere
(in part by reversing the long-term geological pattern of carbon seques-
tration through its practices of combustion), suggests that the admin-
istrative practices of territorial entities are no longer the appropriate
mode of thinking for the long-term future, if at least some notion of
human security is taken seriously (Dalby, 2009b). They may be neces-
sary in the short term, given the absence of appropriate institutions
that can grapple with the important matters of how humanity as a
whole decides what to produce and how to tackle the ecological dis-
ruptions that are compromising human security. But they are nowhere

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Geographies of the International System 145

near being an adequate set of institutions for the tasks that face us in
coming decades.
Clearly, the attempt to solve climate change difficulties in such ‘nego-
tiations’ as those between territorial states in 2009 in Copenhagen, have
not led to the kind of innovations in thinking and practice that are
urgently needed. Much more than international relations (as conven-
tionally understood) is needed to think intelligently about the global
future in ways that engage ecology as a global necessity. To do so effec-
tively will require a much more nuanced geopolitical imagination than
that currently on offer in international studies. Indeed, it will probably
require all three of Long’s (see Chapter 2) categories of interdisciplinar-
ity – multi, trans and neo – if the needed complex new insights are to be
forthcoming. But, if living in the Anthropocene is to be taken seriously,
it will need much more fundamental rethinking of politics and places,
and the interconnections between them, than can be accomplished by
merely adding new disciplines to the conversation within the estab-
lished categories of international relations.

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6
Beyond the Domestic–International
Divide: State Spatial Transformation
as Neo-liberal Geopolitics
Sami Moisio

Introduction

The state is a powerful conceptual abstraction and one of the key con-
cepts in IR, in political theory and in social sciences more generally.
How one conceptualizes the state in scholarly practice depends upon
the perspective from which one approaches it (Hay and Lister, 2006, p.
4). Also, different political groupings may work on the basis of different
conceptions of the state – why and how the state exists, how it devel-
oped and through what processes, what is the relationship between
the state and capitalism, how are elites entangled with the state, what
should the state do and how should it be developed? Overall, our con-
ceptions of the state make a difference for both policy making and
scholarship.
The contemporary debate on the future of the state is largely inspired
by the mobility of capital and the proliferation of supranational regula-
tive institutions. This debate has proceeded concomitantly with finan-
cial liberation and the dissolution of the previously dominant image of
states as national economies. This has led to speculation as to whether
the state is ‘losing’ or ‘winning’ in its metaphorical competition with
the markets. However, as Georg Sørensen (2006, p. 193) points out,
rather than engaging in this either-or-debate, it is more important to
look at the changing state–market relationship as a constantly fluctuat-
ing one.
This chapter opens up an interdisciplinary perspective on the con-
cept of state and its position with regard the nexus of the ‘domes-
tic’ and the ‘international’ by drawing on the literature concerned

149

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150 Sami Moisio

with state spatial transformation. This literature is interdisciplinary


in a dual sense. Firstly, it is not structured around any clearly demar-
cated disciplinary core (see Chapter 3), but rather is a vibrant field
that brings together political sociologists, geographers and scholars
of international political economy (IPE) and IR.1 Secondly, the study
of state spatial transformation functions through interdisciplinary
concepts (such as territory, territoriality, the international and tran-
snational) that are difficult to define as a property of any institution-
alized discipline.
The transformation of the state from its early roots through the abso-
lutist state and warring state epochs towards the territorial state, the
nation state and the welfare state exemplifies its changing nature. The
state should thus be understood as a historical process. States continue
to act as central players even today, within the era of ‘fast and borderless
capitalism’, even though their form, essence and practices are changing.
One should therefore focus on the ways in which states continue to act,
albeit in a modified manner, during this new epoch (Jones and Jones,
2004, p. 410). As will be shown below, this qualitative transformation
of the state has taken place concomitantly with the rise of neoliberal
hegemony from the 1970s onwards.
This chapter proceeds through seven sections. This introduction is
followed by a section that briefly discusses disciplines and their con-
nection with the increasingly problematic division between the domes-
tic and international spheres of the state. The third section introduces
two partially overlapping research perspectives that discuss the trans-
formation/internationalization of the state under neoliberalism. The
fourth section looks at the literature that has sought to spatialize the
state transformation. This literature has questioned not only the hol-
lowing out of the state argument but also the domestic/international
divide that is so often built upon analysis within the social sciences.
Section five investigates the writings of Richard Florida and Kenichi
Ohmae as illustrations of what I call the ‘neoliberal style of thought’.
It will be suggested that a specific spatiality and materiality is built up
in the neoliberal style of thought, and that this mode of thought has
been salient in the contemporary process of state spatial transforma-
tion in many geographical contexts. The sixth section illustrates this
process in the context of Finland, where efforts to develop a globally
attractive metropolis have superseded what I will call the Keynesian
geopolitics of the state. Finally, the concluding section names some
issues which merit scholarly attention in the interdisciplinary study
of the state.

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 151

Academic disciplines and the domestic/


international divide

The territorially homogenized welfare state still guides our understand-


ing of the state, and in so doing partially conceals the significant change
in statehood that has taken place in the past forty years throughout the
member states of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development). This chapter is grounded in the view that the role
of the state has changed in such a way that the ‘domestic’ affairs and
‘international’ contexts of a particular state can no longer be separated
with ease (Sørensen, 2006, p. 207). That is to say that contemporary
‘regional policies’, for instance, cannot easily be separated from the con-
cept of what is international, as most of these state-related practices are
today informed by the neoliberal style of thought that is clearly con-
nected with the most wildly internationalized fractions of capital.
As Hay and Lister (2006, p. 4) remind us, the concept of the state has
developed hand in hand with the development of institutions we usu-
ally associate with the state. In spite of the fact that the concept of state
has different political connotations in different geographical contexts,
the understanding of state-related concepts such as sovereignty, territo-
riality, democracy, government, society and international are informed
by modern statehood and its characteristics, which are often taken for
granted. As academic disciplines and states have developed in a con-
joined manner at least from the early nineteenth century onwards, the
operation of the state apparatus has influenced the division of labour
among disciplines. More specifically, the formation of state institutions
and discipline formation look as if they were interconnected processes
in that the development of particular state institutions (schools, an
exchequer, law-making bodies, diplomacy, etc.) also required a certain
type of knowledge production. As a result, the task of a sociologist is to
focus on a bounded national society; a legal scholar pays attention to
the judiciary powers of the state; a political scientist scrutinizes political
systems within states; and IR is concerned with ‘foreign policies’ and
the institutions that govern relations between states and some other
actors.
The formation of disciplines as ‘turfs of knowledge production’ has
been influenced by the often assumed qualities of states: that states have
their clearly demarcated insides (national) and outsides (international)
marked by state borders; that states are power containers that include a
clearly delineated society and a national economy; and that states oper-
ate as rational units in order to maximize their powers in relation to the

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152 Sami Moisio

other states. All these assumptions are crucial ontological preconditions


for an orthodox understanding of what is international simply as ‘inter-
state’. These assumptions domesticate the state and draw a clear border
between what is regarded as international relations and what belongs
to domestic affairs. As a result, the internal space of the state is often
considered a purely domestic or, better, a national category.
The political geographer John Agnew gives the name ‘territorial trap’
to the assumption that mutually exclusive, self-enclosed territorial
arrangements must form the basic units of the global political system,
and that such ‘containers’ enclose relevant political, social and economic
processes (see Agnew and Corbridge, 1995, pp. 78–100). This territorial
trap still persists, in many analyses, as evidence that the territorializa-
tion of state power that culminated in post-war Europe still powerfully
informs thinking about the state as a social and political organiza-
tion. Whereas the twentieth century epitomized the development of
a ‘national constellation’ of state institutions and infrastructures, the
changes of the past 30–40 years in the OECD states demonstrate a grad-
ual unravelling of these extensive national constellations. It is impor-
tant to notice, however, that state transformation takes place through
divergent changes in the various dimensions of the state such as legiti-
macy, resources, welfare and law. As Zürn and Leibfried (2005, p. 3)
suggest, the central feature of the twentieth century (welfare) nation
state was that these dimensions were merged and their various activi-
ties concentrated at the national scale. Not only was the public political
discourse focused on the national scale, but also welfare and economic
policies and the production of infrastructures were geared to this scale.
However, given that the state has always been a reflexive form of social
and political organization, any analysis that takes, as givens, scales such
as national, international and local, predetermines what it is able to
say about the state. There is a need to move beyond such essentialist
divides. The literature on state spatial transformation provides a par-
ticularly useful interdisciplinary agenda for this end.

Towards neoliberal states

The literature on the state includes a huge number of approaches that


cannot be reviewed here. A significant proportion of this literature either
questions one of the institutions of states or explores the complex rela-
tionships among these institutions. Those interested in the functions
of the state emphasize that the state apparatus aims to create and main-
tain the state as a ‘collective individual’ by practising infrastructural

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 153

power, for instance (see Mann, 1988), in the form of public goods. The
state is also often regarded as a regulator, facilitator and producer of the
physical infrastructure for running a nationalized economy. The state
may also be considered an arbiter that acts as a neutral mediator in adju-
dicating disputes within its jurisdiction (for a discussion, see Johnston,
1982). The state thus acts as a social engineer that ensures a certain
level of distributional justice in its territory. For those emphasizing the
pluralist nature of the state, many social and geographical groupings
operate within its confines without any one of them being capable of
grasping total control over the state.
In the ensuing pages I will briefly discuss two partly overlapping
approaches that have been applied to the phenomenon of state trans-
formation during the age of neoliberal hegemony. Even though we, per-
haps, may not talk about neoliberalism in the singular, it is nonetheless
important to look at the social practices and discourses of neoliberalism
and to examine the way in which these have become deeply entrenched
in civil society and in state practices (for a useful discussion, see Plehwe
et al., 2006). In this section I will look first at some ideas on the chang-
ing state from the perspective of historical materialism (including the
role of ideas in the production of political order). Secondly, I will turn to
the research perspective that approaches state transformation through
the lenses of governmentality.

Historical materialism, the state and the ideational


basis of political order

For some, the state is primarily a community based on coercion. This


distinguishes it from other social and political institutions. In the
extreme instrumentalist view, the dominant class within the state
practises dominance over people through various mechanisms. Ralph
Miliband (1969) famously argued that the pluralist state is a myth, as
the dominant class is able to manipulate the state apparatus irrespective
of which party happens to be in government. In such a view, the state
is little more than a committee for the affairs of the bourgeoisie. As a
result, politics within states is reduced to reflecting dominant economic
forces.
Structuralist Marxists suggest that the state is there in order to per-
form ‘minimum tasks in support of a capitalist mode of production’
(Harvey, 2001, p. 269). The form the state takes reflects the mode of
production which determines social and political relations. In Western
Marxist analyses, the state has thus often been understood as a capitalist

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154 Sami Moisio

entity, because it operates within a capitalist mode of production. In


such a view, the state as an institution is crucial, as it counters the self-
destructive process of economic competition. It ensures, for instance,
the reproduction of a healthy and skilled labour force and arbitrates the
conflict between capital and labour.
Since capitalism as an economic system is crisis-prone, various writers
have set out to explain how capital is able to constantly reproduce its
dominance in spite of its contradictions. They argue that there always
exists a connection between ideology and the state, so that certain spe-
cific interests of the ruling segments of society can be ‘transformed into
“the illusory general interest” of the whole society’ (Harvey, 2001, p.
271). The ruling class is capable of universalizing its ideas as the ruling
ideas of society. In such a view, the state is inescapably ideological in
that it tries to hide conflicts between social classes behind a national
consensus. Antonio Gramsci (1971) and his followers conceptualize this
phenomenon as hegemony, which refers to political, intellectual and
moral leadership by the dominant class (through education, the mass
media and entertainment) which results in the dominated class con-
senting to its own domination (Jessop, 1982, p. 17). The insight here is
that the power of the capitalist class resides not so much in the coercive
apparatus of the state as an instrument of bourgeois values, but rather
in its capability to shape the perceptions of the people. The ruled tend
to accept the ruler’s moral, political and cultural values – the whole con-
ception of the world – as societal norms, as if there were no alternative
(Hay, 2006, p. 69). Harvey (2001, p. 271) has suggested that for this end,
these ruling ideas need to be presented as abstract ‘idealizations’ that
can then assume a life of their own.
In the structuralist view the state is not a unitary actor but a specific
institutional ensemble with multiple boundaries, no institutional fixity
or pre-given substantive unity (Jessop, 1990, p. 267). If states are con-
ceptualized as the products of social struggles and political alliances
which will shape their development and future formation, one may
suggest that they might well be changing rather than disappearing in
this age of so-called globalization. From such a perspective the strug-
gle between neo-Weberian and neoliberal scholars over whether the
capacity of the state to manage economic activity has been weakened
or strengthened by globalization becomes largely irrelevant. For this
reason Glassman (1999) rather prefers to discuss the internationalization
of the state, which he defines as ‘a process in which the state apparatus
becomes increasingly oriented towards facilitating capital accumulation
for the most internationalized investors, regardless of their nationality’

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 155

(Glassman, 1999, p. 673). This definition is useful not only as it indi-


cates that contemporary states actively engage in internationalizing
activities, which may also foster their status as political actors, but also
because it suggests that state transformation is inherently associated
with the most internationalized fractions of capital. This observation
points to the fact that the capitalist class is not homogeneous, as the
various fractions of capital are potentially in conflict with each other
(Harvey, 2001, p. 275). Even the most internationalized capital classes
thus need to struggle through the institutions of the state to reproduce
conditions for accumulation.2
The process of internationalizing states is often associated with the
concept of the transnational. The ‘new Gramscians’ have sought to
‘internationalize’ the Gramscian theory of the state (see e.g., Morton,
2007; for a critique, see Germain and Kenny, 1998) by scrutinizing the
emergence of a particular type of transnational common sense that is
closely associated with neoliberal ideology. The concept of neoliberal
hegemony or transnational common sense not only refers to the idea-
tional consent that characterizes the contemporary international order,
but also seeks to disclose the current ‘historic bloc’ which Gill (2008,
p. 60) outlines as ‘the historic congruence between material forces,
institutions and ideologies’ (see also Agnew, 2005). By conceiving the
formation of hegemony and historic blocs on a world scale, the ‘new
Gramscians’ have sought to study the role of hegemony in the process
of capitalist development and to reconceptualize the relations between
the ‘international’ and the ‘domestic’.
Leslie Sklair’s (2001) neo-Gramscian concept of the transnational cap-
italist class suggests that it is not the state as such that drives contempo-
rary capitalism but the transnational capitalist class. The latter consists
of people who see their own interests, and/or the interests of their own
social group, often transformed into an imagined national interest, and
best served by identification with the interests of the capitalist global
system. The economic interests of this class are increasingly globally
linked. The state, however, has an important role to play via globalizing
bureaucrats, politicians and professionals. Instead of a one-dimensional
conceptualisation of the state, Sklair (2001, pp. 10; 46) discusses how
transnational corporations, the transnational capitalist class and the
culture/ideology of consumerism operate to transform the world and
the state in terms of the global capitalist project.
During the past thirty years there has been a notable movement
of states in the direction of neoliberal political agendas, and this
has revealingly characterized the force of neoliberal hegemony. The

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156 Sami Moisio

neoliberalization of the state has taken place concomitantly with the


internationalization of finance and production and the rise of the ‘crea-
tive’ industries. Neoliberal agendas called into question the economic
competence of the ‘overstretched’ welfare states, often dubbed as ‘nanny
states’, and their governance: demand-side intervention, nationalized
political mindsets and an ‘ineffective’ public sector. Governments now
do their best to develop open, export-oriented political regimes for the
smooth operation of international markets. In the era of state interna-
tionalization, the central priority for governments is usually economic
competitiveness rather than social welfare. These neoliberal tendencies
are being legitimized by arguing that the fiercely competitive economic
environment abroad, coupled with increasing economic and social
pressures at home, leaves no alternative but to pursue a course towards
deregulation, marketization, privatization and celebration of the vir-
tues of individualism and individual creativity (Peck, 2001, p. 445).
In order to promote competitiveness, neoliberalized governments
boost innovations. Simultaneously, these governments seek to open up
the national economy as they perceive it as fundamentally and irrevers-
ibly shaped by international economic forces (see Jessop, 2002). The
concept of protectionism is now being used to symbolize the past, char-
acterized by closed state territories and ‘centralized planned economies’.
The general thrust of neoliberal development is that more and more
often state governments have started to act as market players, shaping
their policies to maximize their returns from market forces in a neolib-
eral international environment.

The state, neoliberalism and governmentality

A pivotal change as far as the neoliberalization of states was concerned


began to take place in Western Europe in the late 1970s, with a shift to
a more monetarist economic policy. There was surprisingly little resist-
ance to this new ideology. Ever since, a number of institutions above
and beyond the states have contributed to the strengthening of the
neoliberal hegemony. The transformation of the state can also be fruit-
fully approached from the perspective of governmentality, which is
concerned with how neoliberal thought operates within our ‘organized
ways of doing things, our regimes of practices, and with its ambitions
and effects’ (Dean, 1999, p. 18).
The complex mix of the processes of neoliberalism has to a great
extent been brought about by states. As Fougner (2008, p. 308) suggests,
in neoliberal thought the market can only exist under certain political,

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 157

legal and institutional conditions that must be actively constructed by


government. The state thus needs to intervene because of the market:
it must compensate for its deficiencies, limit any dysfunctions in the
mechanism of exchange and create effective competition (Donzelot,
2008, p. 123). The neoliberal state thus operates through a dual logic.
On the one hand, it is expected to stand aside and set the stage for
market functions, but on the other hand, it is expected to be active
in creating an optimal business climate, fostering competition within
society and ‘behaving as a competitive entity in global politics’ (Harvey,
2005, p. 79). For this end the government, hence, needs to constantly
undertake institutional and regulatory rearrangements seen necessary
for ‘state competitiveness’.
The discourse of national competitiveness emerged in the 1980s.
With it the problem of competitiveness turned from the question of
how to manage a firm into how to govern the state. As a result, the
primary governmental problem of state authorities has shifted towards
making the state itself more competitive (Fougner, 2008). More often
than not, national competitiveness derives from the principle of eco-
nomic growth; states should support competition both at home and
abroad in order to maintain and foster a specific type of capitalism.
The international competitiveness of states is described both as a
key objective and a means of implementing a variety of state practices
ranging from economic policy, via regional planning, to education.
Competitiveness is presented both as the goal of state policies and a
means of resolving problems that confront the state (Fougner, 2006, p.
165). Almost twenty years ago, Philip Cerny (1990) illustrated how state
policies were changing as part of efforts to achieve better control over
the increasing international interpenetration, and he came up with the
concept of the competition state. He suggested that the promotion of
international competitiveness had been adopted as the key objective
of national state intervention to the extent that it had come to chal-
lenge previously hegemonic notions such as ‘national security’. The
salience of the discourse of national competitiveness in contemporary
state strategies demonstrates the pervasiveness of neoliberalism, which
is grounded in the view that states are competitors in a global market
for capital, technology and high-skilled labour. A neoliberal govern-
ment must thus consider state attractiveness, effectiveness and innova-
tion capability to be fundamental governmental problems as well as key
constituents of national competitiveness.
The neoliberalization of the state may indicate a gradual transfor-
mation from a civil association into a more limited form of enterprise

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158 Sami Moisio

association (see Cerny, 2003). In each and every one of the ways in
which the state operates there emerge some features that can be traced
back to fictitious markets and the pursuit of economic efficiency (see
Cerny, Menz and Soederberg, 2005). In summary, neoliberal thinking
is based on an idea that state strategies and projects should be organ-
ized from the vantage point of national competitiveness. This form of
political thinking dominates political and economic discussions of the
contemporary world order, is celebrated by international business and,
quite controversially, is also eagerly promoted by state governments (see
also Laffey and Weldes, 2005), even after the global stagnation that
broke out in 2008.

State spatial transformation as neoliberal geopolitics

This section seeks to connect the previous discussion of the neolib-


eralization of the state to questions pertaining to state spatiality and
territory in the age of neoliberal hegemony. This is crucial given that
the concept of state is usually considered as bringing together issues
concerning state institutions, population, various elites and state ter-
ritory. Indeed, territorial sovereignty is perhaps the most common of
all the state-related concepts,3 although until relatively recently it has
remained under-theorized in IR and IPE (Brenner and Elden, 2009).
Recent work on state spatial transformation has specifically ques-
tioned the neoliberalization of state space. One of the key insights
brought forth in the literature is that the neoliberalization of states has
not led on to a non-territorial state but rather to a state space in which
the relative openness of borders, together with increasing networking,
are concomitant processes with the continuing operation of territorial-
ity, territorial borders and territorially defined political identities (for a
discussion, see Jones, 2009). That is, neoliberalism has taken on specific
spatial and territorial forms.
A particular understanding that the contemporary world is inherently
associated with locational competition is a fundamental precondition
for the neoliberal state, which is thus construed around a specific type
of geography of accumulation. The recent literature that scrutinizes the
spatial transformation of the state under neoliberalism is closely asso-
ciated with the premises of historical materialism; it often argues that
changing forms of capitalism tend to revolve around particular types
of geographical arrangement that are historically contingent. Territory
is not a static background structure for regulatory processes and politi-
cal relations but rather one of their constitutive dimensions (Brenner,

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 159

2003, p. 140). Among European states during the twentieth century,


there has been a shift from Keynesian accumulation geographies to the
recent neoliberal ‘glocalizing competition state regimes’ that include
both upscaling and downscaling of the state space. Brenner (2004, p. 3)
suggests:

While we shall see that political strategies to establish a centralized,


nationalized hierarchy of state power have indeed played a key role
throughout much of the twentieth century, they are today being
widely superseded as a more polycentric, multiscalar, and non-iso-
morphic configuration of statehood is created. Consequently, new
conceptual vocabularies are required in order to transcend some of
the entrenched assumptions about state spatial and institutional
organization that have been inherited from the Westphalian geopo-
litical epoch.

The nationally scaled welfare state represented a particular phase in


capitalist development. Brenner suggests that after the Second World
War the European states invested extensively in large-scale national
infrastructures for capital circulation. This model came to be chal-
lenged concomitantly with the rise of neoliberalism; contemporary
state strategies tend to be oriented towards a spatial concentration of
productive capacities and economic assets within a few metropolitan
regions (Brenner, 2003, p. 143). The message is thus that the previously
established, and thus inherited, spatial formations of state space are
being qualitatively transformed (see Brenner, 2009, pp. 2–4).
The configurations associated with the ‘Keynesian welfare state’
model have been gradually replaced by new spatial formations that are
widely understood as corresponding better to the contemporary world.
Recent scholarship on state spatial transformation has tapped into this
and how it has questioned distinctions between the state’s ‘domestic’
and ‘international’ sphere. This literature has also pointed out that the
various state strategies and state projects need to be examined contex-
tually, and that their contextual reading will disclose important spa-
tial and historical formations and institutions around which capitalist
states are structured.
One of the central claims concerns the shift from strategies involv-
ing whole state territories to strategies focusing on networks and new
scales of action such as the European megaregions, substate regions,
cross-border spaces and supranational regions (see Jessop et al., 2008).
The change has largely resulted from particular efforts to build more

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160 Sami Moisio

competitive operating environments for the needs of innovation-led


economic growth and footloose capital. The developments that look as
if they were purely ‘domestic’ in nature thus cannot be fully understood
without exploring the linkages of such processes to capitalist restructur-
ing. This particular standpoint is comparable to the observation pre-
sented originally by Gramsci that national states should not be regarded
as self-enclosed power containers, but should be examined with respect
to their complex and versatile interconnections with states and political
forces on other scales (Jessop, 2005, p. 425). In other words, state power
may not be treated as inseparable from other scales of political power.
Indeed, recent literature on state spatial transformation under neo-
liberalism emphasizes that the contemporary capitalist globalization
includes multiple centres, each with its own capacity to exercise author-
ity and influence, and that this condition cannot be conceptualized
simply in terms of a top-down transmission of power (see also Allen,
2004). John Agnew’s (2005) thought-provoking idea of the continuing
spread of the marketplace culture and the associated ideological power
of transnational liberalism is one of the recent articulations of how glo-
bal power operates without any clear territorial centre of authority. For
Agnew, the concept of transnational liberalism refers to the hegemonic
position of a particular ideology of the market that is held and repro-
duced by a powerful constituency of liberal states, international institu-
tions and capital (Agnew and Corbridge 1995, p. 164).
In summary, the interdisciplinary study of state spatial transfor-
mation under neoliberalism has provided important insights on the
‘internationalization of the domestic’ – for instance, with transnational
liberalism. As a result, the concept of scale has become a useful entry
point for the study of state transformation because it has helped to over-
come some of the theoretical flaws in methodological nationalism and
state-centrism. Those interested in research into state transformation
have found it useful to focus on the multiple scaling processes and stra-
tegic articulations of scale around which the politics of neoliberal state
transformation revolve (Table 6.1).

Location is everything: ideational aspects of neoliberal


hegemony

In the previous section we recognized the polycentric and multiscalar


character of neoliberalism as a geopolitical process. Neoliberal geopoli-
tics revolves around international networks, cross-border regions and
megaregions at the expense of national-scale equalizing arrangements.

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 161

Table 6.1 From Keynesian to neoliberal geopolitics of state space

Keynesian geopolitics of Neoliberal geopolitics of


state space state space

Regional structure Even regional develop- Economic development


ment, national integrity, through metropolitan areas,
decentralization in set- regional concentration of
tlement and industrial economic and innovation
policy activity, rise of metropolitan
politics

Forms of Emphasis on ‘national’, Internationalization of the


governance state-centred, national, diffusing system of
government economic governance

Purpose of the state Economic growth, Provider of conditions


production and for effective competition;
distribution of welfare, economic facilitator and
state ownership, supporter, creator of
provider of military favourable conditions
security, transfers of
income
Regulation The Bretton Woods Deregulation, freeing the
system, regulation by financial market, enabling
national central banks, the free movement of capital
public investments
Nodal scale National Overlapping of several
scales; devaluation of the
national
Prevention of Regional planning, Competitiveness and
uneven regional transfers of income, growth policy, region-led
development dominance of development through
homogenizing policies state income transfers,
internationalization of
places, specialization

Territory Nationalization of Internationalization


territory, natural of territory, emphasis
resources, economic on attractive territorial
growth, defence qualities, economic
policies, societal order, growth through spatial
sovereignty centralization, suppression
of the territorial
dimension of defence
policies, movement from
homogenization towards
territorial specialization

Source: modified from Brenner and Theodore (2002).

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162 Sami Moisio

I suggest that, in order to understand the contemporary state spa-


tial transformation under neoliberalism in an adequate interdiscipli-
nary perspective, it is also necessary to analyse the world of ideas. For
instance, neoliberal geopolitics resonates well with the ideas of con-
temporary neoliberal intellectuals such as Richard Florida, Michael
Porter, Kenichi Ohmae and many others, although it is surprising that
such writers are rarely introduced as important contributors to the ide-
ational aspect of neoliberal hegemony in spite of their participation in
the political process of producing, maintaining and transforming neo-
liberal common sense. The ideational aspect of neoliberal hegemony is
also important because there are potentially many quite distinct neo-
liberal ideational constellations that revolve around different spatial
concepts.
The set of ideas put forward by Florida and others will be referred to
in the ensuing pages as a ‘style of thought’. This concept was originally
introduced by Ludwik Fleck as a particular way of thinking, seeing and
practising. A style of thought thus ‘involves formulating statements that
are only possible and intelligible within that way of thinking’ (Rose,
2007, p. 12). The concept of a style of thought is useful for the present
purpose as it refers to a system of terms, concepts and assertions that
are organized into a particular form that count as an argument. ‘Style
of thought’ is used here not only to accentuate the role of intellectuals
in the process of creating political order but also to reveal how neo-
liberal hegemony involves particular ‘thought communities’. Overall,
considering the style of thought of neoliberalism provides insights into
its social and ideational basis, as well as into its particular materiality
and spatiality.
The neoliberal style of thought is often predicated upon how to pro-
duce economic growth in the post-industrial world, and upon the treat-
ment of states, cities and ‘regions’ in terms of their competitiveness – as
if they were firms operating in markets. Michael Porter’s conceptuali-
zation of national competitiveness, for instance, stresses the need for
governments to constantly create competitive advantages in order to
survive in the current economic rivalry in world politics: states need
to increase their productivity by means of primarily supply-side eco-
nomic management and by fostering ‘clustering’. If a nation loses the
ability to compete in a range of high-productivity/high-wage industries
characterized by innovation, high technology and world-class talent,
its standard of living is threatened: ‘it’s the type of jobs, not just the
ability to employ citizens at low wages, that is decisive for economic
prosperity’ (Porter, 2008, p. 177).

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 163

The underlying principle of the neoliberal style of thought is that


there is a movement away from the ‘manufacturing state’ and towards
a ‘post-industrial innovation state’, which is based on a combination
of high-paid professionals and innovative work that Florida (2008, p.
94) calls the ‘creative sector of an economy’. The future prosperity and
success of a state thus depend on its capabilities for relying on science
to bring forth (technological) innovation. Competition is also regarded
as a pervasive global condition. In the past, the cities of one country
or region competed for investment and talent with other cities in that
same country or region. Now locations all across the globe are compet-
ing with one another (ibid., 2008, pp. 28–9).
According to Florida, the ‘creative class’ is the key to economic growth,
innovation and the future success of a location and company. Coping
with creative people includes fostering a specific type of spatiality (ibid.,
2002). As Peck (2005, p. 740) correctly points out, Florida’s ideas have
proved enormously seductive among civil leaders around the world. He
associates the concept of creative class with a workforce composed of a
relatively large group of people in creative jobs in science and engineer-
ing, architecture and design, education, the arts, music and entertain-
ment. For him, in times of globalization, economic competitiveness is
crucially connected with the locational preferences of this creative class
which secures economic growth. Florida justifies his claim by stressing
that successful firms tend to locate where the talent is. These are not
the cheapest locations, but firms nevertheless want to locate in them as
these hubs are where the highly talented creative class resides. Successful
firms in the creative economy need highly specialized employees who,
according to Florida, tend to settle where the ‘quality of life’ is best. And
because the talented people are becoming more and more mobile, the
challenge of places and states is to manage that mobility.
The neoliberal style of thought is grounded in the view that economic
success is not only place-bound but also inherently associated with
high-tech industry and the attractiveness of city–regions with regard to
talent. Firms relocate to the places that provide the best environment
for talented labour. And as a result, these ‘few world-class cities’ benefit
and prosper. Firms in the creative industry form clusters, and thereby
support a process that attracts more talented people to move into the
‘creative city’. As a consequence, cities must actively scan the horizon
for investment, monitor competitors and emulate ‘best practices’ (see
Peck and Tickell, 2002, p. 47). They have to restructure themselves to
respond to the creative class’s needs just as much as companies have
already done (Peck, 2005, p. 742).

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164 Sami Moisio

For Florida (2008, p. 32), the emerging global politics is not a mat-
ter of competing states but rather competing metropolises. He divides
the world into three groups of cities according to their economic per-
formance: peaks, hills and valleys. This topographic distinction is a
direct response to the thesis of another well-known writer, Thomas L.
Friedman, who famously argued that the world was becoming ‘flat’ –
a view in which geography has lost its significance, as innovative
work is possible everywhere (see Friedman, 2006). Even though the
arguments put forward by both Florida and Friedman are based on
the same style of thought, they end up emphasizing different spatial
dynamics. Florida argues that talent, innovation and creativity are
not distributed evenly across the world but tend to concentrate in
specific locations – which makes global competition a harsh spatial
game:

When looked at through the lens of economic production, many cit-


ies with large populations are diminished and some nearly vanish.
Three sorts of places make up the modern economic landscape. First
are the cities that generate innovations. These are the tallest peaks;
they have the capacity to attract global talent and create new prod-
ucts and industries. They are few in number, and difficult to top-
ple. Second are the economic “hills” – places that manufacture the
world’s established goods, take its calls, and support its innovation
engines. These hills can rise and fall quickly; they are prosperous but
insecure. Some, like Dublin or Seoul, are growing into innovative,
wealthy peaks; others are declining, eroded by high labour costs and
a lack of enduring competitive advantage. Finally there are the vast
valleys – places with little connection to the global economy and few
immediate prospects. (Florida, 2005, p. 48)

In such a view, the really significant locations in the world economy


remain limited in number – Florida in fact estimates that this economy
is dominated by only a few places. He presents provocative maps which
show that

there are at most two dozen places worldwide that generate signifi-
cant innovation. These regions have ecosystems of leading-edge
universities, high-powered companies, flexible labour markets, and
venture capital that are attuned to the demand of commercial inno-
vation – and there aren’t many of them. (Florida, 2008, p. 25)

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 165

In the neoliberal style of thought, economic growth comes from the


clustering and concentrating of talented and productive people, the
new mobile social class: ‘our productivity increases when we locate
close to one another in cities and regions’ (Florida, 2008, p. 6). It is for
this reason that global politics will, according to Florida, hinge on the
tensions brewing among different locations that are all seeking to man-
age successfully in the global economic game. The main dividing line
in global politics will in the future be between the innovative talent-
attracting ‘have’ regions and the talent-exporting ‘have-not’ regions.
This is a world of concentration, centralization and networks. In such
a view, global politics is about rivalry for particular jobs, people and
investment: ‘what we face is not a clash of civilizations but a deepening
economic divide among the world’s spikes and valleys’ (Florida, 2008,
p. 32).
At first sight, Florida’s arguments do not touch upon the state; the
state is laid aside. However, the message is ultimately about the territo-
rial state: it is the responsibility of the state to foster development that
asserts the role of metropolises as havens of jobs, talent and investment.
Irrespective of Florida’s seemingly objective observations, his theory is
highly political, enormously normative and politically geographical.
Florida is a devoted urbanist who observes the world primary through
the lens of metropolises: ‘global cities are magnets for people – particu-
larly those who are ambitious and highly skilled’ (Florida, 2008, p. 4).
He reformulates state–city relations in the post-industrial age and posits
the ‘creative city’ as the crucial component of state success. This city-
centred view of the world coupled with the emphasis on mobility and
creativity characterizes the contemporary neoliberal style of thought.
Florida’s implicit normative lesson is that the territorial state is an out-
dated political unit as far as the production of economic growth is con-
cerned.
The very logic of the neoliberal style of thought is designed to show
that there has already been a movement away from economies, success
and prosperity characterized by state territories. It is particularly strik-
ing to notice how contemporary spatial planning in most of the OECD
world is based on these neoliberal ideas of economic growth. Rather
than critically questioning this idea, scholars have, surprisingly, often
taken it for granted. As a result, it is common today to speculate on how
spatial planning (public intervention) can positively affect the innova-
tion potential of a region in a world of few real megaregions (see, for
instance, Cappellin, 2007).

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166 Sami Moisio

The megaregion is one of the central concepts in the spatial under-


standing of neoliberal world politics, whereby the spikes of the world
are perceived as more connected with each other than they are with the
people and places in their ‘national backyards’. Florida argues at length
how the successful metropolitan cities are morphing into megaregions,
‘home to tens of millions of people producing hundreds of billions and
even trillions of dollars in economic output’ (Florida, 2008, p. 7).
The idea of the restructuring of the world into megaregions was
first presented in the early 1990s by Kenichi Ohmae, then a McKinsey
consultant. Ohmae’s idea that metropolitan regions, not entire nation
states, are indisputably growth centres is part of a wider discursive and
material re-envisioning of world politics that began in the 1990s, and
which is today shared by many policymakers and distinguished schol-
ars. A leading regional scientist, Allen Scott (1996, p. 396), suggests,
for instance, that regions are becoming ‘motors’ of the entire capitalist
system:

We seem now to be shifting into a transitional political phase on


the way to a more effective global regime. . . . We are on the road, in
short, towards a vastly more integrated international system, or to
what Ohmae has referred to in more dramatic terms as a borderless
world, although we still remain far from its theoretical final point
of destination. As we move in this direction, the territorially based
sovereign state is giving way to the ‘trading state’, whose economic
well-being depends to greater and greater degree on its successful
pursuit of export-oriented production within an international divi-
sion of labour.

Ohmae’s (1993) ideas reflect another key principle in the neoliberal


style of thought: a distinction between ineffective state politics and
effective corporate culture. In his view, state-centred decision-making is
harmfully biased towards the political interests of political elites. States
are dysfunctional entities specifically in spatial terms. Ohmae tailors a
map in which conglomerates of metropolitan regions become the most
effective units in the global economy in place of old-fashioned states:

The nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit


for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavour
in a borderless world. It represents no genuine, shared community
of economic interests; it defines no meaningful flows of economic
activity. On the global economic map the lines that now matter are

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 167

those defining what may be called ‘region states’. The boundaries of


the region state are not imposed by political fiat. They are drawn by
the deft but invisible hand of the global market for goods and serv-
ices. (Ohmae, 1993, p. 78)

In such a view, if the state does not allow its most ‘capable regions’
to fully enter the global economy, the state as a whole is in danger of
becoming isolated from that economy. This has also fed ‘network-talk’
that represents the world as dominated by flows (capital, people) and
nodes. These nodes are understood as providing effective entry points
into the global economy because the characteristics that define them
are shaped solely by that global economy and not by harmful state
policies.
In summary, the arguments of Florida and Ohmae are underpinned
by principles of social and economic progress. Their arguments belong
to the neoliberal style of thought that involves specific spatiality. This
spatiality revolves around concepts such as cluster, network, spike, val-
ley, hill, megaregion and metropolis, to mention but a few. It is also
striking that a critique of the territorial state is inherently built into
the neoliberal style of thought, even if very little is said explicitly about
the state. The power of the neoliberal style of thought is partly based
on the fact that it suggests how the state should be reworked spatially
in order to better fit market requirements. In other words, the power of
the neoliberal style of thought may be based on its promise to be more
efficient at creating prosperity and competitive advantage than is politi-
cally biased state-centric politics. An economy that is structured around
metropolitan and megaregional concepts is offered up in the neoliberal
style of thought as an antithesis to the dysfunctional nation state.

The gradual neoliberalization of Finland

As indicated above, it is possible to recognize the operation of neo-


liberal style of thought and the associated geopolitics in numerous
institutional contexts. The European Union (EU), for instance, had
become a territorial management operator by the 1990s, and the cur-
rent Europeanization of space (see Jensen and Richardson, 2005), with
its emphasis on economic growth through flows and global nodes, is
ultimately based on neoliberal geopolitics. In fact, European integra-
tion accentuates the role of large-scale metropolitan city-regionalism
and global networks as fundamental components of competitive state-
hood. The same ideas also underwrite the state transformation process

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168 Sami Moisio

in the case of Finland, EU member since 1995, which in this section will
be taken up as an illustrative case study of with what kind of research
agendas and needs of conceptualization we are faced.

From equalization to competition

Before scrutinizing the more contemporary projects aimed at increasing


Finland’s competitiveness, a few words should be said on the history of
the territorialization of state power in Finland. In retrospect, the period
that began in the late 1950s and continued up to the 1990s marked a
tremendous territorialization of state power. The state territory became
a central constituent of state strategies that sought to foster economic
growth. This period was thus marked by Keynesian territorial manage-
ment.
The construction of the nascent welfare state brought together
manufacturing based on natural resources, a relatively closed national
economy, a state territory through which sovereignty performances
were effectively played out and interventionist welfare and regional
policies that fostered the national scale as the primary one for political
action and loyalty. The state increased its visibility throughout the ter-
ritory through the creation of institutions such as universities, and the
industrialized peripheries exploited their natural resources and, in so
doing, connected these regions with the emerging national economy.
Territorial equality figured prominently on the political agenda, and
welfare structures were enlarged. The nationally scaled territorial econ-
omy was further affirmed as a system of significant transfer payments,
and an extensive system of public services was constructed from the
late 1960s onwards. Finnish governments became politically commit-
ted to using their administrative power to promote ‘geographical uni-
versalism’ in the providing of public services throughout their territory.
Most of the politico-economic strategies and projects revolved around
the national scale. As its infrastructural power increased, the state very
effectively penetrated the everyday lives of its citizens from the 1960s
onwards.
The construction of the Finnish welfare state was a territorial project
par excellence which subordinated specific places to the territorial state.
This was part of a wider international development – the rise of the
welfare state – which marked the creation of the most extensive state
territorial regimes the world has ever seen. Subordinating localities to
the state was thus an inherent part of the Keynesian form of territorial
management. The territory of the Finnish state was a crucial component

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 169

of state sovereignty and an element in its security policy. It was a strate-


gic resource that was to be defended in its entirety. Post-war territorial
management was thus grounded in the idea that the nation’s independ-
ence, which was perceived as threatened, could best be secured by con-
stituting a form of national integrity based on loyal citizens who were
settled throughout the territory.
Most of the projects that territorialized state power in Finland were
motivated by a complex combination of security and economic con-
cerns which can be termed ‘spatial Keynesianism’. It was ultimately
based on the fostering of the national scale in order to create nationally
standardized frameworks for capitalist production and collective con-
sumption in a fight against the spread of communism. The construction
of the welfare state was primarily a nationally oriented equalizing proc-
ess that sought to establish balanced regional development throughout
the nationalized peripheries: equal growth and equal urbanization all
across the national territory. This process shaped socio-spatial configu-
rations such as city–state relations within the state space.
The massive global changes that took place at the turn of the 1990s
gradually destabilized that Keynesian geopolitics. In place of territorial
management emphasizing the state territory as a strategic resource, it
became commonplace to argue that Finland is located in the midst of
economic competition between political units that are all seeking to
maximize their shares in a volatile global knowledge-based economy.
The emergence of a neoliberal style of thought in Finland in the
late 1980s included fostering a particular type of ‘culture of com-
petitiveness’ and connecting the state with the dominant principles
of international finance and trade. A significant portion of new leg-
islation revolved around the new language of internationalization
and competition. New institutions were also founded. One of the
most revealing examples was the Finnish Competition Authority, in
1988. It was, in fact, the first Finnish state institution that sought
to protect sound and effective economic competition, to increase
economic efficiency in both private- and public-sector activities,
and to increase competition in fields hitherto heavily regulated
(Kilpailuvirasto, 2009).
Since the early 1990s, most institutional and political reforms have
been based on their contribution to the strengthening of a particular
type of state transformation in which a culture of competition and
effectiveness largely on international and global scales has emerged
as an unquestionable principle for organizing the economy and social
relations within the political community.

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170 Sami Moisio

Towards an international state space

Contemporary state strategies in Finland are dominated by neoliberal


styles of thought. In these strategies the success and survival of the
state and nation are linked to concepts such as creativity, attractiveness,
innovation, metropolises and megaregions. Moreover, these strategies
are based on an increasingly salient consensus that the ‘manufacturing
state’ is coming to an end, which in turn will require dissolution of state
structures that were created during the industrial era. Contemporary
state success and failure is thus understood as being connected with the
capability of the state to develop innovations that can be commercial-
ized. National competitiveness is connected with ‘learning’, ‘education’,
‘innovativeness’, ‘skills’ and ‘creativity’. The development of a success-
ful knowledge-based economy defines the demands and obligations
placed upon Finland and its citizens and institutions.
The rise of the knowledge-based economy in Finland has led to an
increasing scalar argumentation, one which requires more interna-
tionalization of the state and its people. For instance, the government
launched a ‘country branding project’ in 2008, chaired by Jorma Ollila,
the former CEO of Nokia and current chairman of Royal Dutch Shell
(and one of the most prominent Finnish representatives of the transna-
tional capitalist class). The secretary of the branding group, revealingly,
stated that the very purpose of such branding is ‘to enhance Finland’s
international competitiveness: strengthen the operating potential of
Finnish businesses; increase foreign political influence; and promote
interest in Finland as an investment target’ because countries which fail
to foster their brand ‘could find themselves in the company of North
Korea, Myanmar or Zimbabwe’ (Tuomi-Nikula and Söderman, 2009).
As a new national project, an internationalized Finland of innova-
tions would replace the ‘outdated’ information society project of the
1990s. The latter is understood as being outdated because it was too
closely based on the national state structures that originated in the
1960s and echo decentralization and territorial fixity. The next wave
of economic growth should now be based on re-scaled national capaci-
ties such as globally significant talent and a capability for coping with
constant change. The project is geared to moulding the geographies
of economic development, material and immaterial investments and
political struggle into a new spatial fix that is more international, selec-
tive, effective and competitive than previous ones.
The adjustment of the Finnish state to resonate better with the under-
pinning rules of the neoliberal style of thought presupposes reworking

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 171

(or better, optimizing) the state spatially. This includes not only a
fundamental devaluing of the spatially decentralized structures that
were constructed during the cold war (and largely preserved during
the 1990s), but also the hype that surrounds the notion of metropolis
as the ultimate cornerstone of the creation of a globally competitive,
efficient, flexible, attractive and creative state. The construction of new
infrastructures and institutions has been at the core of this process.
The efforts at accommodating Finland into what are understood as
the rules of the contemporary global economic game have perfectly
revealed that state power does not necessarily have to operate through
fixed territorial arrangements but can be re-territorialized around new
spatial scales and institutions. In other words, the process of ‘interna-
tionalizing’ Finland does not necessarily involve the construction of
the global scale at the expense of nationally scaled configurations but,
perhaps more interestingly, may also give rise to ‘glocalization’ (see
Swyngedouw, 2004).
Various political forces have been suggesting from the late 1990s
onwards that the Finnish state space should be streamlined (in other
words, re-scaled) in order to respond better to the new competitive
environment of global politics. In many of these visions, which seek
to attract some of the mobile money and talent, the Helsinki region
should be developed as a truly international ‘metropolitan region’ that
would operate as a powerhouse, or growth engine, for the whole nation.
I have conceptualized this process as the creation of a metropolis state.
This view of Finland as a metropolis state refers both to the power of the
neoliberal style of thought and to the spatial formations around which
this particular style of thought tends to revolve, and which it nurtures.
Metropolitan city-regionalism places weight on ‘international’ scales
of action. Its political construction is closely connected with attempts
by the government to increase the state’s capability for innovation.
As such, the process of fostering metropolitan city-regionalism can be
understood as a manifestation of the world as envisaged by Richard
Florida and Kenichi Ohmae.
In the discursive construction of metropolitan city-regionalism,
places are located on different scales with reference to their capacities
for contributing to national survival. In this process regions with sig-
nificant innovation potential come to be classified as global and inter-
national, whereas the least valuable places are categorized as being of
only national or local significance. These new place hierarchies indicate
the presence of a neoliberal style of thought in which places are valued
primarily in terms of their market and innovation potentials and their

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172 Sami Moisio

ability to attract the creative class. National competitiveness becomes


almost exclusively linked to large-scale urban environments.
The search for a new wave of innovation-led economic growth has
meant that there has been an emphasis on greater unit sizes, a demand
for specialization, an emphasis on pursuing the international peak, crit-
icism of all decentralized state structures and an association of small
unit size with poor quality and inefficiency. The ideational and mate-
rial construction of the metropolitan state is grounded in an association
of state success with the opening up and adopting of global models. In
this view, Finland’s ‘national survival’ will require the development of
both top international know-how concerning innovations and a new
state space that would enhance the culture of creativity. Thus, Finland’s
national survival has today become synonymous with the success of
the metropolitan region and its institutions, which has, hence, become
a national question shared by all Finns. It is thus often argued that
further liberalization will require a significant spatial centralization of
population, infrastructures and investment. Furthermore, the increase
in spatial selectivity is regarded as an irreversible national process which
will inevitably contribute to the internationalization of the state.
The process of constructing internationally attractive city-regionalism
around Helsinki is ultimately based on the expected needs of footloose
capital. In other words, the re-scaling of the Finnish state is intriguingly
associated with the figure of the international investor. In the develop-
ment of a metropolitan state, Finland’s urban network is being re-scaled
in relation to the national, provincial, European and global scales on
the basis of the expected capability of different places to occupy roles
in the global economy. The spatially renewed neoliberal state has, thus,
abandoned the principle of equal ‘internationalization’ of the different
parts of the national urban network and, instead, has taken to direct-
ing the regions along differing paths of development. The operation
of the neoliberal style of thought will lead to the formation of a new
place hierarchy, which in turn will contribute to an uneven distribu-
tion of public investment, for example, in research and development,
and will thereby further help to differentiate the development paths of
localities.

Concluding remarks

It has been suggested in this chapter that the transformation of state-


hood includes a notable spatial element and presents scholars of
international studies with an enormous catalogue of conceptual and

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 173

substantial challenges that touch upon the ways in which we under-


stand the link between state and territory. It is evident that the static
view of state territory as a passive backdrop for political action and social
processes is problematic (see Häkli, 2008). The literature on state spatial
transformation has succinctly pointed out that, instead of focusing on
state territory as a rigid space, scholars ought to pay attention to the
territorial processes which are not only shaped by international politics
and economics (mode of production), but are also co-constituted by the
latter.
I have also suggested in this chapter that contemporary ‘superstar
economists’ such as Michael Porter, Richard Florida and Kenichi Ohmae
should be critically examined as important and influential theorists of
the ‘international space’. More specifically, I have introduced some of
their key tenets as being based on the neoliberal style of thought that
motivates current practises in state transformation. Since the late 1970s
an enormous number of practises that explicitly aim at international-
izing the state have been based on domestic policy reforms and have
sought to transform the state in order to respond better to the assumed
requirements posed by transnational world politics. This indicates that
the ‘international space’ is actively being territorialized in contempo-
rary state transformation. Yet, even though the Keynesian notion of
state territoriality has been qualitatively reworked, the territorial state
remains pivotal to the re-scaling process and, therefore, to the spread of
the neoliberal hegemony.
Current state transformation does not mean that state territorial-
ity itself is somehow less relevant than before, but rather that a set
of territorializing processes are at work ‘in, around and through the
national state’ (Peck, 2001, p. 450). The study of state spatial transfor-
mation should look at the discursive scalar practices through which
the internationalization/transnationalization of the domestic economy
takes place. It is in these practices that concepts such as international
gain their scalar meaning and, in so doing, guide state institutional
and infrastructural reforms and their associations with rescalings of the
state apparatus, itself, its governance systems and regulatory regimes
(Jones and MacLeod, 1999). One of the most intriguing challenges for
the study of state spatial transformation is to scrutinize how the neo-
liberal style of thought is increasingly embedded in almost all state
reforms, from defence policies to a range of public policies.
It may seem that the operation of the neoliberal style of thought
as a contemporary form of common sense is making the world more
homogeneous. Yet, even though the neoliberal style of thought seems

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174 Sami Moisio

to be deeply rooted throughout the OECD world, one of the greatest


challenges is to enquire into how these transnational practices always
take place in particular geohistorical contexts, assume different forms
because of the different inherited state structures and institutions, and
have potentially different outcomes in different places. State spatial
transformation and transnationalization are always, therefore, both
historically and spatially contingent. Given this geographical contex-
tuality, it becomes crucial to investigate how transnational ideas are
adopted and modified in different national contexts.
The transformation from the Keynesian to the neoliberal state that has
been tracked in this chapter is perhaps best conceived ‘not as a unilinear
transition from one coherently bounded regulatory system to another,
but rather as an uneven, multiscalar, multidirectional, and open-ended
restructuring process that generates pervasive governance failures, crisis
tendencies, and contradictions of its own’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002,
p. 19). One of the key challenges for the study of state transformation/
state transnationalization is to further develop interdisciplinary research
programmes to examine the political conflicts that result from these fail-
ures, uneven development and potentially increasing social and spatial
injustice. It will similarly become crucial to examine the operation and
political power of the intellectual networks organized around the differ-
ent fractions of capital. Finally, neoliberal state transformation may give
rise to new social movements and actions that not only challenge the
neoliberal ideas of world politics but also contribute to the emergence of
alternative scales of state spatial restructuring.

Notes
1. Many scholars working in this field have interdisciplinary backgrounds.
Neil Brenner, for instance, has a BA in philosophy, an MA in both geogra-
phy and political science, a PhD in political science and works as a professor
of sociology.
2. The state may also be considered as forming the arena for a struggle between
social interests – not only those represented by ‘capital’ (see Painter and
Jeffrey, 2009, p. 55).
3. The concept dates back to the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin,
who conceptualized state authority in a particular area as being singular
and absolute (Skinner, 1989). The principle of territorial sovereignty was
later highlighted in the writings of Max Weber (1994 [1919], pp. 310–11),
who famously stated that ‘we have to say that a state is that human com-
munity which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physi-
cal violence within a certain territory, this “territory” being another of the
defining characteristics of the state’. This conception of the state is deeply

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Beyond the Domestic–International Divide 175

rooted in political and academic discourse. In fact, the popular concept of


a failed state not only refers to a territory which lacks a single sovereign
power, but often also depicts an undesirable and chaotic world of state fail-
ure (for this discussion see Luke and Ó Tuathail, 1997).

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7
The Human Subject in
International Studies: An Outline
for Interdisciplinary Research
Programmes
Pami Aalto

Introduction1

In this chapter I will explore the research directions amenable for mak-
ing the ‘human subject’ an integral part of the wide and plural field of
interdisciplinary international studies (IS). I will ask what options open
up if and when we examine the various aspects of the ‘international’
from the point of view of the human subject.
The human subject is taken as the most fundamental concept for
referring to ourselves and our fellow human beings in the interna-
tional sphere, a concept from which other more-precise notions like
‘human nature’, ‘individual’, ‘individual actor’, ‘decision-maker’, ‘citi-
zen’, ‘subject-position’, and so on, can then logically flow and mate-
rialize. It will emerge that attempting to ‘humanize’ international
studies in this manner can lead us in several directions. At one end,
it provides added value by sharpening the analytical and explanatory
potential of IR and, at the other end, it offers normative potential by
helping to better understand our interhuman ties, to expose inequali-
ties and ‘human wrongs’, to promote our empowerment and allay our
common fears.
In order to ascertain the options for ‘humanizing’ international
studies it will be useful first to proceed from the roles assigned to the
human subject in the various theoretical orientations of the discipline
of international relations (IR). Exploring the scope and limitations of

178

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The Human Subject in International Studies 179

disciplinary approaches is a good starting point for interdisciplinary


thinking and research as it reveals what is excluded within existing
disciplines, what outward-oriented engagement can produce, and in
what outward directions one should go (Moran, 2002, p. 2). On that
basis it will then be possible to outline what directions beyond IR –
what related disciplines and fields of study – we can explore in order
to extend our understanding of: the roles the human subject can play;
what aspects of the international those roles manifest; and how all this
can improve our understanding of international issues, processes, ten-
sions and problems.
It will emerge that the human subject is already in many ways present
in contemporary IR. However, none of those presences or roles assumes
similar centrality in the field, as did the conceptualization and study of
the human subject prevalent in the cold war era ‘psychological school’
of IR – as a singular decision-maker and/or acting as a member of a
wider circle of national security experts in the midst of nuclear control
issues, superpower tensions and crises, and other such dramatic events.
In contrast to this dramatic image, the faces of the human subject pres-
ently in IR are more diverse, while their overall standing among the
many research foci and explanatory tools of the field is less consequen-
tial. This is partly a result of the fragmentation of IR into different theo-
retical orientations, research programmes and less closely knit bodies
of literature (see Chapters 1 and 3). And, partly, it is due to a lack of
willingness and of a systematic effort to include the human subject in
theory building and actual empirical research (cf., Byman and Pollack,
2001, pp. 108–9).
To reinforce our capacity to examine the various aspects of the inter-
national from the human point of view, I suggest that we consider sev-
eral interdisciplinary directions that help us to extend the study of the
human subject from the realms afforded by IR approaches, old and new,
towards several other disciplines and fields of study. These interdiscipli-
nary directions will mostly be transdisciplinary in nature. We are, hence,
dealing with approaches wherein existing disciplinary boundaries
are challenged by means of applying or transferring theories or other
imports from other disciplines to IR. In some cases the option of merg-
ing IR with one or more disciplines remains a theoretical possibility
that to date, however, has not been fully implemented, unless we take
political psychology as an example (see Chapter 2).
Some of the interdisciplinary directions to be considered will tell us
more about representatives of elite groups such as foreign policy deci-
sion-makers and other states-people; in a more analytical sense some

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180 Pami Aalto

will situate human subjects in the role of individuals, reflecting on the


bifurcated role of citizens as both anchors of the states-system and as
critics of existing forms of international conduct; some will, instead,
focus on inter-human ties across various scales, also including people’s
everyday routines; and some will introduce subject positions such as
those of refugees, displaced people, or women in relation to men, who,
in those capacities help to maintain international practices of power.
Human subjects, hence, occupy very diverse places and are invested
with very different powers.
In the following section, in order to show the range of opinion within
IR, I will briefly reflect on some key markers in the debate on the place
of the human subject in it. Then I will move on to introduce three rela-
tively coherent interdisciplinary research programmes and two alleg-
edly less coherent, but nevertheless pertinent, research directions. Each
of these retains a meaningful connection to IR while simultaneously
better incorporating the human subject into the picture and, as such,
contributing to the wider field of international studies. Naturally, only
some of the most obvious programmes and research directions can be
covered here.
First, in terms of case selection, reasonable representation is ensured
by demonstrating that suitable starting points in IR – which would
enable the incorporation of the human subject – range across nearly
the whole spectrum of IR’s main theoretical orientations. Of these, real-
ism, liberalism, the English school, and the more ‘reflectivist’ camp –
the possibilities afforded by post-colonialism and feminism – will be
considered.2 To systematically detect the differences among them, I
will compare them according to their ontological, epistemological and
normative premises, with the most important weight assigned to ontol-
ogy. However, for each case the discussion will have to be limited to a
few key scholars whose work best offers ‘positive heuristics’ for mak-
ing interdisciplinary linkages capable of generating theoretical and/or
empirical progress – that is, new content in the study of the human
subject (see Chapter 3).
Second, interdisciplinary literatures and perspectives extending these
grand theoretical orientations towards the better operationalizable
middle-range level are found among each of the three big cultures of
knowledge production – the (natural) sciences, social sciences and the
humanities (see Kagan, 2009).
Third, in the concluding section I will discuss how the programmes
and research directions so located open up the various aspects of the
international.

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The Human Subject in International Studies 181

The international relations debate on the human subject

In IR most of the debate on the human subject is historically tied to the


level-of-analysis debate that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Initially,
Kenneth Waltz (1954) mentioned the individual as ‘the first image’ of
international politics alongside states and the international system.
Then David Singer (1961) omitted the first image when reconceptual-
izing Waltz’s state–system relationship in terms of a methodological
choice between two levels of analysis – the international system and
the national state.
Further contributions to the debate revealed Singer’s confusion of the
‘level-of-analysis’ and ‘unit of analysis’ with each other, arguing that
the level-of-analysis always includes two or more types of units inter-
acting (Nurdusev, 1993). The human subject and his or her links to
the state and state bureaucracies were also re-established as a relevant
level-of-analysis after Singer’s omission of it. For some, it appeared as
the primary level of analysis (Isaak, 1974). John Burton introduced a
‘cob-web’ model where ‘individuals’ and groups of ‘people’ were equally
as useful to analyze as states to develop an accurate idea of the interac-
tions constituting ‘world society’. Though he did not primarily frame
his work as a contribution to the level-of-analysis debate, it implied that
different levels of analysis can be looked, depending on what questions
we are asking and what issue area those questions may concern (Burton,
1972, pp. 37–8). Overall, level-of-analysis has been a recurrent problem
in IR in various ways – for example in the agent-structure debate that,
together with sociological imports into the discipline, led to the birth
of constructivism (e.g., Wendt, 1987). It is fair to say, however, that the
individual level never realized its full potential in any of these debates.
In this context Benjamin Solomon’s plea in 1997 for a return to the
‘first image’ stands out for its direct advocacy. He noted that the main
theoretical orientations of IR at the time – realism and liberalism – both
explain the destiny of humankind by means of ‘impersonal, indirect,
under-the-surface, and inevitable trends or forces, benign or malign’
(Solomon, 1997, p. 249). Solomon wanted to help citizens to better
understand their ability to influence the operation of those impersonal
forces. This would entail nothing less than launching a global educa-
tion project, a Herculean task in which peace organizations and move-
ments had previously failed. But progress in such a task could help by
creating some preconditions for new accommodative and cooperative
interactions and transnational institutions. In this manner IR theory
would also be geared to better understand the role that citizens play

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182 Pami Aalto

as anchors of the inter-state system. Overall, Solomon argued that an


action programme of this kind would empower the global citizenry
to change the system towards one that is more conducive to good life
(ibid., pp. 249–55).
Solomon’s proposal set human subjects and their interaction with
other units as a partial level-of-analysis invested with causal and
explanatory power, in largely the same fashion as in the original level-
of-analysis debate in which the focus was on better explaining interna-
tional outcomes such as war and conflict. Yet, in a spirit reminiscent of
the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, Solomon’s ultimate concern
was to help us sharpen our awareness of what is going on around us and
think of what we can do to alter those realities. In this sense Solomon’s
message fits into the normative end of the possibilities of ‘humaniz-
ing’ IR explored here. A similar ethos is also to be found in the work
of Ronnie Lipschutz (2001, p. 323), who in sketching a people-centred
approach to global political economy asserts: ‘A theory of global politics
that disregards the people that make up the global polity is, at best, an
idealized fantasy and, at worst, an impoverished nightmare’. The same
normative argument is defended on a more general level in the phi-
losophy of Margaret Archer, and linked to an explanatory framework.
Archer attempts to find a middle way between idealist subjectivism and
extreme forms of objectivism by focusing on how ‘our human powers
of reflexivity have causal efficacy – towards ourselves, our society and
relations between them’ (2003, p. 9). She tries to ‘reclaim Humanity
which is indeed at risk’, in particular in academia, by the ‘postmodern
onslaught upon humanity’ (2000, pp. 2–3).
Archer would be gravely concerned by the postmodern attack on the
human subject in the emerging body of work on ‘post-human politics’.
This is a transdisciplinary literature inspired by currents in social the-
ory, philosophy, human geography, media studies, computer science
and gender studies (see e.g., Badmington, 2004, p. 1344). One of its
main theses is that the development of cyborgs, nanotechnologies, gene
technologies, artificial intelligence and the like have demolished the
differences between machines and humans (e.g., Gray, 2001). Another
line of writing attacks the anthropocentric ‘humanist tradition’ which
not only views the human as an essence or norm against which animals
and machines are measured, but also sets humans as the origin and
centre of history. Consequently, those (liberal) accounts – like Francis
Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future (2002) – defending humanity as a
meaningful starting point are vigorously criticized in a poststructur-
alist deconstruction. Overall, the authors applying these perspectives

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The Human Subject in International Studies 183

on IR question the assumption of a universal, rational (and Western)


human subject which, according to them, characterizes both realism
and liberalism. One such analysis suggests that the unacknowledged
possibility of ‘non-western and non-human centred approaches to
international politics’ threatens to negate ‘pluralism under the name of
human rationality’ (Oga, 2007).
Between the normative extremes offered by Solomon and ‘post-
human politics’ we find other perspectives in which the focus on the
human subject is more analytical. By far the biggest and most coherent
body of such research is the already mentioned rich tradition of the
‘psychological school’, which seeks to explain international outcomes
by drawing upon the wider field of political psychology (McDermott,
2004a, pp. 2–3). Today it conserves the research agenda that dates back
to the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, the school has extended its scope
to cognitive research on learning (e.g., Levy, 1994) and to the formal
modelling of prospect theory (e.g., McDermott, 2004b; 2004c), as well
as to the role of identity and emotions in foreign policy (e.g., Hymans,
2006). However, as stated, today the school’s relative standing in IR has
declined notably compared to the cold war era of the 1960s, when it had
a prominent status within the ‘second debate’, or as part of the behav-
iourist challenge to traditionalist IR theory centred around realism.
The relative marginalization of the ‘psychological school’ in IR exem-
plifies an ignorance of human subjects, the study of which has, for
example, been left to ‘psychologists’, historians and area studies spe-
cialists (Byman and Pollack, 2001, p. 110). It is also attributable to the
structural turn in IR since the 1990s. This includes the challenge of
constructivism – inspired by Giddens’s structuration theory –to struc-
tural neo-realism and the increasing popularity of often-likewise struc-
tural neo-Marxist perspectives and other grand theories such as that of
the English school.
At the same time, on the margins of IR several new approaches to
human subjectivity are emerging, each of which draws upon differ-
ent interdisciplinary combinations. These range from psychologi-
cal perspectives to peace and conflict research (e.g., Blumberg, Hare
and Costin, 2006), to new openings in the study of everyday life in
world economy (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007), on to gender analyses
of women subject-positions and resistance (Stern, 2005) and the sub-
jective roots of geopolitical discourses (Aalto, 2003).3 Of these, peace
research has partly formed its own transdiscipline. The study of world
economy could be counted as a critical response to transdisciplinary
international political economy (IPE) (see Chapters 2 and 4). While

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184 Pami Aalto

gender research on the subject is already substantial, subjectivity and


geopolitics have not been a frequent combination in critical geopoli-
tics (for an exception, see Pain and Smith, 2008), while this literature
overall has remained closer to the geography discipline than to IR. The
major point here is that none of these approaches seriously addresses
IR’s ‘great debates’, around which the discipline is very much centred
(Wæver, 2007; see Chapters 1 and 3). Consequently most IR theorists
do not pay much attention to these approaches or to the balance of pos-
sibilities and drawbacks they manifest.
To rectify this apparent marginality and maintain a maximum of
contact with IR’s great debates without sacrificing conceptual inno-
vation, a healthy balance is needed between mainstream and ‘reflec-
tivist’ orientations as starting points for interdisciplinary enquiry.
Briefly, that suitable starting point for making the human subject
integral to interdisciplinary international studies can be found across
nearly the entire spectrum of IR, means that the human subject should
be far less marginal than the record of actual empirical research sug-
gests! There is no single ‘right’ way of better incorporating the human
subject into our research efforts. Rather, there are several ways, each
of which is open to interdisciplinary work enriching our conceptu-
alizations. This is, in fact, not an entirely unfamiliar situation in IR,
as historically speaking its main theoretical orientations, as well as
many of its middle and lower level theoretical constructs, are to a
large extent imports from other disciplines (see Chapter 1). As Quincy
Wright put it, IR ‘cannot be understood without considering the dis-
ciplines which have contributed to its creation, the subdivisions into
which it is organised, and the objectives which it seeks’ (Wright,
1955, pp. 28–9). This also concerns IR’s most famous theoretical ori-
entation, realism.

A realist programme extending towards the humanities

Out of the main theoretical orientations of IR, realism is commonly


associated with the long tradition of political theory, starting with
Thucydides, leading to Hobbes, and on to the present day – although
these early writers never wrote of ‘IR’ (Schmidt, 2002, p. 7). Nevertheless,
among IR’s orientations, realism is a relatively coherent, albeit multi-
faceted, theory of fundamental questions about the problems of war
and peace among states – with a pessimistic and prudential dominat-
ing account (Elman, 2007). Realism is in principle a good candidate to
qualify as a scientific research programme in a modified Lakatosian

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The Human Subject in International Studies 185

sense (Lakatos, 1970; see Chapter 3). Nevertheless, judged on its success
as such a programme dissolves into the question of which realism is
at issue. Some doubt whether Waltz’s neo-realism (1979) constitutes a
progressive research programme, or indeed a programme at all, given
its rigidity with regard to incorporating any new elements alongside
its system-centric focus. Experts also disagree on whether neoclassi-
cal realism is a progressive or degenerative programme (see Harrison,
2003, pp. 357–8). But when speaking of a promising realist programme
for including the human subject, a strong start is available in Hans
Morgenthau’s classical realism.4
Morgenthau is often associated with the ‘disciplining’ move of IR in
the 1950s. Yet, as argued in this book, his work contains unequivocal
interdisciplinary influences as well (see Chapter 1). The second princi-
ple in his Politics among Nations (1985, p. 5) asserts that a realist theory
of international politics will ‘guard against two popular fallacies: the
concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences’.
Morgenthau claims that motives are the ‘most illusive of psychologi-
cal data’ and that the good intentions of statesmen do not necessarily
lead to good outcomes. For this reason political theory must judge, not
motives, but the ‘political qualities of intellect, will and action’. Here,
Morgenthau opens the door to what became the ‘psychological school
of IR’ by saying that deviations from the rational conduct of foreign
policy and diplomacy may, in fact, form a coherent system of irration-
ality from which the study may open up space for a theory of its own
(pp. 5–10).5 From here, his theory goes on to elaborate issues such as the
qualities of statesmanship, the role of citizens in the form of percep-
tions of personal insecurity, the assumption of a ‘minimum’ of psycho-
logical unity of the world, and consideration for the role of morality in
international politics and world public opinion – all of them alongside
a mostly state-centric agenda.
As far as the human subject is concerned, Morgenthau’s realist ontol-
ogy refers chiefly to statesmen and other elite groups. They have a fixed
‘human nature’ characterized by aggression; a drive for power; fear; and
rationality (Crawford, 2009, pp. 271–2).6 Yet, mass psychology and the
role of public opinion are accounted for in backing, or eroding, the
state’s foreign policy. However, Morgenthau ultimately deems world
public opinion and moral considerations, as they operated in his time,
unlikely to ‘keep the struggle for power [among states] indefinitely
within peaceful bounds’ (p. 27).
In epistemological terms, Morgenthau’s realism is, perhaps, best
deemed ultimately traditionalist. He originally came from the German

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186 Pami Aalto

Verstehen tradition. Yet, in his early work he also toyed with positivism,
before denouncing science and positivism altogether in the context of
IR in his The Scientific Man and Power Politics in 1946. In his later work
he repeatedly referred to the search for laws, but by this he meant, for
example, the biological laws that governed international politics, not a
need to make IR ‘scientific’ (Wight, 2002, pp. 27–8). According to one
interpretation, this was his way of accepting the pressures of the time
for the importance of attempting to explain cold war politics that he
encountered upon emigrating to the US (see Neumann and Sending,
2007, p. 684; cf., Guzzini, 1998). In Morgenthau’s view, IR has to cope
with uncertainty, and with the impossibility of making exact predic-
tions. This led him to conclude that the best one can do is to study the
fundamental patterns of history, which reveal the correlations between
past and present arising from the perennial quality of human nature
(p. 19). On this basis, in its foundations the normative approach of this
programme represents a psychoanalytical effort to control the power-
seeking aggression of human nature. State leaders need to be educated
by analysts to act ‘prudently’. Wise leaders must skilfully exploit the bal-
ance of power mechanism to promote aspirations for peace. Diplomacy
and international law help further in channelling the balance of power
to constrain the use of violence and threat of war, and do so much more
than do abstract or universal moral principles (pp. 11–12; 25–7; see also
Harle, 1999: Korhonen, 1983).
With his focus on statesmanship and prudence, Morgenthau assigns
diplomacy a very central role in balance of power politics. He does not
merely examine diplomacy in a narrow sense of looking for applied
knowledge of the ‘right’ conduct of professional diplomats vis-à-vis
one another in the midst of the historically specific circumstances of
the system of states. He is profoundly informed on the historical con-
text of the European states-system, particularly Bismarck’s Germany
(see Chapter 1), and of Bismarck’s capacity to master the ills of human
nature. Morgenthau’s account of foreign policy is built on the history
of diplomacy, and he shows interest in speculating on what diplo-
mats might have to say about, and how they view and judge, interna-
tional relations (see Sharp, 2009, pp. 7; 53; 59). This all suggests that
Morgenthau’s realism includes strong positive heuristics vis-à-vis the
humanist tradition of diplomatic history. Henry Kissinger, a controver-
sial figure but nevertheless a classic in this field, once commented: ‘As
a professor, I tended to think of history run by impersonal forces. But
when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make’
(Isaacson, 1992; cited in Byman and Pollack, 2001, p. 108). Kissinger

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The Human Subject in International Studies 187

aptly summarizes the challenge of bringing diplomacy to the realm of


academic study:

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; states-


men build them. And there is a vast difference between the perspec-
tive of an analyst and that of a statesman. . . . The analyst has available
to him all of the facts; he will be judged on his intellectual power. The
statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time
that he is making them; he will be judged by history on the basis of
how wisely he managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how
well he preserves the peace. That is why examining how statesmen
have dealt with the problem of world order – what worked or failed
and why – is not the end of understanding contemporary diplomacy,
though it may be its beginning. (Kissinger, 1994, pp. 27–8)

Kissinger also somewhat tacitly acknowledges the links between clas-


sical realist tenets and diplomatic history in his commentary on the
future course of his own country’s foreign policy: ‘In the twenty-first
century, America, like other nations, must learn to navigate between
necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international
relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen’ (p.
812; emphases added). To summarize, Morgenthau’s realism is indeed
compatible with diplomatic history: (a) when it comes to ontology, dip-
lomatic history, just like realism, concentrates on elites, but can also
accommodate the state leaders’ needs to cope with peer group pressures
as well as public opinion. The interdisciplinary value added is that dip-
lomatic history provides a more personal touch to the analysis, making
it easier to comprehend the meaningfulness and appearance of policy
choices available in the historical situation in which the decision-mak-
ers found themselves. Realism, for its part, can offer a more abstract
framework within which to situate idiosyncratic diplomatic histories.
In terms of epistemology, (b) diplomatic history relies on traditional-
ism, which broadly speaking is compatible with Morgenthau’s realism.
In the normative sense, (c) diplomatic history concentrates naturally on
negotiation and consultation as the chief tools by which to prudentially
address questions of peace and war, which are of paramount concern
to realism.
Alongside this realist research programme extending towards diplo-
matic history in the humanities, it would also be possible to construct
a programme extending towards the (natural) sciences. This would
push Morgenthau’s psychological and psychoanalytic agenda further

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188 Pami Aalto

by drawing conceptual tools from neurobiology (see Crawford, 2009,


pp. 278–9). Such a science-oriented programme can also be sketched
from a liberal perspective.

Liberal research programme extending towards the


(natural) sciences

The ideational grounding of liberalism is diverse, but much of it cul-


minates in the Kantian copresence of self-interest and the capacity
for moral thought and reason (MacMillan, 2007, pp. 21–3). Liberalism
includes classical variants as evinced in Adam Smith’s work accentuat-
ing the role of trade in pacifying domestic and international relations
combined with political freedoms; and ordoliberal variants bringing
in the state more powerfully. Today, on the most general level, liberal-
ism can be taken as paradigmatic research programme, even though
it actually covers several theories that examine cooperation, interde-
pendence and institutions among states. Two main directions can be
noted, while others are possible (see Chapter 3). First, at the structural
level, neoliberal theories explain cooperation in international organiza-
tions and regimes by referring to economic rationalities (Martin, 2007).
Second, at the lower levels, we have pluralist ‘second-image’ models of
how ideas, sectoral interests and other domestic processes impact states’
foreign policies (Panke and Risse, 2007).
Within liberalism as broadly understood, James Rosenau’s ‘post-in-
ternational’ framework as expressed in his Turbulence in World Politics
(1990) offers probably the most wide-ranging and comprehensive grand
level framework wherein the human subject has a strong role.7 Rosenau
offers a complete research programme for studying the ‘micro level of
individuals’, focusing on learning, analytic skills, cognitive maps, role
scenarios, cathectic capabilities, compliance orientations, legitimacy
sentiments, political loyalties and locus of control (Rosenau, 1990, pp.
210–11). Changes within these variables are interlinked with processes
on all other levels of analysis and ultimately with the transformations
or ‘turbulence’ that Rosenau detects in global politics. In other words,
Rosenau treats human subjects as highly reflective individuals within
a distinctively ‘post-international’ research programme geared at global
level analysis.
Ontologically, Rosenau’s framework covers individuals equally as
decision-makers and citizens. According to him, in the post-industrial
era, ‘like the citizen, the official has become a battlefield on which the
conflicts that constitute the global agenda at any moment in time are

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The Human Subject in International Studies 189

played out’ (p. 214). For this reason Rosenau approaches citizens and
practitioners as ‘composite of identifiable and competing roles’, divid-
ing them into their analytical parts rather than taking each of them
as an entity. Yet, he allows for both rational calculations and subcon-
scious predispositions. Epistemologically, Rosenau’s drive for studying
the causes of change in global politics leads him to caution against
philosophical fixations. We should just boldly go and theorize the puz-
zles and actual developments – if needed, without first consulting other
relevant theories (Rosenau, 1996, pp. 309–16). Speaking of observables,
causes and theory development, Rosenau at this point could easily be
taken as a positivist, but not necessarily as of a very orthodox type.
After all, he was initially an empiricist prior to becoming an advocate of
science opposed to relativism (Mansbach, 2000, pp. 8–12).
The decidedly analytical nature of Rosenau’s programme serves to a
degree to hide his precise normative aims. These do not resemble the
(bourgeois) concept of the progress of classical liberalism; he clearly
wants to analyse the world for our sake rather than for the sake of mere
theory development. It could be suggested that Rosenau’s introduction
of the micro level of individuals mostly serves the analytical purpose
of helping to better explain macro-level change, which in turn can
help us to better explain our own place in the midst of those changes.
If this is correct, such an aim is not very far from the scientific nature
of the ‘psychological school’ of IR and its work on the psychology of
decision-making.
Rosenau’s approach thus offers strong positive heuristics for situat-
ing the individual as a decision-maker in the web of psychological and
bureaucratic influences. For their part, the natural science–oriented
psychological literatures on operational code, belief systems, political
personality and learning provide conceptual focus points for a better
grasp of the psychological basis of individual perceptions, preference
formation, framing and other cognitions underlying individual choices
and decision-making. In this way Rosenau’s individuals can be situated
into a richer theoretical perspective operationalizable at the middle-
range level of theorizing (see also McDermott, 2004a, pp. 268–9). The
proximity of Rosenau’s liberal programme to the ‘psychological school’
is evident in how the research focus of Robert Jervis has evolved since
the publication of his classic work of the ‘psychological school’ (1976):

This world will be more structurally and cognitively complex than


the previous era, will call for more value trade-offs, and will require
greater tolerance for ambiguity. Beliefs about security and the causes

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190 Pami Aalto

of war will also be important. The psychological biases of risk aver-


sion, the assimilation of evidence to fit beliefs, and the propensity to
see what one needs to see will operate strongly. Because the external
environment is less compelling than it was, the range of choice and
role for values will be increased. (Jervis, 1994, p. 769)

Jervis also notes further important aspects of compatibility:

Students of cognitive psychology have always argued that what peo-


ple believe plays an important role in world politics. To put it in the
‘levels of analysis’ framework viewed by students of international
politics, we must examine national decision-making; domestic poli-
tics and the state’s external environment, although important, rarely
fully determined the state’s policy. (p. 772)

In summary, there is (a) sufficient ontological compatibility as both


Rosenau’s liberal pluralism and the ‘psychological school’ deem cogni-
tions and emotions important. For Rosenau, emotions refer to ‘cathectic
capabilities’ and Jervis speaks of ‘empathy’ (p. 773). Bueno de Mesquita
and McDermott (see McDermott, 2004b, p. 155) have also introduced
emotions into the study of decision-making. Moreover, both literatures
seem to allow some place for elites and the broader publics alike, even
though the latter remains a less exploited possibility in political psychol-
ogy. (b) In terms of epistemology, the positivist inclinations of liberal-
ism pose no problem for the ‘psychological school’, which in the past
decade and a half has developed an even sharper (natural) ‘scientific’
or formal edge than it had in the cold war era, namely prospect theory.
This literature takes stock of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, as well
as of Amos Tversky’s assertions of humans being loss averse in decision-
making under conditions of risk and, therefore, often operating from
a status quo perspective. The prospect theory approach encompasses a
two-part research agenda: framing (how prospects are presented) and
evaluation (how choices are made vis-à-vis gains/losses).
In the (c) normative sense, both literatures try to better elucidate
human conduct in a complex environment. Alas, prospect theory has
moved the ‘psychological school’ in a highly abstract direction wherein
the rationality of the individual in pondering choices is modelled in a
context remote from many concrete life situations. Yet, with this move
we gain a highly coherent research programme offering considerable
positive heuristics in the directions of cognitive science, social psy-
chology, game theory and microeconomics, organization theory and

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The Human Subject in International Studies 191

even evolutionary biology. Hence, this programme extends the scope of


international studies as close to natural sciences as is practically possi-
ble. A wider social scientific programme can, for its part, be approached
from the perspective of the English school.

The English school programme extended towards the


social sciences

The English school has an open-ended character which makes it a very


potent platform for interdisciplinary work. This is evident in its ori-
gins in no less than three distinct traditions of political theory: real-
ist/Hobbesian, rationalist/Grotian and revolutionist/Kantian thinking
(Bellamy, 2007, p. 78). These traditions are reflected in the school’s con-
ceptual triad of international system, international society and world
society, all of which represent different aspects of the international.
Owing to this richness the English school offers a promising platform
for building interdisciplinary research programmes (see Chapter 4).
Within the English school’s conceptual triad, the human subject
appears alongside transnational actors within the strongly normative
and political theory influenced world society tradition. This tradition
also offers a take on the human subject very different from the real-
ist and liberal programmes discussed above. World society is, however,
an amorphous and under-theorized realm of the school. This is amply
apparent in Barry Buzan’s seminal treatise From International to World
Society? (2004). Despite its name, the book practically gives up the con-
cept of world society while re-theorizing it. First, Buzan introduces the
new terms of ‘interhuman’ and transnational’ domains or societies, in
which ‘individuals’, and companies as well as other transnational actors
are respectively situated. Interhuman society represents a mechanism,
or a web, of ties among people which together with transnational soci-
ety may either support or erode inter-state society. Second, borrowing
from Wendt, Buzan also introduces an indirect mechanism by which
interhuman ties come into play. He makes distinctions among three
different mechanisms which help to keep inter-state society together:
coercion, calculation and belief. Of these, the belief mechanism is some-
thing which inevitably opens up his framework to the worlds of human
subjects as, for Buzan, belief in the righteousness of the arrangement in
question represents the strongest binding mechanism (pp. 118–38).
Inter-state society, however, remains primary in Buzan’s ontology.
Interhuman and transnational societies provide the cohesive force or,
alternatively, the eroding mechanism of inter-state society. In other

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192 Pami Aalto

words, human subjects and other actors have less inherent ontological
currency than do states. For Buzan, the belief mechanism upholding
inter-state society also has a functional role instead of possessing a pri-
mary ontological status of its own. Human subjects remain vaguely con-
ceptualized as some sort of individuals or ‘people’.8 In epistemological
terms, Buzan’s English school leaves room to move in the directions of
traditionalism, mild rationalism and post-positivism alike. Normatively,
Buzan’s structural rebuilding of the English school is mostly an analyti-
cal treatise on the evolution of inter-state society.
Overall, with regard to the incorporation of the human subject,
Buzan’s ES is rich on ‘positive heuristics’ but is more of a start that
leaves us on a fairly general level. A considerable degree of ambiguity
remains in relation to the direction middle-range approaches should
take and the way they should be operationalized if the possibilities
opened up vis-à-vis the human subject are to be utilized and turned
into empirical research. Considering the options available, one is struck
by how Buzan’s English school breaks with the humanist and historical
orientation of the school’s classics and adopts a self-consciously social
scientific posture in utilizing sociological literature and making some
moves towards the study of globalization and transdisciplinary IPE. In
particular, Buzan takes the first steps towards theorizing the market
institution in international society, and to counter the scant attention
paid to (the) economy by the school’s founding fathers and contempo-
rary theorists alike. With his main concern remaining inter-state soci-
ety, he elects to bypass the role of human subjects as consumers and
actors within the international political economy where they mix and
mingle with states and transnational actors.
Human subjects as economic actors shaping the market institu-
tion can be usefully approached through John Hobson and Leonard
Seabrooke’s (2007) everyday international political economy (EIPE).
This is a holistic approach combining all levels of analysis, just as does
Buzan’s ES. By bringing in economics and individual actors simultane-
ously, EIPE helps us to unpack important aspects of Buzan’s discussion
of the relationship between transnational and interhuman societies. It
gets us beyond conventional IPE work, which has focused on hegem-
ony, trade and financial flows and international regulatory institutions
at the international level. This has included, for example, Hobbesian
hegemonic stability theory, Lockean neoliberal institutionalism, or
regime theory, and most recently, Kantian analysis of the ways in which
states are ‘socialised into deep cooperation within an increasingly
tight international society’ (pp. 5–6). However, EIPE rather attempts to

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The Human Subject in International Studies 193

analyse how our everyday actions can transform world economy – how
the weak, including individuals and meso-groupings and larger-scale
aggregations, affect and respond to the dominant patterns, and how
their co-constitution can generate global change.
The human faces now emerging with the EIPE perspective are very
different from the diplomats, decision-makers and ‘individual citizens’
of the realist and liberal programmes, and push the English school’s
vague conceptualization of the human subject in a more particular
direction, where a deep lacuna has so far prevailed. The subjects of
EIPE include various non-elite groups and also non-Western peoples,
for example peasants and their relationship to the Zapatista liberation
army in Mexico; migrant labourers organizing themselves into tran-
snational advocacy networks and building large business empires in
Asia; small investors for whom pension investment decisions have
been privatized in the US and UK, and the consequent impact of their
investments on global markets; trade union activists resisting global
capitalism; and other representatives of low-income groups.9 Their
actions are defined as:

acts by those who are subordinate within a broader power relation-


ship but, whether through negotiation, resistance or non-resistance,
either incrementally or suddenly, shape, constitute and transform
the political and economic environment around and beyond them.
(pp. 15–16)

The EIPE framework hence helps to sharpen the understanding of


the evolution of the market institution opened up for examination in
the new structural English school work of Buzan by focusing on the
everyday level actions of individuals in various locales. The mutual
compatibilities are sufficient. At the (a) ontological level, Buzan accen-
tuates how international societies are often regionally based and how
important regional differences can be discerned in the way in which
societies are formed and internalized across Europe, Asia, the Americas,
and so forth. EIPE deepens the analysis vis-à-vis the internalization
aspects and adds to that various techniques of bottom-up change:
defiance (overt resistance), mimetic challenge (covert resistance whereby
agents appeal to the normative discourse of the dominant in order
to work their own way); hybridised mimicry (how agents filter domi-
nant normative discourses through their own cultural lenses, thereby
producing hybridized normative orders), and axiorationality (select-
ing new behavioural patterns that meet actors’ welfare-enhancing

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194 Pami Aalto

interests, including economic rationality and social well-being). (b)


Epistemologically, the EIPE framework is compatible with the English
school in attempting to balance between rationalism and post-posi-
tivism (pp. 4-5; 8–9). (c) Normatively, EIPE is more or less compatible
with the revolutionist element of the English school and adds to it a
post-Marxian take.

Reflectivist research directions extending towards the


humanities

To add to the places found for the human subject by proceeding from
the main orientations of IR, it will be useful to consider the highly
diverse, albeit internally less coherent, ‘reflectivist’ theoretical orienta-
tions of IR. Of these highly diverse approaches, post-colonialism and
feminism particularly stand out as theoretically interesting and sizable
enough literatures for making further interdisciplinary inroads better
incorporating the human subject into international studies.
Both of these literatures are in themselves already wide, and self-con-
sciously and explicitly transdisciplinary. They cross several disciplinary
boundaries and are not predominantly evinced as theoretical orienta-
tions of only IR, unlike realism, liberalism and the English school. This
wide-ranging transdisciplinary character of these two literatures also
obviates the need to seek any definite interdisciplinary extensions to
the research directions they offer for enriching our understanding of
the human subject in international studies. Concomitantly, the wide-
ranging character means they do not offer research programmes as
coherent as those of mainstream theoretical orientations. Instead, they
are better characterized as loose approaches posing several puzzle-sets
which may not necessarily be theoretically determined but ‘call upon
the scholar to expand the range of information necessary to provide a
convincing answer to a puzzle’ (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007 p. 3; see
Chapter 3).
Of the two, post-colonialism originates in literary and cultural studies.
In the context of IR, post-colonialism attempts to change the Western-
centric character of the discipline towards acknowledging the power
relationships that link the North and South together in both colonial
and post-colonial contexts. Post-colonialism directs attention towards
people, identities and resistance in those contexts, and examines the
workings of power as a relational force creating subjectivities. Subjects
are seen as being influenced by colonial experiences that continue
today in various contexts ranging from non-West to West, sometimes

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The Human Subject in International Studies 195

resulting in hybrid identities mixing traditional and modern capitalist


psychological and cultural experiences. The marginalized or subaltern
subjects studied by post-colonialism can also resist becoming re-colo-
nized into the western modernity of the ‘colonizer’, developing new
cultural forms (Abrahamsen, 2007, pp. 111–19).
The faces of the human subject emerging from this literature are
not those of the decision-making elites or highly individuated citizens
of the realist and liberal programmes, but are the faces of those who
may be directly affected by their decisions, wealth and power – like
migrants, refugees, detained or ‘encamped’ asylum-seekers, and free-
dom fighters or other campaigners in West and non-West. Some of
these faces, however, do bear some resemblance to the capable grass-
roots and meso-level actors of EIPE. Post-colonialism mainly examines
culturally formed subjects who may have a claim to a certain identity,
or who may be approached as having such a claim. In this sense, faith
is invested in the subject and in his or her agency. EIPE’s subjects, for
their part, are purposive and capable economic agents working their
way from bottom-up positions. Both types possess power and are pos-
sible agents of change.
By contrast, a far more pessimistic take on subject roles, such as refu-
gees, is present in works inspired by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s
bio-politics, in which the body is seen as always caught by the deploy-
ment of power, ending up as a relatively powerless field of play (for a
review, see Pehkonen and Puumala, 2010, p. 52). In these conceptu-
alizations the subject in fact becomes ‘abject’ with little further role
than to suffer. It is dissolved into a mere playground of discursive
power structures, at worst making the humankind assemblage of dis-
embodied textualism where humans are lost and textual representa-
tions reign supreme (Archer, 2000, p. 2).10 This image approximates the
fairly depressing portrayal given by ‘post-human international politics’
of ourselves, our capacities and wills.
Feminism extends the list of places available for the human subject
even further from the picture provided by post-colonialism. It includes
Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) accounts of women in the international sex
industry, women as textile workers in the international political econ-
omy, and in domestic service as wives of diplomats and soldiers on
military bases. These roles do pertain to inter-state relations and its
institutions, such as war and diplomacy, but rather than examining
them from the top-down perspective of elites, the view is as those who
maintain the society and its institutions. A case in point is the Filipino
domestic workers and nannies around the world who contribute a

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196 Pami Aalto

sizable part of the national economy by sending their earnings back


home (see Griffiths et al., 2009, pp. 288–92). Overall, these faces of
women subjects vary from targets of control to bottom-up agents of
international society, and on to resistant subjects thwarting the efforts
of would-be manipulators to control their agency (Enloe, 2007, p. 102).
A further example of a feminist research focus examines human sub-
jects not just as ‘soldiers’ but as male soldiers and male peacekeepers
– a perspective that has raised issues of HIV/AIDS, escalation of pros-
titution and associated human trafficking around the sites of their
deployment (Whitward, 2004).
In summary, the faces of the human subject and the research direc-
tions responsible for revealing them are so multifarious in these two
literatures that (a) at the ontological level, we may in a general sense
only speak of an image of a disadvantaged subject that is most com-
monly present, one which may not enjoy full citizen or civic rights,
and which at its weakest is an ‘abject’; or which at best is a conscious,
if underprivileged, agent of social and political change. (b) At the epis-
temological level, a variety of post-positivist perspectives dominates,
even though elements of more modern critical theory are also evident.
Finally, (c) in the normative sense there is a clear aim to reveal subju-
gated positions and promote their empowerment. Alas, when this is
seen, somewhat nihilistically, as hopeless, the aim is to criticize those
in full political power for failing to acknowledge the face of human suf-
fering and ‘human wrongs’ (see Booth, 1995).

Conclusion

The several faces and places of the human subject explored in this chap-
ter represent the full spectrum of possible interdisciplinary research
programmes and directions available for ‘humanizing’ international
studies. Those options include variants that represent relatively com-
fortable extensions of the agenda of mainstream IR orientations, even
for hard-core IR scholars, and those who challenge the ways in which
we have traditionally viewed IR as well as the wider field of interna-
tional studies. Several further avenues naturally remain within that
wide spectrum.
What we have gained by this discussion of the interdisciplinary
research programmes and research directions incorporating the human
subject is a perspective on the various aspects of the international,
wherein we and our fellow human beings have a role. In short, inter-
national studies painting images of international interaction without

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The Human Subject in International Studies 197

noting how the very constitution of the international would never have
been possible without human beings, would be a very strange endeav-
our, both in the academic and normative sense. Given this causal-
analytic and normative role of human beings it would be odd to now
exclude ourselves from the analyses.
The aspects of the international charted in this chapter cover the
entire spectrum from the familiar and dominant image of inter-state
relations – now examined from the decision-makers’ point of view – to
inter-bureaucratic and interhuman ties at the level of ‘inter–psycholog-
ical’ or ‘social-psychological’ encounters, clashes and outcomes. Post-
colonial and many other forms of identity politics, and critical analyses
of the various ‘wrongs’ in interhuman relations and of how these could
possibly be remedied, are part of the plethora of research foci opening
up for interdisciplinary international studies (Table 7.1)
In other words, some of the possibilities opening up when we exam-
ine the various aspects of the international from the point of view of
the human subject merely add a transdisciplinary cutting-edge serving
the analytical goals of a fairly traditional IR agenda. Further possibil-
ities are evident in literatures that from the very start have a trans-
disciplinary agenda, and which may be more or less relevant for our
understandings of the international. The question is not how to judge
between them, but for what purposes these options should be used.
Both analytical and normative purposes should have a legitimate place
in interdisciplinary international studies incorporating the human sub-
ject into its research agenda.
Finally, it could be noted that the bulk of the possibilities discussed
stay at the fairly detached academic level even when discussing issues
and processes directly relating to ourselves. Practical relevance, when
included, ranges from policy relevance to decision-makers to wider
societal relevance and criticism, but only rarely are these programmes
and directions first and foremost action-oriented in the political sense.
Yet, they each promise ‘positive heuristics’ whereby international stud-
ies can be enriched theoretically and empirically. In stark contrast to
the bulk of the approaches discussed here, ‘post-human international
politics’ would instead offer a predominantly ‘negative heuristics’ for
the study of the human subject as human. The point may sound like a
trivial reminder of the very purposes of that literature, but at the same
time it accentuates how keeping interdisciplinary international stud-
ies broad presupposes simultaneous choices in forming pertinent clus-
ters of research that serve our purposes and address research questions,
including our normative premises.

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Table 7.1 Research programmes and directions for studying the human subject

Programme/research Aspect of the


direction Ontology Epistemology Normativity ‘international’

9780230_282346_08_ch07.indd 198
Realism (Morgenthau + Elites; public opinion Traditionalism with Constraining Inter-state
diplomatic history) as mass psychology mild positivism violence and threat
(search for recurring of war through
patterns) diplomacy, etc.
Liberalism (Rosenau + Elites and individual Positivism with Analyzing complexity Inter-state, inter-
‘psychological school’) citizens as both creative, unorthodox for our own good bureaucratic struggle;
cognate and emotional theorizing interhuman; inter/
social-psychological
English school (Buzan Interhuman ties, Traditionalism/ Evolution Interhuman
and Linklater + EIPE) beliefs post-positivism, and shaping of
and ‘bottom-up’ with possibility for international society
actions in upholding, (neo-Marxist) critical and its constituent
eroding and changing theory state units to better
interstate society and serve human
global economy collectives
Reflectivism Disadvantaged subjects Post-positivism and Reveal inequalities Interhuman
(Postcolonialism and in West and non-West; critical theory in empowerment of
feminism) hybrid and ‘abject’ human subjects and
identities; agents of change realities to
change better serve the needs
of marginalized

6/14/2011 3:29:40 PM
The Human Subject in International Studies 199

Notes
1. For illuminating feedback, which I have mostly incorporated and partly
resisted, I wish to thank in particular Stefano Guzzini, Petr Drulak, Tuomas
Forsberg, Juha Vuori, Tarja Väyrynen and my co-editors, Vilho Harle and
Sami Moisio.
2. Constructivism, notably, does not provide a fruitful starting point owing
to its lack of any interest in, or ‘positive heuristics’ for, incorporating the
human subject: ‘because of it roots in historical sociology, constructivism
is a curious beast: an interactionist paradigm in a psychological vacuum’
(Lebow, 2008, p. 16; cf., Checkel, 1998; Kowert and Legro, 1996). To date
only some few models attempting to redirect constructivism on this score
have been proposed (e.g., Aalto, 2003, ch. 2).
3. The study of human security could be mentioned, but for example a flag-
ship publication bearing the phrase ‘the safety of people’ is mostly silent on
people and their ‘bottom-up’ concerns, and is instead centred on the politi-
cal theory and ethics of security and war and on institutions relevant for
human conduct such as diplomacy, self-determination, intervention and
the like (see Bain, 2006).
4. Some further possibilities are available in Raymond Aron’s production that
also reserves a prominent role for diplomacy conducted by states-people
and prudence as their best ethical standard (see Aron, 2003 [1996]).
5. This potential remains unexplored, for example, in the work of McDermott
(2004a, p. 7), according to whom, for Morgenthau, ‘individuals mostly do
not matter in the outcome of political events’.
6. The same assumption on human nature can allegedly be found in Waltz’s
neo-realism, even though his variant is a structural theory dismissive of
human subjects (see Crawford, 2009).
7. Here, I bypass Rosenau’s earlier state-centrism and tendency to merely treat
individuals as complexes of roles and statuses, while also recognizing how
my categorization of his work under liberalism is, so to speak, liberal, for an
author who defies categories (see Mansbach, 2000, pp. 8–10).
8. This can be contrasted with the more normative conceptualization of
Andrew Linklater, who probes the possibilities of states becoming ‘interna-
tional good citizens’, acting to ‘reduce the harm done to individual citizens
located in separate communities’. In this way, Linklater primarily treats
human subjects as citizens. At the same time the political means, men-
tioned by Linklater, to promote the cause of humans-as-citizens are located
in the inter-state domain. In particular, these means include the possibility
of formulating a foreign policy that would promote the unity of human-
kind while concomitantly maintaining international order (Linklater and
Suganami, 2006, pp. 8; 224–32). In short, while for Buzan individuals per-
form a function vis-à-vis state-based society, for Linklater the society of
states and the state actors therein are asked to perform a function for citi-
zens. The actual faces offered for the human subject range from somewhat
ambiguous ideas of humankind to groups of ‘people’ and citizens.
9. In terms of the types of the groups of human subjects EIPE takes up, it
has some affinities with the research in development studies that some two
decades ago started exploring the microeconomic and microsocial impacts

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200 Pami Aalto

of development cooperation and assistance. However, EIPE has a more pro-


nounced, critical focus on resistance and bottom-up change.
10. The literature on body-politics is influenced by the work of Michel Foucault
(e.g., 1980), who, in contrast to Agamben’s pessimistic take on the human
subject, reserves more scope for resistance.

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Part III
Concepts

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8
Power in International Relations:
An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Tuomas Forsberg

Introduction

Power has traditionally been an extremely important notion in the


study of international relations. In particular, the realist school of
thought has built around it the whole theory of international relations.
Hans Morgenthau (1979 [1948]) wanted to define the study of interna-
tional politics through interests defined in terms of power. For Kenneth
Waltz (1979), distribution of power was the key variable in determining
the nature of an international system. John Mearsheimer (2001) regards
power as the currency of great-power politics.
Power is pivotal, however, not only for realist scholars; all IR theories
have to deal with the concept. As Stefano Guzzini (2005) has noted,
power is too important a concept to be left to the realists. All major IR
theories have an built-in idea of power, whether explicit or not. Liberals
understand power in terms of trade, or soft power; Marxists in terms of
production forces and capital; constructivists in terms of norms; and
post-structuralists in terms of discourses – at least, these descriptions
are how the standard and somewhat stereotypical accounts of these
approaches would like to have it.
The very plethora of approaches to power tells us that, in IR, there is
no single notion of power on which the discipline would converge. This
further underlines the fact that power is a very difficult concept to define
and pin down. It may, therefore, be questionable whether there is any
room for an interdisciplinary approach to power reflecting the idea of
international studies (IS) and whether such an approach would bring any
added value to the present understanding(s) of power in IR. The existing
plurality of IR theories has not enhanced the level of power analysis in
world politics. By contrast, Janice Bially Mattern (2008) has argued that

207

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208 Tuomas Forsberg

‘international relations scholars have responded to the breadth of the


discipline by narrowing both their views on power and their empirical,
methodological, and normative schemas’. Influences from other disci-
plines have been marginal, for example, in Felix Berenskoetter’s (2007,
p. 3) view recent key texts on power in the study of IR do not discuss the
power debates in social and political theory.
Yet, power is a multifaceted concept and, hence, merits interdisci-
plinary analysis. Though realists and many others have claimed that
power is a concept primarily pertaining to, and defining, political sci-
ence, it is also a very important concept for many other disciplines.
Exactly because the concept of power is deemed so central, IR scholars
could pay some more attention to studies of power in other disciplines.
Apart from political science in general, power has been a concept that
has figured prominently in sociology, psychology, administrative sci-
ence, history, geography and philosophy. To this list one can add at
least linguistics, law, the arts and economics. And finally, of course, one
should also remember the natural sciences, which are also concerned
in various ways with power. Such a multidisciplinary understanding of
power is the starting point of the 2008-launched Journal of Power, which
could ultimately be a nodal point for neodisciplinary power studies
(Haugaard and Malesevic, 2008).
Against this background, this chapter asks whether an interdiscipli-
nary approach reflecting the idea of IS can open up the concept of power
in international relations; add some relevant insights to the current con-
ceptual debates, theoretical models and applications of theories based
power; and perhaps be able to sort out some of the current fragmenta-
tion and confusion related to the concept of power in IR. In particular,
this chapter tries to encourage an analysis of power that could be based
on an interdisciplinary taxonomy to be used in various social contexts.
Such a taxonomy, and research based on it, would help us transcend the
disciplinary barriers surrounding the study of international relations
that prevent us from seeing relevant research in other fields. Before going
into taxonomies, we begin with definitional and conceptual issues, since
if different disciplines define power in incommensurable ways, then any
interdisciplinary attempt to draw together studies on power would not
only be too ambitious, but also essentially futile.

The concept of power

It may be surprising how little attention such a basic notion as power


really has received in the study of international relations, but conceptual

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 209

analysis has never counted among the strengths of the discipline. In


the absence of a common terminology, as David Baldwin (1989) notes,
discussions about power are often marred by miscommunication.
Berendskoetter (2007, p. 1) remarks that, despite paying attention to the
constitution of the objects through language, ‘the linguistic turn in IR
did not really spark much interest in debating “power” ’. Definitions of
power are important because if one wants to theorize power, one needs
to have a definition of power that is compatible with the theoretical
perspective adopted. Moreover, it is also important to study the concept
of power because any analysis of power would be irrelevant if it merely
proclaimed its understanding of power without demonstrating its supe-
riority over alternative definitions. It avails little if we just define power
in one way, and on the basis of that definition discuss what power is
and what it is not with no consensus on the justification or purpose of
the initial definition.
Power as a concept cannot simply be ignored or wished away. Some
have suggested that we should reject the whole concept of ‘power’ in
favour of notions such as ‘influence’ (Mueller, 1995, p. 7). Power, it is
claimed, is too ambiguous or too closely associated with military uses
of influence. Those who believe that military power has lost its effec-
tiveness in contemporary world politics regard the concept of power as
obsolete. If we reject realism, we should thus also reject the concept of
power. Yet, there are differences between the concepts of ‘influence’
and ‘power’, which have nothing to do with the latter’s association with
military force. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that substitute terms,
such as ‘influence’, would be any less problematic. In other words, ter-
minological choices are no substitute for conceptual arguments. There
are good reasons why power is so persistent in political language. For
a social scientist, the existence of confusing definitions of a concept
should not be reason for its rejection. Rather, we should pursue more
appropriate uses of it. What then remains more important is to chal-
lenge particular and distorted definitions of power, such as the view
that power has ultimately to do with military power.
Conceptual choices in IR would therefore benefit from philosophi-
cal and interdisciplinary meta-theoretical reflection. The concept of
power is a shining example of how such reflection helps, since on closer
inspection, it turns out that empiricist power analysis has not concep-
tualized power in a satisfactory way, and that some of the conceptual
problems in the study of power can be overcome if we go beyond empir-
icist assumptions. In fact, an empiricist power analysis cannot come
to terms with the lay definition of power (which is to regard power as

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210 Tuomas Forsberg

the ability to affect), because it converts power either into observable


resources or observable outcomes.
Indeed, empiricists accounting for power have not been able to set-
tle this definitional problem among themselves, although much of the
power analysis in IR has dealt with whether we should understand power
as resources or as outcomes (Hart, 1975). Some claim that power is ulti-
mately about effects, hence, one should look at outcomes. Others claim
that it is futile to look at outcomes because the exercise and possession
of power are two different things. According to Waltz, power should be
defined in terms of power resources. So cumbersome is this debate that
authors can disagree over what most scholars agree on. Hence, Alan
Lamborn (1991, p. 42) argues that ‘there has been a remarkably endur-
ing and widely shared belief according to which the key to great-power
status could be found in the relative scale of the financial and human
resources available to central government’, whereas John Rothgeb
(1993, p. 21) claims that ‘controlling other actors is a central theme
in the definitions offered by a number of scholars’. This disagreement
derives partly from the fact that many authors may use both definitions
of power at the same time. Morgenthau (1979, p. 26) famously argued
that ‘when we speak of power, we mean man’s control over the minds
and actions of other men’, but he (1979, p. 102) also defined power in
terms of its resource-like components. Waltz (1979, p. 191) criticized the
outcome-oriented analysis of power by stating that ‘to define “power”
as “cause” confuses process with outcome’. Yet, he (1979, p. 192) also
offered the simple notion that ‘an agent is powerful to the extent that
he affects others more than they affect him’. At some point, James
Rosenau (1980), in turn, avoided the concept of power altogether and
used ‘capabilities’ for resources and ‘control’ for outcomes.
Although I will argue that this debate has been misplaced (Lukes,
2005), let me first note that different conceptualizations of power need
not necessarily be considered a problem. Of course, people may use
the concept of power differently and, hence, also define it differently.
Conceptual borders are fluid and may change. How the term is then
understood always depends on the context. There may be different
ways of using the same concept, all of which are defensible. There may
also be reasons for using the concept of power in various contexts with
different meanings and, in fact, we often do so without major complica-
tions. Sometimes we may claim that power is close to domination, and
sometimes that it is more like (legitimate) authority (Hindness, 1996).
This partly explains why conceptual disputes are not likely to be set-
tled. There are different meanings which exist latently in the concept of

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 211

power in ordinary language and can be emphasized if needed. As with


many other concepts, power is cluster-like. It has a number of differing
connotations, which are often attached to it but are not necessarily part
of the definition. One may even say that the word ‘power’ may refer to
various different but closely related concepts. In those cases, the exact
meaning of ‘power’ depends on the context, and especially on with
what term it is contrasted.
The conceptualization of power is thus likely to remain an essentially
contested concept. This may lead us to conclude that it is fruitless to
search for a single conceptual definition of power, a definition which
could be imposed whenever the concept is used. Yet, as the political
theorist William Connolly (1983, p. 227) has remarked, there is nothing
contradictory in first admitting that the meaning of ‘power’ is essen-
tially contested and then making the case for the best possible defini-
tion. The essential contestability does not imply that any definition is
equally good, nor that linguistic rules can be broken without justifica-
tion. People may have good reason to define power differently, for this
may allow them to talk about different issues. The problem is, however,
that specific definitions often seem to be conflated with a more gen-
eral understanding of power, and it is this unnoticed switch from the
specific understanding to a more generally shared web of connotations
which is problematic in individual works, and which is also at stake
when definitions of power are contested. The importance of contest-
ing concepts is that there is always a normative point that is implic-
itly shared, but not always articulated, which in the case of power, in
Connolly’s view, is responsibility.
In other words, the ‘essential contestability thesis’ does not mean that
it would be entirely futile to set about the task of reconstructing a better
and more precise concept of power, which might then gain acceptance
by a wider audience. This is a legitimate mode of conceptual analy-
sis. Many people have attempted this (Oppenheim, 1981), some more
convincingly than others. There are, however, usually three problems
with such work. First, because such analyses are often restricted to one
language, the definitions which are provided may be ethnocentric and
unhelpful for those writing in a different language (e.g., Aron, 1986).
Second, the reconstruction of concepts seems to downplay the hetero-
geneous use of any term, a use seen as unnecessarily harmful. Third,
because concepts always exist for some purpose, a definition based on
even a close and sound analysis of different contexts in which the con-
cept is used may be useless as a conceptual argument if the definition
serves no relevant purpose. Therefore, it could be advisable to start from

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212 Tuomas Forsberg

the other end of the conceptual analysis and ask: What follows if we
understand power in a particular way? Why do we need such a con-
cept? What is its role in social scientific analysis? (Guzzini, 2005). If
concepts are theory-laden, the point of conceptual analysis is, in the
first instance, not to make all concepts fit our theory, but to spell out
the theory behind a particular understanding of a concept.
Conceptual analysis cannot ignore ordinary language, and the usual
sources of ordinary usage are dictionaries. In most dictionaries we find
a variety of potential uses of the word ‘power’, but what is essential is
the idea that power is the ability to do something (Morriss, 1987, p. 13).
As Barry Barnes (1988, p. 92) has argued, the whole value of the con-
cept of power in everyday life resides in its deeply theoretical character
as a label for capacities. The crux of this definition is that if power is
the ability to cause effects, it is neither a thing nor an effect, but it is a
dispositional concept. According to this logic, power exists even when
it does not cause anything, but on the other hand, all effects are caused
by some sort of power. Dahl’s (1957) much-cited intuitive idea of power,
for example, was that A has power over B to the extent that he can get B
to do something that B would not otherwise do. Despite the widespread
criticism of Dahl’s analysis of power, I think that this idea of power may
well serve as a useful approximate definition.
To repeat, as Morriss (1987, p. 49) has argued, what is at the core of the
concept of power, as understood conventionally, is that it is a capacity
to cause effects. When we are talking about social power, these effects
concern other people. Although this basic idea can be conveyed with
different words, and one’s theoretical background can be further expli-
cated in the context of the definition (and although one may discuss
whether the ability to develop an ability is power), the most impor-
tant implications for the study of power are there in Dahl’s concept of
power. The trouble associated with Dahl’s definition of power is caused
rather by Dahl’s other examples, and other empiricist applications or
operational definitions which cannot but reduce the concept to a regu-
lar relationship between cause and effect.
According to Morriss, then, ordinary language supports the idea that
power is a general capacity to effect. Yet the variety of ways in which
the word ‘power’ may be used in ordinary language, and the equivalent
words in different languages, gives us reason to be cautious when taking
examples from ordinary language to support or refute a particular con-
ceptual argument. It is a fallacy to think that ordinary language leads
automatically to the best conceptualisations. As Connolly (1983, p. 221)
has argued, ‘it is always necessary to decide whether the counter-example

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 213

will be allowed to override the thesis or the thesis to override the counter-
example’. Conceptual analysis is also always temporally located, since
meanings may change (and our argument may be part of the change),
as Terence Ball (1988) has argued. Pure ordinary language analysis of
concepts may often be inadequate and therefore cannot be more than
the starting point for making conceptual arguments.
Hence, the first argument against regarding power as resources or out-
comes is that the concept that power as a disposition to cause effects
fits better with ordinary language. But we also need a second argument
which is that there are insufficient reasons for understanding power in
terms of resources or outcomes over the alternative of treating power
as a disposition. I argue that the reasons given for definitions of power
based on both resource and outcome simply have to do with the empiri-
cist understanding of power. Power is difficult to capture by means of
empiricist analysis, since capacity is not directly observable and cannot
be conceived of in terms of regularities. As Andrew Collier (1994, p. 75)
has pointed out, one of ‘the most enduring and damaging legacies of
empiricism is the tendency to ask questions of the form “how do we
know about x?” and think that the answer settles the question “what
is x?” ’ Because of this, power is an extremely tricky concept for empiri-
cists. Although some scholars may insist that ‘the most useful defini-
tions are those which direct efforts to empirical research’ (Nagel, 1975,
p. 175), this view tends to convert all real definitions into operational
definitions (Isaac, 1989 p. 73).
The definition of power as the ability to affect implies a statement
that B could probably act differently in a hypothetical situation in
which A’s power is not present. Because such a counterfactual situation
is typically hypothetical, it is not easy to know when power really is
present. Here, power analysts face the so-called ‘three dimensions of
power’ debate. The first dimension, based on Dahl’s (1957) intuitive
definition of power, operates at the level of decisions. According to this
view, the one who wins a dispute has more power. We know power from
the stated preferences. The second dimension, based on the study by
Bachrach and Baratz (1962), counts non-decisions as well: those who
have power can use it in such a way that disputes do not make it onto
the agenda. The third dimension, added by Lukes (1974), includes even
those apparently voluntary decisions that run against real preferences.
Lukes’s point is that powerful actors can manipulate the interests of
others so that the disputes do not even exist in terms of differing opin-
ions. In other words, we have to consider all these options, overt manifest
conflict, a conflict that is not manifest in terms of action but in terms

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214 Tuomas Forsberg

of attitudes of the actors, and a conflict of ‘real’ interests, which may


not be manifest in terms of the attitudes of the actors. It is especially in
the latter case, where power cannot be directly observed, and requires a
theoretical reconstruction.
Many people have wondered if such an understanding of ‘power’ as
a general ability to affect is too broad. The means of power can be any-
thing from military force to different forms of persuasion or manipula-
tion. Power may reside in all possible contexts of action, and the effects
of power may be good or bad. Therefore, as the famous phrase goes,
a theory of power would be like a theory of (w)holes (Morriss, 1987,
p. 45) and can hardly be located in any particular discipline. In fact,
the critique against a broad concept of power can be either practical or
normative. Firstly, it can be argued that such a concept of power cannot
explain anything, because it cannot be operationalized or because it
explains everything. In other words, it is deemed practically useless for
scientific purposes. Secondly, it can be argued that a broad concept of
power loses the normative point, which has to do with responsibility, in
other words, it is normatively questionable.
There are several ways to delimit the definition or sharpen the nor-
mative point, none of which are necessary, however, since ‘power’ as a
general capacity to affect is a meaningful concept without any limita-
tions having to do with the nature of intentions, means or outcomes.
Because most of these arguments in support of limitations are based,
in the first instance, on ordinary uses of the concept of power, we may
just show that this way of limiting power cannot convincingly be based
firmly on ordinary language but rather on certain contextual uses of
the concept. Secondly, we may say that none of the distinctions lose the
moral point, which has to do with responsibility, although they would
not directly follow our judicial definitions of it.
Some have tried to argue that only those outcomes that are benefi-
cial represent power. Yet, the capacity to affect can be seen as power
regardless of the nature of the effects. Some sort of capacity is needed
to produce harmful effects, too. The one who exercises power does
not necessarily use it in order to further his or her own interests. For
instance, we can say that somebody has power to hurt himself. Neither
should we count freeriders, who have no power themselves to effect the
system, as being powerful simply because they benefit from it. We also
think that those who do harm to themselves are also responsible for it,
and for that very reason nobody else should be held responsible.
A second possibility is to limit power to certain methods. Typically, this
is done by regarding power as coercive. This would exclude persuasion

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 215

and other positive means of effecting from the realm of power. Some
have drawn this distinction in terms of power and influence. Connolly
(1983, p. 96), for example, states explicitly that ‘to threaten someone suc-
cessfully is to exercise power over him while to make him an offer in a
context where other options are reasonably open to him is surely not to
exercise power over him’. Yet, although power is often used negatively,
we should not assume that power must be necessarily coercive. And
although there is a moral distinction between threatening and offer-
ing, we are also sometimes responsible when we persuade somebody to
do something or when we offer somebody something in exchange for
doing something even without coercion. If I hire a contract killer, I am
responsible for what he or she does. I alone may be held responsible,
if I coerce somebody to kill someone, but the responsibility persists in
spite of my using other methods. We may even be responsible if we do
not stop somebody from doing something bad if we have the power to
do so.
A further possibility is to limit power as an agency concept in contrast
to explanations that are located at the structural level. Connolly (1983,
p. 219), for instance, calls such power structural constraints or structural
determination. If power is considered ability, there is, indeed, a funda-
mental reason not to regard structures in terms of power, since struc-
tures do not have the ability to regulate their use of power. But this does
not mean that the idea of ‘structural power’ is ‘redundant’ (Dowding
1996, p. 28) since impersonal structures can clearly have causal effects
which are not necessarily actual. To separate agency power from struc-
tural power, Guzzini (1993) prefers the term ‘governance’ for the latter,
but according to him both of them together form the scope of power
analysis. If structures are seen as causally effective for something that
happens, then the individual responsibility is reduced, although it may
not disappear entirely.
Finally, in line with Bertrand Russell’s (1938) famous definition of
power – ‘power is the ability to produce intended effects’, some people
want to attach power only to those outcomes which are intentional. For
example, Morriss (1987 pp. 25–8) regards power as an ability which must
be exercised at will. Although there is a distinction between intended
and unintended effects, this is not necessarily a distinction that should
be attached to power. We may well say that the president has the power
to dissolve the parliament or that the superpowers have the power to
destroy the world despite whether they have any intentions of doing
so, and if they do so they also exercise power. It is, of course, hardly
possible that any president would dissolve parliament without any

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216 Tuomas Forsberg

intentions of doing so, but the superpowers might destroy the world
without any intentions of doing so. Responsibility may increase if the
acts are intentional, but not all unintentional acts are free from respon-
sibility. In short, the fact that the consequences are unintentional does
not necessarily mean that we are free from responsibility. A state can
be held responsible for shooting down an aircraft and killing the pas-
sengers, although it was not the intention.
These are the major lines along which conceptual debates over the
meaning of power have been carried out. The list is by no means
exhaustive, and I have summarized them only briefly because this dis-
cussion has already been conducted extensively. I hope to assert what is
essential here, namely that power can be regarded as a general capacity
to affect and this does not necessarily need any further specifications.
To say that power can be a meaningful concept without any of these
limitations is not to say that these limitations make no sense. It is only
to contend that there is no reason to attach them necessarily to the con-
cept of power. Why these disputes are so intense is, in the first instance,
not because people would disagree over the empirical contents of the
concepts in a purely scientific sense, but because they have to do with
our normative views. All the qualifications attached to the definition of
power reflect different degrees of responsibility. Because people often
disagree on where the borders of responsibility lie, the definitions of
power are contested.
The definition of power as a capacity to affect is thus not above nor-
mative contests. Power has to do with responsibility, but in a slightly
different way than as understood by Connolly. His shortcoming is
in looking solely at the responsibility of the acts. But we may also be
responsible for something that happens without our doing anything.
In the context of North–South issues, the starvation and malnutrition
of the masses may be worse than the effects Western states have inten-
tionally brought about. Therefore, the way power is tied to responsibility
has not so much to do with acts as such, but the relationship is doubly
negative. If you have no power, you have no responsibility (Morriss,
1987, p. 21).
The claim is partly true that the concept of power as a capacity to
affect is much too wide for any empirical research. Wide concepts easily
become overloaded by extension and are then emptied of more specific
meanings. However, pace Connolly, this does not mean that power is
purely a normative concept distinguished from other concepts only by
normative criteria (Morriss, 1987, p. 201). Power has empirical uses, as
does the concept of ‘hole’, but as we do not see it as meaningful to study

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 217

holes generally, we should not see it as meaningful to study power gen-


erally, either. To study ‘power in the international system’ empirically is
like studying ‘beauty in nature’: we can hardly arrive at any meaningful
generalizations; the best we can get is a set of interesting fragments or
broad historical outlines (Mann, 1986; 1993).
To reiterate: when ‘power’ is used empirically, it needs to be specified.
We do not even normally use the word power without such specifica-
tions: the sentence ‘I have power’ is not easily understood without a
context (‘what sort of power do you have?’ and ‘over whom do you
have power?’ would be the likely responses). Even categories such as
social power or political power are probably too wide. There is a fun-
damental message in Baldwin’s (1989, p. 131) often repeated insistence
(taken from Lasswell and Kaplan) that in discussing power (empirically)
‘it is essential to specify or at least imply who is influencing whom with
respect to what; in short both scope and domain must be specified or
implied’. Of course, we may not be able to say exactly how precisely the
scope and the domain must be specified. The important point is that
we are able to spell out those features of the context that explain why
some sort of power in that context is an ability to cause effects. To what
extent, for example the current international system is a meaningful
context in which to study power, is open to argument. The ‘shadow
of war’ as one defining feature of the international context may apply
extensively to current international relations but not to established
zones of peace. The analysis of power cannot be reduced to the study of
zillions of microcontexts in which power is always something different.
Nevertheless, Baldwin’s hope that substantial discussions of interna-
tional power should be oriented ‘less toward general theories of power
and more toward contextual analysis’ is reasonable.
To sum up this part of the argument, drawing on ordinary lan-
guage and on philosophical research on the concept of power such as
Morriss’s (1987) analysis of it, we can define power as ability to effect.
This is not the only possible definition of power, but it is clearly an
understanding of power that is interdisciplinary but neglected in the
study of IR, where the focus has been on empiricist conceptualizations
of power based on resources or outcomes. Therefore, it is worth consid-
ering what follows if this definition of power is taken as a starting point
of power analysis in studying international phenomena, processes and
structures. In this spirit, the trivial point is that because power is a gen-
eral capacity to affect, the objects of the study of virtually all sciences,
such as law, geography, history, psychology and so forth can be seen
in terms of power, and to demarcate international relations or political

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218 Tuomas Forsberg

science by virtue of their focus on power is no longer possible. Because


of its general nature as the ability to effect, neither does it seem very
promising to construct a neodiscipline around the concept of power.
Power remains such a multifaceted phenomenon that does not warrant
building a substantial theory of power but rather requires a framework
where more substantial explanatory theories can be located. This need
for contextualization might bring us back to the need for a division of
labour between disciplines, but it would be a mistake to assume that
contextualization can take place in isolation. By contrast, to know the
importance of a context requires that we can compare different con-
texts across disciplinary domains and for that purpose we need inter-
disciplinary frameworks of power.

Interdisciplinary taxonomies of power

There are a number of taxonomies of power. It is useful to review at


least some of them from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to
build common frameworks across various social contexts. Using such
taxonomies in IR would help us to learn how power works in other con-
texts and to critically examine why certain forms of power are seen to
be privileged in international relations – and with what consequences.
It is particularly important that the underlying logic of the categoriza-
tion be made visible so that the taxonomy becomes both differentiated
and exhaustive.
The study of IR is best known for lists that include various elements
of power. Morgenthau (1978 [1948]) famously named eight elements
of power: geography, natural resources, industrial capacity, military
preparedness, population, national character, national morale and quality
of diplomacy; he later added quality of government to the list. Aron
(1966), in turn, made distinctions among space, material and immaterial
resources and collective action capacity. Waltz (1979, p. 131) notes ‘size of
population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, mil-
itary strength, political stability and competence’. It is not possible here
to discuss the various problems with listing such components of power.
Suffice it to point that those lists of elements of power are not meaning-
ful if they are not tied to an analysis of how power works. That is why we
need taxonomies of the various mechanisms of power.
The most common taxonomy of various mechanisms of power used
in the study of international politics is based on distinctions among mil-
itary, economic and cultural – or ideological – power. This trichotomy
of power derives from E.H. Carr (2001 [1939]), but it has subsequently

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 219

guided much analysis of power. The ideal type constructions often used
when talking about the EU, for instance – a traditional military power,
trade power, and normative or civilian power – are partly based on the
same logic. This trichotomy is somewhat modified in other famous
treatises on power related to international relations, for example Susan
Strange (1988) uses it, but then, more famously, introduces a fourfold
taxonomy of structural power consisting of security, production, finan-
cial and knowledge structures.
The taxonomy of military, economic and cultural power is seldom
used in other social contexts. An exception is Kenneth Boulding, the
economist and peace researcher who elaborated this trichotomy in a
book-length study (1989) in which he regarded what he called integra-
tive power as superior to military power – the power to destroy – and
economic power – the power to produce and exchange. The trichotomy
is thus applicable to social contexts other than international relations,
although it is very rough and often confuses the idea of having power
in a certain issue area with the mechanisms of power.
Another researcher who has used a similar taxonomy of power in
a broader context than simply the international is the historical soci-
ologist Michael Mann, who in his study (1986) of the history of power
distinguished among military, economic, cultural and political power.
Mann thus added political power as a separate form of power and defined
it as being centralized and based on territoriality. Yet, one may ask in
what sense political power truly differs from the other types of power,
or whether it is simply an aggregate type of power used for political
purposes or by political actors. Mann’s definition seems to suggest that
he is talking more about political actors, states, having political power
than about political power being a clearly different type of power. It is
not impossible to regard political power as a separate type of power, but
it seems to me that if political power is indeed seen as a different type
of power then it needs to be based on authority embedded in politi-
cal hierarchies. Nevertheless, Mann’s work is important because it adds
an historical dimension to this taxonomy of various mechanisms of
power.
Moreover, it is also worth mentioning the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s
(1986) taxonomy of different forms of capital as a source of power. He
coined the notions of social and cultural as well as symbolic capital,
but curiously he did not pay attention to ‘military capital’ as a sepa-
rate source of power that would perhaps have its corresponding field in
some settings of international relations. Again, although Bourdieu has
come to be frequently cited in the international relations literature, his

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220 Tuomas Forsberg

analysis of various forms of ‘capital’ is seldom applied to it, but applied


instead is his concept of ‘doxa’ as the realm of those things that are
taken as self-evident in social practices and discourses.
It is also common to distinguish between positive and negative forms
of power. In international relations, Joseph Nye (2004) has famously
distinguished between hard and soft power, where the latter is based
on attraction and co-option and the former consists of military and
economic means. In Nye’s view the difference between hard and soft
power is best seen as a continuum rather than as a sharp boundary.
Indeed, the common mistake is, however, to think that military power
is negative and economic power is positive, since military power can be
positive when exercised as protection and economic power can be nega-
tive when used as sanctions. Cultural power can equally be positive and
negative – for example, in forms of praising and blaming.
Nye’s study makes the point that soft power is becoming more effec-
tive than ever in international relations, but he does not refer to much
literature from other disciplines to explain why this should be the case.
The idea that negative means of influence prevail in international poli-
tics is also equally hollow if one seeks explanations. There are some
rational choice-based attempts to explain when negative or positive
means of influence are more effective, but the literature is scattered
and often not easy to use in support of the efficacy of negative means
in international relations. For example, the economist Mancur Olson
(1965) stipulated that collective action can be better enforced by posi-
tive sanctions if the number of actors is limited, and that this is often
the case in a state-based international system. Indeed, very few IR schol-
ars have turned to the psychological and sociological literature in order
to study the differences between positive and negative means of influ-
ence. James Davis (2000) emphasizes the psychological aspect of fear
when using threats but reputational concerns are often seen as equally
important.
These taxonomies of power mainly deal with direct forms of power
between agents. There are, however, forms of power that are more subtle
and embedded in the structures rather than being found in the capaci-
ties of agents. Traditionally, IR scholars have largely ignored these forms
of power, but Andrew Bennett and Raymond Duvall (2005a; b) have
proposed a taxonomy of power that distinguishes among compulsive,
institutional, structural and productive power.
Compulsory and institutional forms of power work between specific
actors, whereas structural and productive powers constitute the actors.
Compulsory and structural forms of power, in turn, represent direct

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 221

forms of power, whereas institutional power and productive power are


indirect. Compulsory power entails the direct control by one actor of the
actions and conditions of another. It is not limited to material resources
but also includes rhetorical and symbolic tools; the label of ‘compul-
sory power’ may be unnecessarily biased towards negative means of
power. Institutional power refers to an actor’s ability to control another
indirectly. The actor that wields institutional power cannot be said to
possess the institutions, but she can use the institutions by shaping
their agendas, practices and policies to bring about the desired effects.
Structural power concerns the structural relations that constitute the
subjects such as master–slave and capital–labour. Structures thus create
different capacities. Productive power works through diffuse social pro-
cesses such as discourses and systems of knowledge that create meaning
and identities – an insight into power that is typically associated with
sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1994) understanding of
power.
The importance of Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy lies in its very abil-
ity to lift up these latter categories of power, integrate them into the
analysis of power and show – through empirical analysis – how rela-
tional and discursive structures that are much more frequently paid
attention to in diverse sociological studies are also able to constitute
subjects in international relations.
There are thus already quite a number of ways of classifying power
in IR and there are clear connections to other disciplines and their
understanding of power. Yet, taxonomies of power from other discip-
lines could still help refine the understanding of power in international
relations. Perhaps one potential taxonomy merits closer treatment here
because it deals with the mechanisms of power. The social psycholo-
gists John French and Bertram Raven (1960) draw distinctions among
coercive power, reward power, legitimate power, referent power and
expert power. Coercive power is the ability to force somebody to do
something through physical harm or threats thereof. Reward power is
the ability to give others what they want and get something in return.
Legitimate power is based on a position of authority in an institutional
system or organization. Monarchs, prime ministers and policemen can
exercise legitimate power. Referent power will manifest itself when
somebody wants to act like you. Charisma is the archetype of referent
power. Expert power is based on knowledge and the capacity to per-
suade. The taxonomy has gained extensive popularity in the literature
on organizational studies but, with a couple of exceptions, has not
been applied to international relations.

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222 Tuomas Forsberg

Raven and French’s taxonomy is insightful because it typologizes


power on the basis of the mechanisms by which it works. In that sense
it comes close to Habermas’s (1984) taxonomy of different rationalities.
If his idea of strategic rationality, normative rationality as well as com-
municative rationality, are understood as different power mechanisms,
we end up with three types of power plus physical power that works
outside the realm of rationality. These mechanisms of power can also be
derived from the functionalist sociologist Talcott Parsons (1963), who
distinguished between coercion and inducements, activation of com-
mitments and persuasion. Although his background theory was very
different from that of Habermas, the underlying logic of separating the
forms of power is the same.
Power that works through strategic rationality can be defined as an
ability to manipulate the utilities of the other both through threats and
promises. The second mechanism, based on normative power, refers to
the activation of commitments, and rests on the prior obligation of B to
do something demanded by A. Authority structures, prescribed in law,
are the primary example of such instances of power. The third mecha-
nism, based on communicative rationality, is to get B to do something
through persuasion or the force of a better argument that, by means of
factual or normative reasoning, changes B’s value assessments of her
existing options for action. Persuasion may require rhetorical skills of A,
the ability to manipulate information or related properties, but in the
pure case of persuasion, it is no more A’s properties directly which cause
B to change her mind, but rather the truth value of her words.
Two important reminders about power can be drawn from this tax-
onomy to improve our critical reflection of how power works without
completely losing sight of its material bases. First, in contrast to pure
physical power, social power always depends on B’s perceptions of A’s
power. Nuclear weapons have the power to destroy cities or even the
whole world in spite of our perception of them but, as political weap-
ons that are not used, perceptions and discursive signification play a
crucial role. Therefore, there is no objective way to define what are rel-
evant power resources in social interaction. Of course, B’s view about
the effectiveness of A’s resources and her ability to use them, may be
mistaken. The mistakes may be of two sorts. First, B may err in assess-
ing A’s physical power. She may believe that A has only three divisions
when, in fact, she has ten. In war such misjudgements may be cru-
cial, and if those natural powers are used, B may be seriously punished
because of her erroneous belief. But second, and equally important, B
may also misjudge A’s social power. The interactionist view of power

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 223

is too narrow when it focuses only on the relationship between A and


B, since society consists of more than two actors. Because A may use
her power to get C or D to use their power to influence B, B has to take
account not only of A’s natural power but also of her social power.
In other words, when assessing A’s power, if B thinks that she can be
affected, she needs to take into account not only her own view of what
A’s power is in their relationship but also the general assessment of A’s
power in society. Because B needs to do this, we may claim that social
power is not purely objective, not purely subjective, but in an impor-
tant sense, socially constructed so that it may be ‘objectified’.
In an important sense, social power in international relations, too, is
thus based on shared understandings of power (van Ham, 2010). This fact
has several consequences for how power can be used in social relations.
Firstly, although natural power remains a power regardless of whether
it is used, power resources cease to be indicators of social power if there
is a shared understanding that they will not be used. Secondly, shared
understandings reproduce power, since those who have social power
may use this to strengthen the shared understanding of power. Thirdly,
the shared understandings of power are necessarily simplified versions
of the real power relationships. In other words, distribution of power is,
as Barnes (1988, p. 92) calls it, an aspect of distribution of knowledge.
The capacity of people to grasp and represent a distribution of power sets
limits to the possible form that such a distribution can take.
‘Maps of power’ may then become more relevant than real relation-
ships. As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1979, p. 113) has argued,
the social constitution of power is exactly a means to reduce the com-
plexity of social systems. According to him the direct communicative
recourse to power is replaced by reference to symbols which commit
both sides normatively, and at the same time take into account the pre-
sumed power differential. The institutional anchoring and practicabil-
ity of such substitutes renders exact calculations unnecessary, and even
renders problematic any attempt to do so.
A further important reflection in distinguishing these different ratio-
nalities underlying power is that it is not self-evident that B should
comply simply because A has power, no more or less in international
relations than in other social contexts. Power, in itself, does not explain
anything. Rather, the idea that it is somehow justified to comply because
A has power is a mechanism of power that is based as much on strategic
as well as on normative or habitual rationality (Lake, 2009). The point
here is that rules constitute every power game, including wars between
states, not only what we think are ‘institutionalized forms of power’

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224 Tuomas Forsberg

in a hierarchical power structure. According to Neumann and Sending


(2010), the international is dominated by liberal political governmen-
tality that works as a major technique of power when the international
has become thicker with more actors populating it. In other words,
social power never works in a non-interpretative vacuum that inter-
national relations is often traditionally perceived to be, but in Richard
Ashley’s (1990, p. 269) words, power resides ‘in a domain of doxa’ which
naturalizes the rituals of power. For the philosopher John Searle (2010,
155–160) this is ‘background power’. It is not that interpretative struc-
tures are shaped by pre-existing power but that ‘power’ itself is shaped
by such structures. The structure may thus constrain the more powerful
as well as the weak. A superpower may have power to pacify its ‘back-
yard’, but in order to preserve its status as a superpower it is also neces-
sary that it does so.
The argument of this section has been that in order to better under-
stand power in international relations it would be helpful to think of
different types of power in terms of taxonomies applicable to all kinds
of social contexts. Rather than denying some of the basic realist views
about the nature of power in international relations, we could try to
explain the differences in the forms and functions of different power
mechanisms with the help of other disciplines and thereby answer
questions as to whether and why the realist views about power hold
only in certain spatio-historical contexts of international relations, or
whether they have any wider significance, or conversely, how power
mechanisms typical in other contexts are also at work in international
relations. Many traditional political and social theories of power often
assume some organizational or normative contexts to the extent that
students of IR see those schemes as not easily applicable to the study
of power in world politics, but it is equally problematic to think that
because of international anarchy, or some other feature of the inter-
national system such as territoriality, power needs to have a certain
‘realist’ logic. Many assumptions to do with the prevalence and effi-
cacy of military force in international relations turn out to rest on a
socially constructed basis that derives more from normative rationality
than from any natural corollary of strategic rationality in the context
of international anarchy.

Conclusion

This chapter discussed the benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to


power in the study of IR and sketched out an agenda for understand-

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Power: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 225

ing power in IS. Added value can be found on at least two fronts. First,
a conceptual engagement of power that takes into account philosoph-
ical and linguistic studies would lead to a better conceptual analysis
and definitions of power which would help to overcome some dichoto-
mies and confusions currently underpinning the study of power in IR.
Second, building interdisciplinary taxonomies as frameworks for studies
on power would lower the disciplinary boundaries around IR and make
it possible to explain why certain types of power are more prevalent and/
or effective in international politics than in other contexts of social life.
Too much that could be empirically investigated is simply assumed in
the study of international relations, in particular by realist scholars.
Interdisciplinary studies aiming at better understanding power should
be a two-way street. Whereas IR scholars need to support their analysis of
why certain forms of power work in relations between states or in world
politics more generally, scholars in other fields should broaden their
frameworks of power to cover international aspects of power. In this way
the space for interdisciplinary international studies would be enhanced.
Both scholars of IR and of other disciplines need to be more explicit
when explaining why certain forms of power are able to produce effects;
if power in international relations has different forms than in other
social contexts, it needs to be ascertained whether this derives from the
means available, the anarchic nature of the system, territoriality, lack of
trust between estranged communities or norms and practices developed
in the course of world history. Whatever the answer, it is almost always
possible to check whether the explanation holds in other social contexts
than in the international, contexts that share at least some of the same
essential characteristics, or lack them. Increasingly, however, the inter-
national is further away from any ideal type that would legitimate a
distinct theory and account of power, but the underlying rationalities of
power that dominate in the sphere of the international exist in domes-
tic political, organizational and other contexts. Such studies on power
would constitute a truly interdisciplinary research agenda on power that
would increase our understanding of power as a core concept in interna-
tional studies and in IR, with a challenging and critical angle.

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9
War: From Disciplinarity to
Multidisciplinarity and Further
to Transdisciplinarity
Petr Drulák

Introduction

The study of war and peace used to be seen as a disciplinary core pro-
viding a clear identity for the study of international relations (IR) in
the twentieth century, making IR a discipline separate from political
science and other areas of social inquiry. On the other hand, as Aalto,
Harle, Long and Moisio remind us in their introduction to this volume
(see Chapter 1), in its origins in the 1930s the scholarly study of war and
peace was part of an interdisciplinary project of international studies
(IS). It was only later that it became overshadowed by the ‘disciplinary
turn’ in the shape of the single discipline of IR. This tension between
disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is not so surprising given that
there are only few phenomena other than war which would generate
greater attention in such a wide variety of scholarly disciplines and in
other modes of representation.
Apart from IR, war has been especially prominent in history, which
has traditionally focused on wars as key subjects of research, and in
international law, which came into being in the Grotian shape of ‘the
law of war and peace’. Moreover, it has also been widely addressed by
political philosophy and a number of specialized sciences such as politi-
cal science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, political economy and
demography, to name just the most prominent. In addition, war has
also inspired and provoked a huge number of artistic representations
which have usually been ignored by both disciplinary and interdiscipli-
nary approaches. These representations can be found in literature, film,
painting, sculpture, architecture and music. War is in the focus of such

228

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 229

ancient masterpieces as Homer’s Illiad as well as contemporary Oscar-


winning movies such as Bigelows’s The Hurt Locker.
Thus, the students of war can tap into an enormous fund of knowledge
and representations pertaining to their subject. However, as implied,
this fund is compartmentalized into different disciplines and genres.
On the one hand, this compartmentalization is necessary and benefi-
cial, as it enables the enhancement of knowledge and the refinement
of artistic representations. While the scholar relies on the body of pre-
ceding scholarly texts, the artist refers to the body of preceding artistic
representations. Their own contributions are then defined with respect
to these bodies which grow in their diversity and/or richness of infor-
mation thanks to these contributions. Some scholars may frame these
contributions in terms of the progress of advancing knowledge within
a Lakatosian research programme (see Lakatos 1970; also Chapters
3 and 7). But the idea of progress will be challenged by other schol-
ars (Kuhn 1962) and it will be difficult to defend in the artistic fields
(Gombrich, 1971). In any case, thanks to boundaries of disciplines and
genres, and irrespective of the presence or absence of progress, one can
speak of the growth in a variety of perspectives, growth which enriches
our ability to come to grips with the phenomena of interest.
On the other hand, these boundaries also divide and isolate.
Disciplinary narrow-mindedness is the price to be paid for the benefits
of compartmentalization. Students of war often end up as prisoners of
their disciplines who know a lot about the specific features of war while
ignoring the broader picture. For example, IR research on war tends to
focus on a couple questions related to the causes of war, emphasizing
international distribution of power, leaders’ (mis)perceptions, domestic
political regimes and economic ties (Levy, 2002). Not that these ques-
tions are unimportant, but they cannot cover other important aspects
of war, such as its internal dynamics or its meaning for war participants,
and they may not help us much in our attempts to understand contem-
porary conflicts (Kaldor, 2005 [1999]). Some alternative perspectives on
war can be found within IR but much more is available beyond its dis-
ciplinary boundaries.
Therefore, the study of war presents a clear case for interdisciplinar-
ity. However, this interdisciplinarity usually takes the form of a multi-
disciplinary project which lays different disciplinary approaches next
to one another, showing their diversity without any attempt at synthe-
sis or integration (for a conceptual discussion on interdisciplinarity and
its manifestations, see Chapter 2). What we need is a transdisciplinary
approach able, at least to some extent, to integrate these approaches

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230 Petr Drulák

when analysing war. This does not mean that transdisciplinarity neces-
sitates a grand synthesis of all possible theories and analytical frame-
works. Instead, it calls for common ground upon which these theories
and frameworks can be related and compared to one another.
The analysis of conceptual metaphors offers such common ground.
War is an abstract concept and, like any abstract concept which is not
part of our immediate experience, it is understood in terms of meta-
phors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). These metaphors relate war to more
tangible experiences, such as physical combat, games or storms, among
others. Therefore, a particular understanding of war is always embedded
in a specific metaphor or in a set of metaphors which relate it to quite
different areas of our experience. It is on the basis of these areas that
different representations of war are constructed. Thus, by examining
conceptual metaphors which inform scholarly and artistic representa-
tions of war, we gain insights into the construction of these representa-
tions and bring them to a common analytical ground upon which they
can be compared. For example, we can find many overlaps between the
metaphor which relates war to physical combat and the one which links
it to a game, just as we may see important differences between these
two metaphors and the one which pictures war as a storm.
In the course of four steps, I substantiate metaphors as a means to
arrive at a transdisciplinary examination of war. I start with episte-
mological questions distinguishing theory, history and arts as three
distinct forms of representation which are essential for understand-
ing war. I also make the theoretical case for arguing that each of these
representations relies on metaphors. Following this, the key issues in
the scholarly study of war are summarized by looking into metaphors
used within IR, history and other scholarly disciplines such as politi-
cal science, sociology, political economy, psychology, anthropology or
demography. Consequently, the multidisciplinary perspective is further
broadened by examining the representation of war in fiction. Finally,
on the basis of this multidisciplinarity, a transdisciplinary approach
using conceptual metaphors is introduced.

Theory, history, art and metaphors

Theory and history present two different modes of scholarly inquiry


into war. In practice, they are often intertwined and sometimes are
hard to distinguish from each other. Thus, historiography has a long
record of engagement with, and divorces from, the theories and meth-
ods of social sciences starting with Marxist history to les annales and on

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 231

to quantitative history. By contrast, sociology, which by default repre-


sents a theory-oriented reflection on society, has developed a subfield
of historical sociology in which theory meets history (Hobden, 1998).
Similarly, the theory-oriented discipline of IR is much indebted to his-
tory. It started its modern existence in the history-oriented writing of
classical realists (e.g., Kissinger, 1957), and the same orientation was
followed by the broad stream of scholars who today are identified as
belonging to the English school. More recently, post-structuralists have
made attempts at ‘historicizing’ IR (Ashley, 1989; Walker, 1989) and,
currently, IR seems to be going through a ‘historical turn’ (Teschke,
2003, pp. 1–2). Many important IR contributions are in many respects
closer to history than to theory, as is the case, for example, with Erik
Ringmar’s thought-provoking interpretation of the Swedish interven-
tion in the Thirty Years War (Ringmar, 1996).
Despite these affinities and overlaps, it makes sense to distinguish
analytically between the two. Thus, Ringmar carefully distinguishes
between ‘historical writing’ and ‘social science explanation’ which cor-
responds to the distinction between history and theory. While histo-
rians recount stories which unfold over time and which should get as
close as possible to what actually happened in a particular case, social
theorists instead aim at a general causal law which would not only
explain one particular case but also a set of cases which share some for-
mal features but which are not temporally connected. Similarly, leading
theorists and historians of war and peace have identified several differ-
ences between the two modes of scholarly inquiry (Elman and Elman,
1997). These can be briefly summarized in terms of ideal types rather
than actual practices (Table 9.1).
A textbook example of a purely theoretical study of war, which uses
history only as a source of data, is the Correlates of War Project. This
project is based on a huge data set of military conflicts since 1816, from

Table 9.1 Differences between theory and history

Theory History

Time orientation Preparing for the future Understanding the past


Object of inquiry Set of events One event
Result Simple law Complex narrative
Method Deduction Induction
Epistemology Nomothetic explanantion Ideographic understanding

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232 Petr Drulák

which general patterns of states’ behaviour in war are derived by means


of statistical methods. This research does not raise questions such as
why a particular state attacked its neighbour. Instead it asks general
questions such as under what general conditions do states attack their
neighbours.
By contrast, historical studies dwell on specific cases. For example,
Fritz Fischer (1975) asserts that the German empire was keen on starting
a great-power war in 1914, and Ringmar (1996) argues that the Swedish
intervention in the Thirty Years War was conditioned by the peculiari-
ties of the process of Swedish identity construction at that time rather
than by more objective factors. But neither Fischer nor Ringmar pro-
pose a general law or pattern which could easily be applied to other
military conflicts.
Despite these differences, both history and theory share a commit-
ment to truth, be this a detailed truth about a particular event or a
general truth about a series of events. In this respect they differ from
the arts, which are committed to aesthetic values and from a scholarly
perspective may seem inaccurate or fictitious. In the arts the mode of
expression counts more than whether the ideas are seen as truthful or
normatively acceptable. Many great works of art came into being as
a celebration of ideas which may be quite alien to the contemporary
audience, for example, military aggression, racial supremacy, chauvin-
ism or praise of dictatorship, but this does not prevent their general
appreciation. For example, one scholar confesses his love for ‘Puccini’s
Turandot and Madame Butterfly while at the same time being repulsed
by their orientalist representation of the “Far East”’ (Bleiker, 2003a,
p. 422), and another warns those with political objections to Wagner
that they should not listen to his music so as not to be seduced by it
(Krippendorff, 1999).
Artistic work is frequently open to competing interpretations, while
theoretical and historical works offer ideas which can be expressed in
different ways, with the mode of expression tending to be secondary,
works of art offer a set of expressions to which different ideas can be
related and which for their part are treated as secondary. Of course,
in artistic fields these distinctions have been subject to heated debates
between those stressing the independence of artistic expression (l’art
pour l’art) and those who emphasize its social, cognitive and political
functions (e.g., Marxists). But even Marxists will concede that the cogni-
tive role of the arts is different from that of science, and this difference
boils down to the quality of expression, held as being more important
than the underlying ideas (Lunačarskij, 1975).

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 233

However, how should we then understand the famous Aristotelian


dictum that the poet is closer to philosophy (and thus to the truth)
than the historian (Aristoteles, 1996)? Aristotle appraises poetry higher
than history because according to him the former seeks to account for
the general and the universal while the latter dwells on the particular.
In this respect, poetry, and art in general, has a theoretical quality of
producing a message which pertains to a set of events rather than to
a single event. This quality is also recognized by modern aesthetics.
Thus, Jan Mukařovský, a leading member of the Prague Circle, argues
that a truly great work of art transcends the conditions of its origins and
speaks to audiences of different historical epochs (Mukařovský, 1966
[1936]). For example, Leo Tolstoy’s monumental novel War and Peace
deals with the fates of three Russian aristocratic families at the time of
the Napoleonic Wars. However, the message of the book goes beyond
those particular events and individuals as it endeavours to tell us some-
thing more general about the nature of war, about the dynamics of
interpersonal relationships and about many other things readers can
discover there.
IR students have been turning to the arts since the 1990s, at least
(Holden, 2003). Not only has IR experienced its ‘historical turn’, but it
also went through an ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker, 2001; 2009). This turn is
about engaging ‘the innovative nature of the aesthetic to rethink deeply
entrenched and often narrowly conceived approaches to understand-
ing and solving world political problems’ (Bleiker, 2003a, p. 417). More
briefly, art ‘challenges the modern tendency to reduce the political to
the rational’ (Bleiker, 2003b, p. 395).
What does this mean for the study of war? With respect to the First
World War, Bleiker (2003b, p. 395) argues that while the theoretical
search for laws and generalizations provides ‘a view of world in which
people are all but invisible’, such painters as Otto Dix or Max Beckmann,
who portray dying soldiers, are ‘able to express a sense of terror that
could hardly be captured in words’. Art thus mediates ‘the human side
of war’ (ibid.).
Moreover, war can be linked with the concept of the sublime, as
Francois Debrix does with respect to the American intervention in Iraq
(Debrix, 2006). The sublime is sometimes described as ‘the pleasurable
experience through the visual representation of a situation that is oth-
erwise normally painful, terrorizing or destabilizing’ (Debrix, 2006,
p. 768; Mirzoeff, 1999, p. 16). It refers to ‘fascination, awe and even
delight at events that are inherently painful and horrific’ (Bleiker, 2009;
Bleiker and Leet, 2006, p. 734). For example, in an artistic context and

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234 Petr Drulák

interpretation, the images of the suffering, or even tortured, enemy,


the atomic bomb mushroom cloud, or the spectacular fall of the Twin
Towers on 9/11, all are capable of evoking the experience of the sublime.
This morally contradictory experience can hardly be captured by the
instrumental reason of scholarly examination. However, art can pro-
vide some insights: ‘Burke and Kant believed that poetry, because of its
very obscurity, is particularly well suited to engage the sublime’ (ibid.,
pp. 723-4). In this connection, it is probably no coincidence that wars
generate such huge waves of artistic creativity.
But art, and especially literature, has much in common with history.
Like history, it usually addresses the particular – specific events and per-
sons. In this respect, there is a distinction between epic, drama and film
on the one hand, and, on the other, lyric and music, but even lyrical
and musical compositions are often inspired by particular events such
as wars. Moreover, historical writing usually has literary ambitions as
well. Like the arts, how historians express themselves, in other words
the aesthetic dimension of historical writing, is an important attribute
of its quality. Therefore, artistic representation merges the theoretical
quest for a general statement with the historical focus on particular
events and persons.
All in all, the relationship among theory, history and art can be visu-
alized as a triangle. Theory is linked with history by the search for a
factual truth; art is linked with theory by the quest for a message which
transcends particular events; and art is linked with history by express-
ing the particular and by art’s concern for aesthetic norms (Figure 9.1).
Another link connects theory, history and art. Each can be analysed in
terms of metaphors. The case for metaphors is relatively uncontroversial

Theory

Expressing Expressing
factual truth the universal

History Art
Addressing
the particular

Figure 9.1 Relationship between theory, history and art.

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 235

in the study of artistic representations, in which metaphors have always


been used as analytical tools. However, metaphors may seem less appro-
priate to the analysis of scholarly texts. Therefore, more needs to be said
about the relationship between metaphors and scholarly thought.
Metaphor has traditionally been considered as ‘a device for seeing
something in terms of something else’ (Burke, 1945, p. 503; quoted in
Cameron, 1999, p. 13). It links two different phenomena, pointing out
their similarities and identities. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), whose con-
cept of metaphor is used in this text, understand metaphors as both fig-
ures of speech and figures of thought. From their perspective, metaphor
links two conceptual areas – source and target – making it possible to
understand the target area in terms of the source area. In other words,
what we know about the source area is applied to the target area as the
metaphor establishes a formal identity between the two, stating that ‘A
is B’. This definition of metaphor also includes all forms of analogical
thinking.
The presence of metaphors in both thought and speech produces the
distinction between conceptual metaphors and metaphorical expressions
(Lakoff, 1993; Drulák, 2008). Conceptual metaphor is an abstract con-
ceptual mapping between source domain and target domain, which is
identified on the level of thought and reason. It is an abstract rule which
governs our thinking by providing links between the two domains. By
contrast, metaphorical expressions are specific words by which the con-
ceptual metaphor is substantiated. ‘State was defeated’, is an example of
such a metaphorical expression, which frequently occurs in the politi-
cal discourse. However, like the words ‘attack’ or ‘defence’, this phrase
is linked to the conceptual metaphor WAR IS A PHYSICAL COMBAT.1
All refer to the COMBAT metaphor that conceptualizes war as a hos-
tile encounter between two individuals who resolve their dispute by
physical force.
Even though these expressions may seem obvious and unproblem-
atic, our analysis points to their cognitive dependence on the COMBAT
metaphor, with tangible implications for political practice. Statements
like ‘defeating the enemy’ or ‘imposing our will on our opponent’ would
have been meaningless without this conceptual metaphor. Given that
our conceptualization of a certain target domain (for example, war)
usually depends on a relatively narrow set of conceptual metaphors, the
analysis of metaphors also uncovers the cognitive limits of the language
we use to capture a certain domain or phenomenon.
The extent to which even abstract and heavily mathematicized theo-
ries of natural science depend on metaphors is surprisingly high. Their

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236 Petr Drulák

history abounds with examples of unexpected metaphors which sig-


nificantly enhanced our knowledge of the world and then entered our
conventional wisdom (Duhem, 1974; quoted in Bourdieu et al., 1991,
pp. 194–5). For example, seeing LIGHT as SOUND by Huygens yielded
the concept of the light wave and made the analysis of light more intel-
ligible. Considering ELECTRICITY as HEAT enabled Ohm to apply a
developed body of knowledge about the latter to transform into a pris-
tine area of the former. These metaphors are hardly visible in practice,
as the scientific procedure entails applying a set of equations developed
for the analysis of the source areas (sound, heat) to the analysis of the
target areas (light, electricity).
This seemingly neutral and objective procedure frequently makes us
forget that the very justification of the transfer of equations is embed-
ded in a particular metaphor. Not only do metaphors produce new
insights to be translated into theories, exemplifying the most powerful
tools of ars inveniendi (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 5), but they also lend
substance to the logical constructions of theories as well as providing
explanations. Therefore, these ‘scientific metaphors’ (ibid., p. 55) are at
the heart of theories, being essential, and ‘without which theories could
be completely valueless and unworthy of the name’ (Campbell, 1967;
quoted in Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 196).
What is true in the abstract world of natural science is even more
the case in the realm of social science. The basic concepts used in the
rational inquiry of society are inevitably metaphorical (Lambourn,
2001). The very concepts of state and society tend to be metaphorized
as PERSONS who make decisions, have organs, enter relationships,
suffer from illnesses or have their moods. There are further meta-
phors of society, frequently seen as an OBJECT moved by forces mod-
elled on physical laws; as a FAMILY; or as a BOXING MATCH, among
others. Importantly, hardly any definition of such an intangible
concept as society can exist without a metaphorical link to a more
tangible, familiar entity. In this connection, de Man (1984 [1978])
aptly points out the inevitability of metaphorical language by show-
ing how Locke, despite his rejection of figurative language, is himself
dependent on metaphors – while also pointing to their indispensa-
ble and unacknowledged role in the writing of Condillac and Kant.
Similarly, despite his harsh criticism of the figurative language of
poets, Plato actually makes some of his most important points by
means of a metaphor – for example by comparing people to prisoners
of a cave who take for real the shadows on the cave walls (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980).

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 237

The role of metaphors has also been acknowledged in the study of


history. Hayden White’s ground-breaking book (1973) shows that his-
torical accounts depend on shaping language, and that this language
not merely embellishes speech, but also embodies the plot and logic of
the historical interpretation. In this respect, he referred to four classi-
cal tropes, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, to distinguish
four types of historical writing accordingly. However, he sees metaphor
as central with respect to the others. Moreover, the above conceptuali-
zation of metaphor, unlike the classical one, also covers many linguistic
features traditionally associated with other tropes.
To sum up, metaphor provides a possible common ground for a meet-
ing between theory and history as various forms of scholarly inquiry, as
well as between scholarly accounts and artistic representations. Now, it
is usually the case that metaphors are examined either with respect to
science (Lakoff and Nunez, 2000) or with respect to the arts (Lakoff and
Turner, 1989). However, it is quite rare to look into metaphors of both
scholarly texts and works of art, examining how these two avenues of
our experience can be brought together within a single framework. That
is what this chapter does in the name of developing a transdisciplinary
understanding of war. Before this metaphorical transdisciplinarity can
be properly outlined, the results of multidisciplinary research on war
first need to be discussed.

War in scholarly perspectives

War has been studied in IR and in other disciplines for a long time. This
study has yielded a variety of important scholarly results. I start by sum-
marizing a few key reviews of the study of war in IR (Levy, 2002; Diehl,
2005). Next, I examine some contributions to the scholarly understand-
ing of war which come from other disciplines and help to broaden the
interdisciplinary understanding of war, namely, psychology, econom-
ics, sociology and anthropology (Kurtz, 1999). Finally, I consider an
example, coming from historiography, of a reflection on war.
Most IR research focuses on the question of why wars occur. The
question of causes was the key subject of Kenneth Waltz’s (1954 influ-
ential treatise Man, the State and War, and has also been underwritten
by the quantitative research which has dominated war studies in IR
since the 1960s. It is with respect to the search for causes of war that
the concept of levels of analysis has been introduced. I will use the lev-
els of analysis debate to summarize the most important IR perspectives
on war.

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238 Petr Drulák

Starting with the most general level of the international system and
international interactions, mainstream IR accounts offer several expla-
nations for the outbreak of war. Realists emphasize the changes in
the distribution of power among states, changes which are presented
as rational actors seeking power. However, realists cannot agree as to
whether war becomes likelier with an increase in the concentration of
power in the hands of one state, or whether such a concentration actu-
ally fosters peace and stability (Levy, 2002). It all depends on whether
war is seen as a result of a breakdown of hegemonic rule or as a result
of a possible breakdown of freedom, which is the result of international
anarchy.
Liberals look into economic interdependence and domestic democ-
racy. Unlike power distribution, interdependence and democracy are
usually defined at the dyadic level rather than at the systemic. Thus,
they investigate pairs of states with respect to their reciprocal economic
ties, or to their domestic political regimes (for this reason I discuss
democracy at the international level, not at the unit level). The inter-
dependence argument relies on the model of states as welfare seekers
which are likely to avoid war if the economic ties are close enough.
The democracy argument emphasizes that democratic states are like-
minded in some important respects. This decreases the risk of military
conflict between them.
The democratic peace argument points to norms and identities. One
could actually speak about democratic normative ties between states,
which are studied by constructivists and frequently omitted from, or
barely mentioned in, mainstream IR perspectives on war (Diehl, 2005;
Levy, 2002). The constructivist understanding of war at the interna-
tional level addresses norms regulating the use of violence between
states (Wendt, 1999), distinguishing between norms which encourage
the use of violence and those which inhibit it.
The next level of analysis is that of the unit – the state and domestic
factors. Realists are again divided into offensive ones, who believe that
states are bound to have aggressive intentions regarding one another,
and defensive ones, who attribute to them moderate intentions con-
sidering aggression as a result of ‘domestic pressures and pathologies’
(Levy, 2002, p. 354). Scientific rationalists rely on an expected utility
theory of war which sees the decision to go to war as a result of cost-ben-
efit analysis (Bueno de Mesquita, 2005 [1980]). The same logic applies
to most game theoretical models of war. Sometimes the same logic is
applied to a particular group within the state which can gain benefits
from war and which is strong enough to influence state behaviour, for

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 239

instance the military-industrial complex. This explanation is related to


the ‘diversionary theory of war’ (Levy, 2005a; b) according to which
this nefarious group is the political elite itself, which starts wars to dis-
tract attention from domestic problems. Constructivist unit level theo-
ries consider wars as results of, or as a means of, particular identity
construction (Ringmar, 1996). Students of decision-making processes
explain wars as inadvertent consequences of decision-making proce-
dures of the state apparatus (Tuchman, 1962; Allison, 1971).
Finally, at the level of the individual, IR scholars refer to psychological
theories to account for leaders’ (mis)perceptions of political reality. In
this perspective, wars can be attributed to their erroneous perceptions.
However, these distortions reflect systematic biases which go beyond the
concerned individual and can be addressed as general patterns of mis-
perception (e.g., Jervis, 1976). That is where IR theory-oriented research
differs from the historiographic research, which in general tends to put
more emphasis on individual actions while attributing possible percep-
tions and misperceptions of leaders to unique circumstances rather
than to general patterns.
However, IR theory-oriented research at the level of the individual
also differs from psychological research on war, despite their shared
focus on the mind of the individual. Psychology addresses war by
examining both its causes and consequences at the level of a general-
ized individual, not necessarily an individual in a leadership position.
Thus, Freudian psychoanalysis ascribes war to (self)destructive drives
of individuals originating in their subconsciousness. For Freud, war is
‘a pathological destructiveness, freed from the restraints of conscience
and civilization’ (Hartman, 1999, p. 134); it is a victory of nature over
civilization. Building on Freud, Fornari sees war as an adaptive mecha-
nism which responds to anxieties experienced in early childhood (ibid.,
p. 135). It results from an inability to mourn, which is resolved by con-
structing images of the good, to be identified with, and the evil, to be
destroyed. Similarly, others focused on the psychological need for an
enemy and for differentiation at the group level – ‘narcissism of minor
differences’ (ibid., p. 136) – which enhance the self-esteem and identity
of the group.
But psychological studies also show that this natural aggression is
counter-balanced by a human reluctance to kill other humans. Drawing
on ethology, it is argued that people share this reluctance with animals,
which also refrain from killing their own kind. It is argued that in a
combat situation ‘combatants stop thinking with their forebrain, which
is the part of the brain which makes us human, and start thinking with

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240 Petr Drulák

the midbrain . . . which is the primitive part of the brain that is generally
undistinguishable from that of an animal’ (Grossman and Siddle, 1999,
p. 140). But ethological analogies can also point in the opposite direc-
tion, linking warfare with the spread of the genes to the next generation
(Wisman, 1999, p. 632) or with an innate drive to control territory (Gissy,
1999, p. 29). In this perspective, war enhances biological reproduction.
Especially valuable are the studies on the psychology of combat and
on psychological effects of combat experience. They introduce the
concept of a ‘psychiatric casualty’ to account for disorders afflicting
people after the extreme stress and exhaustion of the combat situation
(Grossman and Siddle, 1999, p. 140). They also point to the psychiat-
ric traumatization of non-combatants due to exposure to destruction
(Wessels, 1999, p. 159).
The economic perspective considers war as a form of ‘economic behav-
iour’, or ‘a form of competition for command over scarce resources’
(Wisman, 1999, p. 631). In this connection, economists can contribute
to the analysis of the causes of war by arguing that war is waged as long
as it pays off. They often point out ethological analogies. However, most
economists focus on consequences – the costs of war. They point out its
overall negative effects for the modern economy, including a variety
of indirect costs, wherein war is unprofitable even for the victors. This
leads to seeing war as an irrational accident (Seiglie, 1999).
Anthropology examines how warfare is integrated into the cultural sys-
tem of the society, developing the concept of ‘warrior societies’ (Sanders,
1999, p. 775). In this perspective, war is seen as a product of specific cul-
tural norms which are reproduced in a variety of rituals. Thus, war can
serve the reproduction needs of collective identities. It is a rule-bound
practice full of symbolic meanings. However, anthropology also studies
the interplay of cultural factors and material conditions such as compe-
tition for scarce resources. Many of these anthropological approaches
and insights have been used in military sociology (Siebold, 2001).
Sociology tends to see war as obsolete, irrational and unfit for modern
industrial society – the main focus of this discipline (Spencer, 1999).
However, society can address war in connection with revolution as
an outcome of social inequalities. Historical sociology has provided
insights into a variety of social causes of warfare, as well as into the
intimate relationship between European wars and the rise of European
states (Hobden, 1998).
The theory-oriented perspectives discussed so far rely on several con-
ceptual metaphors of war: GAME, QUARREL, HARVEST, ACCIDENT,
PRODUCTION, NATURE (Table 9.2). Some, but not all of them, are

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 241

Table 9.2 Metaphors of war in theory

Theoretical Explanation of the source domain.


Source domain perspective War is ...

GAME IR realism, game Intentional clash between rational


(COMPETITION) theory; etology actors. Each of them has clearly
defined stakes in the conflict which
it tries to maximize at the expenses
of others
QUARREL Psychoanalysis Intentional or unintentional clash
between emotional actors
HARVEST Economics; IR Source of material gains for
(GOOD OR BAD) expected utility individuals or ruling groups. Unlike
theory in the GAME metaphor, there is no
interaction with others. The focus is
on costs and benefits of war
ACCIDENT IR misperceptions, Result of unfortunate failures and
bureaucratic politics, misunderstandings due to a variety
secret diplomacy; of factors
classical sociology;
economics
PRODUCTION IR diversionary Man-made device which brings
(TRANSFOR- theories; Marxist about new products (such as states
MATION) political economy; or particular identities) and helps to
anthropology maintain the extant products
NATURE Etology; psychology Inevitable part of human existence.
Like animals, people are part of
nature and cannot escape its laws

mutually exclusive (e.g. GAME and ACCIDENT or PRODUCTION and


NATURE). Each highlights or constructs different features of war.
Unlike theorists, historians do not address war as such. Instead, they
examine specific historical events which are related to a concrete case
of war. Moreover, even more than the ‘not-so-international discipline
of IR’ (Waever, 1998), historiography is not international at all, being
divided into nationally oriented disciplines. Therefore, it is impossible
to offer any comprehensive summary of historiographic writing on war.
Instead, I illustrate the historians’ approach by referring to the work of
the German historian Fritz Fischer (2004 [1961]) on the FIRST WORLD
WAR, which is one of the most influential and controversial historical
accounts of this war in German historiography.

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242 Petr Drulák

In the early 1960s Fischer made claims that the German empire was
weighing up the world war option for a few years before its actual out-
break – meaning that it actively exacerbated international tension in
the run-up to the war, and that it was actually interested in starting
the war. These claims were not really surprising outside Germany, as
they reflected the position of the world war victors, who argued from
the very outset that the Germans were to blame for the outbreak of the
FIRST WORLD WAR. However, their claims ran contrary to the tradi-
tional view of German historiography, which subscribed to the official
reasoning of the imperial German leaders that Germany was drawn into
the war against her own will and against her own better judgement.
Fischer challenges the view that the FIRST WORLD WAR was ‘an
operational accident of history’ (Fischer, 2004 [1961], p. 11) to which
all the parties were drawn against their own inclinations. This view
then prevailed in Germany, while it has remained popular elsewhere
until today. The scholarly literature which relies on the metaphor of the
FIRST WORLD WAR as an ACCIDENT tends to focus on the role of the
mobilization plans of Germany, Austria and Russia in the outbreak of
war (Tuchman, 1962; Levy, 1986). After the assassination in Sarajevo of
the Austrian archduke, Francis Ferdinand, the unexpected interplay of
mobilization plans sidelined political leaders and led the bureaucratic
war machineries of the European great powers into inevitable conflict,
despite the last-minute efforts of their leaders, including the German
Kaiser, to preserve the peace.
By contrast, Fischer argues that the FIRST WORLD WAR was an
intended consequence of the German ‘bid for world power’ (Griff nach
der Weltmacht). He supports his argument with a sociological and eco-
nomic analysis of the Wilhelmine Empire and, most importantly, with
detailed archival research. It is thanks to German archives that he gains
unique insight into the decision-making process of the German leaders.
On this basis, he proves that the German political leaders, especially
the Prime Minister Bethmann Hollweg, were preparing for war while
calling for peace in their public statements. Their anti-war rhetoric only
served to foster domestic political support for their aggressive foreign
policy (at which they succeeded) and also to keep Britain out of the war
(at which they failed). For example, Fischer reveals the double game
of German diplomacy in July of 1914, when it seemingly encouraged
British mediation efforts towards Austria while actually working to tor-
pedo these efforts.
His careful analysis of German war aims shows that Germany saw the
war as a means to raise its status from a European great power to a world

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 243

power. Moreover, these aggressive war aims were widely supported


within German society, including business leaders, political parties,
nationalist NGOs and military leaders. According to Fischer’s archival
sources, the military leaders deemed the summer of 1914 an optimal
moment for starting the war, because they saw German troops as better
prepared than Russian and French forces, and expected this favourable
margin to disappear within one or two years. All in all, far from being
seen as an unintended ACCIDENT of history, the FIRST WORLD WAR is
interpreted by Fischer as a well-calculated bid for power in a destructive
GAME launched by Germany.
Thus, even though Fischer’s, and in general historians’ accounts, tend
towards a detailed description of archival facts, it cannot do without
metaphorical expressions (‘bid for world power’) and conceptual meta-
phors (GAME) on which the historian’s narrative relies.

War in the arts

Like historical accounts, artistic representations of war reflect one par-


ticular event, which makes it difficult to summarize them in any mean-
ingful manner. Therefore, they offer unique metaphorical expressions
which capture the particularity of the situation. At the same time, like
theoretical interpretations, they try to express something transcending
the particular event, aiming at the universal, which for its part enables
the preparation of some sort of a summary at the level of conceptual met-
aphors. However, in the absence of the summarizing secondary literature
on the metaphors of artistic representations of war, I will use just three
illustrative examples to show how metaphors of war are used in novels.
Each of the three novels offers a profoundly different reflection of the
FIRST WORLD WAR. While Erich Maria Remarque’s (1967 [1928]) All
Quiet on the Western Front is among the most famous anti-war pieces in
twentieth-century world literature, Ernst Jünger’s (1978) Storm of Steel is
often considered a celebration of militarism (Jünger, 1978), and Jaroslav
Hašek’s (1985a; b) The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War
counts as a superb war satire. Despite this, the three novels have a lot in
common. They were written by former soldiers (Remarque and Jünger
served in the German imperial army, Hašek in the Austro-Hungarian
army) and their main characters are soldiers. All three novels have been
translated into numerous languages and shaped the popular perception
of the First World War, and of war in general.
Remarque tells of a young German volunteer who is trapped in the
trenches of the Western front. Both the main character and his fellows

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244 Petr Drulák

sincerely hate the war and try to survive as best they can. However,
one by one they fall, and eventually the main character dies as well.
Remarque uses numerous distinct metaphors to mediate his under-
standing of war to the reader. These connote both the universality and
particularity of metaphors of war in the arts (Table 9.3).
Like Remarque, Jünger bases his narrative on his own firsthand
account of the German volunteer soldier and, like Remarque, reflects on
the human suffering and the material damage the war brought about.
However, unlike Remarque’s main character, Jünger’s protagonist is not
disillusioned by the war. He rises to become an officer and, despite his
numerous injuries, seeks dangerous combat situations which he actu-
ally enjoys. My identification of Jünger’s metaphors draws upon previ-
ous research (Verboven, 2003) (Table 9.4)
The main character of Hašek’s novel is also a volunteer soldier. In
contrast to the previous characters, he is not a young idealist. Švejk is
an aged dealer in stolen dogs who is officially certified as insane and
physically unfit for military combat. His main feature is his tendency
to end up in difficult situations and to get out of these situations, either
by lucky coincidence or by telling everyone unending stories which are
supposed to explain what happened. These stories convince his listen-
ers, usually his superiors, that Švejk is crazy and nothing can be done
about it. The question whether the main character is really insane or
whether his supposed insanity only masks a cunning survival strategy
is never answered in the novel. Even though the novel is about war,
and the protagonist is a serving soldier, it never addresses combat situ-
ations. Instead, it focuses on Czech wartime society, all the main char-
acters being Czechs, and on the inner workings of the Austrian military
machine (Table 9.5).
What do these metaphors tell us about war? Let us start with those iden-
tified in at least two of the three novels. The metaphors which link war
with NATURE (Remarque, Jünger) point to its inevitability and to lack of
any personal responsibility for war. It is a natural phenomenon beyond
human control. The metaphors of TRANSFORMATION (Remarque,
Jünger) put emphasis on its profound impact on everything war touches.
War is primarily seen as a change which includes loss of individuality
and the awakening of human animality. Jünger’s metaphor of HUNT
which implies that humans turn into hunted animals is close to the met-
aphors of TRANSFORMATION. However, unlike these, it is asymmetrical
as it is based on the distinction between hunter and hunted.
The metaphors of ACCIDENTAL VIOLENCE (Remarque, Hašek)
picture war as something beyond any rational scheme or common

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 245

Table 9.3 Metaphors of war in the arts (I)

Source domain Description

TRANSFOR- Individuals are transformed into a single whole. Soldiers are


MATION like formerly individual coins which were melted down and
then minted anew (Remarque, 1928/67, p.154)
Individuals become part of the surrounding nature ‘our
hands are earth, our bodies are mud, our eyes are rain
puddles’ (ibid., p.161)
Individuals turn into animals: ‘Three quarters of soldiers’
vocabulary is about food and digestion (ibid. 13), ‘we
turned into dangerous animals’ (ibid., p.70). Animality
protects humans against insanity (ibid., p.155)
NATURE War is a strong wind destroying everything (ibid., p.38),
‘iron fountains’ (ibid., p.66), enemy fire like ‘rain’ (ibid.,
p.79)
EXTREMES Humiliation – officers humiliating soldiers in boot camp,
humiliating conditions of life (latrines, sex in the barrack
room) (ibid., p.152)
Physical pain – dying people, dying horses (ibid., p.42)
Mental anguish – regrets after killing the enemy in close
combat (ibid., p.125–27)
Consumption – soldiers eat until they get sick from it (ibid.,
p. 135)
Friendship - the war experience brings people closer
together than any other possible experience
ACCIDENTAL Individual survival is a matter of coincidence (ibid., p.63)
VIOLENCE
CORRUPTION Bribes in the military hospitals (ibid., p.140)
DISEASE People die of war as they die of ‘cancer, tuberculosis, flu,
diarrhoea’ (ibid., p.153)

Note: The first column examines the universality of the conceptual metaphors by listing
the source domains which have been used in the novel. The second column addresses the
particularity of the metaphors by describing their respective metaphorical expressions.

conventions. Similarly, metaphors of DISEASE (Remarque, Hašek) also


evoke this kind of fatal exceptionality, especially if the disease in ques-
tion is seen as incurable, such as certain cancers or mental disease. By
contrast, the metaphors of CORRUPTION (Remarque, Hašek) deny any
exceptionality to war. It is just business in harsh conditions.
Like the metaphors of ACCIDENTAL VIOLENCE and DISEASE,
Remarque’s metaphor of EXTREMES also stresses the exceptionality of
war conditions. However, in contrast to these, it is not unambiguously

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246 Petr Drulák

Table 9.4 Metaphors of war in the arts (II)

Source domain Description

NATURE ‘Steel storm’, ‘fire waves’ of attacks (Jünger, 1978, p.284),


‘floods’ enemy troops (ibid., p.294) and ‘wind’ or ‘rain’
of enemy fire (ibid., p.87)
PERFORMANCE The artillery fire is associated with ‘musical melody’ or
with ‘dance’, one believes to listen to ‘drums’ or ‘fifes’ in
the battle and military clashes are described as if they
were a ‘play’ in a theatre (ibid., pp.11; 33; 90; 29; 238)
TRANSFOR- People are ‘smelted’ in ‘blast furnaces’ and ‘hammered’
MATION on (ibid., p.135; 11; 149). Soldiers turn into various
animal species or simply into ‘animals’ (Verboven, 2003,
p.149). The loss of the common sense in the fighting
mood as if in a dream or intoxication (Verboven,
2003,pp.190–1). The landscape is remade by war and the
transformation. Inanimate objects turn into animals
such as tanks as ‘elephants’ or ‘giant beetles’ (Verboven,
2003, p.198)
HUNT Soldiers hunt for their enemies (Verboven, 2003,
p.182–3)
COMMUNICATION German fire is ‘responded’ to by the fire of the enemy
(Verboven, 2003, p.83; Jünger, 1978, p.32)
GAME Soldiers play either an unspecified game with the enemy
or they try their luck by games of chance or juggling.

negative as it refers to extremes in both negative conditions such as


suffering or cruelty, and in conditions which are neutral or positive such
as consumption or friendship. Thus, the metaphor of EXTREMES evokes
exceptionality which can go either way. At the same time, this excep-
tionality of war is hidden by the three metaphors of PERFORMANCE,
GAME and COMMUNICATION, which Jünger uses as they picture the
war as something usual, normal and rational.
Hašek’s metaphor of POOR HARVEST, as well as all the other meta-
phors he uses, need to be interpreted in light of the irony with which
the novel is written. War is pictured by means of logistical problems of
business people and soldiers, which makes it somewhat ridiculous. The
same applies to the metaphor of QUARREL, which likens war to pub
brawls. Also, ironically, the main character of the novel, who is certified
as mentally challenged, maintains his common sense while the suppos-
edly rational elites behave crazily.

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 247

Table 9.5 Metaphors of war in the arts (III)

Source domain Description

MENTAL ILLNESS The main character is certified as insane but his judgement
is more or less commonsensical. In contrast, a genuine
insanity penetrates the high ranks of the Austrian army.
There is a senile general completely out of touch with
reality and ‘Austria had plenty of such generals’ (Hašek,
1985b, p.96) or the general who turned mad and whose
crazy orders needed to be transmitted because the
procedure required so even though nobody obeyed (1985b,
p.81). All the army chaplains are mentally disturbed.
QUARREL The Austrian emperor’s thinking is put as: ‘You killed my
uncle, so I’ll sock you in the jaw. The war surely comes’
(Hašek, 1985a, p.23). There is a comparison of war to
a small revenge among the beer drinkers concluding
‘wanting to take revenge on someone ... innocent people
take the rap’ (1985b, p.91).
POOR HARVEST A usurer complains about losing his claims with officers
who are killed or captured (Hašek, 1985a, p.178–9), a hop
merchant despairs over the war damage done to breweries
and to the supply chains (Hašek, 1985a, p. 220). The war
against Italy is expected to bring short food rations for
soldiers (Hašek, 1985b, p.91).
ACCIDENTAL An accidental death of a soldier is described in a cynical
VIOLENCE manner (Hašek 1985b, p.54), ‘he has his bowels in his
pants’. Soldiers are humiliated by officers, a private is
ordered to creep like a dog in the office (1985b, p.268). An
NCO has a boy executed without an obvious reason
(1985b, p.275), Jews are beaten up for ‘spreading rumours’
(1985b, p.325).
CORRUPTION The archbishop of Budapest prays for soldiers: ‘God bless
your bayonets that they penetrate the bellies of your
enemies. Let the justest God direct the artillery fire above
the heads of enemy staffs. Let the merciful God spill blood
in quashing all the enemies by the wounds which you
cause them!’ (Hašek, 1985b, p.98). Austrian officers steal
and sell the food for their troops (ibid., p.108).

Discussion

This chapter did not aim at the identification of all possible war met-
aphors in the scholarly literature and artistic representation. Instead,
it sought to show, first, the enormous diversity of resources which

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248 Petr Drulák

can be used for conceptual reflection on war, and, second, how this
diversity can be ordered in a transdisciplinary manner by examining
metaphors.
We can see how most of the above conceptual metaphors cut across
the disciplines and go beyond scholarly investigation. Moreover, the
identification of conceptual metaphors makes it possible to overcome
disciplinary labels and to focus on the insights which various inter-
pretations provide. It is variety of insights which leads to a new knowl-
edge no matter what their disciplinary backgrounds. Thus, GAME,
TRANSFORMATION and ACCIDENT are each present in many differ-
ent perspectives on war, both within a single discipline and among the
disciplines. But the disciplinary story is secondary to the analysis of
profound differences among these conceptual metaphors themselves.
Whereas the GAME metaphor mediates the instrumental under-
standing of war as a more or less controlled process, the ACCIDENT
metaphor implies the loss of control over it at some point, and the
TRANSFORMATION metaphor rules out any control by default as it
implies a profound change in everybody and everything being affected
by war.
However, it is also useful to look into how the very same conceptual
metaphor is associated with different metaphorical expressions and dif-
ferent entailments in line with the discipline in which it is used. The
GAME metaphor can lead to a game theoretical analysis, but it can also
inform ethological theories of war as well as narrative accounts of how
soldiers play with the enemy or turn into game-addict ‘gamblers’. The
NATURE metaphor can evoke objective laws which scholars of all pos-
sible disciplines identify, or it can lead to analogies with earthquakes
and storms. The ACCIDENT metaphor is behind theories which exam-
ine flaws in individual perceptions, in collective decision-making or
in social conditions, but it can also be captured by literary accounts
of random violence. The PRODUCTION/TRANSFORMATION metaphor
may subsume scholarly accounts of the reproduction of, and change in,
social identities by war or the accounts of its impact on the psychol-
ogy of the combatants, but it also informs vivid literary descriptions of
combat experience.
In addition, some conceptual metaphors are only elaborated by one
discipline or by a single artistic representation while being ignored by
others. Such metaphors can then serve as a source of innovation in
the disciplines in which they have been so far neglected, as long as
their respective metaphorical expressions and entailments can be devel-
oped there. For example, the metaphors of war as DISEASE, MENTAL

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War: Multidisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity 249

ILLNESS or CORRUPTION, which come from the novels, have so far not
been much elaborated in the scholarly literature, and the insights they
offer could possibly provide new avenues of research.
Making these connections and comparisons possible, the analysis of
war metaphors entailing different scholarly and artistic representations
goes beyond a simple multidisciplinary listing of these representations.
It is transdisciplinary. The research benefits of any transdisciplinary
project are obvious and have already been extensively discussed (see
Chapter 2). However, the project introduced in this chapter differs from
usual transdisciplinary projects such as political psychology or political
economy (see Chapter 2), which are discipline-centric as they lead to
new disciplines arising on the margins of existing ones. This project is
an example of a concept-driven, or concept-centric, transdisciplinarity.
Unlike traditional transdisciplinarity, concept-centric transdisciplinar-
ity does not strive to merge parts of different disciplines into a new one.
Instead, it starts with a concept, such as war, and then collects a variety
of its reflections and representations to link them on their common
metaphorical grounds.
This kind of transdisciplinarity is less ambitious, more practical,
more flexible and more innovative than the usual one. It attempts at
epistemic integration (see Chapter 1) at the conceptual level rather than
at the disciplinary level, and it does not prescribe which disciplines
are to be engaged. Indeed, their choice will differ from case to case as
it depends on the concept in question. Moreover, the concept-centric
transdisciplinarity also brings about important benefits in teaching.
Not only does it make students aware, from the very beginning, of the
multifaceted nature of war and of concepts, but it also makes war and
other concepts more tangible by including their historical and artistic
representations.
On the other hand, these benefits of concept-centric transdisciplinar-
ity may sometimes be outweighed by the costs of academic politics in
which disciplines can serve as key structures for the accumulation of
resources needed in institutional battles over budgets and recognition.
In this perspective, traditional transdisciplinarity or neodisciplinarity
(see Chapter 2) may provide viable alternatives. However, the results of
such a cost-benefit analysis will depend on the state of the organiza-
tion of the respective academic fields and these fields are frequently
more national than international. In this connection, the drive to cre-
ate new disciplines, whether transdisciplinary or neodisciplinary, may
be much stronger in big countries with well-institutionalized academic
disciplines, such as the US or UK, than in small countries with weakly

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250 Petr Drulák

institutionalized disciplines as is the case, for example,. in Central and


Eastern Europe (Drulák, Karlas and Königová, 2009).
Cutting across the disciplines, and going beyond them, metaphors
provide us with two valuable contributions. First, at the level of concep-
tual metaphor they connect distinct areas of human reflection which
may seem unconnectable and incommensurable. In so doing they reveal
abstract models of thought which hint at unexpected links. Second, at
the level of metaphorical expression – where the artistic reflection is
especially important – metaphors point to the practical consequences
of abstract concepts, for example, by making the horrors of war more
tangible or by reflecting the contradictory nature of the sublime within
the war experience. These two contributions to knowledge make the
analysis of metaphors of war, and of other political phenomena, a
promising path for transdisciplinary research.

Note
1. In order to distinguish between conceptual metaphors and metaphorical
expressions, we CAPITALIZE conceptual metaphors.

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End Comment

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10
End Comment: The Practices of
Interdisciplinarity
Iver B. Neumann

In this concluding comment, I try to take stock of the discussion


presented in the volume. First, moving from the general to the spe-
cific, I set off with a discussion of how academic disciplines emerge as
a result of both ‘fission’ and ‘fusion’. Of the two options, international
studies (IS) began as, and remains, a case of fusion. Second, I then try
to identify the ‘centripetal force’, and find it in subject matter as well
as in social theory. Since their institutional inception within academia,
social sciences have acquired a certain cohesion through social theory.
This may also be seen in the types of historians and lawyers who are
drawn to international studies: there tends to be at least some theoreti-
cal bent involved.
Third, I turn from the level of disciplinary discourse to the level of
practices. The key hindrances to further development of international
studies are to be found not only in the different kinds of reasoning
that characterize extant disciplines, but also in their different styles of
reasoning. Throughout this discussion I draw on my own experiences –
foremost amongst them my decades-long involvement with area stud-
ies (Russian studies and also, to some degree, European studies) – and
my experience in acquiring an anthropological voice in addition to the
international relations (IR) voice that I already possessed since my early
training.

Interdisciplinarity through fusion

Sociologists of academic disciplines stress how new disciplines tend to


grow out of already established ones (Becker and Trowler, 2001). One
example would be the emergence of geology out of physics, which was
a straight case of fission. As discussed in this volume, international

257

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258 Iver B. Neumann

relations has a rather different history. It was only to a limited degree


the result of fission (splitting off) from political science. For this reason
it is a straightforward historical mistake for political science to claim
international relations, with political theory, comparative politics and
administration and organization, as one of four ‘branches’ of that
discipline.
Historically, international relations grew out of interdisciplinary con-
versations among history, law and sociology. The process was energized,
not first and foremost by fission, but by fusion. I note in passing that
this was not only the case when speaking of scholarship within the
major powers, as discussed by the editors and David Long (see Chapter
1). It was also true for a peripheral country like my own – Norway –
where IR congealed around the history and law-oriented milieu of the
Nobel Peace Institute (Leira and Neumann, 2007). As seen from within
IR, a phenomenon such as international studies, in which representa-
tives of other disciplines pool resources with the – now fairly well estab-
lished – discipline of international relations, is a return to early days,
but from a position of strength. It must also be noted, however, that IR
never really left those other disciplines. As Barry Buzan and Richard
Little (2001) point out, most IR scholars who bring something new to
the table do so not only by refining and extending material already
extant within the discipline. They also customarily make raids into
neighbouring disciplines. One may add that representatives of those
disciplines are, themselves, also happy to ride in on their own accord,
hawking their theoretical insights and empirical findings about the
‘global’. The example prominently on display in this volume is that of
geographers. Becker and Trowler (2001) may talk about fission as new
disciplines emerge, but the social sciences make up a fuzzy set, and the
boundaries with regard to history and law are fuzzy as well.
In this volume, David Long introduces a useful categorization when
he notes that interdisciplinarity may be said to have three aspects: com-
mon subject matter, common concepts/methods/theories, and/or com-
mon institutionalization (see Chapter 2). If the subject matter is what
holds the enterprise together, we have multidisciplinarity. If concepts,
methods and theories are common, there is transdisciplinarity. If there
is common institutionalization, there is neodisciplinarity. Analytically,
these three seem to be modular. Common subject matter invites com-
mon languages, and common languages invite common institutionali-
zation. Area studies may serve as an example. The common subject was
a territorial region (for example, Africa) or a political one (for exam-
ple, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe). Out of the conversations

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Practices of Interdisciplinarity 259

on the common subject came convergence on certain common con-


cepts (totalitarianism) and, even if to a very limited degree, theories
and methods. Then there was institutionalization, both in the sense of
common seminars and conferences, separate journals and book series
and units (typically centres) within academia.
The example of area studies also points up the limits of a view from
the inside and out, which is by definition the perspective used in area
studies. This is because the key precondition for all this to happen was
not that academia would pursue this kind of inquiry. It was much more
important that American institutions bankroll the entire enterprise.
What Foucauldians call the power/knowledge nexus was such that the
rationales at work within academia were less important than those at
work without. That in no way detracts from Long’s categorization, but
it is a reminder that interdisciplinarity is particularly sensitive to politi-
cal conjunctures and, hence, is probably shot even more through with
power than are other spheres of knowledge production.

The cohesion of social inquiry

As Long points out (see Chapter 2), international relations, interna-


tional politics and international studies are neodisciplinary (held
together by institutionalization) to only a limited degree. There are cer-
tainly conferences and seminars, and their absolute numbers as well
as the number of people attending them have increased heavily since
the end of the cold wars. The numbers attending the annual confer-
ence of the International Studies Association (ISA) have, to note but
one key example, increased more than threefold. The increase in the
number of journals and book series has matched – given the neolib-
eral pressure for more ‘deliverables’, probably more than matched – the
increase in the number of practitioners. It remains a fact, though, that
although the trade of international studies is practiced at over a thou-
sand think-tanks worldwide, the number of separate university institu-
tions remains limited.
International studies are rather kept together by what Long calls
multidisciplinarity. As discussed at some length above, the subject
matter is given as social discourses and practices concerning and/or
involving the crossing of politically relevant borders. Changes in the
overall pattern of the subject studied (shorthand: from international
relations to world politics to globalization) have been intense over the
last decades, and have been a precondition to the swelling of our num-
bers. The second thing that makes for cohesion is what Long refers to

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260 Iver B. Neumann

as transdisciplinarity. In this book, the major stress is on the plurality


of concepts, methods and theories. I do, of course, agree with all those
contributors who stress the tremendous pluralism of methods, method-
ologies and theories within IR. It should be noted, however, that this
pluralism is not unique where disciplines are concerned. What do a
sociologist of culture and a statistical sociologist have in common? I
would say neither more nor less than their opposite numbers within IR.
Pami Aalto’s chapter (see Chapter 3), in which he discusses the state of
play in terms of Lakatosian research programmes, is a useful reminder
in this regard.
At the same time it is also true that large chunks of international law
and history, disciplines which were already very much there when the
social sciences went through a decisive phase of gestation in the early
1900s, remain at some conceptual, methodological and theoretical dis-
tance from other forms of social inquiry. Still, I would argue that within
international studies the closest thing to a least common denominator
remains social theory, broadly understood. In his chapter on three dif-
ferent historical attempts at institutionalization along interdisciplinary
lines, Vilho Harle celebrates the efforts of the Frankfurt school in this
regard. He points out that their model, in which the active force of a
core science integrated the efforts of separate disciplines into a coher-
ent theory of the totality, proved to be historically productive. The core
science was social philosophy. It may, particularly in a perspective that
envelops more than Germany, be useful to think of social philosophy
or continental theory as the merging of two core sciences, namely phi-
losophy and sociology. Note that sociology at this point was usually a
shorthand for social inquiry overall. Harle concludes as follows:

This model, however, positively rejects the core role of IR in interna-


tional studies, which in its [i.e. IR’s] stead, calls for a philosophy of
the international or international theory to give purpose and struc-
ture to international studies. (see Chapter 4)

I agree with Harle that, if we are talking in terms of organizational


models (as distinct from political commitments and teleological histo-
riosophies), and if we relax the authoritarian role of the director and the
insistence on a high degree of political and theoretical conformity, then
the Frankfurt school model is very promising indeed. The core idea is to
insert a particular social theory at the heart of interdisciplinary work.
Harle goes on to argue, however, that if international studies broadly
understood are going to head down this path, then it will negate the

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Practices of Interdisciplinarity 261

core role of IR. But that all depends on how IR evolves. My wish would
be that IR fully acknowledge its status as a social science, which means
that the core of IR itself should be social theory. If social theory is at the
core of IR, then IR may be at the core of international studies, and the
problem identified by Harle is dissolved.
The first step in such a direction is to acknowledge that it is social the-
ory as such, and not any one particular type of theory, which forms the
core of IR. Patrick Jackson (2011) has recently published a very useful
book in this regard. He discusses the unity of disunity of IR as a com-
munity of science and celebrates the plurality of ways of doing social
theory. One thing that Jackson’s book can do for us is to highlight how
the fault lines that divide IR will continue to exist within the wider field
of international studies, and for the simple reason that they are common
to social inquiry overall. Jackson reviews the normative debate on how
to delimit science, and he defines science by its goals, not by its meth-
ods or theories. It is systematic, communal and empirical production
of knowledge. Social science is the systematic production of empirical,
factual knowledge about political and social arrangements. Jackson is
sceptical of prescribing more rigorous standards to practicing scholars,
preferring instead to celebrate a broad church and pushing ecumenical
dialogue. In short, he is an ally of those producing this volume.
As to diversity, Jackson finds it first and foremost in philosophical
ontology, that is, in the hook-up to the world that we make in order to
produce knowledge in the first place. The key fissures in overall debates
about science concerns, first, what kind of hook-up the scholar has to
the world. Am I a constitutive part of the world, or do I follow Descartes
in thinking about my mind as radically cut off from the (rest of the)
world? In the former case, I am a mind-world monist. In the latter case,
I am a mind-world dualist. The fissure between monists and dualists
is matched in divisive power by a second one, which turns on a ques-
tion of scientific ontology: namely, what kind of status our theories are
given. Are they transfactual, meaning that they are based on the real
existence of structures that generate observable stuff that we may then
study? Or, are they phenomenalist, meaning that they are based on the
scholar’s experiences (and not rooted in any further claim about some-
thing really existing outside of those experiences)?
Note that Jackson privileges these two fissures at the cost of a number
of other candidates, such as positivist versus interpretivist and qualita-
tive versus quantitative. Such fissures easily degenerate into questions
of methods – techniques for gathering and analyzing bits of data –
questions which are less foundational than the questions of ontology

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262 Iver B. Neumann

and methodology singled out for discussion here. Depending on what


philosophical wagers scholars place regarding the two key fissures,
they place themselves in one of four cells in a two-by-two matrix: neo-
positivism, critical realism, analyticism and reflexivity. Each cell gives
a different answer to the problem with which we have wrestled since
Descartes, namely how to overcome the mind/world split when we
hook our inquiry up with the world. Neo-positivist workhorses find the
answer in falsification. Critical realist ones find it in the best approxi-
mation between determining dispositional properties and the object
under study. Analyticists and reflexivists dissolve Descartes’s problem
by drawing up an ideal–typical analytic or by analyzing themselves and
their own experiences as effects of structures.
The main point here is that the diversity highlighted by Jackson may
be found in all social inquiry and, hence, in all disciplines that concern
themselves with such inquiry. This means that these commitments
are not only divisive in the sense that placing your wager with one of
the four positions will divide you from those placing any one of the
three other wagers. Taken as a set, the commitments are also inclusive,
because everybody must choose among variants of these four options
and so, like participants in a carnival where you have to come dressed as
something from a deck of cards, the universe of choices already makes
you part of a series. A parallel to nation states may be made here: the
matters that have a role to play in constituting them – territory, popu-
lation, central administration, flags, anthems – obviously differ from
one another, but they differ within an already set frame. To use Sartre’s
term, they make up a series. One key factor that hampers interdiscipli-
narity is simply ignorance about the universe of choices that constitute
people as participants in the same undertaking (see also Chapter 3).
If we acknowledge IR as a social science, formed around a commit-
ment to social theory, then international studies will be the wider set of
scholarly activities in which the object remains the same. IR will have
what we may call a meta-cohesion in the sense that the discipline’s
multiform concepts, methods and theories are mutually recognized by
its practitioners, whereas the relationship between IR and international
studies would be marked first and foremost by what Long refers to as
multidisciplinarity (see Chapter 2).
There are a number of interesting developments in this direction. To
mention but one example: as a global society has emerged as an object
of governance, international law has become increasingly interested
in questions regarding state building, regimes, fields and discourses.
One particularly interesting area for further interdisciplinary research

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Practices of Interdisciplinarity 263

is what is now referred to as global administrative law. The basic idea


here is that global politics has reached a level of density where it makes
sense to talk about a number of processes in the language of adminis-
trative law. That language emerged as part of state-building processes,
so here there is a central challenge to IR and its constitutive focus on
state sovereignty and international anarchy. IR is at a disadvantage vis-
à-vis the emerging field of global administrative law, inasmuch as its
remit has no direct bearing on what other agents in global politics do,
whereas legal scholarship is traditionally a science of governance whose
results feed much more directly into that part of social processes that
we refer to as legal. Here we have an example of the consequences of
focusing on the human subject in international studies as discussed by
Aalto (see Chapter 7), and also an example of the importance of power
in many disciplines as discussed by Tuomas Forsberg (see Chapter 8). IR
scholars, beware!

The practice of interdisciplinarity

Aalto’s plea for making the human subject an integral part of the wide
and plural field of interdisciplinary international studies may serve as a
pointer towards the future of international studies overall. It may also
serve as a reminder of how this volume has not taken full advantage of
one resource common to social theory, namely the theorizing of prac-
tice. This book is a useful exercise in that it asks what interdisciplinarity
is and how best to go about it on an abstract level. Most of the par-
ticipants have their own experiences with how to live interdisciplinar-
ity, but we learn little or nothing about all that. I would say that, not
least thanks to this book, the debate about interdisciplinary interna-
tional studies is now ripe for a practice turn (Neumann, 2002; Bauer
and Brighi, 2009; Pouliot, 2010). As Drulák reminds us (see Chapter 9),
such a turn should give proper due to linguistic practices. It is time to
look at the specific practices involved; not only to identify differences
in concepts, methods, theories and so on, but to study what actually
happens when transactions play out between practitioners of different
disciplines or when practitioners of one discipline venture into the ter-
ritory of another. Such work may be based on observation of interac-
tion, or it may be autoethnographic (RIS, 2010).
Let me illustrate what I am talking about by outlining my own tran-
sition from being trained as a political scientist to practicing as an IR
scholar to being trained again as I recently took a second doctorate, this
one in social anthropology. Two themes stand out: my problems with

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264 Iver B. Neumann

a focus on outcome, and the related problem with getting a handle on


the style of presentation needed to present material which is geared to
constitutive practices instead of political outcomes.
It is a regrettable fact that, after ten years of trying to retool from
a political scientist to a social anthropologist, and despite my one-
year exposure to university anthropology at the impressionable age of
twenty, I still cannot let go of my infatuation with the outcome of polit-
ical processes. Actually, I do not even really want to. Strathern (2004,
p. 23) wrote about me when she wrote about ‘knowledge workers’:

The knowledge that is attached to them goes with individuals when


they leave one job for another, moving locations; insofar as their
knowledge was originally created in the company of others, then
it is the community from which they take. It is visible in being left
behind. But in what sense can a person ever leave a previous commu-
nity (so to speak) completely behind? To the extent that knowledge is
embedded in what they do, it will in turn show traces of their train-
ing, occupation and the contexts in which they have used it.

It is not only jobs but academic disciplines and professions as well.


There can be no academic discipline without discipline being practised.
My three degrees in political science and my long years in a think-
tank doing applied, outcome-oriented IR have disciplined me in more
senses than one. The micromechanisms of power whereby I was being
moulded to serve the needs of anthropological knowledge production
clashed with my embodied practices.
I would actually argue that it is the blossoming of political anthropol-
ogy that keeps the classical study of politics alive. If we go to the classics
of political theory, there is a focus on the preconditions for political
order, and there is a focus on how that order is maintained. Many
present-day political scientists and IR scholars seem to have forgotten
about the preconditions. With very few exceptions, they take the exist-
ence of certain institutions, or the need to create them, as the starting
point of the analysis. In terms of doxa, an anthropologist would find it
interesting that donors spent around one billion dollars on the Republic
of Congo’s first-ever election in 2006, and they would concentrate on
how that event reflected and changed social processes overall. A politi-
cal scientist would ask if the election adhered to already established
practices as they have emerged elsewhere, which parties ran, and who
won.1 To put the point differently, anthropologists focus on the consti-
tutive, while political scientists focus on the outcome. Anthropologists

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Practices of Interdisciplinarity 265

tend to define politics as a question of who we are, while political sci-


entists tend to define it as who gets what, when, how. In the terms of
classical political theory, anthropologists focus on the preconditions
for political order, and political scientists focus on how that order is
maintained.
Ian Hacking (2002) problematizes modes of knowledge as what he calls
styles of reasoning. Styles of reasoning are characterized by the objects
which constitute the world to be known, preconditions for making
truth claims and ‘criteria of proof and demonstration’ (Hacking, 2002,
p. 4) – that is by an ontology, an epistemology and a methodology.2 I
would argue that the difference in object of study (constitution versus
outcome) reflects an ontic difference between seeing the social world as
being emergent, as do most anthropologists, and seeing it alternatively
as being structurally given or in terms of methodological individualism
on the other, as do most political scientists.3 This ontic difference is tied
in with how the two disciplines lean towards different epistemological
commitments (in Weberian terms, understanding versus explanation)
as well as towards different methodologies (some variant on the phe-
nomenological themes of intent and reflexivity on the one hand versus
defining the object as a ‘dependent variable’ to be studied by other stuff
that is held to be invariant – independent variables – on the other). I
am talking here about what the (obviously incomplete, pace Strathern)
transition from political science to anthropology has been about for
me, and would schematize as follows (Table 10.1):
If I should identify the major challenge in my transition from polit-
ical science to anthropology, however, it is to do with style, with how
to write up the material. For someone theorizing styles of knowledge
production, Hacking actually gives very little attention to style (see,
instead, Derrida, 1985 [1978]). Writing anthropology is very different

Table 10.1 Ideal-typical styles of reasoning in anthropology and


political science

Anthropology Political Science

Ontology Reality constructed Structure or agents given


Epistemology Constructing Excavating Truth
(understood as)
Methodology Reflexivity Identify means and intent
Data collection Reading and fieldwork Reading and interviews

Source: Neumann, 2011.

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266 Iver B. Neumann

from writing political science. A decade ago, Finn, one of my political


science students, reported that his first political science professor had
written down the following piece of advice on the blackboard for the
initiates to read: ‘Write boringly’. To him, and arguably to political sci-
entists at large, writing should reflect the idea that you are writing from
nowhere, about objectively given stuff. Consider what Ardener (1989,
pp. 213–14) has to say about the change of horizon that characterizes
the ethnographic, field working experience:

There was a time when the relativity of cultural categories was


raised to a philosophical bogey as ‘relativism’. Anthropology then
was discovering a mismatch between the categories of the observer
and those generated by the purported object – other people. When
the differences are more subtle, the gap is narrower between these
two; the mismatch is virtually simultaneous. Since mismatch is our
experience of relativity, then the reduction of ‘transmission time’
(between the observer and the purported object) and the narrow-
ing of the mismatch (between the categories of the observer and the
other), demonstrates that the process that we first called relativiza-
tion is not a form of anti-objectivism, but (as its application to ‘famil-
iar’ experience more clearly shows) is on the contrary our only mode
of objectivization.

This problem simply does not arise for most political scientists, for
whom the object of study is already objectively given. Therefore, there
is no such book title as ‘Writing Political Science’ (but cf., Shapiro,
1988). Here, we also have the reason why political science finds self-
reflection, such as the one I am engaging in now, to be meaningless.
As seen from political science, all the contortions that the situation
identified by Ardener brings to anthropological writing are simply so
many misconceptions that keep anthropologists from getting on with
the job. ‘The job’ is, of course, what political scientists define as their job,
namely objectively to tell the reader what kind of process led to what
outcome. If everything should build up under the conclusion in this
way, and the conclusion should be reached by means of explanation,
then it follows that the writing style itself becomes teleological. This
means that anthropological talk about showing it, not saying it, about
letting the data decide the form of presentation, about being reticent
about passing judgement on statements by interlocutor goes directly
against the grain of political science. Marcus (1998, p. 119) maintains
that the ethnographer

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Practices of Interdisciplinarity 267

tries to get at a form of local knowledge that is about the kind of


difference that is not accessible by working out internal cultural log-
ics. It is about difference that arises from the anxieties of knowing
that one is somehow tied into what is happening elsewhere but, as
noted, without those connections being clear or precisely articulated
through available internal cultural models. In effect, subjects are
participating in discourses that are thoroughly localized but that are
not their own.

There is, in addition, the anxiety identified by Strathern of being


in the grip of a kind of academic reasoning and knowledge produc-
tion about which I felt, and still feel, deeply ambivalent. ‘Despite
their very different values and commitments,’ Marcus (1998, p. 125)
argues further, ‘the ethnographer and his subject in this project are
nevertheless broadly engaged in a pursuit of knowledge with resem-
blances in form and context that they can recognize’. This does
not necessarily hold true for relations between anthropologists and
political scientists. Although the subfield of political anthropology
has blossomed over the last fifty years, interdisciplinarity between
that subfield and political science has, nonetheless, remained very
rudimentary indeed.
Political scientists have largely been uninterested in the precondi-
tions for political community to exist, and anthropologists have largely
been interested in the outcome, in terms of the winning and losing, of
the processes that they study, beyond looking at them as symptoms of
wider social tensions. This difference has spawned two different styles
of writing; one suggestive, another explicit. I can report that if you take
the same material and subject it to these two different ways of seeing
and writing, the result will be two very different products. The text
will hardly pass muster for publication beyond the disciple whose style
of reasoning has been used. Even more damning for interdisciplinary
efforts, practitioners of other disciplines may fail to find something
interesting there whatsoever.

Wrap-up

The devil is, as the saying has it, in the details. This volume suggests a
very useful language for discussing interdisciplinary international stud-
ies and their relations to the discipline of international relations. By
including a number of people from a neighbouring and infinitely older
discipline, namely geographers, it also demonstrates the fruitfulness

9780230_282346_11_ch10.indd 267 6/15/2011 12:22:41 PM


268 Iver B. Neumann

of interdisciplinary approaches in practice. We should now build on


this work and, perhaps taking a leaf from science studies, look at the
everyday obstacles to interdisciplinarity. One way of doing this would
be to turn to one of interdisciplinarity’s many fruits, namely practice
theory.
Let me end with three concrete suggestions for how to proceed: diver-
sification of our reading, increased scholarly cooperation and support
of interdisciplinary journals. It will be noted that I am following Long’s
categorization here, suggesting one multidisciplinary, one transdiscipli-
nary and one neodisciplinary way to proceed.
First, multidisciplinarity: international studies would stand to benefit
from a stronger focus by its practitioners with regard to what is going on
within social theorizing overall. Far too often, patterns of publications
present themselves as a hindrance, in the sense that any one scholar
tends to follow only journals within her core field. The extent to which
she also follows journals in other fields that run articles relevant to
the issues researched, or indeed interdisciplinary journals, seems to be
much more uncertain. To take but two examples, studies in regional
integration often proceed without taking into consideration what the
hundred-year-long tradition of studying integration as a general social
phenomenon has to say. Again, studies in the importance of religion to
international studies tend to begin in medias res, without looking at how
the phenomenon of contacts between religions has been studied, and
continues to be studied, within theology, the history of religion and the
sociology of religion.
A second way of furthering interdisciplinarity would be collaboration
with scholars from other disciplines. Time and again, I am struck with
how discussing with, and, ideally, co-writing with, colleagues from
other fields widens my grip on the subject matter by increasing the
number of concepts, methods and theories at my disposal. The best
should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good; we are not
necessarily talking about full immersion here. Simply increasing the
gray areas of our knowledge, of increasing our side view, as it were, may
prove immensely fruitful.
A third way of going about interdisciplinarity is to found and con-
tribute to interdisciplinary journals. These seem to be proliferating,
with one prominent example for international studies being the aptly
named Cambridge journal, International Theory, which is explicitly
interested in boosting social theory as a common core of international
studies.

9780230_282346_11_ch10.indd 268 6/15/2011 12:22:41 PM


Practices of Interdisciplinarity 269

To sum up, we should turn to the study of interdisciplinary practices,


and we should begin by reflecting and diversifying our own scholarly prac-
tices with a view to furthering interdisciplinary international studies.

Notes
1. To dedifferentiate, my source here is actually the work of a political scien-
tist; see Autesserre (2011).
2. Note that objects to be known here simply means phenomena, and so is
something different than the specific class(es) of phenomena that Long has
in mind when he talks about subject matter (see Chapter 2).
3. Despite its name, methodological individualism is clearly an ontic commit-
ment to treating individuals as given resource maximizers. Note that one
may dedifferentiate the two givens by arguing that an ontic commitment
to a world of given individuals may actually be treated as a structural com-
mitment; if the social world consists of maximizing individuals, then this
would be a structural precondition for any one action.

References
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The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell).
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Bauer, H. and E. Brighi (eds) (2009) Pragmatism in International Relations (London:
Routledge).
Becker, T. and P.R. Trowler (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual
Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University
Press).
Buzan, B. and R. Little (2001) ‘Why International Relations Has Failed as an
Intellectual Project and What to Do about It’, Millennium, 30(1): 19–39.
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Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT
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Hacking, I. (2002) Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Jackson, P.T. (2011) The Conduct of Inquiry in International relations: Philosophy
of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London:
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Leira, H. and I.B. Neumann (2007) ‘Internasjonal politikk i Norge: En disip-
lins fremvekst i første halvdel av 1900-tallet’, Internasjonal politikk, 65(2):
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Marcus, G.E. (1998) Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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270 Iver B. Neumann

Neumann, I.B. (2011) At Home with the Diplomats: The Ethnography of A European
Foreign Ministry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Pouliot, V. (2010) International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia
Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Review of International Studies (RIS) (2010) ‘Forum on Autoethnography and
International Relations’, 36(3): 777–818.
Shapiro, M.J. (1988) The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography,
Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).
Strathern, M. (2004) Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity,
Accountability, and the Flow of Knowledge (Wantage: Sean Kingston).

9780230_282346_11_ch10.indd 270 6/15/2011 12:22:41 PM


Index

9/11, 135–137, 141, 234 Asia, 130, 134, 137, 193


Austria, 242, 247
Aalto, Pami, 24–25, 228, 260, 263
Aberystwyth, 11, 130 Bachrach, P., 213
abject, 195–196 balance of power, 186
aboriginal studies, 39 Baldwin, D., 209, 217
actor, 7, 136, 142, 154, 178, 221 Balkans, 134
administration, 60, 128, 134, Ball, T., 213
137–138, 142 Baratz, M.S., 213
administration and organization, Barnes, B., 212, 223
258 Barnett, M., 221
administrative science, 208 Basra, 136
see also management Baudrillard, J., 114
Adorno, Theodor, 94, 95, 99 Becher, T., 258
aesthetic turn, 233 Beckmann, Max, 233
Afghanistan, 8, 136, 138 belief, 46, 60, 71, 109, 189, 191–192,
Africa, 130, 139, 258 210, 222
Agamben, Giorgio, 114, 195 Bennett, Andrew, 220
agency, 7, 195–196, 215 Bentham, Jeremy, 6
aggression, 185–186, 232, 238–239 Berenskoetter, F., 209
Agnew, J.A., 126, 152, 160 Bigelow, K., 229
Alaska, 130 Bigo, D., 129
America, 108 bio-politics, 195
American Political Science Bismarck, Otto von, 17–18, 186
Association, 13 Boulding, K., 219
Americanism, 142 Bourdieu, P., 219
Anthropocene, 25, 127, 143–145 Brenner, N., 159
anthropology, 4, 20, 23, 27, 36, 40, British Committee on the Theory of
42, 46, 57, 135, 228, 230, 237, International Politics, 101, 105
240, 263–267 British school, 132
anthropological voice, 257 Bull, H., 105
Archer, Margaret, 182 Burke, K., 234
architecture, 54, 163, 228 Burton, J., 181
Ardener, E., 266 Bush, jr, 136–138
area studies, 4, 20–21, 40, 54, 127, Bush, sr, 134
183, 257–259 business studies, 31
Argentina, 133 Butterfield, Herbert, 101, 105
Aristotle, 233 Buzan, B., 25, 56, 58, 106, 139,
Aron, R., 55 191–193, 258
arts, 14, 26, 163, 208, 230, 232–234,
237, 244 calculation, 189, 191, 223
Ashley, R., 224 capitalism, 85, 98, 132, 140, 149–150,
Ashworth, L.M., 56 154–155, 157–158, 193

271

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 271 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


272 Index

Carr, E.H., 102, 105, 130–131, 218 diplomatic studies, 39


cartography, 133, 135, 137 diplomatics, 55
Castells, M., 134 see also foreign policy
Cerny, Philip, 157 disciplinarity
China, 132 antidisciplinarity, 32, 42, 49
classical realism, 81, 113, 185 crossdisciplinarity, 43
climate change, 86, 110, 143, 145 disciplinary imperialism, 43, 45, 49
coercion, 153, 191, 215, 222, 137 disciplining move of IR, 185
Cold War, 18–19, 22, 125, 127, intradisciplinarity, 37, 44, 47,
133–135, 139, 143, 171, 179, 49–50
183, 186, 190, 259 neodisciplinarity, 23, 25, 31, 33,
Collier, A., 213 38–39, 52–60, 66, 93, 111–112,
Collier, P., 48 208, 249, 258–259, 268
colonial government, 13 subdisciplinarity, 13, 16, 18, 20,
community of science, 261 36–37, 54–58, 60, 100
company, 103, 107, 163–164, 170, supradisciplinarity, 32
191, 264 unidisciplinarity, 42
comparative politics, 21, 37, 258 Dix, Otto, 233
computer science, 182 Drulák, Petr, 26, 263
Condillac, 236 Dublin, 164
conduct of foreign relations, 13 Dunne, T., 101
Connolly, W., 211–212, 215–216 Duvall, R., 220–221
constructivism, 4, 8, 81–82, 84–85,
181, 183 earth system science, 143
Copenhagen, 145 East Timor, 134
criminology, 53 ecological predicament, 141
critical economic geography, 46
critical IR, 110, 114 education, 32, 34, 59, 94, 108–109,
critical realism, 4, 262 114–115, 154, 157, 163, 170
critical security studies, 101, 110 Eichengreen, B., 46–48
critical theory, CT, 25, 95–97, 99, EIPE, 25, 192–195
101, 182, 196 emotion, 183, 190
cultural studies, 6, 39, 57, 85, empire, 7, 25, 126–128, 130–131,
87, 194 136–138, 141, 193, 232, 242
Czech, 244 Enders, W., 47
energy, 20, 86
Dahl, R., 212–213 English School, 4, 9, 15, 19, 24–25,
Dalby, S., 25 56, 82, 84, 93, 101, 104, 107,
Davis, James, 220 115,–116, 180, 183, 191–194,
Debrix, F., 233 231
Deleuze, 114 see also international, international
democratic peace, 20, 238 society; rationality,
demography, 40, 54, 228 rationalism; revolutionism;
Descartes, 261–262 world, world society
development studies, 39–40, 48 Enloe, C., 195
Dilthey, 98 environment
diplomacy, 8, 57, 104, 106, 151, environmental and climate change
185–187, 195, 218, 242 studies, 110
diplomatic history, 11, 13, 25, 57, environmental problems, 144
186, 187 environmental studies, 39, 53

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 272 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


Index 273

epistemology, 21, 187, 190, 265 Gandhi, Mohandas, 108


epistemic integration, 20, 249 gender studies, 44–45, 53, 182
epistemological, 8, 43, 75–76, 84, Geneva, 94
87, 180, 185, 189, 192, 194, geography, 4, 11–14, 16, 20, 25,
196, 230, 265 35–36, 46, 54, 115, 126, 128,
Europe, 108, 141, 152, 193, 132–133, 135, 158, 164, 184,
250, 258 208, 217–218
European integration studies, 4 geographer, 48–49, 128, 139–140,
see also integration 150, 152, 258, 267
European studies, 39–40, 54, 257 geology, 257
everyday international political geopolitics, 21, 25, 32, 73, 110, 114,
economy, 25, 192 126–127, 133, 135, 144, 150,
160, 162, 167, 169, 184
falsification, 78, 262 critical geopolitics, 25, 110, 114,
feminism, 26, 53, 180, 194–195 126–127, 133, 184
feminist economies, 44–45 Gerlach, Kurt, 94
see also post-colonialist and Germany, 94, 130, 134, 186,
feminist studies 242–243, 260
Ferguson, N., 133 Gill, S., 155
Finland, 25, 112, 150, 167–172 Gilpin, R., 47
Fischer, F., 232, 241–243 Glassman, J., 154
fission, 257–258 global governance, 7
Fleck, Ludwik, 162 Global Society, 49
Florida, 150, 162–167, 171, 173 governmentality, 25, 153,
foreign policy, 16–18, 31, 56–57, 156, 224
108–109, 137, 179, 183, see also Foucault
185–187, 242 Gramsci, A., 154, 160
see also conduct of foreign Gramscian theory, 155
relations Gramscians, 155
Fornari, 239 Greece, 8, 133
Forsberg, Tuomas, 26, 263 Grossman, D., 94
Foucault, Michel, 4, 19, 114, 221 group dynamics, 14
Foucauldians, 259 Grünberg, Carl, 94, 98
see also governmentality Guattari, 114
Fougner, T., 156 Guzzini, S., 207, 215
Franco, 17
Frankfurt, 94 Habermas, J., 222
Frankfurt school, FS, 24, 93–95, Hacking, Ian, 265
97–98, 100–101, 107, 115–116, hard core, 75–77, 79, 81–82, 86–87,
182, 260 107
French, 221–222 Harle, Vilho, 24, 228, 260–261
Freud, 98, 239 Hartley, K., 48
Friedman, T.L., 164 Hašek, J., 243–246
Fromm, Erich, 94 Hay, C., 151
Fukuyama, F., 182 hegemony, 7, 114, 125, 127, 129,
fusion, 26, 97, 257–258 131–132, 136, 150, 153–156,
158, 162, 173
Galtung, J., 25, 108–109, 111–112, hegemonic stability theory, 192
115 Hermann, M.G., 51
game theory, 136, 190 Herz, John, 18

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 273 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


274 Index

Higgott, R., 132 interhuman society, 191–192


historiography, 8, 11, 16, 230, 237, international
241, 242 international economics, 15, 31,
history 37, 39, 55
historian, 6, 49, 98, 105, 112, 130, international economy, 39
139, 183, 231, 233–234, 241, international history, 9, 15, 37
243, 257 International Institute of
historical materialism, 25, 153, 158 Intellectual Cooperation, 11
historical sociology, 41, 43, 51, international law, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13,
231, 240 15, 17–20, 37, 39–40, 49–50,
historical turn, 231, 233 57, 81, 84, 105–106, 108, 186,
historical writing, 231, 234, 237 228, 260, 262
Hitler, 18 international law and
Hobbes, Thomas, 184 organization, 11
Hobden, S., 45 international organization, 13,
Hobson, J.M., 192 50, 77
Hodgson, G.M., 46 international political economy,
Hoffman, S., 14 4, 25, 45–46, 48–49, 101, 132,
Holsti, K.J., 4, 6 150, 183, 192, 195
Homer, 229 see also everyday international
Horkheimer, M., 94–99, 101 political economy; Marx,
human marxist political economy
human condition, 129, 141–142 international society, 7, 15, 24, 55,
human geography, 182 82, 102–107, 191–192, 196
human nature, 83, 178, 185–186 International Studies Association,
human security, 108, 144, 182 12, 19, 129, 259
human subject, 25–26, 103, International Studies
178–185, 188, 191–197, 263 Quarterly, 12
see also interhuman society; international system, 7, 24–25,
post-human politics 31, 55–56, 81–82, 102–103,
humanitarian intervention, 134 106–107, 126–128, 131–132,
humanity, 103, 108–109, 126–127, 166, 181, 187, 191, 207, 217,
137, 139, 143–144, 182 220, 224, 238
humanities, 8, 25, 32, 53, 67, 69–71, international theory, 56, 83, 102,
77, 85, 100, 112, 180, 187 104–106, 115, 260, 268
Huygens, 236 international trade, 13
interracial relations, 129, 141–142
identity, 16, 21, 44, 53–54, 82, 116, invariance, 109
129, 132, 138, 183, 195, 197, IPE, 4, 9, 20, 23, 25, 45, 47–48, 51,
228, 232, 235, 239 150, 158, 183, 192
Ignatieff, M., 138 see also international, international
imperial history, 136, 138 political economy
India, 141 Iraq, 134, 136, 138, 233
Institute of Social Research, 94 irony, 237, 246
institutional inertia, 137, 142 irrationality, 185
integration, 4, 16, 20, 23, 39, 47, 49, ISA, 12–13, 19, 259
54, 60, 97, 99, 112, 115–116, see also international, International
167, 229, 249, 268 Studies Association
see also Europe, European Israel, 131
integration studies ivory tower model of science, 109

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 274 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


Index 275

Jackson, P., 261–262 linguistics, 23, 208


Jackson, R., 106 Linklater, H., 101
Jay, M., 97 Lipschutz, R.D., 126, 182
Jervis, R., 189–190 Lister, M., 151
Johnson, M., 235 Little, R., 56, 58, 139, 258
Jones, Roy, 104 Locke, J., 236
Jordan, R., 36 London, 94
Journal of Political Economy, 48 London School of Economics, LSE,
journalism, 53 101, 104–105
Jünger, Ernst, 243–244, 246 Long, David, 23, 145, 228, 258–259,
justice, 101, 108, 111, 153 262
Jutila, M., 110 Löwenthal, Leo, 94
Luhmann, N., 223
Kahneman, Daniel, 190 Lukes, S., 213
Kaldor, M., 134 Luxembourg, 132
Kant, 234, 236
Kaplan, Morton, 34, 217 Mackinder, 130
Kashmir, 131 Madrid, 17
Kaul, I., 48 de Man, P., 236
Kelman, Herbert, 108 management, 40, 52, 108, 133–135,
Keohane, R., 21–22, 45 162, 167–169
Kirchheimer, Otto, 94 Mann, M., 219
Kirk, G., 18 Manning, C.A.W., 15–16, 55, 57, 102,
Kissinger, Henry, 18, 186–187 105
Klein, B., 125 Marcus, G.E., 266–267
Klein, J.T., 9, 32–33, 45 Marcuse, Herbert, 94
Korhonen, P., 22 market
Krugman, P., 46 market institution, 192–193
Kuhn, T.S., 24, 68–73, 75, 80, 86 market society, 131
see also normal science; puzzle marketization, 134, 156
Kurdistan, 134 Marx, 98
Marxism, 4, 9, 77, 94
Lakatos, I., 24, 68, 74–81, 86, 107 marxist political economy, 94
see also hard core; negative see also neo-Marxism
heuristics; positive heuristics Mattern, J.B., 207
Lakoff, G., 235 Mazar, 138
Lamborn, A.C., 210 McDermott, R., 190
Lasswell, H., 217 Mearsheimer, John, 135, 207
Laudan, L., 24, 68, 80–81, 84, 87 media studies, 53, 182
Law of Nations, 6 megaregion, 159–160, 165–167, 170
law of war and peace, 228 Merelman, R.M., 49
Lawson, S., 20–22 de Mesquita, Bueno, 190
learning, 5, 34, 50, 52–53, 66, 73, 86, metaphor, 32, 230, 235–237, 242,
88, 170, 183, 188–189 244–246, 248, 250
legal studies, 39, 53 metaphorical expression, 235, 243,
Leibfried, S., 152 248, 250
Lenz, Theodore, 108 methodology, 4, 15, 24, 43, 68, 72,
levels of analysis, 10, 25, 127, 129, 74–77, 87, 94, 262, 265
181–182, 188, 190, 192, 237 metonymy, 237
Liberals, 8, 207, 238 metropolis, 150, 167, 171

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 275 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


276 Index

Mexico, 133, 193 normal science, 68–70, 110


Miliband, R., 153 see also Kuhn
military science, 13 normativity, 109–110, 113, 116
Miller, R., 125 North Korea, 7, 170
misperception, 239 Nye, J., 220
Moisio, Sami, 25, 228
Morgenthau, Hans, 17–18, 21, objectivism, 182, 266
25, 113, 125, 131, 185–187, Ohm, 236
207, 210, 218 Ohmae, Kenichi, 150, 162, 166–167,
Morriss, P., 212, 215 171, 173
Moscow, 94 Ollila, Jorma, 170
movies, 229 Olson, M., 220
Mukařovský, J., 233 Oncken, Herman, 17
multiculturalism, 141 ontology, 21, 180, 185, 187, 191,
multidisciplinarity, 23, 31, 33, 261, 265
38–40, 49, 52–53, 56, 58–59, ontological, 44, 75–76, 84, 87,
73, 76, 93, 106, 112, 118, 224, 103, 126–127, 131–133, 139,
230, 258–259, 262, 268 142, 152, 180, 188, 190,
music, 98, 163, 228, 232, 234 192–193, 196
Myanmar, 170 operational research, 14

Næss, A., 108 Pacific, 130


national pacifism, 13
national interest, 7, 18, 108, Palestine, 131
114–115, 155 Paris, 94
national security, 108, 157, 179 Parsons, T., 220
natural science, 5, 8, 12, 53, 67–70, Patomäki, H., 22
74, 78, 100, 143, 180, 187, 189, peace and conflict studies, 39, 53
191, 208, 235–236 peace research, PR, 4, 13, 23–25,
natural scientific models, 4 84, 93–94, 108–116
negative heuristics, 76, 79, 82, 86, Peck, J., 163
107, 197 Pehkonen, S., 110
neoclassical perception, 222, 243
neoclassical economic philosophy
models, 43 philosophical and linguistic
neoclassical economics, 44, studies, 225
46, 49 philosophy of science, 9, 22, 24,
neoclassical realism, 185 67–68, 84
neo-Gramscian, 155 philosophy or sociology of science,
neoliberal institutionalism, 192 111
neo-liberalism, 4 physics, 53, 77–78, 257
neo-Marxism, 41, 43 Plato, 236
neo-realism, 4, 183, 185 poet, poetry, 233–234, 236
Neumann, F., 94, 101 political
Neumann, I., 26–27, 106, 224 policy studies, 39
neurobiology, 188 political power, 17, 160, 174, 196,
Nietzsche, 17, 114 217, 219
Nobel Peace Institute, 258 political psychology, 4, 23, 25,
norm, 130–131, 134, 182 49–51, 179, 183, 190, 249

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 276 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


Index 277

political – continued Raven, B., 221–222


see also psychology; social, social Realists, 8, 18, 103, 207–208,
and political psychology 231, 238
political theory, 4, 6, 9, 17–18, refugee studies, 39
21–22, 57, 77, 81, 87, 102, regime theory, 192
105–106, 108, 114, 149, 184– regional studies, 14, 39
185, 191, 208, 258, 264–265 Remarque, E.M., 243–245
Pollock, Friedrich, 94 Republic of Congo, 264
Popper, K., 68 resistance, 25, 37, 41, 44–45, 114,
Porter, M., 162, 173 156, 183, 193–194
positive heuristics, 24, 76–77, 79, Review of International Political
83–84, 87, 107, 180, 186, Economy, RIPE, 46, 48, 51, 132
189–190, 192, 197 revolutionism, 106
see also hard core; Lakatos; Richardson, Lewis Fry, 108
negative heuristics Ringmar, E., 231–232
post-colonialist and feminist studies, Robson, William, 34
110 Rome, 137
post-human politics, 182 Rosenau, James, 25, 71, 135,
post-international politics, 10 188–190, 210
postmodernism, 41, 43 see also turbulence
power studies, 208 Rothgeb, J., 210
progress, 70, 74, 77–79, 86, 167, rule, 235, 238, 240
180–181, 189, 229 Russell, B., 215
prospect theory, 25, 183, 190 Russia, 242
see also Kahneman, Tversky see also Soviet Union
psychoanalysis, 77, 239
psychology Sandler, Todd, 47
psychological school, 179, 183, Sarajevo, 242
185, 189–190 Sartre, 262
psychology and sociology of Sassen, S., 129
international relations, 13 satire, 243
see also political, political Scandinavia, 108
psychology; social, social and Schmitt, 114
political psychology scientific revolution, 68, 75
public Scott, A., 166
public health, 39 sculpture, 228
public opinion, 185, 187 Seabrooke, L., 192
puzzle, 5, 24, 68, 70–73, 78–79, Searle, J., 224
85–86, 189, 194 second debate, 8, 183
puzzlement, 24, 68, 71–74, 79, security studies, 39, 101, 110,
86–87 113–114, 135
puzzle-set, 10, 194 see also critical, critical
see also Kuhn security studies
Sending, O.J., 224
rationality, 183, 185, 190, 194, Seoul, 164
222–224 sexuality studies, 39
rational actor model, 136 Singer, David, 181
rational choice, 46, 48, 132 Sklair, L., 155
rationalism, 82, 106, 192, 194 Smith, Adam, 188

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 277 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


278 Index

social Toynbee, Arnold, 105


social and political psychology, 31 transdisciplinarity, 23, 31, 33, 38,
see also political, political 40–53, 59–60, 76, 112, 230,
psychology; psychology 237, 249, 258, 260
social cosmology, 55 transnational actor, 107,
social philosophy, 4, 24, 92, 95, 191–192
97–100, 107–108, 113–115, 260 Trowler,P.R., 258
see also philosophy turbulence, 135, 188
social power, 212, 217, 222–224 see also Rosenau
social psychology, 41, 51, 98, 99, Tuvalu, 132
108, 190, 197, 221 Tversky, Amos, 190
social science explanation, 231
social theory, 4, 23, 26, 84, 98, unit of analysis, 181
101, 182, 257, 260–263, 268 United Kingdom, UK, 13, 40, 56,
sociology 106, 193, 249
sociology of knowledge, 32 United Nations, UN, 103,
sociology of science, 80, 111 131–132
soft power, 207, 220 United States, US, 13–14, 16–17, 56,
Solomon, Benjamin, 181–183 94, 130–131, 135–137, 141,
Somalia, 134 186, 193, 249
Sørensen, G., 149 the universal, 233, 243–244
Sorge, Richard, 94 urban studies, 39, 54
sovereignty, 126, 137, 139, 151, 158, Uruguay, 132
168–169, 174, 263
Soviet Union, 140, 258 de Vattel, Emmerich, 6
see also Russia Väyrynen, T., 110
state transformation, 150, 152–153, Verstehen, 186
155, 160, 167, 169, 173–174 Vietnam, 18
statehood, 25, 85, 151, 159, 167, 172 violence, 20, 93, 108–109, 111, 127,
states-system, 102, 180, 186 131–132, 134, 136–137, 144,
Strange, S., 31, 219 186, 238, 244–245, 248
strategic studies, 4, 26, 39, 125, Vitalis, R., 129, 142
127–128
Strathern, M., 264–265, 267 Wæver, O., 19, 106
subjectivism, 182 Wagner, R., 232
see also human Walker, R.B.J., 21–22, 126, 129, 137,
sublime, 233–234, 250 142
Suez, 136 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 42
Suganami, H., 101 Waltz, K., 103, 106–107, 181, 185,
survival, 17, 170–172, 244 207, 210, 218, 237
synecdoche, 237 Washington, 138
synthesis, 14–15, 46, 82, 230 Watson, A., 105
systems theory, 41 Weber, Max, 17
Weberian terms, 265
theory of international politics, Weil, Felix J., 94
101–102 Wendt, A., 45, 82, 191
Tolstoy, Leo, 233 White, H., 237
totality, 55, 67, 74, 97–101, 113, 115, Wight, M., 56, 102, 104–106
260 Willie Sutton syndrome, 142

9780230_282346_12_ind.indd 278 6/15/2011 12:28:36 PM


Index 279

Wilson, Edward, 14 World War I, 17, 36, 129–130,


Wittfogel, K., 94 142, 233, 242–243
Wittfogel, R., 94 Wright, Q., 13–16, 56, 100, 108,
Wolfers, Arnold, 18 128, 184
women’s studies, 32
world Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, ZfS,
world economy, 95, 164, 183, 193 95, 98
world geography, 13 Zimbabwe, 170
world history, 13, 20 ,225 Zimmern, A., 11–12, 15
world society, 40, 82, 101, 106–107, Zinnes, D.A., 71–72
115, 181, 191 Zürn, M., 152

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