Confronting China
By James H. Anderson and Daniel R. Green
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024

Billed as a guide for practitioners, the pragmatic focus of Confronting China proves both a strength and a weakness. The chapters, authored by knowledgeable and well-credentialed experts, concisely summarize the key policy disputes and challenges related to China in a broad array of topics, ranging from alliance management to cyberspace. However, the book’s focus on the military dimension of the competition proves a weakness. Lacking a clear and compelling explanation of the threat posed by China’s military, recommendations for a massive U.S. military buildup appear unpersuasive and impractical.

The book begins with the fairly uncontroversial observation that “China’s rise as a peer competitor has created an unprecedented threat to the post Second World War international order” (p.1). It cannot be denied that China has become a near-peer, with the second largest economy in the world and diplomatic influence that extends around the world. China’s dissatisfaction with major elements of the U.S.-led international order is also well known. As but one example, in 2016, senior diplomat Fu Ying compared the existing U.S.-led international order and its compatibility with China to an “old suit that no longer fits.”

Yet characterizing China in these terms suggests that the contest will mainly play out in the diplomatic, political, and economic domains. Some of the chapters do recognize the importance of these non-military domains, especially in the sections that review Beijing’s efforts to undermine U.S. alliances and spread Chinese influence in Africa, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

But reflecting a theme of “security,” the book focuses principally on the military dimension of the competition. As the authors point out, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undergone a massive and unsettling buildup over the past few decades. From 2000 to 2016, China’s military budget increased annually by about 10 percent, although this growth subsequently slowed to about 5–7 percent per year. China’s military, as the annual DOD report on Chinese military power has noted, now fields advanced aircraft, missiles, warships, and tanks in numbers that exceed or only slightly lag behind that of the United States.

To what end is China modernizing its forces? Although the book’s authors, following conventional wisdom, assume Beijing’s motivations are aggressive, they overlook other potential economic and political reasons. Chinese leaders generously fund the military in part to cultivate its support, provide patronage, bolster patriotic support, and encourage military contributions to economic development. These economic and political factors explain, in part, the persistent problems of corruption and poor combat readiness that plague the PLA.

Even if we assume that the buildup is driven purely by aggressive impulses, and even if we assume that the buildup eventually results in highly competent, lethal military, it’s not clear how a powerful PLA could help Beijing achieve its goals. The authors repeatedly assert that China’s military buildup is somehow tied to its presumed goal of “global dominance” (p. 103). Yet China’s military is widely regarded as a regional military at best with a limited ability to project power abroad. China has no military allies except maybe North Korea and only one overseas military base (in Djibouti), while the United States has dozens of allies and as many as 750 military bases in 80 countries.

Despite the disparity in global military presence, perhaps China could use its military to challenge America’s primacy in a war of power transition. Andersen’s introductory chapter hints at this possibility, stating that “most great power rivalries ultimately end in bloodshed.” Similarly, Green’s chapter cites books with titles such as The Coming Conflict with China to suggest such a war may loom ahead (p. 25). However, power transition war tends to occur when a rising power threatens to surpass a status quo power. China’s downward trajectory and continued U.S. economic success has made such a transition increasingly unlikely. In 2021, China’s economy reached 76% of the size of the U.S. economy, but three years later, stagnation left China’s economy at 2/3 the size of a thriving U.S. economy.

As prospects for power transition war have receded, some have instead proposed a war motivated by a declining China’s fears about the future. But these predictions have not borne out, as Chinese leaders have shown little interest in belligerence amid a consuming focus on domestic woes. The most popular argument is that China might start a war with Taiwan that escalates into a broader war with the United States, a view advanced by several authors in the book. However, this does not solve the problem of how a powerful PLA helps China achieve its goal of international primacy. A Chinese victory over Taiwan does not guarantee U.S. capitulation any more than Japan’s victory over the United States at Pearl Harbor did. Moreover, war between China and the United States, regardless of how or where it began, carries an enormous risk of escalation to nuclear annihilation, which would render questions of “international primacy” meaningless. Even if the United States decided not to directly intervene in a China-Taiwan war, it is unclear if this would truly end U.S. international leadership. After all, America’s refusal to involve itself directly in combat operations when Russia invaded Ukraine did not fatally undermine U.S. international leadership.

Perhaps, despite these objections, the scale and breadth of the PLA’s modernization demands a U.S. response. If so, what? Here arises a second problem with the book—the impracticality of a proposed massive U.S. military buildup. On page 304, an author calls for floating “$300 billion a year” in bonds to pay for expanded defense production to “dissuade China from breaking the peace.”  Similarly, one author proposes a return to a “two war” force planning construct, which, the author acknowledged, could entail “quantitative and qualitative improvements to U.S. conventional forces,” “more robust force deployments,” and a “greater ability to ‘swing’ forces from one theater of operations to another before and during a conflict” (p. 180). The resource implications of funding such a large military are staggering and raise questions about whether this really is the only or best response.

After all, such a breathtaking ambition faces serious economic and political hurdles. Anxiety about the country’s colossal debt burden has left the American public and Congress skeptical even about current levels of military spending. Severe and intractable problems of political polarization and perpetually low public support for the government have dissuaded U.S. administrations from directly involving American troops in warzones in Europe and the Middle East. Even indirect assistance, through military aid, has proven contentious and difficult to sustain.

China’s challenge to U.S. leadership remains real and imposing, but the military competition does not appear to be the most urgent domain. Future research could perhaps guide policy makers in how to conduct a complex, multi-domain rivalry with China in a manner that accords with the country’s increasingly severe economic constraints and fragile politics. However, that book awaits to be written another day.

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Mark Hurst is a Lecturer in the History of Human Rights at Lancaster University. His research focuses on human rights organisations and activists during the Cold War, and more broadly in the history of human rights, dissent, and political activism, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union. His book British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965–1985 was published in 2017 by Bloomsbury.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates in the discourse around human rights?

I think there are two major issues that are being grappled with. The first relates to the history of human rights. There have been many interventions on the so-called ‘breakthrough’ moment, when human rights transitioned from the political fringes to the centre stage. Shifting perspectives on when this occurred range from the 1940s to the 1970s, and more recently to the 1990s. This changing perspective shapes current understandings of human rights – a powerful notion that often underpins international politics. Being critical of how we understand human rights offers huge potential for understanding the modern world. What is clear in these debates is that the self-evident notion that human rights have a long and entrenched history is anything but stable. In the context of issues such as ‘fake news’, global pandemics and the increasing importance of social media as a news source, understanding where human rights have come from has huge potential to reshape contemporary political discourses. It might seem like a stretch, but our understanding of the history of human rights can reshape the way we see events such as Brexit, the rise of populist governments around the world, and China’s role in international affairs amongst others. In each of these cases, the age-old question of what the relationship between the citizen and the state should be is key. The intervention that human rights have made on this issue in the later twentieth century was dramatic, and understanding where this change came from and the implications it had is likely to help us understand politics for many years to come. 

The second is in the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the influence that often-uncredited actors can have on human rights issues. Whilst scholars are well aware of the impact of soft power and the influence of non-state actors, I think the time is right for exploring these areas in much greater depth. For example, in the case of recent events in Russia, the influence of these non-state actors is hugely significant. The investigations of the poisonings of the Skripals and Alexei Navalny were driven by the journalists at Bellingcat, rather than traditional state actors. Whilst there are clear echoes here of activist campaigns in the Cold War, the extent to which journalists, academics and human rights activists can use tools such as social media to influence the political landscape is utterly fascinating. There has been some excellent work unpicking this space, such as Barbara Keys’ work on the role of the telephone in human rights campaigns and Sarah Snyder’s research on the importance of activist networks in the final years of the Cold War. I think the potential for further work in this space is huge, and again likely to have particular importance in understanding contemporary politics. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

As a contemporary historian I am both blessed and cursed by the way in which shifting international events impact the history that I study. I often feel rather envious of my colleagues working on earlier time periods, as they at least have some stability! In the course of writing my book British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965-1985, my interests in the response to political dissidents in the Soviet Union were shaped by contemporary events such as the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Aleksandr Litvinenko, and the Pussy Riot case. Seeing Madonna perform a concert in Moscow with ‘Free Pussy Riot’ written on her chest has echoes of a previous era, where individuals like the playwright Tom Stoppard and the actor David Markham used their celebrity status to draw attention to human rights issues. In this regard, I have become acutely aware of how contemporary events shape how the past is understood, and how history can help make sense of current events. Seeing this play out in real time has been both worrying and mesmerising in equal measure, and the intertwined nature of past and present (and possibly future too) has really shaped the way I see the importance of history.

In terms of scholars, I have found the work of Samuel Moyn and Barbara Keys to be influential on the way in which I understand human rights in international relations. Challenging unchallenged notions of what rights are and where they come from is doubtless a difficult space, but doing so is essential for understanding the power of human rights. Stephen Hopgood’s provocative work on the ‘endtimes’ of human rights has made me think critically about the political power of ethics, and how it can be used/abused in intentional and unintentional ways.  

Finally, the way in which I understand how we can influence the world around us and make sense of political events has been shaped by the work of the political dissidents that have formed the bedrock of my research for over a decade. Andrei Sakharov’s call for international collaboration in the face of Cold War pressures, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s insistence that we ‘live not by the lie’ have driven my interests in morality, ethics and truth, and the power that these concepts hold. Recognising this power and how it can be utilised remains a key challenge in my research, and I am sure that my understanding of this will continue to evolve. 

What is the utility of history in interpreting current events?

It is all too easy in the face of 24-hour news coverage to get caught up in the here and now. Especially so in international relations, where major events quickly grab media attention and fail to be assessed in any depth before the media bandwagon shifts rapidly on to the next event. Context is essential; international relations is shaped by its past. Contemporary history offers a nuanced and critical lens through which to understand events, drawing on the immediate relevance of international relations, whilst being grounded in the historical context. This approach offers case studies to assess how international relations functions, offering context to diplomatic issues that can often be lost. Whilst this doesn’t offer a perfect model for what should/shouldn’t be done, it does open up the space to engage with what might be effective. 

Taking recent events in Ukraine for example, understanding this solely from what is happening on the ground now misses out the context that explains why things are happening in the way they are. There is a compelling case to be made that recent events in Eastern Europe are a direct echo of the end of the Cold War, where unresolved tensions from the collapse of the Soviet Union have returned to the surface. This can also be clearly seen in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric on the invasion, which is littered with historical references ranging from Peter the Great through to the Nazis. These links are sometimes dismissed in the press, but these references offer an insight into the rationale (no matter how flawed) for the military action taking place. I don’t think these can be effectively understood without a historical perspective, which goes beyond offering the background to recent events. Instead, it grounds our understanding of them, and explains why they are happening. 

Your research focuses on the role of non-state actors, such as NGOs or British trade unions, in human rights debates during the Cold War. Can you tell us how these organisations, often on the political left, came to occupy such an important position in the ideological fight against communism?

The important issue here is motivation. The efforts of a myriad of NGOs and activists concerned with human rights in the Cold War can be seen as a clear campaign against Soviet communism. This, however, comes from a post-Cold War vantage point, where we know the Soviet Union collapses. This, combined with the challenge of identifying the ‘breakthrough’ moment for human rights means that we often read this history backwards, rather than seeing it as it was. Many of the activists working on what we now understand as ‘the fight for human rights’ in the Soviet Union wouldn’t necessarily use the language of human rights to describe their efforts. Many were motivated to do what they thought was right, which often happened to conveniently fit alongside anti-communist, or anti-Soviet narratives of the day. It is also worth noting that these non-state actors came from a broad political church. Trade unionists that were especially active in supporting Soviet human rights issues were often on the right wing of the trade union movement, such as Frank Chapple and the Electrician’s union (the EETPU). That said, the challenges that events such as the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring posed to left wing politics internationally doubtless influenced the struggle against communism. 

In terms of their importance, I think the reason that non-state actors came to be particularly influential in these campaigns is that they filled a political space that state actors could not. In the latter years of the Cold War, state actors had to toe a diplomatic line that their non-state counterparts could ignore. This allowed them to obtain information and expertise on human rights issues that offered them particular influence. This dovetailed with broader changes in politics in Britain, where the NGO and experts became increasingly significant in Westminster. They were, however, still limited by the political ‘desirability’ of their expertise: when human rights were not seen as a significant factor in international relations, these NGOs were largely overlooked. However, following the human rights breakthrough, these groups gained political traction, largely because their efforts went in the same direction as government policy.

So, whilst these non-state actors were very influential in shaping human rights debates, I think we need to be careful in overstating their position. They shaped the nature of these debates, and informed the impetus behind them, but relied on the politics of the day to open up the space for their acceptability. 

Did disputes over human rights significantly impact – or even define – East-West relations during the Cold War, or were human rights seen as detached from a wider geopolitical struggle?

This is a million-dollar question! I’m really interested in the implications of this question for how scholars understand broad periods of historical change. There has been some fascinating work done on the potential of removing the Cold War lens from the history of international relations in the late C20th, and the impact this can have on the way we understand this period. I think the same can be said of the history of human rights. Trying to understand the Cold War without the human right lens is all but impossible given the importance of things like the Helsinki Accords, the campaigns for Soviet dissidents, and the shift to more morally-framed foreign policies from the late 1970s onwards. Stephen Jensen has persuasively argued for the need to look beyond the superpowers in order to effectively understand human rights in the Cold War. However, the challenge in breaking this issue down into manageable areas is the impossible challenge of trying to assess everything in order to make any claims. This is clearly an impossible task, but is the position we end up in if we follow this through to its logical conclusion. Human rights issues undoubtedly impacted and shaped key moments of the Cold War, but at the same time we should keep in mind that they also have their own historical lineage that is both close and apart from international relations in this period. 

I think the way ahead on this issue is to be aware of the overlapping nature of human rights and the Cold War and the impossibility of separating these issues, whilst at the same time being open what divorcing them for the sake of analysis can offer us in understanding this period. I have recently explored this approach in assessing the work of Keston College beyond the Cold War lens. Keston was founded in order to monitor the position of religion in ‘Communist Lands’, something that meant its efforts were clearly linked to those of the Cold War. However, to reduce them to nothing more than Cold Warriors misses the subtleties of the organisation’s motivations, which so often came from places beyond a bipolar reading of international relations. 

Today, in many ways, human rights represent a growing fracture in international politics. They are being denied or even weaponised around the world, notably by figures in the Russian intellectual elite, such as Alexandr Dugin. Does this disagreement, in the context of Russia and the West, have precedent, and what are the implications for epistemological and political stability?

This is a fascinating question that I think helps reveal a lot about both human rights and broader notions of political power. Human rights are, by their very nature, a fluid concept. This makes them especially suited for framing persuasive political narratives – after all, who would disagree with human rights? Herein lies their power, and the reason we should be critical of how we understand them. The challenge is to draw on the important aspects of these concepts, without being lured in uncritically by their promise – something that is incredibly difficult given their inherent flexibility! We are likely to see politicians around the world follow Dugin’s example of using these fluid ideas to push political agendas, with the consequence of further muddying the waters of how human rights are understood. Whether this will lead to political instability is difficult to judge, but I think we have to be conscious that it is not only unpalatable political regimes that use these techniques. 

In terms of historical precedent, I think there are some parallels here with the challenge that the Scientific Revolution posed to religious dogmas. Enlightened thinkers challenged a variety of long-held and unchallengeable concepts of divinity, and were often viciously attacked for doing so. Many of these ideals had much value for individuals, in much the same way that human rights clearly have an important role. This, however, does not mean that we should be uncritical of them. Awareness of the clear benefits of attempts to protect humanity must be balanced against the potential for this pursuit to be distorted for political ends, knowingly or unknowingly. 

What, if anything, can the story of human rights during the Cold War tell us about their future in the twenty-first century? Will this be determined by the actions of nation states, or by non-state actors?

As a historian, I feel duty-bound to be cautious of making predictions for the future! That said, I think the history of human rights in both the Cold War and beyond offers an important insight into how ideals that we hold as sacrosanct can come and go with relative ease. Just because human rights are the current lingua franca of international relations, that does not mean that they will remain in this position. Indeed, efforts from myriad governments around the world to remove human rights acts from the statute books suggests that another ideology may take their place in the near future. Whether this will be in the form of nationalism, totalitarianism or something else is difficult to see. The history of human rights does, however, highlight that seemingly-entrenched ideals are often anything but.

As for the state/non-state question, this again is difficult to judge. In the last century, non-state actors have had significant and increasing influence on politics, and this position is unlikely to fade. However, many governments are also becoming increasingly strident, often pushing political agendas against the advice of experts and the support of public opinion. The future of human rights is likely to be shaped by both state and non-state actors, with the level of influence that both sides have to be determined by broader political developments. Whilst the state will doubtless continue to hold the political reins, non-state actors have shown their abilities in influencing policy during the Cold War and beyond – something that is unlikely to disappear. 

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of history and international relations?

Be curious. Trust your instincts as to why something is interesting, as they are often right.

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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David Campbell is a writer, professor, and communications strategist, currently working as Managing Editor of VII Insider. He is Honorary Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and for more than twenty-five years he taught visual culture, geography, and politics at universities in the USA, Australia, and the UK. David is the author of six books and more than sixty articles, most notably Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (revised edition, 1998) and National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (1998). He has produced visual projects on the Bosnian War, imaging famine, and the visual economy of HIV/AIDS, and collaborates on photographic, multimedia and video projects — all his work can be seen on his website.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

I have a number of fields, as I discussed with Professor Roland Bleiker in a recent video interview. However, if my current, primary, field is understood as being concerned with the relationship between visuality and politics, especially international politics, then I think the most important questions and debates in this space concern the potential impact of images, how audiences consume images, and the effect of images on those audiences. Others will designate different issues as important, and I would not want to argue for the prioritisation of my concerns over all others, but I feel strongly that we have a lot more to know about the consumption and interpretation of images by audiences (and it is vital to stress the plurality of the idea of audiences, as there is no longer – if there ever was – a single, mass audience consuming or engaging media). We have done a lot of work on the production and circulation of images, but most arguments about the meaning and impact of images involve the projection of an analyst’s interpretation of what they could mean onto audiences. There are, of course, some social psychology experiments in this space, and in communications studies there is some audience research, but for critical International Relations scholars there is much more to do to build on those insights and make them relevant for the analysis of images in international politics. In the last year I have started to sketch out some thinking about this (see this online article from May 2021; free registration required) and I am working with friends and colleagues in the University of Queensland’s Research Program on Visual Politics to expand this work (see this online article from March 2022). 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking? 

That’s one large question! I think I would resist some of the question’s framing by saying I have never set out to understand “the world” in the sense of trying to find a single explanation or framework that could grasp a totality called “the world”. Most of all, and thinking well beyond my research agenda, I would say that the older I get the less I understand about contemporary politics generally. Watching events over the last five to ten years I am more often that not left scratching my head at the way epistemic issues of knowledge have been trumped (and, yes, that is in part a pun) by identity issues. If we look at the rise of national populists in European and North American politics (the likes of Johnson, Orbán, Trump and all their acolytes), and we think about the violent nationalism of Putin, and we reflect on how difficult it is for discourses based on evidence and rationality to puncture a point of resistance in these formations, how we can argue and fight for change is very perplexing. 

This is made more difficult by the fact that most contemporary journalism is failing us, not because it is biased, but because it is beholden to outmoded notions of “balance” and “objectivity”. You can’t be balanced and objective about people who deny the climate crisis. You can’t be balanced and objective about people who seek to tear down the core institutions of democracy (independent media, the judiciary, free and fair elections). You can’t be balanced and objective about people who think they can erase another country or another population. We need researchers and journalists who are committed to accurate, verifiable arguments in support of a democratic culture. That work can be done in a lot of ways and in a lot of sites, but all of it needs an explicit and progressive ethos to be worthwhile.

In your book, you argue that the United States’ identity is constituted through foreign policy and through the interpretation of danger posed by others. Why do you think the US stands out in this regard?

Writing Security does not argue the US stands out in this regard – that would be a claim consistent with American exceptionalism, which is one of the things that book seeks to question. The US is an example, albeit an important example, for the argument about the logic of foreign policy (in all its forms) rather than its exemplar. It would have been possible to write about other countries using the theoretical approach in Writing Security. Indeed, the first seeds of that book’s argument are to be found in my undergraduate dissertation where I wrote about the domestic sources of foreign policy in Australia and New Zealand as a way of explaining the differences in nuclear policy of each country. By the time the argument had developed into Writing Security, which was another step beyond what I wrote in my doctoral dissertation, I had gone well beyond the idea of “domestic sources”. But that at least shows it is an argument that exceeds the US itself.

How do you think the United States’ identity has been re-shaped by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?

To be honest, I’ve not really thought about that question, and have not done any research on that issue. I would say, though, that responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are among the drivers that have disturbed me as part of the rise of identity issues over epistemic approaches in the last few years. The politicization of a global public health issue along partisan lines is deeply disturbing and goes well beyond the US. That public health policy in countries like the UK could end up being determined by right-wing backbenchers claiming necessary and temporary restrictions are tantamount to the end of freedom is, to put it mildly, depressing. People have died because of these myopic ideological claims, and yet such deaths have been normalised and those who are responsible face few if any sanctions. The pandemic, though, is impervious to these political currents, and as a global crisis, will be with us for some time to come, largely because of the failure of the Global North to provide the majority world with the ability to vaccinate itself.

In a recent book chapter, you demonstrate how visual framings in the Australian media have served to dehumanise refugees and asylum seekers, and associate them with threats to sovereignty and security. What could be done to overcome this narrative in a state system that is grounded in borders and sovereignty?

This chapter was co-authored with Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison and they deserve the bulk of the credit for an excellent piece. I won’t speak directly for them, but I think a lot could be done to overcome the dehumanising and securitisation narratives vis-à-vis refugees, and what can be done is not in principle constrained by borders and sovereignty. Borders and sovereignty are only ethical limits on hospitality if we draw them in an exclusionary, tight, manner. But it is possible to imagine borders and sovereignty conceived of in a way that allows for a generous and humanitarian response. That happens practically too, as we have witnessed recently with the EU’s openness to those fleeing the war in Ukraine. The fact that Ukrainians could catch a free train to Berlin and be housed quickly with German citizens – without any need for applications or visas – while those trying to get to London were caught up in a tangled web of bureaucratic malevolence, demonstrates perfectly that it is the political choices of governments, rather than the fact of borders and sovereignty, which determines how refugees are treated. 

What do you think prompted the recent ‘visual turn’ in International Relations?

We should be sceptical of all talk of ‘turns’ in academia. Theorising doesn’t follow a singular narrative that turns this way or that way depending on new agendas. Hopefully what is happening is that more and more layers, more and more topics, are being added to the larger research agenda. Nor have people only recently discovered the visual, and neither do we live in a uniquely visual age. Yes, media infrastructures, and the way we produce and consume visual media, has changed significantly in the last 25 years, and we’re only beginning to come to terms with that. Perhaps those changes were the prompt for this so-called turn. 

But the good work that is being done is not turning the whole field. When analytical philosophers spoke of a “linguistic turn” in the 1950s, it wasn’t as though language had previously been unimportant or that everyone was going to adopt their perspectives. It was that there were new approaches to language in philosophy, approaches which many of us are in some way indebted to and still building on. And that is what I hope is being signified by a so-called “visual turn” – new approaches being layered on to others to offer different and hopefully better interpretations of political phenomena. At the same time, layering cannot be just a matter of adding new focal points to the research agenda without regard to competing theoretical assumptions. It is not the case that the more is better. This layering has to be done in a way that is theoretically consistent.

How can photography and academia complement each other in explaining and revealing the realities of international politics?

Photography is a very broad term. There are many photographies. Many of those photographies might use the same technology of visualisation, but they can have very different purposes and effects. Although “art” versus “documentary” can be a hackneyed dichotomy, there is undoubtedly something very different between the landscape photography of an Andreas Gursky or the portrait photography of an Annie Leibovitz, on one hand, and the documentary work of a Sebastião Salgado and the photojournalistic reports of a Lynsey Addario, on the other. Each of these must be judged in relation to their purpose and impact. For me, although there are important cultural issues to be discussed vis-à-vis “art” photography, it is the politics of representation in documentary and journalistic work that is of most interest. This work enacts people and places in powerful ways, and that is what I have spent a couple of decades addressing. But rather than seeing this visual work as distinct from academia, I would like to see scholars taking this visual work as a site for their own investigations, so they can purse the political through the visual. I would also like to see visual practitioners engaged more directly with scholars, and in a small way that is what I am currently doing in my current position as managing editor of VII Insider, an online platform for debate and discussion that is part of The VII Foundation.

In your own work in photography and multimedia, what prompts you to pursue one particular project over another?

It’s not easy to articulate a simple rationale behind all the projects I’ve done, because they are inevitably a combination of desire and opportunity. The video projects The Boarding House and Laygate Storieswere collaborations with long-time friend and documentary photographer Peter Fryer, and were part of a wish on both our parts to produce local stories with many dimensions. On the other hand, Living in the Shadows was a collaboration with photographer Sharron Lovell, whom I also taught with on a multimedia journalism program, which gave me a chance to develop some production skills while telling an explicitly political story, the vast internal migration in China. The more research-based projects – Atrocity, Memory, Photography; Imaging Famine; and The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS – came from moments where my academic and visual interests intersected. Indeed, Atrocity, Memory, Photography and Imaging Famine were seminal moments in my own “visual turn”.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

I spend most of time working outside of the formal institutions of academia, so it would be presumptuous of me to advise those who are starting out on university careers and bearing a heavy burden of administration, teaching, and research. I’m worried this sounds a bit trite, but the only thing I would say to people who want to be scholars is to work hard to keep open a space amongst all the pressures for your passion. What is it that you are most curious about? What puzzles you more than anything else? What do you most want to know? Let’s be honest, you might run the risk of not getting as many grants if that is your starting point for scholarship, but if you can make it work in your career, being motivated by those questions will increase the chances that your life in academia is more fulfilling.

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

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Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute and Harris School of Public Policy, where he co-leads the Development Economics Center and directs the Obama Foundation Scholars program. His work on violence, crime, and poverty has been widely covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, Slate, Vox, and NPR. He is an economist and political scientist who studies violence, crime, and underdevelopment. His most recent book is Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. It draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. 

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates in your field?

The thing that excites me about the study of conflict is that people are moving away from running the same theory-less regressions of “does climate cause conflict” or “does poverty cause conflict,” but now they’re trying to think deeply about what does cause conflict; why normal peaceful bargaining breaks down. They’re trying to design experiments and other kinds of studies that actually test our theories and tell us whether our theories are right. The best work in Economics on conflict is the work that is merging with Political Science and vice-versa.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Ten or fifteen years ago I was asked to study a program in rural Liberia that was looking at land disputes between ethnic groups, religious groups, even just between households. 1 in 5 people had a pretty major land dispute, and something like a third of those were turning violent. Most of those were a punch on a nose or trampling crops, but sometimes the machetes came out and the village was a bloodbath. The program was just what we would call Alternative Dispute Resolution, which is a way of getting people to understand their biases when they’re trying to settle their disputes and share information through mediation with better negotiation tactics. This sort of seemed like a micro-conflict story, but as I worked on this I realized that everything that was going on—all the reasons they were fighting and that this intervention might work—were the same stories that I learned in class as a Political Science and Economics student on why we fight. On the international level we would learn about information asymmetries, commitment problems, psychological and behavioral biases, and irrationality. What was so powerful to me was realizing that these things operating at the international level were dictating conflict at the local level. For me that was a very career changing and mind changing moment. 

Your most recent work, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and Paths to Peace, starts by discussing the premise that we don’t fight. How are we able to avoid conflict?

I started with the basic premise of saying that we don’t fight, which sounds like a weird thing to say in the middle of another great power war. But two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan, and calm ensued. War is just so ruinous that it’s almost impossible for either country to contemplate. Most of the time we don’t fight because war is so costly—that’s true for ethnic groups, villages, civil wars, and countries. The reason we fight is that our societies or our leaders ignored those costs of war, or were willing to pay them for some reason.

When are these high costs of conflict ignored?

In some sense, there’s a reason for every war, and a war for every reason. What I try to point out in my book is that there are basically only five logics that cover most of the ground. The first one is pretty elementary, and says that an awful lot of leaders in our society are not accountable (either personalized dictators or an elite cabal), so they’re not accountable to most of the costs and can safely ignore them. At the very least, these leaders are too quick to use violence. If they think that their chances of staying in power are enhanced by war, they have a private incentive. The second reason is intangibles, or ideological, incentives (i.e., we know there’s a cost of violence but we’re willing to pay it). Every story you hear about a leader pursuing personal glory and a place in history, that is a story about a leader who knows the costs but is willing to pay it for some intangible gain. The third is when we underestimate the costs or overestimate the benefits of war, or we overestimate our chances of victory. The great political scientist, Bob Jervis, called these misperceptions. 

The last two reasons will be familiar to anyone, as people often call these the rationalist causes of war: the role of uncertainty (or asymmetric information), and commitment problems. War in this uncertain world is always a gamble, you could make an honest miscalculation. We can’t always believe our opponents’ signals because they might be bluffing. For anyone who’s ever played poker, this is obvious. Your opponent might be bluffing, you can’t see their cards. So it’s never the optimal strategy to always fold or always call. The final of these five, commitment problems, helps explain an awful lot of long wars in history. It’s the idea that we simply can’t trust our opponents to stick to any deal that we make, that they typically have some incentive in the future to renege. We end up having what some call a preventative war. There’s an old Iraqi saying that says, “If your enemy’s going to eat you for dinner, you better eat them for lunch.” I didn’t know it to be true until I was going through the book, but every conflict we might discuss –whether it’s World War II or a village in Liberia—is usually one or more of these reasons in disguise.  

Why We Fight opens by explaining how unlikely armed conflict is, even among enemies. Is this trend constant over time, or has it changed?

It’s debated. Steven Pinker and Ian Morris have made the claim of the world getting safer over time. For interpersonal violence, that’s absolutely true. And I’m not talking about interpersonal violence in this book. Have international wars, civil wars, and ethnic conflict become fewer in number? Not necessarily. I’d say there’s a slight downward trend, but the people who have done the hard statistical work have shown that it’s not quite as resolute as that. Perhaps, at best, what has happened is that war has become costly enough that for the most part conflict remains common, but because they’re so costly they remain relatively less deadly than before. On the international stage, with the advent of more and more powerful weapons, that’s a pretty serious deterrent to conflict. What more powerful weapons mean is that war might break out less frequently, but when it does the violence is more intense. So I think that’s a more complicated story than whether it’s declining over time. 

Does increasing the costs of conflict (through things like sanctions) decrease the chances of conflict, or will leaders ignore those costs? 

On balance, they’re a real deterrent. I think we should think of these like speed bumps. If you live on a busy street and cars go whizzing by, you put on a speed bump. You tell your kid to look both ways, but you’re a little worried that your kid will pay a little less attention and get hit as a result. We can’t treat sanctions as a surefire result, but I think they deter a lot of bad leaders from doing bad things, whether it’s acquiring weapons of mass destruction or performing genocide. But the reason we don’t know that for sure is because we don’t really observe all the successes, we only observe the failures. We see when Saddam Hussein commits some terrible act despite the promise of sanctions, we see when Putin invades Ukraine despite the threat and implementation of sanctions. But we don’t see, however, the 12 things maybe Putin decided not to do over the last 20 years because he was worried about sanctions. This makes it really hard to determine if they’re effective in the ways that social scientists would like to know.  

What sort of lessons do you hope readers will take from your book?

I want people to think of conflict resolution a little like medicine. Imagine if a doctor only ever saw terminally ill patients and never knew that there were patients who were healthy. They would be rotten at diagnosis and even worse at treatment. I think that’s a mistake we make. They think that World War I or the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the product of misinformed leaders making a mistake. There’s some truth to that, but usually there’s some sort of deeper roots: unchecked leaders, ideological incentives, commitment problems, etc. that make us perceptible to these conflicts. If we get the diagnosis right, the treatment is rolling back one of the five causes of conflict. 

What are some of the most common misconceptions about conflict that you have uncovered during your research?

One of the biggest misconceptions is that poverty causes conflict. It goes back to the idea that war is ruinous and we’re fighting over a pie. We can either divide it up based on our chances of winning it, or we fight over it, destroy a share, and flip a coin to decide who gets it. It’s almost always better to take the pie that is undamaged. Whether that pie is big because we’re rich or small because we’re poor, war is still costly. It’s always better to divide that pie peacefully. Poverty wasn’t even a first or maybe even a second order driver of why we choose to fight. It does a lot of other terrible things, but I think we can say that it doesn’t make it more likely to send us to civil or international war, and I think that’s one of the biggest misperceptions in the field.  

Where do you see the fields of economics and political science crossing over the most? Do you feel the importance of these overlaps is changing?

I see two things. One is the intersection, and one is that political scientists are getting back to their core competencies. Political science students are far more methodologically inclined than they ever were before. I think the quality of work has just skyrocketed. Economists have moved in the same direction. You no longer have this totally false belief that students held, that you had to run a regression or have an experiment to get a job. It wasn’t true, it was never true, and I’m happy to say it’s still not true. So you have students going back and pursuing political science in the way that many political scientists have changed our minds—with great books. I think this has been a terrific advance in both fields.  

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

You want to decide what kind of scholar you want to be. Do you want to be at the forefront of quantitative social science? Do you want to be at the forefront of theory? Choose that, but make sure you get a degree of mastery in other areas through your graduate training and people on your committee, because you are going to need to be able to understand and critically evaluate and collaborate with the people who are doing this other kind of work. Specialize, but don’t specialize too much. 

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Manu Bhagavan is a specialist on modern India, focusing on the twentieth-century late colonial and post-colonial periods, with particular interests in human rights, inter/nationalism, and questions of sovereignty. He is currently Professor of History, Human Rights, and Public Policy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center-The City University of New York, and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Manu is the author or (co-)editor of seven books, including the critically acclaimed The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (HarperCollins India/Palgrave Macmillan) and a collection on India and the Cold War (Penguin India, UNC Press). He appears frequently in the media to comment on current affairs and was featured in a 2019 comedy roast of the US President as part of the satirical program Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. He is currently completing a biography of Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, a pioneering diplomat who was one of the most celebrated women of the 20th century. Follow him at @ManuBhagavan.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I’m a historian of 20^th c. India, with broad interests in human rights, diplomatic history and international affairs, and inter/nationalist thought. Generally speaking, I am struck by the wave of new research on India’s engagement with the world. This engagement was in terms of trade, migration, and networks, as well as in terms of colonial and intercolonial spaces. But there was also a concerted effort to think constructively and coherently about foreign policy. And many Indians played important roles in the creation and functioning of key international organizations. What we are finding is that India, and places like it, have made many important contributions to international thought and have not simply stood at the edge of some imagined periphery. This work broadly I find very exciting, but perhaps most so because it is being led by a group of amazingly talented younger scholars, who bring with them fresh perspectives and a needed fearlessness to challenge old dogmas. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Though I’m a historian, I’m going to field this question from a contemporary angle. I think I had grown overly comfortable with the idea that rights, once given, were difficult to take away, especially if there were norms and institutions that created a broad base of support for the underlying values. Intellectually, I understood erosion in fact to have occurred historically. Yet I think I lulled myself into believing the narrative of the stability of the post-World War II order.The systems associated with that may have been far from perfect, but they did allow for change. This, however, could take place only incrementally and with wide support. For those of us eager for a better tomorrow, this slow pace could seem disheartening.

Several years ago, in reflecting on what had made the mid-forties so ripe for institution building, I settled on the notion that it was a brief “utopian moment,” when there was broad consensus on the need to move things in a new direction that would, at least generally, prevent the large-scale catastrophes of the preceding era. I recall a conversation with a distinguished senior colleague at that time in which we considered this idea of possibility, and of moments in which such possibilities could be made real. The international order, for all that it provided, remained far too unequal, unfair, and unjust. So we thought about the nature of change and how it might come about. My sense then was that it took great peril to allow for the kind of dramatic change the world had seen after two previous global wars. This was a disappointing conclusion not only because it meant, at the time, that faster change was not possible, but also because of the fear of what rapid change would also imply.

Over the last seven years or so, this fear has been made real, as global problems involving corporatism, climate, disease, and conflict have eroded popular faith in democracy and led to the return of illiberal strongmen ready to wash away much of what has stood for 75 years. We are now in fact in a moment of possibility. We are also once again in one of great peril. 

To what extent have former colonies in the Global South succeeded in adopting a decolonized outlook in the way they deal with the rest of the World, especially the West?

This is a very broad but excellent question! With the caveat that specific answers will vary from country to country obviously, I think the general issue here is what we mean by “decolonial.” If by this, we mean “assertive, independent, and free to make their own choices,” then I think there is certainly an interest in doing this throughout the Global South. But if the term is also meant to imply “anti-imperial,” then I think the issue gets more sticky. While many countries of the Global South, including large ones like India, may rhetorically push back against Great Power imposition, especially from the West, the question remains how committed they are to resisting intricate forms of control, such as that exerted by powerful multinational corporations or by military alliances. Additionally, countries of the Global South that think strictly in terms of “national interest” may not be willing or able to effectively coordinate amongst themselves to ward off subtle predatory actors. And perhaps most importantly, are countries of the Global South willing to restrain themselves from thinking and acting imperially, especially in their own neighborhoods?

Domestically—that is in internal, sovereign spaces—“decolonial” might also be taken as a rejection of all non-indigenous things altogether. This is an extreme reading of the concept that can lead to an abandonment of cosmopolitanism and a hunt for an artificial past of purity, with dangerous consequences. Gandhi, as I’ve written about, expressly rejected any such interpretation of decolonization. What he wanted to target was the imbalance of power and its application. (Of course, he also warned about the oppressive elements of modernity itself as well, where other anti-colonial peers like Nehru took an opposing view, but that’s another story...). 

Do you think interconnected ‘global’ histories, shared triumphs and humiliations, can help formerly colonized nations to achieve greater cooperation amongst themselves?

We have “connected histories,” it is true. But these very histories are also filled with racial and caste injustice, with colonial exploitation, and with gender inequality. It is not sufficient just to recognize this and move on. We must reckon with the past, and redress what is necessary, before we can truly productively move forward. Otherwise, the past will always exert its grip on us and pull us backwards. 

There is a battle over the past being waged today. Reactionary forces seek to shield themselves from any self-reflection and to reassert the very old order that produced so much harm. The careful study of the past, where we allow it to disturb us, is very much a threat to this project. That is why we are seeing a resurgence of book banning, attacks on educators, and curricular restrictions. What is at stake is the Truth itself. And a future where we all belong. 

In your book, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World, you highlight ‘lead actors’ who not only shaped Indian foreign policy but helped build organizations like the United Nations. After the ‘fall’ of the Nehruvian consensus, how would you typify the makers of Indian foreign policy, and what is their ‘worldmaking’ project, if any? 

After Nehru’s death, the Indian establishment largely committed to a policy of what I have called muscular moralism, ready to preach to anyone within earshot, whether they were willing to listen or not. This approach, pioneered under Indira Gandhi, remained in place, for the most part, until very recently. India spoke platitudes without either an overarching strategic vision or a moral compass. So, although its foreign service was exceptionally talented, it simply was unable to operate in any kind of coherent manner. 

It remains difficult to see what exactly is India’s plan for the world, and its place in it. Today’s establishment speaks about multilateral and bilateral relations and certainly operates from a position of growing confidence. Its commitment to seeing problems from India’s locality and not from that of Europe or the United States or anywhere else, and to take each crisis on its own terms, is in a sense a certain kind of continuity with Nehruvian nonalignment. 

Yet nonalignment 1.o was something specific to the context of the Cold War, a mechanism to avoid the blocs of a bipolar world, to cool tensions, and to minimize the threat of nuclear annihilation. It was also a means to an end, that being a more united, federalized planet. As talk emerges of a new Cold War, or of a revived old one, involving countries like China, Russia, and the United States, nonalignment 2.0 certainly seems tactically relevant. But to what end? 

In the Indian context, how far has the rise of illiberalism (complementing the rise of Hindu Nationalism) affected the way India approaches the World?

In international fora, on the diplomatic circuit, India talks the language of liberalism, of rights, institutions, and a rules-based order. It also consistently calls for change in global systems, to distribute power more democratically. It is, in this sense, a good global citizen. Yet there appears to be a growing disconnect between India’s official external stances, its stated values, and its growing defensiveness of any kind of criticism of internal matters. At one level, this is understandable, since the most powerful countries of the world have essentially done this very thing for decades, criticizing others while remaining impervious to any kind of effort to reflect the gaze back on themselves. 

Impenetrable domestic sovereignty historically was used to defend imperial practice and racist policies. Liberalism in this sense has been rife with contradictions and open to charges of hypocrisy. But India previously saw these inconsistencies as opportunity, driving a wedge between the professed and the practiced and holding everyone to a higher standard.  

In today’s fork in the road, India has clearly decided that the liberal order of old, stubbornly clinging onto such inconsistencies, must be retired. Now it must choose whether to abandon liberal values altogether, as strongmen from Hungary and Turkey to Russia and Brazil have chosen to do. Or whether it wants to recommit to a reimagined, pluralistic truer postliberal order. The former appears the easier. The latter requires leadership. 

With the rise of populist and authoritarian leaders around the globe, there has been a protectionist inward-looking approach to some foreign policy. Within this context, is ‘internationalism’ still a viable approach? 

There have always been many forms of internationalism, and many of them have existed dialogically with nationalism. So it is, in this sense, not at all surprising that many on today’s far right, even as they cast aspersion on “globalists,” are actively coordinating with one another, an international League of Nationalists, as some have called it. The solutions of this tinfoil crew—closed borders, majoritarian politics, homogenized societies with patriarchal hierarchies, and a robber baron economy—are no solutions all, and each will only create a cascade of new troubles. We are already facing massive problems on a global scale, the existential climate crisis paramount among them. Ultimately, we will have to come together, while recognizing and celebrating our differences, if we are to meet the challenges we face. Internationalism of the liberal or progressive variety then is not by any means to be given up on. On the contrary, it remains our only hope. 

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

I think students should master their chosen disciplines but then should push relentlessly at disciplinary boundaries, learning about the tools and methods of others as well. I’ve had numerous IR students express an interest in working with archives, for instance. Young scholars should not be afraid to experiment or to make mistakes. In fact, it is only through this that new knowledge can truly be generated. Unique points of view can creatively approach thorny old problems and help to untangle them. My message in short is that we are waiting for you!

*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Inderpal Grewal is Professor Emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Anthropology at Yale University. She is one of the founders of the field of transnational feminist studies, and known for her prolific work on transnational feminism, cultural theory, feminist theory, and her extensive research of post-colonialism, South Asian cultural studies, mobility and modernity, nongovernmental organizations, human rights, and law and citizenship. Grewal has served on the Editorial and Advisory Boards of core journals in the field of feminist cultural studies, including Women's Studies Quarterly and Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Meridians: feminisms, race, transnationalism. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Her recent publications include “Theories of Discrimination: Transnational Feminism,” in Handbook of Discrimination and Affirmative Action, (edited by Ashiwini Deshpande) and “GBV and Postcolonial India: Transnational Media, Hindutva, and Muslim Racializations”, in The Cunning of Gender (edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, Nadera Kevorkian and Rema Hammani.

Where do you see the most exciting debates/research happening in your field?

In Gender Studies, some of the most exciting debates are happening in Trans Studies, even though a great deal of this work concerns the US. A second area would be work on politics, policy and power, particularly understanding how politics of gender and sexuality impact the state as well as so much of social life (political parties and their gender/sexuality policies, for example). Relations between humans and non-humans and the sustainability of the planet is a very important and complex debate: for instance, there are feminists on both sides of the debate on how much population size matter in questions of sustainability. In the US context, the impact of Black feminism and analysis of the gendered aspects of racial capitalism have been crucial. In the context of India, there are debates about neoliberalism and capitalism in the making of ongoing gendered inequalities, with greater focus on caste, but with more regional emphasis than before (so for instance, distinguishing how gender operates in different regions). Also ongoing is the work on sexuality, as well as sexual violence.

Finally, and also of huge importance, is how security and securitization often seem to come before welfare and development, not just in India, but also in so many other spaces; this research includes how security is itself a gendered construct to be understood in the context of the rise of neoliberalism globally. And such a project is also transnational, not just in the use of security technologies around the world, but also in how questions of gender and sexuality, the “protection” of the family etc. are mobilized in connected ways around the world to enable the acceptance of these technologies and surveillance systems.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I began my career trying to understand the cultures of British imperialism, especially focusing on how travel was central to empire—many of us argued that instead of the common belief that travel broadens the mind, we found the travel entrenched cultural beliefs that supported imperial projects. Over time I became interested in how diasporas were often where nationalisms were generated and where becoming a diasporic subject – or citizen – meant accepting and deploying ideas of nationalism, for example, being “American.” I researched how ideas of what it meant to be American were circulating globally and those ideas were part of how people related to the US (perhaps wanting to migrate, seek asylum, become trading parter or investor or viewing the US as the imperial hegemon), even as they also saw themselves as citizens of other nations and drew on other nationalisms as part of their identities. In that project, I tried to understand American imperialism as making global –or transnational—subjects, even if people were not living diasporic lives in the US. That interest in American empire led me to the next project on the specific sort of nationalism that is produced in America, which is generally called “American exceptionalism.” I was interested in how different groups of people also saw themselves as “exceptional” by participating in two forms of power that are visible in the US in the new century: of being humanitarians (seeing themselves as generous white or multicultural samaritans) and participating in surveillance (creating family and kinship relations by surveillance --for example using phones to monitor the movements of their family or friends). You can see that my interests were very much trying to understand how subjects became part of imperial cultures, how cultural ideas supporting imperial ventures often became powerful and influential (i.e., hegemonic). This area of research has been very important to postcolonial studies and cultural studies.

What changed over time was that my sense that postcolonial research was often entrenching national boundaries rather than showing how boundaries are constructed or porous or contentious, and that such research (often created by diasporic scholars) left out the history of migration or mobility that often enabled that scholarship. In sum, over time I found postcolonial research needed to address the questions of diasporas, geopolitics, and the constructedness of not just the nation, but also territoriality—all the issues that we now understand as transnational issues. Now I research the issue of mobility, of people, ideas, goods, and militaries, but with attention to gendered inequalities that are produced through mobility. What remained in my work is the postcolonial focus on studying nationalism, though I would argue that that nationalism must be understood as a transnational project.

One of the main justifications behind America’s presence in Afghanistan was to ‘protect’ women. How can a gendered understanding of contemporary imperialism explain the treatment of a woman’s body as the site of masculinist competition?

So much of imperialism and nationalism is made powerful by using women’s bodies- and bodies of LGBTQ people (in places such as Uganda or the US) in order to generate fear or desire. There is a huge body of research on this topic, from the questions of sexual assault and the military, to the example you give of the Bush administration justifying the bombing of Afghanistan in order to “save” Afghan women. It is axiomatic that war does not ever “protect,” it always and consistently destroys lives (though it invigorates some economic ventures –such as the defense industries, or war profiteering). And so much nationalism is simply about controlling women in the name of protection; nationalisms do not say, for instance, that all rape must be prevented, but they just say that only rapes by the Other must be criminalized. In the case of the US in Afghanistan, after many years and many billions spent, it ended up making deals with the Taliban and now has left so many Afghan women in a dire situation. The US is now dragging its feet in giving asylum to many women who helped the US in Afghanistan and who are now suffering under the new regime.  

In what way can love transgress the boundaries of the nation-state and produce a transnational resistance to its forms of control?

I would say that what love shows is how so many boundaries, of the state, caste, religion, region, sexuality and gender are obstacles to people’s everyday lives and to their wellbeing. The violence used to maintain those boundaries are visible most through opposition to love – and how nationalisms often include such violent policing. But contradictorily, love can also support fascism, because the leader exhorts the people to love him (its generally a him, though not always). Thus, love is a double-edged sword too. Spaces of encounter (for instance, diasporas) can be places where different groups of people come into contact in new ways and generate new relationships – often in political solidarity, but sometimes supporting nationalisms from afar. However, so many transnational alliances, coalitions, and solidarities, can also produce a variety of forms of resistance. For instance, though there are a few groups in the Sikh diaspora in North America advocating for Khalistan, there are also groups that are more concerned with addressing human rights violations that took place in the 1980’s and 1990’s because there has been so little justice for those victims of state violence.

You have explained the scope of your theory of transnational feminism as extending beyond borders, identities and definitions. What would you say its limits are?

Like most theories, transnational feminism emerged as a corrective to feminisms that were nationalist, nation-bound or imperialist. Transnationalism in general shows how boundaries (of many kinds, but mostly the nation) are constructed, porous and contentious, as I’ve said above. There is so much that transnational feminist research can do if it is applied to our thinking of so many entities and events. It helps us understand international political movements and how and why they spread across borders and boundaries. Recently, I have become interested in how social movement activists use transnational media for very specific and local ends; I am interested in whether, for instance, the agitation by Indian women wrestlers against sexual assault within Indian wrestling, which has been covered internationally, benefits by this transnational attention.

Transnational feminisms limits are that it is not concerned with internal migration or what we might see as internal issues so that it has not been taken up by scholars living in India for instance, but more by scholars working on India who live outside it. So, for instance, Dalit scholars working on Dalit diasporas find the concepts useful, but not so much those who have to struggle within the country. It is so necessary, however, to understand how concepts such as race and caste are connected, or why Dalit Panthers came about, the influence of Maoist ideas on political movements (the history of the Indian government blocking Dalit activists’ struggle to see caste in terms of racial justice is one important aspect that IR researchers could take up). However, transnational feminist analysis was a way to challenge the hegemonic national framework that is so taken for granted. But we always remember that the nation-state is also a product of European imperialism and is always struggling to remain independent and intact, even as its borders are in jeopardy (this is not just visible in South Asia but also in parts of Africa).

Another limitation is that with transnational feminism research focus centered on nations and nationalisms, other sorts of geographical concepts – oceanic networks or transregional or regional research – is not within its framework. However, I see transnational feminist research as essential to research projects, both historically, and for the contemporary world centered on nation-states as products of European imperialism, and for understanding geopolitics.

How has the emerging field of critical caste studies contributed to existing discourses on intersectional feminism?

So much good work and debates on this issue are now coming out. There are many researchers arguing for using the concept for caste; there is a new anthology on Intersectionalism just published by Routledge. It’s become a powerful way to think about caste in a new way, though I think feminist researchers in India do have a history of paying attention to caste and gender together, even if they did not call it “intersectional.” However, there is also interest in how caste is transnational – be it because of Dalit migration and remittances, or how historically various groups were selected for indenture by the British, or how Partition, for instance, entrenched caste inequalities.

How do intersections of caste, race, region and language unsettle the universality of first-world feminism?

I think rather than thinking about universality, I find the notion of “pluriversality” more interesting. This idea comes from scholars of Latin America (Arturo Escobar, Marisol De La Cadena) This concept suggest that diverse groups of people have their own notions of what is universal, that what we exist is in a radical relationality between all beings. Escobar and De La Cadena center indigenous cosmologies as leaders in this type of thinking. What this means that we need to research alternatives to prevailing notions of what humans seek, and alternatives to the whole set of ideas from European and American colonial projects and Developmentalist modernization programs which are leading to global climate disasters. So, I think also feminism needs to engage with a pluriversal politics – one in which a belief in a radical relationality between humans and non-humans can be foregrounded so that we think of all inhabitants (not just human) of the planet and which engages with the world outside of capitalist modernity. How to make such a feminism is the most important task before us.

In Saving the Security State, you argue that “neoliberalism militarizes everyday life while producing the “exceptional citizens””. Who are these “exceptional citizens”? Do they always conform to the stipulations of the security state, or do you note instances of dissent from this?

This book was focused on the US empire. I have been interested in how empires create cultures that support the imperial project, and so my concept of “saving the security state” was a way to ask how different groups of people who see themselves as Americans (and Indian Americans are certainly part of that group) act in ways that uphold US power. I argued that some believe that humanitarianism is an American trait, even as so many researchers believe that so many humanitarian projects do not succeed even in their stated goals, and that such projects are a way to leave unquestioned American capitalism and imperialism. A second way in which many groups uphold the empire is by not questioning the massive surveillance apparatus that upholds the racism, policing, and militarism that pervades everyday life. So “exceptional citizens” are subjects of the US empire and its belief in being an “exceptional” nation. I think however, that every nation believes it is exceptional in some way or other and that it is different from other nations – or citizens of other nations. This project of exceptionalism prevents transnational solidarities and collaborations and is central to nationalisms.

In what manner do sites of resistance to patriarchal oppression transform to sites of emancipation? What is the relationship between the two?

Oppression and emancipation are both such massive projects, even if they are so radically different. We also have to think pluriversally and transnationally about the power of transgression, unsettling, upheavals, strikes, gheraos, shutdowns, bandhs – all of which seem more the way that social change also takes place in particular times and places. Historical shifts, changes all are continually taking place, if we are able to look in the right places and if those can be harnessed to progressive rather than regressive or revanchist projects. Struggle against sexual violence can take place in so many different ways in the ways I mention above. But embracing the cause of the so-called violation is so important, and both feminist and LGBTQ research have shown us that just as much as we condemn the violence, we also value that which is struggling to change oppressive conditions. Those struggles happen all the time and continually, in small and large ways, in streets and offices and houses and neighborhoods and parks. Those cannot be stopped.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

Don’t be hampered in your thinking and theorizing and acting by social or disciplinary norms – but understand historically how those norms came about. Those norms belong to the past, and so often they come from a different time and from different contexts that are helpful to understand. Overall, doing careful research remains such a huge contribution so that it is important to combine that critical eye for disciplinary boundaries with research methods that make sense to the communities you serve.

*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Christoph Vogel is a researcher, investigator and writer with over 15 years of experience in analysing politics and conflict across Central Africa. He is a co-founder of Ebuteli, a Congolese research institute on politics, governance and violence, and runs suluhu.org, a platform promoting researchers from the Global South. Most recently, he served as Research Director of the Insecure Livelihoods Series, a collaborative project between Institut Supérieur Pédagogique Bukavu, DR Congo and Ghent University, Belgium. Christoph is the author of numerous newspaper articles, analytical reports and scholarly publications, including the book Conflict Minerals Inc. (Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2022) based on his award-winning dissertation at the University of Zurich. A former UN Security Council expert on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Christoph has worked for a wide range of academic and other organizations such as New York University, London School of Economics, Cologne University, Rift Valley Institute, World Bank, the United Nations, ICRC and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

That’s a tough one to start with, as there are probably as many debates as there are conflicts across the globe. One of the themes that I find fascinating is to understand the multiple motivations and aspirations that participants in conflicts have – whether combatants, elites or civilians. The study of conflict is by definition a complex endeavour, and it is hard – sometimes outright dangerous – to do rigorous research in situations of violence and insecurity. To a certain extent, this has promoted a lot of remote research as well as a tendency to conduct investigations based on our assumptions rather than actual empirical data and authentic voices from the ground. Bearing in mind these challenges of access and reliability, I consider current debates on mixed methods for the sake of triangulation as well as the use of novel methodologies – such as GIS to complement ethnographic insights – highly salient.

Another aspect, somewhat linked to that but going beyond specific conflicts, concerns the broader epistemologies that guide research on conflicts and violence. Here, we often observe the persistence of fixed narratives and frameworks that can leave little space for grounded analysis. Working with both researchers that call a conflict zone their home as well as with active current and former participants of conflict, including the adoption of their own emic concepts has therefore become a recurrent focus that helps me to balance my own positionality, as well as dominant paradigms in mainstream research.

Finally, a lot of my curiosity goes into understanding the political character of conflict. We now know that most if not all conflicts in the world are rooted in a certain degree of contestation, grievances and political visions of conflict protagonists – even if they can trigger massive violence or proverbial war economies. This, in reverse, creates a challenge whereby we must make sure to explain the multiple drivers and logics of any conflict we study without succumbing to pars pro toto or crude generalization.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

When I began studying conflict in the late 2000s, somewhere half-way through my studies, the global academic community interested in conflicts and violence still depended by and large on paradigms set by classic political science, international relations and certain strands of economics. Usually white, male authors such as Collier, Rotberg, Fukuyama to name but a few, and their grand catch-all theories and studies had a disproportional impact on how students would approach any particular case study. Yet, almost none of them has any significant empirical experience on situations of protracted crisis and violence. Voices from the ground and dissenting theories used to have little space in syllabi and public discourse. While that remains the case until today, there is a slow but gradual opening towards more interdisciplinary and collaborative research. In my case, studying a bit of an eclectic mix between political science, area studies, geography, sociology and anthropology, as well as my initially accidental and later on more consistent engagement on the ground in different conflict zones – not just as a researcher but also as a humanitarian and UN worker – has provided a much necessary widening of my own scope and toolbox to approach and understand confusing and contradictory observations.

Yet, looking at the world from a longue durée perspective, some of the broader global changes appear rather minor. The dominant post-Cold War view in conflict studies centred much on globalisation as a key shaping force on how inter-state and intra-state conflicts evolve. However, if we look at the intercontinental entanglements in trade, politics and culture that have existed for so many centuries and even prior to what is seen as the age of colonialism and imperialism, globalisation is anything but a late twentieth century phenomenon. One thing though, that certainly changes the world rather quickly, and the ways in which we look at it, is the technological revolutions that frame late-modern capitalism in the early twenty-first century. Not only do we have an entirely different set of tools to follow on salient and less publicised world events by the minute, this type of progress also increasingly defines the conduct of warfare and the ways in which narratives are made and diffused – not only in so-called high-technology wars such as the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan but also in the so-called small wars like in eastern Congo, the Central African Republic or South Sudan often wrongly considered peripheral.

How does your interdisciplinary approach, combining political anthropology, critical geography, and conflict studies, shape your understanding of conflicts and political dynamics in the Central African region?

I am very convinced in general that disciplinary boundaries help to structure the evolution of specific theoretical schools and specific frames of thought at best. There is certainly some merit in having a range of social science disciplines to make sense of the world – including on politics and conflict in particular regions – from different angles. Yet, and Central Africa is a stark example for that, any deeper understanding of social dynamics requires combining different perspectives. The conflict in eastern Congo, for instance, has been dragging on for some three decades now. By now it has become another kind of “Thirty Years War” even if it is in reality an assemblage of multiple crises and conflicts, some framed by recurrent dynamics and others rooted in specific, situated logics.

Despite wide recognition of the complexity – a word often used as an empty shell rather than an analytical category – a lot of academic and journalistic writing on eastern Congo remains guided by tired clichés and mono-causal explanations, whether due to laziness, parsimonious editors or the need to appeal to audiences with little patience for conflicting and paradoxical explanations. Two classic themes are the ideas that violence in eastern Congo is either driven by ethnic hatred or by greed. To be fair, this is not 100% plain wrong: the larger conundrum of eastern Congo’s violence includes the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and its consequences across the border, as much as instances of pillage.

However, reading genocide as purely driven by deadly hate against the Other means to underestimate the political project, the planning of the genocide and the factors enabling it – notably, international complacency. In a similar vein, seeing pillage as an isolated and unique objective of conflict fails to explain why economic accumulation has only featured prominently in certain moments throughout the 30 years of larger and smaller wars. Needless to say, the imagery of mindless greed and hatred also reconfirms broader racial, colonial stereotypes assigned to Congo’s wars from foreign observers, while international corporations, governments and consumers benefit most from Congo’s riches.

In your recent book Conflict Minerals, Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo, you explain the negative impact of the Western campaign against ‘unethical’ mining on the eastern Congo’s political economy and stability. Could you briefly explain which nuances and specificities of conflict in the eastern Congo the Western campaign failed to recognise?

In driving the idea that Congo’s conflicts are driven by minerals only, international campaigners are mistaken in several ways. First and perhaps most easily, the most important mining business in Congo is copper and cobalt in the southeastern part of the country, which has barely been affected by armed groups. Artisanal mining in the conflict-affected Kivu and Ituri provinces represents an important livelihood to communities as well as traders and smugglers but remains one among many sources of revenue for conflict actors. Secondly, eastern Congo’s conflict began years before coltan or other minerals became an issue, suggesting that other root causes stood at the beginning: notably these are the politics of land and identity, the breakdown of Zaire, the geopolitics of the Great Lakes, but also the long trajectory of political manipulation and dispossession since colonial times or before.

But campaigners were not only factually wrong in how they described the Congolese conflicts. There was an intended push to break down what they saw as a messy, complicated story into something that is easy to grasp, and literally tangible through the direct link between the “digital minerals” of Congo and the smartphones of all and sundry in Europe and North America. This single story was convenient not only for PR reasons, but also for its neat link to how Central Africa has historically been constructed in global public imageries, alluding to a type of weak, permeable underbelly of global extraction that is both backwards and in need of civilisation but also savage and dangerous. This framing placed campaigners and policymakers into a text-book White Saviour role, justifying new forms of regulation aimed at cutting the link between violence and global supply chains. Yet, while this failed to recognize that violence is inherent to mining and supply chain capitalism anywhere, it was useful to implement new models of extraction and trade, forcing local producers into monopoly without addressing much of the persisting dynamics of smuggling, violence and armed mobilisation.

How have miners in the eastern Congo themselves responded to try and mitigate the disruption and structural violence fostered by Western policies?

Wherever there are top-down policies being implemented in contentious situations or on contested issues, there are uneven, surprising trickle-down effects. Anthropologists like Sally Falk Moore or Anna Tsing have written extensively on how this plays out in political, social and economic matters. The case of artisanal mining communities in eastern Congo is not very different. Miners and other stakeholders, such as local traders, have responded with a wide array of coping mechanisms and creative escapism. There was a lot of adherence by lip-service, as Western policies have tried hard to co-opt the very networks dominating mineral extraction. As local mineral markets found themselves hostages of a new supply chain management, many miners and traders have employed some sort of “forum-shopping”, by which they pragmatically find avenues to work both inside and outside the regulatory framework.

Conflict actors, in turn, have become more ingenious in camouflaging illicit activities or turn to other opportunities to make ends meet. Taxation, preferably through roadblocks and checkpoints, as Peer Schouten demonstrates in a wonderful recent book, has long been and remains the most versatile way of financing rebellion and armed conflict. Tragically, this also shows that the fight against conflict minerals has actually less affected those apparently targeted, but rather led to the dispossession of civilian populations. If in some cases this has even prompted ex-combatant miners to return to arms, it has generally weakened mining communities who have fewer alternative livelihoods.

Do you think the failure of the campaign against ‘unethical’ mining will serve as a lesson learned for the international community, or do the drivers of such mistakes, like White Saviourism and colonial frames, remain too entrenched?

Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of hope for lasting, substantial change. Colonial mindsets are a very human thing that goes far beyond racial inequality and broader international frames of Othering. They are stubborn relational logics that can exist between any groups of peoples at any level. White Saviourism as a particular form of colonial thought is as hard to tackle. It took nearly ten years of annual OECD conferences for many stakeholders to understand that not only such frames are misleading and reproduce structural violence but also that the use of ethical arguments to justify massive intervention into a complex minefield of regulatory and politico-economic questions has somewhat backfired as a whitewashing of broader inequalities that have little to do with the actual conflicts in eastern Congo.

Moreover, despite growing evidence that conflict minerals are not the main cause of violence and displacement in these conflicts, renewed crises such as the return of the M23 rebellion since late 2021 are now again framed by a new generation of journalists, analysts and policymakers as resource-driven – even though this rebellion does not control any mining sites. At the same time, Western governments and the global public remain selectively attentive to Congo’s conflicts. Portly long-term engagements such as the UN peacekeeping mission in the region or the billion-dollar aid industry are kept on course as much as possible, while the less costly but more complicated and draining political engagement suffers from a lack of attention and competing geopolitical interests by key players of the international community. Coupled with Congo’s own governance problems, this creates a powerful and stubborn form of inertia through which violence fragments but continues in essence.

How do you overcome the challenges of conducting research in conflict zones?

It’s hard to do a good job in listing and explaining the entire set of challenges that comes with doing research on and in conflict zones, but perhaps a couple of points can contribute to the multiple ongoing debates around the ethics, politics, and logistics of it. Personally, after some 15 years trying to understand conflicts in eastern Congo and beyond, a big risk is to remain stuck in déjà-vu and a slowly petrifying attitude towards seemingly replicating and repeating phenomena. There is no silver bullet to avoid that but trying to remain scientifically and also personally engaged with the evolving dynamics of conflict zones – notably by regular and sustained presence – seems crucial to keep questioning oneself as well as simplistic framings by others. Yet, this comes with ethical challenges: what is my, or our, role in conflict zones far away from one’s home, what about whiteness, masculinities and other positionalities? How do we interact and collaborate with the people we talk to and work with? Again, there is no silver bullet, but there is no alternative to at least pushing these reflections and debates and remaining open to new and possibly contradicting viewpoints.

Then, of course, on a more practical level, there are questions of access, safety and legality. Many conflict parties are increasingly framed as terrorist groups by governments fighting them, so engaging raises legal concerns. The global marketplace of political analysis raises serious questions as to whether research on conflict serves the cause of knowledge and peacebuilding, or rather partisan interests of governments. Similar to humanitarian action, academics face growing pressures of partiality that can restrain access to all sides of a conflict and the capacity to generate objective results. Finally, one’s own safety and that of others participating in research is perhaps the most basic challenge. While I have seen cases in which a lack of caution or a deliberately daring approach have led to nefarious consequences, I am still lucky and grateful to not have encountered any major issues immediately relating to my presence or action. Nonetheless, without looking for it, there have been cases where colleagues and I got caught in crossfire and similar dangers. Needless to say that any arrogant and irresponsible approach is rather useless for analysis – there is no situation in which one can conduct a calm conversation on important matters when bullets fly. Hence, while it would only benefit propaganda and Orientalist thought if researchers scrapped any intimate engagement with conflict zones, the very first thing in any project or trip remains to carefully discuss feasibility and safety.

You also lead suluhu.org, a platform for open-access publishing, decolonial consulting and current affairs analysis. What motivated you to start this platform and what are its main objectives and goals?

This platform has somewhat organically emerged from an erstwhile blog that I mostly ran between 2008 and 2015. Back then, there was little nitty-gritty and day-to-day analysis beyond the international mainstream media, and writing about current events did not only contribute to a narrow space of conversation with Congolese and international colleagues, but also helped me understand things better and ask questions I would not otherwise have asked. Many of today’s online media in Congo and its neighbouring countries did not yet exist and social media still largely had a blind spot when it comes to the region. At some point, my own regular blogging began leaving me in want of reading more of what others think. Together with friends from a local internet radio that had just emerged a few years earlier in Goma, we set up a blogging project called Amani Itakuya – “peace will come”. In two series, 50 different contributors – from youth activists and fellow researchers to artists and even ambassadors – chose their respective angle to write about. No strings attached except some link to questions of peace and conflict. From trauma and arts to business and legal questions, authors were diverse and covered an even more diverse set of issues that mattered to them.

After that, it became somewhat an automatism that researchers and activists from the region would regularly pitch ideas, allowing me to train how to edit and to keep the platform alive as I lacked time to blog due to hunting my doctoral degree and stints in jobs where I could not regularly blog. Other than that, the platform also benefitted from a number of collaborative projects, such as on mapping armed groups or open letters on the conflict minerals issue. Finally, the glaring absence of young Congolese colleagues in international academic journals led Ben Radley and I to set up a kind of modest and makeshift open-access, online journal. Although we were probably a bit optimistic as to the workload and vision, there are as of now 8 Suluhu Working Papers that have gone through a self-organized, barrierless process of publication, and are cited by other works. In parallel, a small Great Lakes-heavy crowd has conducted a couple of research consultancies under the banner of suluhu.org and under a clear framework of equal pay and equally distributed influence and participation in both data collection and research as well as drafting and recommendations. Currently, alas, the platform lies a bit fallow owing to reasons as mundane as the cycle of life, with families taking over more of our time and dedication, but the objectives and ideas around suluhu.org remain issues that keep echoing elsewhere.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of conflict studies?

There are many ‘old’ scholars that may consider me a ‘young’ one, so I should try to be not professorial. It is really important to be hungry without eating others. Hungry in the sense of never be satisfied with the knowledge one can have, and always look for new things and understand old things better – but not at the expense of others. This is not about polite-seeming altruism, it is respect and a portion of egoism. Respect your colleagues, especially those called “assistants”, publish with them. Epistemic erasure is now finally a topic, but barely a decade ago this was not the case. A comprehensive approach to collaboration – from data collection to final paper – is not only a way to recognize and respect the hard work of others, it makes for better research and contributes a substantial part to one’s own intellectual development. The shoulders on which you stand don’t always immediately appear as giant.

Also, take every-day and laypeople concepts seriously. Embracing what may sometimes seem little scientific at first sight is not only an invitation to understand things outside one’s own analytical frames, it is also useful to control existing theoretical ideas by juxtaposing emic perspectives. Also, even if it is often recommended not to be emotionally attached, try to develop a reasonably passionate relationship with the places and people important to your work, but regularly check yourself (and have yourself checked by peers) so as to not develop partisan or extremist views. And finally, conflicts are deeply political. Good research on conflict ideally is apolitical with regards to partisan differences, but this does not mean it should not be political about values and rights of anyone affected by violence. Some of this is very bad advice, because it is virtually impossible to fully apply it, but it has helped me to remind myself of it whenever I can, and to keep trying.

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Steven Feldstein is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program where he focuses on issues of technology and democracy, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy. Previously, he was the holder of the Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs and an Associate Professor at Boise State University. He served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the democracy, human rights, and labor bureau in the U.S. Department of State as an appointee under President Obama, where he had responsibility for Africa policy, international labor affairs, and international religious freedom. He also served as the Director of policy at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously worked as counsel on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations under Chairmen Joseph Biden and John Kerry.

Feldstein is the author of The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2021). He has published research on how artificial intelligence is reshaping repression, the geopolitics of technology, China’s role in advancing digital authoritarianism, and the changing patterns of internet shutdowns. He also released a global AI surveillance index to track the proliferation of advanced big data tools used by governments. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Berkeley Law.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I think the war in Ukraine has ushered in new debates about the role and use of technology in conflict and geopolitics. Given how much the internet can assist citizens in avoiding hostilities or locating life-saving services – from access to water to medical and health necessities – there are growing questions about whether protecting citizen access to information should be protected under international law. I’m also struck by how much emerging technologies, such as the Starlink satellite internet device or even crypto currencies – are playing important functions in helping Ukrainian citizens push back against Russian aggression. My hunch is that this is just the beginning of further innovations regarding digital technology and war.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

One of the biggest insights coming out of my research for my book is that we have to be careful about not being overly deterministic about the impact of technology. Technology is a tool – neither good nor bad (nor neutral) – that is wielded by actors on the ground with specific motives and incentives. In my field research, the most important factors dictating whether regimes would adopt digital repression techniques was the presence of underlying political repression or authoritarianism. As a general rule, bad governments will seek to do bad things with whatever instruments they can get ahold of. 

What is digital repression and how is it achieved?

In my book, I define digital repression as “the use of information and communications technology to surveil, coerce, or manipulate individuals or groups in order to deter specific activities or beliefs that challenge the state.” Digital repression comprises five broad categories of techniques: surveillance, censorship, social manipulation and disinformation, internet shutdowns, and the targeted persecution of online users. These five techniques are not mutually exclusive, in many circumstances they overlap. However, each category also relies on a unique set of tools to perform its objectives, which is why they’ve been grouped separately.

In your recent book, The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance, you examine case studies of digital repression around the globe. Can you give us specifics on a few interesting examples? 

In the book, I include specific chapters looking at digital repression instances in Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia. Each of these case-studies offers a unique set of insights to better understand the trajectory of digital repression. In Thailand, the government deploy digital repression strategies to advance its political agenda; its context offers insights into how an autocratic state with a tradition of censorship has adapted to the digital era. The Thai government combines information controls with traditional repression, providing the state with potent capabilities to manage dissent. Thailand also demonstrates how digital repression is born from and develops out of internal factors – external actors, whether the United States or China, only have limited influence in shaping the state’s strategies. For the Philippines, I examine how former president Rodrigo Duterte implemented a unique strategy of social manipulation and disinformation to advance his agenda. The chapter looks at democratic backsliding in the Philippines, explores the meaning of Duterte’s political ascent, and investigates principal drivers of digital repression in the country – particularly the complicated relationship between internet platforms like Facebook and the spread of illiberal speech in the country. My third case study looks at Ethiopia, a country that continues to be roiled by civil war. I look at the government’s internet shutdown strategy, growing levels of social manipulation and disinformation, as well as surveillance and censorship concerns. Chinese companies have a considerable presence in Ethiopia, and I also consider to what extent Chinese officials have enabled repression in the country.

In a 2020 blog post, you mention that most of China’s digital repression lies in advanced surveillance, both domestically and abroad. Has this strategy continued? How does it compare to the strategies of other autocratic states? 

China deploys a range of tools when it comes to advancing digital repression tactics in other countries. Its companies are world leaders when it comes to exporting surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition (which allow countries like Uganda or Serbia to track and monitor opposition candidates). Chinese companies are also very active in selling censorship tools (offering everything from cyberspace management to internet firewall technology to countries such as Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and Tanzania).

Additionally, you write that digital repression is occurring in predominantly autocratic countries. With democracy declining around the world, do you expect to see digital repression occurring more frequently in democracies as well?

To be clear, digital repression is taking place in both authoritarian and democratic countries. But there is a much higher prevalence of digital repression occurring in authoritarian states. The likelihood that an authoritarian country like Saudi Arabia will rely on digital repression strategies versus a democracy like Ghana is significantly higher. The growing tide of authoritarianism unfortunately seems to suggest that a many more non-democratic regimes will rely on digital tools to support their autocratic objectives in the coming years.

What are the potential consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in relation to government use of technology, both within Russia and outside of it?

As I mentioned above, Russia’s invasion has put a spotlight on the importance of tech to geopolitics. Russia already demonstrated concerning digital trends prior to the war with a crackdown on independent press, pressure on digital platforms to take down anti-Kremlin content, and implementation of surveillance and censorship restrictions. The war has accelerated these patterns, virtually closing off Russian citizens from independent media sources and forcing out external platforms in favor of Russian ones (such as Yandex, VK) that the Kremlin can control. The future is dismal when it comes to the ability of Russian citizens to access independent voices and to get a clearer picture of the devastation Putin has wrought on the country.

Is there a relationship between economic turmoil and the use of digital repression by states?

There certainly can be. For many autocratic countries, part of the “bargain” made with elites is that in exchange for political control, the government will promote economic growth or at least promise to stay out of economic affairs. Thailand is a good example of how this has played out – the government consistently deploys censorship strategies to choke off citizen access to information so it can maintain its power, but it also is sensitive to outside perspectives that could damage its economic model. As a result, it will refrain from carrying out certain digital repression strategies if the business community feels this will jeopardize outside investment (relates to the idea of the “dictator’s digital dilemma” described in my book). 

What strategies, if any, can individual citizens use to oppose autocratic regimes attempting to digitally repress their rights?

It depends on the regime and the context, but there are lots of strategies civil society organizations can pursue. One important idea is for groups to link with outside actors and facilitate international pressure on regimes that are violating digital rights. This could mean pressing the United States and other democracies to implement sanctions or to issue public statements criticizing repressive governments. Another idea is for groups to experiment with innovation and adaptation when faced with digital repression, In my book, I profile how Ethiopian opposition groups were forced to adapt to internet shutdowns by using physical networks and other means to transmit information about government abuses. Ultimately, they successfully pressured the government in power and precipitated a shift in leadership.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

One of the best experiences I had was working overseas for one year in Rwanda as part of the Princeton in Africa program. Getting real-world experience outside of the United States and grappling up close with major dilemmas regarding post-conflict justice, reconciliation, and war, was a transformative experience for me. Princeton in Africa (where I currently serve as a board member) and other programs like it (such as the Peace Corps) are still up and running and are worthy of strong consideration for students who seek to become future IR professionals. 

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Daniel McDowell is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a 2021-22 Wilson Center China Fellow. His work focuses on the international politics of money and finance, with a focus on the role of the United States and China in these arenas. His first book, Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? The United States, the IMF, and the International Lender of Last Resort was published in 2017. His second book, Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 

Where do you see the most exciting research and debates happening in your field?

I am most drawn to work being done at the nexus of security and international political economy. Those two IR subfields sort of diverged at the end of the Cold War. There have of course been people like Dan Drezner, Carla Norrlöf, Paul Poast, and others who continued working in that overlapping area, but overall, I think it was neglected. I think we are now in an exciting place where walls of separation are breaking down. 

Though it is not the only piece of work that illustrates this shift, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s International Security paper and broader research program on “Weaponized Interdependence” is a splendid example of the changing landscape. Their work reframed how we should think about economic globalization. Markets cannot escape today’s geopolitical realities like intensifying strategic competition between the US and China and the return of existential security concerns to the European continent. Fifteen years ago, most of our theories on trade, finance, and investment reduced matters to domestic political battles between interest groups with competing policy preferences. There was a much smaller role for international politics in those models. And, when international politics did enter the picture, matters of security were rarely centre stage. It is not that those models were necessarily wrong, rather they were reflective of a different moment in time when strategic and security matters objectively mattered less in the forming of foreign economic policy. But the world is changing, and so the questions we ask and the models we build need to adapt, and that is what is happening—and that makes this an especially interesting time to be doing work in IPE.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I started my PhD work in 2006 and finished it in 2012. The Global Financial Crisis erupted right in the middle of that formative period of my intellectual life. It completely reoriented my interests and shaped the research questions I began to work on. The crisis shined a light on the centrality of the US financial system, the dollar, and the Federal Reserve in the world economy. These were now undeniable and unavoidable facts that I had to deal with, even though they were not topics I entered graduate school to study. Ultimately the crisis led directly to my first book.

Homing in on issues of international currencies and finance early in my career required me to address questions of power and US-China competition sooner than I would have had I decided to study trade or other topics in IPE. So, while the answer may seem a bit simplistic, the financial crisis had a more significant impact on my interests and thinking than anything else I can think of.

What are the political risks that sanctioning regimes can have on the global status of the US dollar? What steps should the US be taking to maintain its economic status and international political influence?

This question is the subject of my second book Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar. The book's premise is that the more the United States uses dollar dominance as a coercive tool of foreign policy, the more that political risk concerns enter the thinking of sanctioned governments or those that fear they may be sanctioned in the future. Despite the dollar’s overwhelming economic appeal, sanctions can tarnish the dollar’s shine as an international currency due to political concerns, and those political risk considerations can push states to introduce what I call “anti-dollar policies.” As the name implies, these steps seek to reduce an economy’s reliance on the dollar as an investment and cross-border payments currency. In the book, I show that sanctions are linked to the introduction of anti-dollar policies. In some cases, sanctions correlate with actual de-dollarization, where economies successfully reduce their reliance on the dollar. 

The book is clear that this is not a story about the dollar losing its status as the top international currency. There is no evidence to suggest that sanctions are going to bring about a transition at the top of the global currency hierarchy, though they may shape it at the margins. What is on the table, however, is the future effectiveness of US financial sanctions as a coercive tool. As more states' efforts to circumvent the dollar system and greater coordination among anti-dollar states emerge, the United States will find it more difficult to impose the economic costs it has grown used to inflicting at the stroke of the president’s pen.

I am not arguing that the United States should cease using financial sanctions. What is the point of preserving a weapon if the only way to maintain it is to not use it? Rather, I want to suggest that US policymakers can be more circumspect in their decision to use dollar dominance as a weapon. For example, they need not reach for financial sanctions every time there is democratic backsliding in a country over here or a human rights violation in a country over there. There are other tools in the toolkit that can be used to respond to events like those that do not require politicizing the dollar system. The goal ought to be to preserve the potency of financial sanctions for those events that pose the gravest threats to the interests of the United States and its allies and the stability of the post-war order.

In the context of competition between international currencies, what is the role of Central Banks in supporting hegemonic efforts by governments? 

At the most basic economic level, central banks issuing international currencies (or issuing currencies that aspire to achieve international status) need to focus on what I call the “two Cs”: first, to cultivate market confidence in the currency’s stable value over time and, second, to help develop and sustain market systems that enhance the convenience of using the currency for cross-border activities.

On the issue of convenience, here is where China scores particularly poorly. Beijing’s financial policies limit the usefulness of the renminbi. Relative to the dollar or other major currencies like the euro, yen, and pound sterling, it is quite an inconvenient currency in which to invest and transact. The People’s Bank of China is working on ways to improve this by, for instance, creating the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) which in time could enhance the convenience of international renminbi-based transactions. But at the moment, the system still has an exceptionally long way to go.

Beyond the “two Cs”, how central banks respond to crises can shape attitudes toward their currencies. For example, the Federal Reserve has stepped in to function as the world economy’s international lender of last resort twice in the last 15 years, first in 2008-9 and then again in the spring of 2020 when markets crashed as the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic were sinking in. These moves have enhanced the dollar’s international appeal by assuring foreign banks, businesses, and governments that the Fed is standing by to stabilize global dollar funding markets when they seize up.

What is the future for the international status of other currencies like the Euro and the Renminbi? Can global recovery and growth benefit from competition between currencies?

Presently, the euro and the renminbi are both facing some challenges. The euro has fallen to parity with the dollar for the first time in decades as concerns about energy and security abound following Putin’s war in Ukraine. China’s economy continues to struggle under Covid Zero, and Xi’s economic policies have hurt foreign investor interest in Chinese assets. The dollar looks quite good, by comparison. But currencies go through periods of strength and weakness, and these conditions are bound to change. I expect that the renminbi’s international role will continue to rise slowly in the coming decade, but I would not expect it to compete with the euro for second place, let alone the dollar, in any of the major roles (reserves, trade settlement, FX markets).

The Europeans have recently called for greater “strategic autonomy” from the US, including the dollar, which led to some of the most ambitious talks about the euro in years. And yet the war in Ukraine has only drawn Europe and the United States closer together. Strategic autonomy seems a long way off. I expect the euro to continue playing a secondary role to the dollar but not lose its hold on the number two spot.

Certainly, greater competition between currencies can generate economic benefits. Intra-eurozone trade is more efficient because settlement relies on the common currency, not a third-party currency like the dollar. China could benefit from greater use of the renminbi in trade settlement, as it would better insulate its firms from FX risk and provide business opportunities for Chinese banks.

How do you interpret relations between US and China in terms of international trade and finance? What effects does their competition have on the global economy and growth?

Trade relations between the world’s two biggest economies remain at a 21st century low. The Biden Administration has not prioritized US-China trade and so the two powers basically remain fixed in the same trade Cold War that began in 2018. The future is bleak as the US and China are increasingly head-to-head competing for global export market share in high-tech manufacturing. Trade in services is also fraught due to privacy and security concerns surrounding personal user data. It is not a pretty picture.

In finance, competition is less pronounced. Chinese financial markets are big, but they remain very closed relative to the US. China’s currency is still a bit player. China is concerned about US financial sanctions capabilities, and so Beijing has become more interested in insulating itself from such risks. Economic policy has not entirely caught up with concerns, but that may change. I will be keenly watching how China’s financial relations with Russia evolve as the Ukrainian conflict drags on, for example. I expect we will see increased tension between Washington and Beijing on this front over the next few years. 

How significant is the role of blockchains in the global economy?

If the last six months have taught observers of finance anything, I would hope it has taught them that Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are not peer competitors to state-backed legal tender. They remain speculative assets that reflect moods of hype and panic among a narrow subset of financial investors and do not have much use beyond generating lots of stories in the financial press.

How can governments and Central Banks tackle the issue of digital currencies? 

My sense of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) is that, if they take hold, their most significant impact will be at the level of the consumer. The digital renminbi has received a lot of hype as a potential threat to the dollar, but the PBOC’s former chair recently explained that the development of the digital currency is mostly about improving and streamlining consumer-merchant exchange.

CBDCs are also talked about as a way to create a more equitable financial system. If individuals can have digital wallets with the Fed, for example, it would help millions of “unbanked” Americans have access to financial services. Of course, the loser in that scenario would be commercial banks, as they would likely suffer a diminished role as financial mediators. The point here is that most of the issues related to CBDC that are on my radar tend to be domestic in nature. There is a role for politics, but less so at the international level. 

Did international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank act satisfactorily in response to the Covid-19 pandemic? 

If the pandemic laid bare anything, it was that developing and emerging economies do not have anywhere near the level of fiscal space that the US, Europe, and Japan have. The massive spending packages implemented in the developed world, mostly funded through issuing debt at incredibly low-interest rates, outstrip anything that the rest of the world could offer.

Still, the IMF and World Bank responded quite admirably to the pandemic challenges facing the developing world, in my view. The institutions learned from past crises. More financing was made available on-demand with little to no conditionality to member countries facing an unprecedented economic shock. In general, these institutions performed their functions by providing countercyclical lending to economies less equipped to get that funding through private channels alone.

This does not mean the institutions did not make any mistakes, but relative to past crises, I would give them a solid grade. The next few years, however, may prove trickier as interest rates rise in the major economies and developing countries dig out of the debt, they have piled up over the past two years. If I had to guess, navigating the aftermath of the pandemic will be a greater challenge for the IMF and the World Bank than the initial response.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Political Economy and International Relations?

There are many well-worn research topics in IPE and IR more generally. There is splendid work being done in these areas, and you can obviously contribute to developed debates through empirical or theoretical innovation. But there is also something to be said for striking out on a new path. So much of my research has been influenced by events unfolding in the world. Governments are always adapting and innovating in the face of a changing world. Closely follow the news in your topic area. You can find inspiration there to build on. There is risk in this approach because events can change dramatically before a project is finished, but there are also great upsides. The subject you study stays fresh, and that keeps you on your toes. It can also keep you motivated in year two or year three of a long project because you are not just looking backwards into history, but you have to keep pace with the present with an eye turned toward the future.

Second, and relatedly, become an expert on something that most people are not experts on in the field. Obviously, methods training is more important than ever, and this should be a priority for any young scholar. But you also need to know something about something. Do not just stick to the IR literature on your topic. Read extensively outside of our field. If what you are studying has to do with international law, you should be reading work by international lawyers and really getting to know the nuances of the legal system as it relates to your subject. If what you are studying has to do with international finance, then you need to be reading reports from the industry. There are many ways to add value to the IR literature. Being able to make complex topics from outside the field more accessible, interesting, and relevant to other scholars inside the field is one such way.

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and New York Times Bestselling Author. He’s written The Myth of the Rational Voter, named “the best political book of the year” by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders (co-authored with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s Zach Weinersmith). He blogs for Bet On IT, and has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Newsweek, Atlantic, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, and appeared on ABC, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. An openly nerdy man who loves role-playing games and graphic novels, he lives in Oakton, Virginia, with his wife and four kids.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

There has been a pile of great work done in immigration over the last 20 years. At this point I feel like the evidence is so strong that the additional research isn’t that exciting, I think that we’ve got a really good handle on the enormous gains that we are foregoing by disallowing immigration. Of course, there’s also the continuing conversation on economic growth. I find it’s one where the topic is great, but I can’t honestly say that much new stuff has been coming out that is shaking my world.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The main thing that changed my thinking over time is just being quantitative, or more generally, it’s being numerate. There are a lot of issues that I’ve cared about for a long time, but when I started caring about them I’d hear some arguments, but it didn’t occur to me to say, “Let’s get some numbers to see how big of an issue this really is.” So for example, I was very pro-immigration for about 15 years before I really saw the evidence on how big of a deal it was. When I started seeing the numbers I realized this was not one issue out of twenty, this was the number one most important issue in the world. That’s probably the biggest change in the way that I think about the world—even when I’m sympathetic to something, my reaction is to ask whether it’s just a story, or is this something that changes everything?

For events, I’d say that I actually make a very concerted effort to have my mind not change much by events because events are actually mostly noise. There’s one thing that happens and it gets the world excited, but what does it really show? Often there are a bunch of other events that are just as important that don’t make the news. For example, if something big happened in the world the day Russia invaded the Ukraine, we probably never heard about it because it was crowded out. If you’re a horrible third world dictator, that’s the day to go out and execute all of your political prisoners, and we’re never going to find out. The event that has actually weighed heavily on my mind is the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and trying to compare that to events that people say are actually important, and comparing the two to see if that’s true.

In terms of people, that’s a much bigger deal. Phil Tetlock has had a huge impact on my thinking. He’s got two books Expert Political Judgement and Superforecasting that got me thinking about the world quantitatively and having a sense of humility about the accuracy of one’s own judgment. Another person who’s had a huge impact on me is philosopher Michael Huemer from the University of Colorado. He really helped me to understand what an argument even is. An argument is where you start with some premises that makes sense to people that don’t currently agree with your conclusion but which logically implies the conclusion.

Your 2006 paper, “Terrorism: The relevance of the rational choice model” discusses the behavior of terrorists through the lens of Rational Choice Theory. In what ways are terrorists rational actors?

The biggest one is that the vast majority of people who have a theory that says they should be a terrorist don’t actually do it. The vast majority of people who believe that they’ll go to Heaven as long as you die committing a terrorist attack somehow refrain from doing it, which suggests that there’s either enormous hypocrisy, or they have strongly held views but when push comes to shove, they may have lots of doubts that cause them to reconsider. You will see surveys of maybe 5-10% of Muslims saying that they agree with this stuff, but then why don’t we have a 100 million terrorists? It’s not like they’re that hard to do. People will look at a small handful of terrorists and say, “See, they really believe that stuff.” Well, who’s the they? It's a very tiny number out of the people who officially believe this stuff.

What are the optimal strategies for governments to handle the threat of terrorism?

Once you realize that there are these rational beliefs that are underlying terrorism, at least you should be open to the possibility that maybe we could actually solve this problem at a very low cost. It may very well be that some ideology is very fixated on some minor issue, and maybe you could just give it to them and the problem would be solved. This goes hand in hand with a very common and I think greatly exaggerated negative view regarding appeasement. In that paper I point out that we all appease people all the time, and it normally works. Yet we have an official theory saying that appeasement never works and that it's always stupid.

Your books Labor Econ Versus the World and Open Borders advocate increasing global immigration through open border policies. What are the key benefits to open borders?

The overwhelming one is that you can take a highly unskilled third world worker, move them into the first world and within a day, he can be earning ten times as much money instantly. That’s something we can see with our own eyes. Basic economics says that the reason he’s making ten times as much is that he’s ten times as productive. Why would that be? You very quickly get a lot of answers when you ask that question. In an area like agriculture, it’s fairly obvious. In the first world we just have access to so much better technology which would allow productivity to expand. The same person grows a lot more food here than back home. Manufacturing is the same deal. You can either be doing primitive production back in your own country, or cutting edge production in the first world. For services, it’s a bit puzzling why productivity increases, until you remember that the whole idea around service is to some someone else time. If you save the time of someone who’s time is very valuable, you are actually contributing more to the world than when you contribute to someone like me, who’s time is far less valuable. Put all of that together and you realize that immigration is a way to instantly raise human productivity, not by 10%, but by ten times. The whole idea of open borders is that if we can do this for one person, couldn’t we do it for a million, ten million, a hundred million? We can get astronomical gains in the global economy.

What are the main challenges to open border policies being implemented?

I think the answer is incredibly clear: it’s extremely unpopular, and not just in the United States. I don’t know of any country where these ideas are popular. These ideas immediately provoke a strong revulsion and paranoia among people everywhere. The sheer volume of the fears that they voice, you could spend all day listening to people come up with terrifying scenarios. You can look at them and say, “Well, that terrifying scenario has been checked, that one doesn’t look like it’s very important, etc.” and at the end, people will always talk about how there’s still a chance. If that’s your attitude, you’ll never achieve progress. If open borders was a popular idea, politicians would be adopting it immediately.

In terms of what can be done to change people’s minds, it’s super tough. My book Open Borders is really my best personal effort to change people’s minds. It is the most persuasive book I’ve written, and has changed a lot of people’s minds. It is a non-fiction graphic novel, but it’s written with extremely high standards of evidence and documentation, so really I’m just trying to change the format rather than the intellectual quality and evidence. But my very best isn’t good enough. I think that the answer is that human beings have evolved to become highly xenophobic. The only hope that I have is that while people are often xenophobic, it isn’t that hard to get people to rethink their definition of what their group is. For example, 200 years ago most people in France didn’t speak French and didn’t consider themselves French, and then that changed. 200 years ago most Americans identified with their state rather than the country.

What effect would open borders have on international power structures (EU, NATO, etc.) and international conflict?

Well I was just doing some Twitter polls, which actually confirmed something that I sort of suspected. Obviously most of the movement across borders would occur with people moving from the third world to the first world. But there are many others who would instead like to move to other first world countries as well, and the U.S. seems, by far, to be the destination of choice. With Open Borders, the United States wouldn’t just be getting a lot of third world migration, it would be scooping up a large share of the talent of the European Union, Canada, etc.

This is the one way that we could plausibly see the United States becoming the world’s most populous country this century. It doesn’t take too much insight to see that the power of your country has a lot to do with total Gross Domestic Product (GDP), not GDP per capita. This would likely mean a major shift in global power to the United States.

For international conflict, this would mean an easy way out of a country for any refugees. It would mean that people could get out before becoming refugees. I find that in whenever we have an environmental disaster, we encourage everyone to evacuate before the issue arises, but with international conflict we wait until the country collapses into civil war, etc. before we figure out people might want to leave. I would be happy to speculate that this would likely reduce the number of civil wars, as people could simply leave the country. I think it would successfully pacify many troubled areas in the world. 

In Labor Econ Versus the World you tend to be quite pessimistic about the role of education in turning students into high quality workers. Why is this the case? What are the best alternatives?

The main thing is that if you look at what students study versus what they do after graduation, you typically see a major disconnect. What you might have learned in class has little or nothing to do with what you do at work. The only real appeal is to this idea is that education teaches students how to learn, but there’s a lot of research that says this is mostly wishful thinking, and that at best it teaches you to do exactly what it teaches you. Learning by doing is the way that people really do stuff, so given that, why does education pay so much? What I do in my book The Case Against Education is I try to strongly defend what I believe is the best answer. I will say that I’m the number one champion of this theory, even though other people got a Nobel Prize for it. A lot of other people talk about this theory as a toy or game, and I say that this is the actual answer. The answer is called signaling. It says that the reason education pays isn’t because of what you learn, it’s because you get a stamp on your forehead that certifies you as a high-quality worker. This is why education pays, it convinces employers of your ability. I often say a slogan, that education is a passport to the real training that occurs on the job. The best alternative is working earlier, to have a system where people start adult life at an earlier age and learn what they’re going to do by going out and doing it.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

I would say the most important advice is this: There’s a key concept in Psychology that all researchers should know. That concept is called Social Desirability Bias. What it means is that when the truth sounds bad, people lie. And often the lies become so ubiquitous that they start becoming absurd views with great self-righteousness. So, what does that have to do with International Relations? Well, I love you guys, but when I read International Relations work it seems that it is so infused with Social Desirability Bias that it is hard to see where truth gets its voice. Any time someone says that something is an incredibly important issue, just look at the number of times in International Relations that someone says that something is a middling or tertiary issue. Everyone wants to claim their issue is really important. When someone says, “There’s a possibility this could lead to World War III,” you have to ask who cares? There’s a possibility it could? Could you be any more evasive? Give me a probability. Give me a number you’re willing to bet on. People don’t want to do that, they want to keep their language vague so they can keep pretending like they know everything, but giving a specific number is a great way to eliminate is Social Desirability Bias in your work.

*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Philip Cunliffe joined UCL’s Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction as Associate Professor in International Relations in August 2022. Prior to that he was Senior Lecturer in International Conflict at the University of Kent. He has also worked in the Defence Studies and War Studies departments of King’s College London. He is one of the hosts of the @bungacast podcast. His most recent books include The End of the End of History: Politics in the 21st Century (with Alex Hochuli and George Hoare, 2021) and The New Twenty Years Crisis 1999-2019: A critique of international relations (2020). He tweets @thephilippics.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

Unfortunately, the most exciting debates happening in the field of International Relations are taking place in the cut and thrust of social media rather than in the academic journals – especially with respect to the war in Ukraine. This conflict has revived very basic but important and sharp-edged debates and questions about geopolitics, polarity in the international system, state power, sovereignty, and nuclear deterrence. The war has exposed many of the IR debates, theories and research of the last thirty years as erudite but essentially apolitical esoterica, baroque intellectual artefacts of the era of unipolar globalisation. So much IR discussion became the luxury ideology of a professional elite that provided the cadre for the political infrastructure of unipolarity: aid and development charities, global NGOs, think tanks, foreign ministries and elite universities. Given that all these various theoretical and professional groups took US unipolarity and global economic growth for granted, its adherents never had to confront hard questions engendered by the struggle over resources and power politics. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

It is a tricky question; there have been many shifts in my understanding over time, but most of them are probably too subtle or insignificant to merit expounding in detail. That said, perhaps one of the most important recent shifts in my thinking has been to take the politics and institutions of neoliberalism more seriously than I did in the past. At least until 2016 or so, I generally found most intellectual discussions of neoliberalism exasperating. More often than not, ‘neoliberalism’ was used as a swear-word in academic circles, or as a synonym for greed, consumerism, economic growth, or even, at a stretch, modern society itself. Such discussions all seemed very prim, self-satisfied and lazy, as well as being implicitly nostalgic for an earlier period of international capitalism, which had had enough of its own problems to generate neoliberalism in the first place! 

However, as neoliberalism fades into history, it becomes easier to talk about coherently, I think. Quinn Slobodian’s book Globalists was particularly influential and instructive for me in this regard. Although I believe he thought he was writing a retrospective vindication of the anti-globalisation movement of the 1990s, to my mind his book turned out to be a scathing critique of the European Union, the organisation that constitutionalised neoliberalism across the continent. I always recall Slobodian’s recounting of how frustrated the neoliberals of the inter-war period were, as they surveyed the upstart new nations of Central and Eastern Europe from their vantage point in the former imperial capital of Vienna. A European federation was their way of creating a substitute for the old Habsburg empire, a way of curbing national independence.  

Your book The New Twenty Years’ Crisis was published two years ago. Are the critiques you levelled at the field then still valid, or have the issues changed? 

I think events over the last two years have tended to vindicate the arguments in the book. Russia’s attempted annexation of eastern Ukraine is the consummation of the process described in the book, by which the liberal international order that emerged at the end of the Cold War entered into slow and irreversible decline from 1999 to 2019. I dated the start of this decline to the NATO war over Kosovo, which set in train the political, ideological and military over-stretch that would lead to the Forever Wars, as well as prefiguring the Russian war in Ukraine. The major differences between the Kosovo and Ukraine wars are that the Kosovo War was conducted through multilateral means in the form of NATO, it secured retrospective UN approval for the intervention in the form of the post-war UNMIK protectorate, and Kosovo’s 2008 referendum led to independence rather than annexation by a neighbouring state. Nonetheless, the Kosovo war inaugurated our new era of great power predation and paternalism, justified on the grounds of humanitarian protection, ratified by plebiscite, and ushering in a new age of protectorates in places as diverse as Mali, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Turkish so-called ‘safe zone’ in northern Syria – among others. 

With the return of war to Europe and the emergence of other conflicts globally, where do the norm of humanitarian intervention and the doctrine of R2P, stand today, both conceptually and practically?  

Practically, the outcome of humanitarian intervention and the doctrine of R2P can be seen in Libya’s forever civil war, in the Ukraine war, in Turkey’s interventions across northern Iraq and Syria, in Saudi Arabia’s cruel and bloody war in Yemen. The on-going Libyan civil war is a monument to the folly of R2P, one of the most gratuitously anarchic and destructive ideologies of recent times. 

As the adherents of R2P tended to be theoretical constructivists of one stripe or another, they tended to place a great deal of emphasis on discourse, and in so doing to adopt the attitude of Humpty Dumpty to the discourse of humanitarian paternalism. That is to say, they seemed to think that their words about humanitarian protection meant just what they chose them to mean – neither more nor less, irrespective of the political, military or strategic context. Like Humpty Dumpty on his wall, perched as they were on top of the structures of unipolarity, it never occurred to them that other, non-Western powers might choose to use this discourse of humanitarian paternalism for their own ends, too. It turned out that humanitarian rhetoric provided a perfect alibi for military intervention not only for Western states, as we saw with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but for others too – as we saw with the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, the Russian intervention of 2014 and more recently the full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine, justified as an attempt to ‘de-Nazify’ the country. The discourse of humanitarian protection proved much more difficult to limit and restrain when it was taken out of the context of Humpty Dumpty’s seminar room. 

In conceptual terms, the academic publishing machine continues to churn out pieces on how R2P can be reformed, improved, embedded and what have you. As the theory of R2P placed so much emphasis on the impact of global humanitarian discourse in reshaping state behaviour, it provided one of the most sublime rationales for academic publishing yet conceived – the more R2P discourse, the better the world would become – like a perpetual motion machine that could power itself through its own activity, or a zombie eating its own entrails. Luckily, even this perfect discourse machine seems to be slowly seizing up – the funding for R2P is drying up, and even our dim foreign policy elites are beginning to realise they have greater problems on their hands then deciding which small and helpless country to bomb next. 

In any case, I expect the insidious and virulent strain of liberal paternalism that underlaid humanitarian intervention and R2P will mutate to form new and no less pernicious forms. In addition, the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows how deeply embedded these ideologies are, despite being deeply maladaptive in terms of their functioning. The Biden administration is filled with liberal Obamanauts who cut their teeth in the foreign policy misadventures over Iraq, Libya and Syria. This is evident in US policy, which has responded to the Russian invasion by stoking a forever war-by-proxy in Ukraine, and trying to carve Russia out of the world economy as if it was a minor, isolated Third World state such as Libya or Iraq, rather than a nuclear-armed major energy and raw materials exporter. 

What is the best course of action for NATO members to deal with current crises they face, including both energy and more conventional security issues?

The question presupposes that NATO members all have the same interest on questions of energy and security – which they palpably do not, as the US exports energy, while most European states import it, and the US is protected by the Pacific and Atlantic, while Europe is not. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided the US with the perfect pretext to tighten its strategic grip over its European allies’ foreign and defence policies, hiking up defence spending across the continent and forcing Europe’s states to absorb the costs of the sanctions regime on Russia by tipping them into energy-starved recessions. The advantage to the US of this course of action is fairly clear because the US’s LNG exports will substitute for Russian gas. The advantage to European states, who will simply replace one form of energy dependence with another – and at a terribly high cost over this winter and next – is not so clear. Thus, it is difficult to understate the costs of the NATO geopolitical strait jacket: factories are shutting down across the continent, major economies are hovering on the brink of a deep recession, and governments are drawing up plans for energy rationing. The fact that some of the wealthiest, most technologically-sophisticated states in human history are unable to secure the conditions of their own functioning as industrial societies is a terrible indictment not only of their technical competence, but also of their capacity to form and shape their own national interests. Clearly, energy independence – independence of both the US and Russia – is the answer. If European states really want to secure themselves, they will need to find ways to assert their interests outside of the dead hand of NATO, that relic of the Cold War that ended up creating a new cold war to justify its continued existence. 

Has there been a shift in the way both non-Western nations and Western nations see the utility of peacekeeping?

Again, I would argue that peacekeeping as we know it today is best understood as an artefact of unipolarity, when there was relative harmony on the UN Security Council. Since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping enabled Western states to lower the costs and risks of their frivolous military interventions and nation-building experiments by outsourcing most of the labour-intensive tasks to peacekeepers drawn from the poorer members of the United Nations or the member-states of the African Union. In this way, they developed a de facto system of low-rent, soft military occupation on the cheap – it was cheaper collectively to pay for blue helmets from Ghana, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia, etc., to deploy in places such as Sierra Leone or Democratic Republic of Congo, than to deploy Western forces there. As a result, Western states rarely had to confront hard-political or security trade-offs concerning the risks, consequences and costs of their military adventurism. Poorer states could earn hard-currency from UN reimbursements for their peacekeepers, while simultaneously burnishing their international reputations and hobnobbing with major powers in the corridor diplomacy of the UN. 

As unipolarity seems to be fading, if indeed it is not already over, I do not think we will continue to see growth in the numbers or size of UN peacekeeping operations – their numbers peaked around 2016. If we do see another spurt of peacekeeping operations, it would probably require some kind of détente on the UN Security Council, or perhaps a series of grand diplomatic bargains that would tie together peace deals in Syria with ceasefires in Ukraine and the Caucasus, or some such. In such a scenario, peacekeeping might return to an earlier, pre-unipolar form, in which peacekeepers acted as adjuncts of diplomacy rather than as the demiurge of nation-building. 

Your recent book The End of the End of History, co-authored with Alex Hochuli and George Hoare, aims to dissect and understand global politics in the current era. Are there any cases of movements, states, or organisations in global politics that you think understand the difficulties of this new era and demonstrate an ability to meet its challenges?   

The book was intended to cohere, summarise and expand upon some of the insights that we gained from the discussions we had both amongst ourselves and with guests, as part of our podcast, @bungacast. In the book, we argued that, while it was clear that the End of History regime inaugurated in the 1990s was drawing to a close, there has been no clear paradigm to replace it. Liberal centrism and technocratic rule are breaking down everywhere, but there is no new ideological project to replace it - see for instance, Giorgia Meloni’s accommodation to the European Union in the recent Italian elections. If the logic offered in our book is correct, then we would not expect to see any collective agency or capacity that could meet the challenges of this new era – at least for the mid-term, foreseeable future. So far, this view seems to have been borne out: the industrialised states of Europe are preparing for energy rationing this winter – which represents a failure to function as modern countries, let alone meet the grand challenges of our era. 

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

The challenges of world politics that we confront today are less amenable to the luxuriant and self-indulgent theorising that continues to dominate IR. Solving the problems of our day requires the kind of intellectual creativity, rigour and precision that has been lacking in the nebula of unipolar theorising. The magnitude of our collective problems should force young scholars to rise to the challenge, especially as these decadent orthodoxies of the preceding era slowly wither away. Given this context, my advice would be – be willing to challenge consensus. We’re entering a new political era, and it is in such moments of systemic transition that the rewards for intellectual creativity and political boldness are significantly greater than they would be in more settled and quiescent times.  

*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Felix Rösch is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. He works on encounters of difference in transcultural contexts, particularly focusing on transatlantic relations and exchanges between Central Europe and Japan, investigating their effect on international political thought. He also studies diplomatic practices and the role of emotions in international politics. Amongst others, his work has been published in Cooperation & Conflict, Review of International Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, European Journal of International Relations, and International Studies Perspectives. His most recent books include Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview (2015), Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations (2018), and Realism: A Distinctively 20th Century European Tradition (2021). Felix co-edits the Global Political Thinkers and Trends in European IR Theory book series (both with Palgrave Macmillan).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

There is a range of very exciting scholarship happening in International Relations at the moment. The study of emotions is still going strong in the discipline and so is practice theory and the study of rituals. It also seems to me that ontological security contributions are ever increasing in recent years. Realist scholarship has also made a comeback since Russia invaded Ukraine. I hope that this renewed interest will help to get a more nuanced understanding of realism that goes beyond the crude version of John Mearsheimer. Besides, I am very happy to see a rising interest in historical International Relations and at the latest EISA conference, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) papers were numerous. This is a noticeable difference from when I briefly engaged with conceptual history during my PhD more than ten years ago, when the work of Reinhart Koselleck was still pretty much unknown in IR. 

What we see in these debates, is what has drawn me to International Relations in the first place. It is a discipline that engages with insights of many different disciplines, such as history or sociology, and investigates to what extent they are useful to understand international affairs. This makes not only for lively debates in the discipline where we can find our own niches and topics; it also gives us the possibility to widen our perspectives on the world. However, I am also sometimes worried that we have now too many campfires, to use Christine Sylvester’s trope, with too many songs played around them that eventually renders it difficult for wider debates to be heard by everyone. And if we do have such debates, like Global IR or multiplicity, their campfires seem to go out before the songs around these fires could reach their full potential.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking? 

This is a difficult question to answer. In some ways, I am still the same person I was when I started studying politics at the University of Jena in the early 2000s. I still believe that differences shouldn’t be a source of fear but be seen as something that makes life beautiful and as necessary since only through them can we widen our own horizons and gain an understanding, however limited, about ourselves. And in acknowledging these differences, I still like to search for commonalities in what makes us human. 

In other ways, however, I very much changed my view on the world since then. This is because I was fortunate enough to meet people who widened my horizons and who instilled courage in me. My PhD supervisor, Hartmut Behr, was the first one to show me that I can be a scholar and saw worth in my thoughts. I always struggled with self-doubt, probably because I don’t have an academic background, being the first one in the family with a PhD, and because during my school years, a lot of my teachers – to put it nicely – did not really increase my self-esteem. In Newcastle, where I did my MA and PhD, I also had a group of lecturers – Kyle Grayson, Simon Philpott, Matt Davies, and Martin Coward – who showed me that International Relations can be so much more than the so-called “high politics”. I learned through them that even comics are sites of international politics. They suggested that I read Roland Bleiker’s work. I never had the chance to meet him so far, but his Aesthetics and World Politics was a real eye opener to me. When I had my first post at Coventry University, I got to know Atsuko Watanabe, who at that time did her PhD at Warwick. Ever since I had read a little book on Japanese political thought by Maruyama Masao, I was fascinated that late 19^th and early to mid-20^th century Central European and Japanese political thinkers could grapple with similar questions and develop a somewhat similar outlook on life, even though they were embedded in two very different intellectual constellations. Through her, I have been able to deepen my understanding about Japanese political thought to an extent that I would have never been able to achieve by myself.  

Your approach combines comparative political theory with international historiography and international political sociology. In what ways has this combination of approaches strengthened your analysis of knowledge production and exchange in transcultural contexts?

In my work, I normally proceed inductively. If you would ask me, if I consider myself a realist scholar, as I often engage with realist thought in my work, then I would say no. I do not like to classify myself and I struggle to put myself in a specific camp. This is probably not the best career strategy, but I can only ever be true to myself. The thought of classical realists like Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt and so many others early- to mid-20^th century scholars speaks to me, as I find inspiration in their work to think about contemporary world affairs, but I do not want to restrict myself in only engaging with them and I do not agree with all aspects of their thought. So, I try to keep an open mind, learn from the work of others, and see what approach or method helps me to understand a particular situation or event. It is from there that I ask myself if working on a specific case or aspect helps me to understand world politics in a more substantial way. I do not have the intellectual capacity of Hannah Arendt, but I like her phrase “thinking without a banister” in this regard, as I try to be open-minded and interdisciplinary in my approach. It is for this reason that I often – although not exclusively – engage with comparative political theory, international historiography, and international political sociology.

How has your focus on 19th- and 20th-century transcultural knowledge production contributed to understanding contemporary global challenges and new possibilities for more dialogical exchanges of knowledge?

In my work, I particularly look into the 19^th and 20^th centuries because, following Barry Buzan and George Lawson, the global transformations that took place during this time still impact world politics today. Industrialisation, technological advancements, nationalism, communism, imperialism are just a few of the developments that completely overhauled the socio-political fabric, impacting our lives to this day. So, one reason why I study these centuries is to understand why the world we live in today – and not a different world – came into being. What happened back then also impacted political thought and knowledge production in general. There is therefore a second reason why I study this period of time: I am looking into its political thought not to find answers or solutions for today’s global issues, but to find inspiration in the work of scholars like Morgenthau, Arendt, Koselleck, Simmel etc. Inspiration here refers to something similar to what the German philosopher Odo Marquard had in mind for scholarship at large. One tries to detach oneself from one’s life-world, to have the space to reflect upon this life-world from a different vantage point. 

In a 2017 article you argue that mid-20th century realists pursued a method of “unlearning” through critiquing and moving beyond the modern imaginary. Can you explain more in detail what you mean with this concept and how it influenced the development of realism?

I understand realism particularly as a critique of the effects of modernity on humans. These were concerned about the depoliticisation that modernity had caused on societies, taking away agency from people to contribute to the construction of their own life-worlds. As I tried to show in the paper, this was not only the case for Western realists like Hans Morgenthau but also other scholars who tried to get to grips with what they experienced as modernity. This means that there was not one modernity but many, and consequently scholars put different foci on their critique. For some, this may have been rapid technologisation, but for others it was the experience of imperialism and the violence it entailed. There was, for example, a modernity debate in Japan during the first half of the 20^th century in which scholars also tried to free themselves from the grips of Western modernity, imperialism, and Western political thought that started to dominate debates there. 

To be able to critique whatever modernity these scholars encountered, I identified a method in their thought that I called “unlearning”, meaning that realists like Morgenthau or the Japanese political scientist Maruyama Masao deliberately tried to remove themselves by engaging with thought prior to their modernity. They did not do that in order to find answers to specific problems, but as a source of inspiration to reflect on current affairs differently and imagine a world in contrast to the one they experienced. This is evident in Morgenthau’s Aristotle Lectures that Anthony Lang edited almost 20 years ago. Morgenthau delivered these lectures almost throughout his entire career in the United States and he not only went through Aristotle’s writings with his students theoretically but used his work to prompt wider debates about American society and politics. 

In the same article, you argue that the realist critique of modernity stems from an affinity with critical theory through its focus on epistemological questions over predetermined ontologies. How could realist methodologies be further informed by or built upon concepts and approaches from critical theory?

Classical realist scholarship and critical theory, at least when we think of the Frankfurt School type of critical theory, developed quite literally in tandem. If we take Morgenthau, arguably the most famous classical realist scholar in International Relations, he finished his PhD in Frankfurt and was in close contact with scholars from the Institute of Social Research. He regularly attended their lectures and worked for Hugo Sinzheimer, the most famous German labour lawyer at that time. In Sinzheimer’s office, he worked alongside – amongst others – Franz Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel. So, it is not so much a question of thinking how classical realism could build upon critical theory or vice-versa, but of acknowledging that both evolved within the same intellectual constellations. It is therefore sad to see that until today, classical realism is conflated with neo-realism, which stems from a very different intellectual tradition; in doing so, a great opportunity is missed to further explore these intellectual constellations between classical realism and critical theory. Classical realist scholars are being criticised for something that they never endorsed but criticised themselves. For example, Morgenthau was concerned about racial and gender inequalities, questioned the squandering of natural resources, and was highly critical of the nation-state because it created a belligerent outlook on the world and because he had experienced himself what horrors nationalism can inflict on people. As William Scheuerman has shown, Morgenthau and others wanted to transcend the nation-state to create a more peaceful world.

In your work you examine the role of art and popular culture in shaping both emotional and experiential understandings of world politics. Can you discuss some examples of this and the insights it provides?

The reason why I like to use art and popular culture in my teaching and engage with it in my research is threefold. First, through art and popular culture, we can get a different perspective on the world, as Roland Bleiker showed. We may experience aspects of the world that were hidden to us, for instance giving a voice to actors that were neglected or even silenced before. Let’s face it, artists – like scholars – grapple with something that they experienced in life and that had a profound impact on them. Often, it was an unpleasant, horrible, or even life-shattering experience. 

Second, I engage with it because it gives me hope and I want to pass on this hope to my students. Even though in International Relations we often deal with horrible events, such as war or genocide, art gives us hope that the world can be different because humans, in all their despair, can still create something beautiful, powerful, and touching. 

Finally, I use art in my teaching to open new worlds to my students. At my previous institution, I taught many students who were from a working-class background and/or were the first in their families to attend university. Many of them had never been to a theatre play before. This is because tickets are expensive here and the still-existing class society in the UK often makes them believe this is only something for the “elite”. Over the years, I took students to theatre plays, museum exhibitions, classical music concerts, and architectural tours. I also weave it into my teaching. For example, I used some of Max Frisch’s theatre plays to reflect on the rise of populism with my students and I discussed with them Goethe’s Faust to reflect on how the global transformations of the 19^th century changed our life-worlds and impacted on world politics. I also traced some Banksy street art while in London with students, as it encouraged discussions about a variety of topics, from migration to the privatisation of public spaces. 

In a 2021 article you analysed dance patterns during the Congress of Vienna in order to understand the impact of affective dynamics on practice changes. Can you explain more about the link you see between cultural practices like dance and broader emotional dynamics? What drew you to specifically focus on dance patterns?

I was first drawn to dance through pedagogy. I was teaching a module that introduced students to different conceptualisations of power and wanted to help them understand that if you have an Arendtian understanding of power – the ability to act in concert – rather than the classic Weberian one, you get a very different outlook on the world. The “other” is then no longer a source of threat and fear but someone who can enrich your life and widen your horizons. After having spoken to dance scholars at my previous institution, modern forms of dance like contact improvisation seemed to be the perfect practice to perform this kind of power. One can dance alone or even with several people, there are no age and gender restrictions and even as a beginner one can quickly perform the most basic dance moves. Ballroom dances like the waltz would not have been ideal for it, as it reifies for example a patriarchal perspective with the man having to lead a female dance partner. From there, I started to wonder if dance (or other forms of sociability) had or has an impact on world politics and vice versa. Performing any form of playful association (Georg Simmel), of course, is always emotional. It creates affective dynamics between the performers and even the audience. Performers themselves experience the entire range of emotions from fear to anger to joy and exaltation. This is because these practices are particularly multidimensional, meaning that a wide range of sensory modalities are being stimulated which in turn cause particularly intense emotional reactions.

What are some of the main challenges that higher education is currently facing and how can teaching practices and models continue to evolve to properly address them?

It seems that the very idea of the university is in danger across the world. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, the neoliberalisation of higher education literally destroys universities. In Germany, the #IchbinHanna debate rightfully criticises, amongst others, temporary contracts for the vast majority of scholars. We are living in a time where knowledge and education (particularly the humanities and social sciences) are under attack, where education has been commodified and devalued. The university today seems to be a far cry from what Karl Jaspers conceived as its ideal more than 60 years ago. Rather than celebrating and protecting it as a place where self-determined communities of learning can form, where people can pursue knowledge freed from practical and political constraints, and where people from all over the world can come together, education has been turned into an ideological playground and treated with disrespect. Students are left with huge debts and referred to as “customers”. People with too much power and too little moral concerns publicly discredit serious scholarships as “Mickey Mouse degrees”, although they gained their Mickey Mouse degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the world. I think as educators, we have to resist such discredit by helping our students to find hope and courage and to understand that these developments – which reflect what happens to societies at large – do not have to be accepted and that living in a different world is possible. I am not sure if there are specific practices but we can provide a space in our seminars and lecturers for students to think critically together with their fellow peers and imagine our communities and the way we live together differently. 

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

This is difficult for me to answer, as I do not want to sound condescending. I do not consider myself senior enough or having accomplished enough that I could give advice to others. The advice that I could provide is at best banal, but I wish that scholars who enter the profession now would keep their passion and remember what drove them to do research in the first place. Being a scholar – particularly in this current political and economic climate – is not always easy and requires a lot of strength from us. I wish that they are as fortunate as I was in encountering colleagues who can encourage them to keep on going forward and continue to work hard, as all of their voices deserve to be heard. I also wish that they stay modest and can meet critique with grace and love as only through critique can we deepen our knowledge and together make a bit more sense of the madness that we call reality. Laura Shepherd put it so nicely in a recent E-International Relations interview: “Generosity is not just about resources; it is about generosity of spirit, of accommodating and welcoming with love even those people and ideas that challenge us.” This is the kind of discipline I like to work in and this is the kind of discipline I hope will continue to exist through the work of younger IR scholars.

David J. Galbreath is Professor of War and Technology in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath. His research focuses on how technology shapes how we think about and do war. He has also been researching European security from European militaries and the trans-Atlantic relationship to resurgent Russia and the war in Ukraine. His current research is on what digital innovation tells us about the future of war. He has been the editor of European Security (2008-2015), Defence Studies (2014-2016), and Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Security (2016-2020). He is the co-editor (with John Deni, US Army War College) of the Routledge Handbook of Defence Studies (2019). Along with Aaron Brantly (Virginia Tech) and Manabrata Guha (Australian National University), he is co-editing the Routledge Handbook on War and Technology (forthcoming).

*Archive post from 2025. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

The understanding of our relationship with technology is something that I am keen to understand and I think that much of the literature in environmental philosophy is one way that we could think of trying to conceptualise this and perhaps to understand it. I think that as a whole, understanding International Relations as something that includes things outside of, or prior to, the human experience will be important going forward.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

My understanding of the world has continued to change as time, space and decision-making have continued to be crunched into smaller bits, what Paul Virilio talks about as fundamentals to ‘Pure War’. But, I think it was my chance encounter with Ruth Miller’s book, Snarl: In Defence of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks, that first brought to my attention a different way of understanding International Relations as beyond policies, agents and institutions. Miller showed that our inability to think about networks outside of ourselves means that networks will always fail. I see this being repeated in IR all the time.

Could President Trump's approach of using pressure and coercion be more effective than traditional diplomacy? How might this impact long-term stability in regions like Ukraine?

I think that this is a loaded question. The Trump administration may be able to do what others have not been able/ or sought to do but this is not the same as asking whether Trump will do what the Biden administration would have sought to do but could not. Trump as a negotiator has always been transactional and power-orientated. I don’t think we should see this as not part of ‘traditional diplomacy’. Beyond a narrowly defined idea of what the United States can get from a peace deal, I am not sure that Trump and Biden could be considered together. They have a different understanding of how the world works and should work.

With countries like China and India continuing trade with Russia, how do you see the balance between economic interests and geopolitical goals in shaping global affairs?

We have never seen a time in International Relations where economic interests and geopolitical goals did not shape global affairs. See how the US militarised the national economy as a national interest in the Cold War. China and India continue to trade with Russia because they can and do not see Ukraine as being related to their own national security or interests. I suspect that there has been some consternation in Beijing and Delhi over why the US continues to find Ukraine in its own national interest, though clearly that is starting to change under the Trump administration which has shown that Ukraine, and Europe, is not in the US national interest. So I would argue that Chinese and Indian trade with Russia is business as usual and not a harbinger of great change in International Relations.

You discuss the concept of "freeriding" within NATO, with the US bearing a disproportionate share of the alliance’s defence costs. Have European nations been overly reliant on the US, or has this been a reasonable arrangement given the circumstances?

The freeriding of European governments on American power can be seen in two ways. The first is that European governments have been rationally determining that they can spend as a percentage of GDP less on defence than they did in the Cold War as their direct territorial security is less but security is required overall. The US military then becomes like insurance.

The second way to think about it is the ‘American Empire’, as Michael Cox talked of it in his 2004 Review of International Studies article. European governments are caught between the US striving for supremacy in International Relations while looking to be seen as loyal parts of the empire. As long as the imperial ‘principle’ thinks that the empire works for them, the controlled ‘agents’ will benefit from the imperial good of security and defence not to mention trade and shared values. However, once the principle begins to think that the empire is not working for them, then agents are caught between seeking to show their value to the empire while preparing for the time when those imperial goods are no longer available. Either way, European governments are in a tricky position.

You make the case that the US is now focused on countering China rather than defending Europe. How do you think this reorientation will impact global security, particularly for smaller countries that rely on US power for protection?

A classic challenge in realism for states with and without power is whether to balance or bandwagon. If we think that these are the only two options, then smaller European states must seek to bandwagon on the power of larger European states, even as these larger European states are themselves set adrift with the likely end of the trans-Atlantic security community. Before this happens though, both large and small European governments will seek to reassure the Trump administration that US national interests are served through a European bandwagon. If this is not successful then we are likely to see the development of a European security treaty organisation that will seek to bring large and small states together to recreate a multinational force that resembles many of the structures and standard operating procedures of NATO.

With European leaders considering increasing support for Ukraine, what challenges does the EU face in balancing security interests with the risk of further escalation with Russia?

As it stands, the EU has little to worry about in terms of antagonising Russia. Firstly, the European support for Ukraine is largely bilateral, between individual EU or NATO member-states and Ukraine. The second is that the UK and Norway remain outside of the EU which are both NATO member-states. Therefore, a likely solution will be to create an entirely new security treaty organisation that includes all European NATO member states. Naturally, one key aspect that this also misses is the future of Canada in any treaty organisation should the US withdraw from NATO or change the treaty to remove NATO’s Article V collective defence clause. Either way, I do not think the EU will be the focus of Russia’s concerns but rather whatever comes after NATO.

Is a US backstop critical for ensuring Europe’s security in the long run, or can Europe develop a self-sustaining defence capability on its own?

European militaries do not have the weapons systems needed to punish the Russians in Ukraine in the same way that American weapons and systems have. While Europeans have given Ukraine more in terms of aid and weapons, the US has had an overwhelming impact on the front line and beyond in Ukraine and Russia. The Americans have offered far sharper weapons than the Europeans. This means that any European future defensive alliance will need to develop similar weapons systems and that is difficult to imagine before 2040 if not even later.

Take for instance the British Army’s ‘Future Fires’ programme which sought to seek an artillery weapons system that would be fit for 2040 but instead, the British Army agreed to the RCH 155 which is not only currently available but is already in action in Ukraine, though the British Army variant will be different (using the Boxer driver module). Despite the British Army’s best efforts, it will have to come up with a new budget line for future fires for 2040. Planning for the future is difficult when investment in defence has been left to decay outside of major operations in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. And this can be applied to all European militaries.

What are the prospects for deeper integration of European defence forces? Could a unified European military better address emerging threats like cyber warfare and instability?

At this point in time, I think we are unlikely to see a unified European military though the Treaty of the EU would allow something like this to happen. The immediate challenge is what to do with the UK and Norway, who are not in the EU, and states like Austria and perhaps Ireland who are at least neutral on paper, though Ireland has given weapons systems to Ukraine. Yet I think the more pressing challenge would be bringing so many national militaries together in a unified command, not to mention so many languages, national defence industries and military cultures. Such a military would also go beyond what any military has been able to do which is nearly always either based on a state or an empire of states. NATO has been a great halfway house in allowing national militaries to develop and flourish while also building commonalities that allow for multilateral operations to happen. While NATO is not a unified military, it can act a lot like one once in battle. This is why NATO is perfect for the role and why it is likely to be the basis on which a new treaty alliance is established.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

I firmly believe that International Relations needs intellectual investigations that go beyond what we think of as politics. Politics is important and I think that it makes sense that most IR studies are in politics departments throughout the world. However, if you are interested in a topic in IR that is not about politics then we must look for those theories and concepts that help us understand that topic more. What we should not be doing is shoe-horning theories of IR into everything because international relations is bigger than IR.

Friends With Benefits: The India-US Story
By Seema Sirohi
Harper Collins, 2023

Friends with Benefits: The India-US Story, from Indian journalist Seema Sirohi, is part historical book, part journalistic memoire. It narrates the remarkable evolution of the US-India relationship — from antagonistic to partners — under five US presidents and three Indian Prime Ministers. With India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, published in 1994, Dennis Kux, a retired US diplomat, had written a history of the complex and difficult relationship between the two countries. He had highlighted the anomaly of the far too often confrontational character of their interactions during nine successive US presidents, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George Bush. Seema Sirohi starts where he left off and chronicles the reversing evolution of their relationship from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden. 

India emerged from the Cold War on the wrong side of history but determined to change course and get closer to the US. It took a little longer for Washington to feel the change and start behaving accordingly. More than any other, perhaps, the presidency of Bill Clinton epitomises the transformation of US policy vis-à-vis India. The relationship went from overtly hostile, to an enthusiastic rapprochement. The author makes abundantly clear, though, that India’s policy changed much less than the US one. For the entirety of Bill Clinton’s first stint in office and most of his second, the issues of Pakistan and non-proliferation drove the relationship. US misunderstanding of the South Asian political and security dynamic, Cold War reminiscence of past alliances, and very effective lobbying on the part of Pakistan, had made the resolution of the Kashmir issue the focus of US policy in South Asia. 

Indian nuclear tests in 1998, soon followed by Pakistan’s, exacerbated the tensions. Sanctions on India were brutal. The US refusal to consider, against all evidence, the Pakistan-China nuclear collusion. Considerations about China’s economy played a larger role than Pakistan in that state of affairs, even though the quality of Islamabad’s diplomacy played its part. It took no less than the Kargil war in 1999 for Bill Clinton to change course and reconsider US relations with both Pakistan and India. Kargil opened many American eyes to a broader engagement with an India whose economy was slowly but effectively becoming more significant and therefore attractive. The nuclear test themselves had nevertheless convinced the US administration that India could no longer be ignored. A subsequent series of discussions between Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh paved the way for the rapprochement. According to Sirohi, the China issue was also becoming more prominent but somewhat ambivalent, as the US was absorbed by Clinton’s willingness to partner economically with Beijing, which was soon to join the WTO. 

The rapprochement first made its significance felt in 2000, at the turn of the century, with the first visit of a US President to India since Jimmy Carter. India’s foreign policy was entering a new era. It was, however, under a new President, George W. Bush, that the relationship blossomed, greatly helped, during the first term, by Pakistan’s sponsored terrorism and the September 11 attacks against the US which suddenly and dramatically increased the US convergence of interest with India. The gradual de-hyphenation operated by the US administration between its Pakistan and India policies, which was formally announced in 2005 but began during Bush’s first term, allowed for more ambitious policies, articulated around the idea that India could play a bigger role in the emerging twenty first century.  

These policies materialised during Bush’s second term with the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Announced in 2005, it led to a formidable administrative battle in Washington which reversed, for India alone, decades of non-proliferation policies, leading to a complete change of paradigm in the relationship. Even so, it took a lot of persuasion to convince the Indian leaders to sign off. The relationship emerged transformed from the Bush era, firmly anchored in new and spectacular popular support in both countries. The perspective proposed by Seema Sirohi here is particularly reflective of India’s erstwhile perspective, one of the very few countries where George Bush was still popular despite the Iraq War.

By contrast, Sirohi presents the relationship under Barack Obama as experiencing a step backward. Soon after the election of Obama, India-US relations seemed to have returned to the bad old days. The initial rhetoric of the administration returned to a Pakistan friendly narrative in Washington, trade difficulties multiplied, and scandals flourished. Individual factors also played a role, starting with the complex and strong personalities of actors such as Richard Holbrooke and John Kerry, whose undeniable talents seemed to be matched by an equal ignorance of South Asian realities. Meanwhile, despite his personal sympathy for Manmohan Singh, Barack Obama did not really invest in the relationship with India. With the ascent of Narendra Modi to power, something that the author welcomes, a new actor emerged, deeply aware of his country’s structural weaknesses but determined to play the US system to his own advantage to help change the situation. Once again, China helped preserve the relationship. Military cooperation progressed, albeit centred on the issue of Beijing. 

If the Obama presidency was an era of relative stagnation for the India-US relationship, things were about to change in a quite bizarre way. In the succession of US presidents and their relationships with India, as presented by Sirohi, Donald Trump is a paradox. His personal mindset was probably the most alien from — if not radically opposed to — anything India could imagine. Yet, his presidency was generally considered positive for the relationship with India. New Delhi was served by the circumstances, smart diplomacy, and the cooperation of a few knowledgeable people in the US administration. As opposed to the situation which prevailed under Clinton, the Pakistani factor, now aggravated by Afghanistan, was no longer mitigated by the need to massage China into joining the WTO. On the contrary, the tariff war with Beijing only made the latter’s alliance with Pakistan, as well as the latter’s duplicity in Afghanistan, more difficult to swallow. Trump, of course could not refrain from repeatedly attacking India on its tariff policy. However, smart and knowledgeable advisors in the NSC were able to compensate for the unsophisticated and ill-thought-out eruptions of the US president while Indian diplomats cunningly used Trump’s family- and romantic-ties to influence him. Thus, the Trump presidency turned out to be a net benefit for India.      

As Joe Biden’s first term is nearing its end, however, the relationship seems to have plateaued. India and the United States are estranged no more. The relationship does not even compare to the situation which prevailed at the beginning of the Clinton era. Yet, it remains somehow uncertain. Past misunderstandings have disappeared, but new difficulties have emerged. While the two countries still pat themselves on the back and underline their democratic convergence, current Indian political trends increasingly make India’s friends uneasy. As asserted by the author, “the question of shared values and human rights could create new stresses” (p.461). Strategic convergence over China remains the main glue between the two countries, but political dynamics on either side could strain the relationship once again. 

Friends with Benefits offers interesting insights into New Delhi’s diplomacy. Indian diplomats and politicians have learned to play the US political system much faster than their US counterparts have the Indian one. The book highlights the malleability of a US political system, constantly torn between competing interest groups and influences, and unclear about the reality of a world it pretends to police. But it also underlines the defining role of US presidents in foreign policy. The relationship with India changed under Clinton and flourished under Bush because both men were personally involved and unusually active. It plateaued under their successors because they demonstrated a relative lack of personal interest despite a public appearance to the contrary.     

The book also provides a most accurate description of Narendra Modi’s foreign policy. In substance, the Indian Prime Minister is marching resolutely in the footsteps of his predecessors, who largely defined the contours of India’s foreign policy after 1992. But he has also proven capable of remarkably innovative tactics while adroitly playing the US system and its leadership. In the process, he managed to blur the perception of his regime, whose values are questionable, with a resolutely modern narrative on economy, technology and strategic proximity to the US. 

For those interested in the history of the bilateral relationship, Friends with Benefits: The India-US Story is a well of information, and is full of insights and anecdotes. Sirohi's perception and understanding, enthusiasm, disillusions and occasional outrage can be felt throughout the book. Yet, they never take precedence over a history to which she was a witness but which was also her history. However, biases are not totally absent either. The narration of the US-India history is written from an Indian perspective, and the author does not always hide her inclinations. The book would have been better served by a larger and deeper contextualisation. The constraints an established global superpower inevitably differ from those of a then-emerging power, but were not sufficiently addressed. This lack of objectivity — which should not be confused with a lack of honesty — does, however, add to the interest of the book. The author’s discreet but constant presence and her sense of humour make it, moreover, an effortless and pleasant read. In the long litany of publications on India and the United States, Friends with Benefits: The India-US Story stands out. It is, by all accounts, a must-read.

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare
By Nicole Wegner
Edinburgh University Press, 2023

When contemplating United Nations peacekeeping, the image that comes to mind is one of a morally good project draped in sky-blue hopes. Knowing peacekeeping is a militarized operation, where does this association come from? What does peace involve? What does it silence? In her book, Nicole Wegner presents, analyzes, and questions the production of the peace narrative involved in peacekeeping, as well as its ideological and political implications.

Using discourse analysis, Wegner unpacks how peacekeeping is mobilized rhetorically, using the peacekeeping myth as a central framework in order to shed light on how it legitimizes militarized violence. In doing so, she highlights the relationship between war and peace and gendered, racialized, colonialist, nationalist, and imperialist discourses. Focusing on the case of Canada and its particular entanglement of national and peacekeeping narratives, the author uses the concept of martial peace to analyze how the idea of peace and the physicality of violence can cohabitate.

The book contains five chapters, an introduction, and conclusion. In Chapter 1, Wegner presents the concept of martial peace, which she describes as the legitimization of military force within a particular type of peace. Peace is then an aspirational discourse that reproduces militarist ideology and practices, and this vision of peace justifies international and domestic peacekeeping and policing. In Chapter 2, she presents how peacekeeping is understood as different from other forms of militarized violence. Her analysis unpacks the UN peacekeeping trinity – impartiality/consent/use of force only for defense – and its connection to the idea of peacekeeping as a moral, “soft” way to use militarized means in global politics. This difference thereby legitimizes such military action. Wegner examines the Canadian version of the myth in Chapter 3, based on its representations in Canadian popular culture, memorial artifacts, and academic theorization. Canada’s global identity is reflected in UN peacekeeping as indicative of Canadian values, in discourses that intertwine UN peacekeeping principles (impartiality/consent/use of force only for defense) with values that Canadians are said to embody (paternal helpfulness and innocence/altruism/non-violence). The peacekeeping myth is kept alive by Canadians who are happy to believe that such values are somehow distinctly Canadian. In Chapter 4,the author discusses the period of the war in Afghanistan, where Canadian troops were deployed in the context of a counterinsurgency operation. Wegner demonstrates that the peacekeeping myth, rather than being disrupted by Canada’s involvement in counterinsurgency, instead made it possible to discursively shift the understanding of the war, making it appear as an exercise in humanitarianism. Chapter 5turns to domestic Canadian policing discourses to highlight the relationship between “peace” – meaning order for the settler population – and violence against Indigenous resistance. In this narrative, the martial force of the state is positioned as legitimate and is used for peaceful purposes, while Indigenous resistance is presented as uncivilized and a threat to good order.

Martial Peace: Binding Militarism and Martial Politics

The concept of martial peace is the main contribution of Wegner’s book. It builds a bridge between Alison Howell’s concept of martial politics, which addresses the violence of liberal societies, and the concept of militarism, related to military action. In doing so, Wegner is intervening in contemporary scholarly debates on the use of critical conceptual tools to analyze subjects related to “war” and “peace” (Howell, 2018; MacKenzie et al., 2018). In a feminist manner, she invites us to question what seems like common sense, i.e., what we understand as “peace,” and shows how narrow definitions obscure colonial and imperial violence. Questioning the politics of peacekeeping, she problematizes how peace is envisioned in different discourses. Wegner bases her analysis on a conceptualization of militarism as an ideology that justifies and legitimizes military action through narratives that reproduce a discursive environment within which the criticism of military activities is taboo and the military is seen as “good.” Her concept connects militarism, peace, and liberal violence in an analytical back-and-forth between national and global politics and power structures. In doing so, she underscores a specific vision of peace – martial peace – that legitimizes militarized violence to achieve peace.

The Peacekeeping Myth: Legitimizing Violence in the Name of Peace 

Basing her analysis on the concept of martial peace, Wegner demonstrates how the peacekeeping myth legitimizes militarized violence. She shows how peacekeeping became mythologized and how the myth is used in global politics to package the “common sense” that makes peacekeeping desirable and understood as a good thing. Wegner underlines the importance of the scale of the use of force, “rather than the absence of it” (p.34), in the myth.  Her analysis is relevant to ongoing debates on peacekeeping and the use of force. Indeed, since the decision of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to involve peacekeeping missions in contexts where peacekeepers are exposed to hostile actors and the dos Santos Cruz Report (2017) recommending a more robust posture to reduce the number of peacekeeper casualties, the discussion on the use of military means has been partially depoliticized. This depoliticization reduces the space to question why peacekeepers are in danger (which would highlight a political aspect of the context) and which peacekeepers are in danger (which would highlight inequalities between Global South and North Troop Contributing Countries; Cold-Ravnkilde, Albrecht, and Haugegaard, 2017). Moreover, it masks the fact that peacekeepers are also harmful to the host population (Razack, 2004; Whitworth, 2004; Higate and Henry, 2014; Jennings, 2017; United Nations, 2023). Wegner’s contribution in examining the peacekeeping myth is to provide a useful framework to understand the debate on the use of force in peace missions and how the idea of “making peace” complements a militarized mindset in an environment where military violence is understood as useful. 

The Canadian Peacekeeping Myth

Wegner, herself Canadian, focuses on the Canadian peacekeeping myth and how it is connected to the appeal of peacekeeping and to the idea of Canadian military activity as innocent and helpful. The myth contains attractive, flattering ideas about Canadian national identity and presumed Canadian values. At the same time, it obscures the violence of the Canadian state in domestic policing and international military operations, as well as its responsibility and that of its citizens in the colonial and imperial order and white supremacy. In Wegner’s analysis of the discourses around martial activities where the Canadian state benefited from the peacekeeping myth, she shows how they directly obfuscated the state’s violence. In the context of the Canadian Armed Forces’ counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan, the myth contributed to idealizing the “civilized” heroes who were defending the world against “bad” brown men, as illustrated by the government’s rhetoric concerning the “saving of Afghan women.” In the case of violence against the resistance of Indigenous communities by Canada’s military and police forces, some of which have also participated in UN peacekeeping, the myth benefits violent colonial institutions by representing Indigenous protest as a threat to order and the Canadian state as the benevolent guardian of said order. The martial politics involved in domestic policing – where violence against Indigenous communities is hidden behind peace and order for the settlers – and national militarism are thus linked. Similar links can also be made concerning research examining other countries involved in peacekeeping; for instance, in the analysis of how Brazilian peacekeepers deployed in Haiti euphemized the violence of their tasks to fit the narrative of a humanitarian vision of peacekeeping (Xavier do Monte, 2023) and how this increased use of force in the context of stabilization is related to processes of domestic militarization in Brazil (Kenkel, 2021). 

Wegner convincingly develops her analysis of the Canadian peacekeeping myth, but this focus also leaves some questions open. The creation of the Canadian myth is presented as something that occurred in the past and is now stabilized. It would have been interesting for Wegner to explore how Canadian orientations and UN peacekeeping activities have interacted with the Canadian peacekeeping myth since the 2000s. In the same way, the unique historical entanglement connecting Canada and UN peacekeeping at multiple levels raises questions as to the transferability of this framework to other countries. For example, how can we use the frame of the peacekeeping myth in countries where peacekeeping has increased in importance since the end of the Cold War but where their participation has not resulted in UN recognition (Krishnasamy, 2007) and international legitimacy?

Overall, Wegner offers a strong demonstration of how international and domestic politics are bound together. Her book will be useful to the study of peace, militarism, UN peacekeeping, feminist and critical approaches more broadly, discourse analysis, and Canadian politics. The concept of martial peace contributes significantly to the study of global politics in relation to domestic dynamics, and its flexibility will be helpful in future research to make visible discursive processes of legitimizing state violence that involve both military and liberal civilian spheres.

*Originally published in 2020. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

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International Political Sociology (IPS) based on the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault, offers a different lens to see global politics and explain it. At the outset, I must register my personal view that I do not agree with those who criticize the Foucauldian IR and accuse the Foucauldian scholars of overstretching Foucault's philosophy to explain the international, while Foucault himself expressed limited views on this field. Such criticism, in my view, runs counter to scientific innovation and creativity. In fact, a similar criticism may be made against Marxism as well. As in the international field, in the discipline of IR as well the "anarchy" prevails (and it is good so); that is, there is no higher authority above the scholars to dictate them what to consider, what not to pay attention. In this respect, the main argument of this paper is that the terminological riches of the Foucaldian philosophy and its application to global politics promise fresh contributions to the IR discipline and the study of global politics. Given the debate on the need to broaden and deepen the IR areas of interests, the Foucauldian IR may offer some new perspectives and tools to that end as well. Having noted these views, I now turn to analyze what IPS has to offer to the study of global politics, terminologically, methodologically, and substantively.

Methodological and Terminological Contributions  

It may be useful to start by referring to the security studies within the IR scholarship. Regarding security terminology, Ken Booth argues that security scholars keep inventing new terms and consume them and try or need to produce new ones in a continuous cycle (Booth, 1991). I tend to believe that this observation applies to the IR discipline as a whole. To remain interesting and keep its explanatory power, IR scholars of various theoretical strands continually push the limits of their creativity and innovativeness to come up with new terminology to describe and explain different aspects of global politics.

Michel Foucault was innovative in terms of bringing about his original terminological glossary. Accordingly, IPS reflects his productivity and that of the Foucauldian scholarship and offers a broad set of terminology that can enrich the terminological toolbox at the disposal of IR scholars. These include, but are not limited to, subjectification, dividing practices, responsibilization, governmentality, government rationality, governing through freedom / at a distance, political technology, dispositif, power based on its unique types (sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitics), resistance, reversibility, biosecurity, surveillance, panopticon, docility and utility, the conduct of conduct, counter-conduct and state racism.

Methodologically the Foucauldian discourse of genealogy may also serve the IR scholarship well. It may be useful to shift the attention of the IR scholarship from macro issues to micro/mundane practices, international/global regimes of practices, in a historical context. Baert notes that in the 1970s, Foucault switches from archaeology to genealogy and "the genealogist, in Foucault's view, travels back in time aiming to demonstrate that at some point radically new concepts were assigned to concepts". Baert further argues that "genealogy undercuts the present in several ways and draws attention to a consequence of this understanding", which is formulated by Foucault as "the present has not always been". (Baert, 2010). In this regard, as done by Steve Smith in The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory (1995), the genealogical approach is useful for IR as well to understand the historical evolution of concepts, theories, paradigms, so on.

Substantive Contributions: Looking Through a Different Lens

When asked about why he stayed away from focussing on state theory, Foucault replied by describing such an engagement as "indigestible meal". The fact that he has paid limited attention to global politics may be an indicator of his perception of this field as yet another "indigestible meal". Due to his distance to global politics, the Foucauldian scholarship has had to hermeneutically apply his views and concepts to global politics and according to some critics, to refute the assumptions of realism (Selby, 2007). Gradual attenuation of the state as the dominant actor in global politics may open up more space for the application of governmentality.

Michel Foucault explains the transition from the concept of disciplinary power, exercised by the sovereign on the individuals, to the practice of biopower (biopolitics) applied in a generalized fashion on the entire population. While doing this, he notes his observation that this transition of practice was accompanied by the adjustment of the terminology as follows: Instead of "taking life", "letting die" and instead of "letting live", "making live" (Foucault, 2003). Giorgio Agamben, on the other hand, argues that "all power rests ultimately on the ability of the one to take the life of another" (Rabinow and Rose, 2006). I tend not to share this view as a global understanding, because I believe that history is progressive, and humanity has drawn many lessons from the practices of the authoritarian and repressive regimes.

Today, despite some circumstantial setbacks it faces, globalization is a key phenomenon that can facilitate the global application of governmentality and open space for the contributions of IPS to the study of global politics. In fact, in Globalisation, Governmentality and Global Politics, Lipschutz notes that "globalization moves fast and impacts on the life of all nations with accelerating force". In this respect, he underlines "the importance of politics centred on the direct participation of the individual in social choices that affect the quality of life, working conditions and the global future" (Lipschutz, 2005). All these, in my view, call for closer attention to possible contributions of IPS.

In this regard, M. Dean argues that "ultimately government/governmentality is about the "conduct of conduct", which means to shape the behaviours and actions of people, according to a defined set of norms and variety of ends". In his view, "government in the final analysis aims to ensure happiness and prosperity of the population". In this respect, the notion of population plays a key role, as the government claims to encompass "each and all" (Dean, 1999). In this sense, Jaeger argues that the reform process in the United Nations (UN) in 2004-2005 aimed to re-design the UN in such a way that it pursues a rationality to manage and regulate the global population. In this regard, he further noted that, based on the Foucauldian concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, "the vitality, security and productivity of global population would become a fundamental objective, displacing the state sovereignty" (Jaeger, 2010). In this connection, Hindess argues that "neo-liberal international system closely linked the government of populations within states with the government of states within the international arena" (Hindess, 2002). The population replaced the family as the model of government (Foucault, 1991).

Regarding international security, a debate has been carried out based on the concept of (global) risk society, which was coined by Ulrich Beck after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some scholars find this new concept as an overstatement and argue that the 'war on terror' is "a new form of governmentality. In their view, this new security approach combines "knowledge and decision at the limit of knowledge, war and strategies of surveillance, injunctions to integration and drastic policies against anti-social behaviour" (Aradau and Van Münster, 2007).

As far as human rights are concerned, Foucault is not considered as "a theorist of human rights in the conventional sense". Foucauldian discourse of human rights rests upon "several disparate figures such as rights as ungrounded and illimitable, rights as the strategic instrument-effect of political struggle and rights as a performative mechanism of community". Accordingly, the Foucauldian approach to human rights is described as "a critical affirmation, which refers to neither a full embrace nor a total rejection of human rights". In essence, for Foucault, rights discourse should enable the creation of new rights as a result of social/communal dynamics (Golder, 2011).

Challenges and Obstacles Before the Foucauldian IR

David Chandler claims that the concept of "global governmentality" does not rest on a sound basis; it is hollow and not meaningfully applicable to the international politics, which is significantly different from the national domestic political, social and economic environment (Chandler, 2009). On the other hand, Kiersey argues that the concept of governmentality is not hollow and can find some room for applicability to the international domain as well (Kiersey, 2009). In the opinion of Jonathan Joseph, Foucault's concept of governmentality faces limitations as a social theoretical explanation and also as an account of the international domain. In this respect, he underlines, as a major limitation, "the unevenness of the international domain in terms of social and political development and argues that governmentality can be meaningfully applied only to those countries and areas, where governmental techniques based an advanced form of liberalism prevail". In the efforts to introduce governmentality in Sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, Joseph argues that the lack of a liberal capitalist social base to encourage the self-regulation of populations has been indicated as a major reason for failure (Joseph, 2010).

Selby believes that "for IR's narrow engagement with Foucault derives from the distinctive problems of internationalizing a thinker whose focus was primarily on the domestic social arena". In his view, the "traditional concerns of international relations theory seem a long way from Foucault's preoccupation with the micro-politics of power relations and subjectivity". Therefore, the scaling up of Foucault from the domestic liberal arena onto a global plane, where realist dynamics remain strong, Selby argues, is problematic and in such an attempt, "the world system's its unity, evenness and indivisibility" should also be considered. Because the contemporary world order has not been fully liberalized, there are limits to the internationalization of Foucault within IR theory. (Selby, 2007)

Similarly, Sam Ashman, a Marxist political economist argues that "the global accumulation process leads not to the evening up of economic differences predicted by neoclassical theory, but rather to the spatial concentration of investment, markets and skilled labour in certain privileged regions of world economy" (Callinicos, 2010). Given this, there seems to be a need to overcome the obstacle of the uneven development of state and civil society around the world (Joseph, 2010). Future development and coherence of a global civil society may be helpful for further elaboration and extension of Foucauldian IR to broader geographies. In this respect, Nancy Fraser argues for the existence of "a multilayered system of globalized governmentality". Based on Fraser’s argument, the author thinks that the concept of different scales and layers of governmentality is helpful in pointing to the unevenness of the international (Joseph, 2010). I find this observation and suggestion realistic and reasonable. In fact, even within the EU, an advanced form of regional integration, sometimes it is debated whether the integration process should continue at multiple speeds because member states have different capacities of development and adaptation. François Debrix suggests that by taking the Foucauldian notion of "panoptic regimes of governance" to heart, "a different approach to the problem of social order in international relations can be introduced" (Debrix, 1999).

Conclusion

IPS needs to pay attention to the theoretical diversity within the discipline of IR. As there is no grand theory of IR to explain everything in international relations/global politics, the IR discipline carries out its studies based on a disciplinary multiplicity. This inevitably leads to theoretical pluralism which some IR scholars have been trying to overcome through several methods like eclecticism and integrative pluralism, but so far with not much success. In this respect, the Foucauldian IR may find its niche and place in this theoretically diverse discipline and demonstrate its usefulness in explaining global politics through an alternative lens. The critique of dealing with "how" of the global politics, instead of "why" of it appears worth considering from a theoretical perspective. Joseph seems to suggest an eclectic solution to address this issue. In this regard, Joseph argues that "while the neo-Gramscian approach tells us a lot about neoliberalism's social and historical context, governmentality tells us more about its rationality" (Joseph, 2010). The critique of dealing with "how" of the global politics, instead of "why" of it appears worth considering from a theoretical perspective. Joseph seems to suggest an eclectic solution to address this issue. In this regard, Joseph argues that "while the neo-Gramscian approach tells us a lot about neoliberalism's social and historical context, governmentality tells us more about its rationality" (Joseph, 2010).

The traditional mainstream IR theories, particularly realism, are often criticized for not paying enough attention to the society and social aspects of global politics. In this respect, IPS may be helpful, together with scientific realism, constructivism and World Historical Sociology, so on, to fill this important shortcoming of IR discipline. Such an approach may be useful to link the domestic social with the international in a new way. In such an effort, the Foucauldian IR scholarship needs to consider taking bolder steps and start engaging with not only liberalism/neoliberalism but with Marxism, realism and other major IR theories as well. Many Foucauldian terms have already found their way into the IR glossary. For instance, "counter-conduct" is a term used to describe the movements which seek a different form of conduct (Dean, 1999). In this regard, global movements that can be described as counter-conduct like a recent movement protesting the violence against women or difficulty of access to drugs used against infectious diseases (Braun, 2007).  Similarly, some scholars argue that, when applied under the Foucauldian notion of 'dispositif,' 'precautionary risk and risk analysis' would serve as "helpful conceptual tools to explain various security practices put in place by different countries after the 9/11 attacks" (Aradau and Van Münster, 2007).

Antonio Gramsci wrote that "The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms" (Booth, 1991). In the context of the IPS' contribution to the study of global politics, it may be the case that Gramsci's "the new to be born" represents an ideal model of global governmentality and the Foucauldian IR would be the most suitable approach to explain the global politics in the future. In fact, governmentality is an alternative understanding of political power, which "seeks to draw attention to a different way of thinking and acting about the ways and means to know and govern the wealth, health and happiness of populations" (Rose and Miller, 1992).

Regarding the issue of rights, Foucault's understanding to keep the development of new rights possible and open-ended, in my view, is a reasonable and useful approach. In this respect, the right of individuals to intervene in international affairs, in fact, exercised in one way or another, represents a good example. As the post-territorial global civil society gets stronger and more effective, some other new (post-)human rights, like the right to a stable and predictable climate, may also emerge so that the behaviours of states and all other actors. Damaging the climate can be constrained not only through mitigation and adaptation, but if necessary, by precautionary security measures.

On the other hand, critical appraisals of the IPS should also be taken and engaged with seriously. For instance, M. G. E. Kelly argues that "the global governmentality perspective is far from unitary, because of the ambiguities in the term governmentality as developed by Foucault" (Kelly, 2010). Also, Joseph argues critically, that "the absence of an international equivalent of the state to apply the micro-practices of governmentality in different parts of the world seems like another problem and moreover, even though civil society plays key roles in governmentality, the existence of a global civil society remains a contested point" (Joseph, 2010). There are several other scholars who also critique the Foucauldian IR in several ways.

In this regard, one important risk for the Foucauldian IR scholarship is the apparent close association of governmentality with the neoliberal government model. The Foucaldian scholarship may do itself a favour by giving some thought to how to decouple their scholarly efforts from this contemporary model of government. This way, the Foucauldian IR can continue to exist even after neoliberalism becomes an outdated political fashion someday in the future. The main objective of the Foucauldian IR, I would suggest, should be to clearly present the possible original contributions to the IR discipline in understanding and explaining global politics. Only this way the Foucauldian IR can prove its explanatory (and maybe also constitutive power) and its place among many IR theories and be regarded as a "new lens" through which one can see and interpret the world politics in a different way.

Reference List

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Baert, P. (2010). Social theory in the twentieth century and beyond (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Malden, MA : Polity, 185-214.

Booth, Ken, (1991). Security and Emancipation, Review of International Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 313-326, Cambridge University Press.

Braun, B. (2007). Biopolitics and the molecularization of life. Cultural Geographies, 14(1), 6–28.

Chandler, D. (2009). Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach. International Political Sociology, 3(1), 53–70.

Callinicos, Alex (2010). "Does capitalism need a state system?", Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism, ed. by Alexander Anievas, Routledge.

Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage, pp. 9-39.

Debrix, François, (1999). Space Quest: Surveillance, Governance, and the Panoptic Eye of the United Nations, Alternatives 24 (1999), 269-294.

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Foucault, M. 2003 "Society must be Defended". Lectures at the College de France,  1975-1976. New York: Picador, pp. 239-63.

Golder, B. (2011). Foucault's Critical (Yet Ambivalent) Affirmation: Three Figures of Rights. Social & Legal Studies, 20(3), 283–312.

Hindess, B. (2002). Neo-liberal citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 6(2), 127-143.

Jaeger, H.-M. (2010). UN reform, biopolitics, and global governmentality. International Theory, 2(1), 50-86.

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Kiersey, N. J. (2009). Neoliberal Political Economy and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Why Governmentality is Not Hollow. Global Society, 23(4), 363–386.

Lipschutz, Ronnie D. (with John K. Rowe), (2005). Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics: Regulation for the Rest of Us, Routledge.

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The Electoral Knowledge Network typically defines two categories of election observation. First, short-term observation (STO), generally encompassing election climate, preceding days, voting day and the count. Second, long-term monitoring (LTO) involves assessing holistically the entire election process, including consolidation of results. It is an intensive assignment where team work is essential and yet many of the people who seek to do this work have had little experience of such joint efforts. This article explores the author's personal experiences with being an election observer, and offers some tips and reflections for those who may want to do this work themselves.

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Every stage of potential recruitment is competitive but like every career path there are ways to success. As for the rewards, these are professionally fulfilling. Financially, the pay for short and long-term observers will vary greatly from country to country. At the Short-term (STO) or Long-term (LTO) level you could easily find yourself getting only basic expenses while you are teamed with someone from a country which pays its observers a full salary. At the worst end of the scale there are countries who only refund incurred expenses after the event. I have noticed it is sometimes a bone of contention where the financial package offered from country to country differs so much between the observer team. One STO might be accounting for every basic expense and getting reimbursed later, while the team partner has a generous financial package for deployment and is also getting a full salary and benefits-based on the level of seniority of the last post served. This is a recipe for conflict but is inevitable due to the way observer missions are comprised. For the most part, countries are asked to supply observers and use their own country formula for renumeration. Even in EU missions, where everyone gets the same per diem of expenses, some observers may also get a salary from their own government, in addition.

Professionally-run elections which are transparent and give all individuals or parties an equal chance are at the heart of modern democracy. These days international election observers are wary of the words “free and fair” as it is based on too many assumptions which fly in the face of practical realities. You could have had the most professionally-executed vote in many a country but the political system itself is so skewed or (frankly) undemocratic – there is no genuine opposition. What the state party or long-time dictator tells you is “free and fair” could have the best electoral administration in the world, and still have no genuine democracy. In short, the process of election of the one-party state could be so precise, every vote is accounted for, and the political system itself effectively neutralizes genuine opposition. The modern dictator could pay for the most sophisticated polling system in the world but if there is no genuine opposition- all that election administration is useless. The equipment is impressive, the tabulations awesome and rapid if not instantaneous, but without a genuinely democratic political landscape to match the technicalities of the election administration, we might as well just have state-elected officials.

The modern International Election Observer is much more focused on whether a “level playing field”  (with useful democratic components) exists to promote multi-party or multi-candidate democracy, and allow genuine freedom of choice. That presupposes an enormous amount of groundwork to ensure popular confidence that there is democracy, to encourage political plurality and create a genuine contest where it is possible for the popular vote to make a difference. Thus, professional international election observation is multi-faceted and multi-layered, and based on complex and continuously evolving election administration methodologies. Ideally the operations of large international election observation organisations are centred on the best principles of election administration. The field operations will also continuously evolve to allow the organisation to achieve the best possible job in capturing the performance of the election administration. By that I mean we have been on a journey from simple paper note-books with narrative comments, to paper election observation questionnaires, to these questionnaires being captured by the use of electronic transmitting pens (combined with smart phones) to computer-tablets and finally to reporting applications based around mobile phone applications. Communication security has also improved.

Modern election observation will normally involve a careful arrangement of questions which will allow (as far as possible) a 360-degree view of the entire election process. It is also likely to involve a combination of long-term observation of the pre-election and post-election process, and more intensive, locally-based focus on the election week itself. These efforts are likely to concentrate on immediate pre-election planning in a region, local polling, and tabulation and finally consolidation of results at a district and local level. It also generally means that a country receiving an international election observation mission should be genuinely open. For example, it should possess an open media and journalistic community who can report untrammelled on all these events without fear of the secret police or social censure. When I first started this work in 1984 there were plenty of elections but many of them were (frankly) non-contests in which the party or president was at the least a “sure thing” or even worse, the only hat in the ring. Discreetly observers would be followed everywhere by intelligence operatives. Now elections are so prolific it was reported that in 2024 there were the largest volume of national and local elections ever seen in the history of elections. Our continuously evolving language in describing these elections is at the heart of the reportage of an international election observer.

It is worth noting that many of the concepts we associate with modern democracy have a rich and ancient history. Take for example medieval Venice where elections to appoint the Doge, the supreme leader of the Venetian Merchants Court, invented the ballot. These first ballots were metal balls, not paper votes. What made them unique and effective was that they fitted covertly into metal boxes which allowed no-one to know how the voter had voted – one of the first large-scale examples of voter secrecy.

The concept of international election observer has been with us now in a serious way for several decades, but if truth were told, it too is almost as old as electoral democracy itself. No sooner had we introduced what we hoped to persuade our public and the international community as democratic elections than each country began to compare itself with others. It is almost as old as the concept of election itself. When I first started as an international election observer in 1984, the reporting methodology was piecemeal if not quaint by today’s standards. Travelling off to an exotic island-state for the Commonwealth Secretariat I was given a note-book and told to write any observations down to inform the debriefing meeting which would be held on return in the famous Locarno Room of the UK Foreign Office. It was quite ceremonial compared to the technical methodologies today. Since then, there has been an enormous professionalization in both the methodologies and principles of international election observation, the world over. Practically every region of the world has its own election observation framework (EU, OSCE, OAS etc.) and numerous internationally binding conferences have formulated a set of standards for international election observation.

Almost all Foreign Ministries across the world have a desk devoted to international election observation. This may he known as a focal point who will organize either a roster of willing election observers from suitably qualified people, or circulate calls from relevant bodies or for bilateral missions organized by the individual country e.g. a colonial country may well assist its former colony by assisting in the observation of postcolonial elections. The Organisation for Security & Cooperation OSCE and European Union (EU) are the two largest programmatic organisers of election observations missions. For the OSCE it is within the OSCE countries, and the delivery is made by an OSCE entity called the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). For the EU, the landscape is much wider and follows an invitation from the country for the EU to assist and/or observe elections. EU missions may theoretically take place across the world, (but in practice most are in Africa, Asia and Latin America). To serve on OSCE or EU missions you must also be registered with an UpToDate profile on their databases. Both organisations have rigorous training and any deployment with either organisation presupposes successful certification on the OSCE basic training course. This is considered mandatory.

There are a host of other trainings conducted by the OSCE, EU and national providers, all of which will enhance your potential to be selected by the focal point of your country, and eventually recruited unto a mission. Selection unto EU missions is generally tougher as one of their missions nowadays typically will involve only a few volunteers from each member state. Some of the OSCE missions are much bigger, so the best place to start, and service on an OSCE mission is more-or-less necessary to be considered for an EU mission.

Whatever organisation an Observer may serve with nowadays contain essentially three types of openings. Short-term observer (STO) between a week and two weeks normally. Previously medium-term (MTO) openings offered several weeks but these have more-or-less disappeared. However, with some organisations an STO mission is more like medium-term. Then there are Long-Term Observers (LTOs) deployed for about two months or more. Especially if the election requires a second round you could find yourself three months in the field. Then there are core team posts of different kinds, both for election missions that have STOs or LTOs and also separate election missions we might summarise as “limited missions” where there are only LTOs and core staff or just core staff. Such “core-staff-only” missions include the preliminary mission which decides what the organisation is going to do in the future election observation, or re-visits the observation with the delivery of the mission report follow-up. Core-team posts are generally slightly longer than LTO missions, but there are also core-team short assignments.

The core staff position is the highest (and hardest) to achieve and would normally presuppose years of experience and relevant qualifications in an area like political science, law, election administration, IR, diplomacy, statistics or possibly logistics. The most senior core staff will be the Head of mission (in the EU and OSCE this is normally a senior politician and indeed in the EU will be a serving MEP). There will be a deputy, and depending on the size and scope of the mission many specialist roles like election advisor; perhaps a human rights and/or gender adviser, and staff involved in the coordination of the observers. All of these positions are “open-recruitment” to the sending organisations (e.g. OSCE, EU or Carter Center etc.) and are the most highly competitive.

The United Nations (UN) has been a big driver in the setting of standards for international election observation. It is also one of the major organisations assisting countries in the administration of their elections to the highest possible standards. The UN itself no longer observes elections for, as the reader might surmise, it would be a conflict of interest to help administer and then also try to independently monitor elections. This would be a bit like marking your own homework. There are however, occasionally non-observer roles open for large UN mission operations which include democratic elections. These might include election administration technical advice, and in the past even election supervisor jobs.

There are many others international organisations also involved in election observation. One thinks in particular of the Carter Center, established by the late President Jimmy Carter, which has a large election observations programme. In the USA both the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the National Republican Institute (NRI) recruit international observers for its overseas missions. There are a range of country specific recruitment opportunities too with regional political organisations or international NGOs. There are also many other regional-bodies like the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Organisation of African States (OAS), and the Asian Observer’s Network (ANFREL). There are also numerous smaller organisations which set up international; and bi-lateral observation missions whether as projects associated with particular countries, universities or NGO programmes.

In the past two decades there has also emerged a proliferation of domestic observer organisations who seek volunteers for a national election observation projects. In the UK (for example) there is Democracy Volunteers. Sadly, there has also emerged a separate phenomenon of fake election observers. Generally, they try to recruit (mostly) unwitting politicians who may not always realise ulterior motives or agenda. Common-sense might also make the potential recruit ponder if they are being invited to be an election observer for one of the lesser-known observer organisations or for a particular country, could there be an alternative motive in motion? One might be surprised by the number of international officials who have made the apparent mistake of accepting invitations which turn out to be less than objective.

What makes a good candidate for international election observation? Frankly, many countries do not insist on any particular academic or professional expertise but rather recruit from among experienced people such as former public servants, states-people or NGO executives. Most recruiters have specific medical, educational, language, country experience and (subtle) age criterion and there are country-specific foci which bear on recruitment. There is also a robust Code of Conduct which governs the conduct of the observer and this will feature in the mission-specific training.

Many overseas assignments have offered me evidence of the challenges people face. People become involved for various reasons and may demonstrate diverse personalities. People who do overseas work are often categorised as falling under one or more of three characteristics that Hall jokingly labels Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits. Budding election observers might be regarded as uncaring mercenaries largely in development work for the money this dangerous employment often offers. Others seem imbued by a missionary sense of making the world better- some are even quite religiously zealous about it. Finally you get people who are escaping from their mundane world – so-called misfits who seem to fare better when outside their own country. Perhaps that is because their eccentricities are less conspicuous to foreigners. Abroad, the shy introvert might even metamorphose into an apparent celebrity, such is the aura that development work often carries. This can be enhanced by wearing military gear and looking like you are armed.

These unique personal foibles have consequences when people work under great pressure, and it can easily be a recipe for disaster. I’ve arrived at a remote regional capital to find the long-term workers have not spoken to each other in weeks. I’ve heard cases of attempted poisoning and myself witnessed an assault made only with a humble biro. There are those who hog the radio and those who quarrel over who is boss. Then there are people who for various reasons, and perhaps on direct orders from their government, seem to set out to be a nuisance to the mission. There can be a potential unspoken apoliticality to the election environment, and it is important for the observer to be able to handle this objectively. For this reason, I encourage those who wish to embark on a service-career to prioritise the concept of service. All international organisations involve the successful management of cultural differences and personal opinions and it is vital to put the mission ahead of any personal views you may have. What happens if something goes wrong? These days we sometimes make a call to human resources at headquarters or there might even be a dedicated HR person on the bigger missions. Sometimes even these HR people can be really good, especially if they have been aid workers themselves and know the field.

Drawing from my time in the field, I will recall some of my own experiences. My first case is the mercenary type. He had crashed the UN vehicle at speed and killed a farm animal. In his report he told me he had encountered a suicidal horse. Actually, correct financial reportage is essential. A report like that would involve an awkward conversation. My second case is the mercenary type too. Nothing seemed to go right for this person and they hated the work and always wanted to be outside. We discovered the observer had recently spent two years in a federal penitentiary for fraud on a lawyer’s licence. Again, honesty is the only policy. In a case like that you might even have to check if the person had been legitimately selected.

Another mercenary case that needed a quick field decision was a good worker whose personal life came into view. In the Islamic country we were posted in, they could not invite an aid worker to stay who hosted a swingers club back in the US. This is a reminder that when we serve as observers we are also being observed. As mentioned, in some countries this might even include being followed by the secret service. One needs to be very careful about one’s personal social media presence. Nowadays some missions ask for complete social media silence during an active election mission. Sometimes those who feel committed to making the world better can overlook the fact that election observation should not be combined with independent goals like preaching. Of the troublesome missionaries, there was a person who prayed with her aid queues. We eventually had to manhandle the bible off that observer and remind them of our neutrality. From time to time, I’ve had to prevent aid partners from making church membership compulsory to get food aid.

Often governments send people who have strong qualifications but no field aptitude. Perhaps unkindly, we regard observers who manifest dysfunctional tropes in the vital context of the field as misfits. People who cannot or will not adapt are certainly always with us in abundance. There are those who would only go to the toilet in their own hotel room which rendered them useless in the field. I recall an observer who would go nowhere because they hated getting smoke in their hair. Then there are the so many who clearly come to us with a lot of experience doing a bad job. Then you realize that they lasted no longer than a day or two in previous overseas assignments. They seemed to have been everywhere on aid work but sometimes even had to be sent home from the airport for being drunk on arrival off the plane. Examples like these show that people should consider their personal circumstances when volunteering. It is important to realise that international service is about service, not engaging in an escape from home/reality fantasy, or quarrelling about who is in control or other minutiae. Doing an effective job is why you are there, and personality issues must take a back seat. You have to abandon your ego and prioritise working together constructively as a team.

I have referred to Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits, for indeed many people who do this work demonstrate liabilities that need addressed before a person can be effective. Some countries pay so well their observers may seem like mercenaries. Some people try to make observing a career, although this is very difficult because the missions are very competitive it is difficult to get regular assignments. Should you, the reader, embark on this journey you will encounter some people with a personal agenda which may make them appear more like missionaries. Sometimes their empathy with the hardship of the people can be meritorious. On other occasions it can be unproductive. And it is incumbent on everyone who signs up to be an asset not a misfit. I have encountered many so-called “country-specialists” who likely knew the tourist spots of the capital but did not know about election observation. That can be a flaw in recruitment where the country sends people who have regional expertise in a different job. Typically they have been assigned to a city office and have no sympathy for the hardship of fieldwork.

Prospective observers should know that deployment rosters can be long, sometimes days end with little sleep. Health and safety rules apply, and each mission will have medical and security experts, but operational conditions will vary enormously. Calmness and patience are vital. There is also a lot of internal competition so do not necessarily think your partner is going to help you get your next assignment. Whether mercenaries, missionaries or misfits we all have to get along or fail together. It is the mission not the missionary that counts when saving lives or observing elections. Professional evaluations follow, and for many it may seem like a fall in esteem for their apparent personal weaknesses to be discussed in public. Likewise, one observer may blame the other in such post-mission evaluations which can be soul-destroying and embarrassing. Above all, election observation is challenging work, but remains an important and relatively accessible opening into international service.

Further Reading

Beaulieu, Emily, Susan D. Hyde, ‘In the Shadow of Democracy Promotion: Strategic Manipulation, International Observers, and Election Boycotts’, Comparative Political Studies, 42/3 (2009), 392-415

Benstead, L., Kao, K., & Lust, E. (2020). Does it matter what observers say? The impact of international election monitoring on legitimacy. Mediterranean Politics, 1-22, 2020

Birch, Sarah, ‘Patterns of Electoral Malpractice’, Project on Electoral Malpractice in New and Semi-Democracies Working Papers (Colchester: University of Essex, 2008), 1-28

Bjornlund, Eric, Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy (Washington DC; Baltimore; London: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)

Carothers, Thomas, ‘The Observers Observed’, Journal of Democracy, 8/3 (1997), 17-31

Carter Center (2011), ‘Waging Peace: Nepal’, <http://www.cartercenter.org/countries/ nepal-peace.html>

Carter Center (2011b), ‘Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation’, (Atlanta: Carter Center, 2011)

Cowen, Tyler, ‘Cooked Books’, The New Republic, 18 March 2008

Dorman, Sara Rich, ‘Make Sure They Count Nicely This Time’: The Politics of Elections and Election Observing in Zimbabwe’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 43/2 (2005), 155-77

Fawn, Rick, ‘Battle over the box: international election observation missions, political competition and retrenchment in the post-Soviet space’, International Affairs, 82/6 (2006), 1133-53

Flores, Thomas E. “Monitoring the Monitors: Understanding Election Observation in Today’s World.” International Studies Review, vol. 15, no. 3, 2013, pp. 432–37.

Garber, Larry, Glen Cowan, ‘The Virtues of Parallel Vote Tabulations’, Journal of Democracy, 4/2 (1993), 95-107

Geisler, Gisela, ‘Fair? What Has Fairness Got to Do With It? Vagaries of Election Observations and Democratic Standards’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 31/4 (1993), 613-37

Hartlyn, Jonathan, Jennifer McCoy, ‘Observer Paradoxes: How to Assess Electoral Manipulation’, in Andreas Schedler (ed.), Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), 41-54

Grömping, Max. 2017. 'Domestic election monitoring and advocacy: an emerging research agenda', Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 35: 407-23.

———. 2019. 'More Bang for the Buck: Media Freedom and Organizational Strategies in the Agenda-Setting of Human Rights Groups', Political Communication, 36: 452-75.

———. 2021. 'Agents of resistance and revival? Local election monitors and democratic fortunes in Asia', Democratization, 28: 103-23.

Kelley, Judith. “D-Minus Elections: The Politics and Norms of International Election Observation.” International Organization 63, no. 4 (2009): 765–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40345955. July 2010, Volume 21, Issue 3

International Election Observation Missions: An (in)used tool for the post-legislative study of electoral legislation Paperback – 1 Jun. 2021 by J. Angelo Berbotto (Author)

Judith Kelley, Election Observers and Their Biases (2021)

Kelley, Judith G. Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Lyall, Jason. “Civilian Casualties, Humanitarian Aid, and Insurgent Violence in Civil Wars.” International Organization, vol. 73, no. 4, 2019, pp. 901–26.

Moncrief, Stephen. “Military Socialization, Disciplinary Culture, and Sexual Violence in UN Peacekeeping Operations.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 54, no. 5, 2017, pp. 715–30.

Inken von Borzyskowski, The Risks of Election Observation: International Condemnation and Post-Election Violence, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 3, September 2019, Pages 654–667, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz024

Reporting on elections : Council of Europe handbook for civil society organisations (Strasbourg, 2024)

Using international standards in elections: Council of Europe handbook for civil society organisations (Strasbourg, 2024)

Useful Websites

IDEA – https://www.idea.int/sites/default/files/publications/why-professionalizing-international-election-observation-might-not-be-enough.pdf

The Declaration of Principles on International Election Observation – https://www.idea.int/publications/catalogue/declaration-principles-international-election-observation-and-code-conduct

Democracy Volunteers – https://democracyvolunteers.org/category/international-observations

Election Observation & Democratic Support – https://www.eods.eu/useful-readings

OSCE Election Observation Handbook – https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/5/e/68439.pdf

EU Election Observation Methodology – https://www.eods.eu/methodology

Domestic Election Observation – https://www.coe.int/en/web/electoral-assistance/domestic-election-observation

IFES – https://eaccess.s3.amazonaws.com/media/attachments/resources_mainresource/570/Election_access_observation_toolkit_accessible.pdf

Citizen Election Monitoring – https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/citizen-electoral-observers

Martin Duffy has participated in more than two hundred international election and human rights assignments since beginning his career in Africa and Asia in the 1980s. He has served with a wide range of international organizations and has frequently been decorated for field service, among them UN (United Nations) Peacekeeping Citations and the Badge of Honour of the International Red Cross Movement. He has also held several academic positions in Ireland, UK, USA and elsewhere. He is a proponent of experiential learning and holds awards from Dublin, Oxford, Harvard, and several other institutions including the Diploma in International Relations at the University of Cambridge.

*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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Energy geopolitics has entered a new chapter in its long history. Climate change and energy security urge for a shift to renewable energy and other decarbonization options. Such a transition implies big changes to energy systems, markets, and trade flows, and in turn industrial opportunities and political dependencies. The abundance and widespread nature of renewable energy, for example, could ease tensions in what are now oligopolistic oil and natural gas markets. At the same time, global politics shapes the speed and direction of the energy transition. Great power rivalry influences technological choices, trade partnerships, and which global agreements can be reached and enforced. A fast and just transition to a more sustainable energy supply is not assured in world where a multitude of global and regional powers defend their economic and political interests. How will this reciprocal and complex interaction play out? Will the energy transition pacify global (energy) relations or will great power rivalry weaponize the energy transition? While definitive answers are for future historians to give, this brief summarizes the key expectations and considerations regarding the interplay between renewable energy and global politics, sketching the dilemmas countries face while balancing national and collective interests.

New map, new game?

Energy geopolitics is commonly associated with oil and gas security, generally framed as the availability of affordable supply. It focuses on a world in which some countries possess certain resources while others try to get access to them. It paints the picture of oligopolistic global markets where importers hold strategic reserves, diversify imports in terms of sources, origins, and routes, and work with diverse contract portfolios, and where exporters try to generate as much revenues from exports as possible and share an interest in safe transport infrastructure with importers.

Over the last decade, the transition to renewable energy and other decarbonization options has started to reshape the energy map, through investment patterns and directly. The geographic and technical characteristics of renewable energy sources like solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydropower are very different from those of coal, oil, and natural gas. Sources are abundant, widespread, but intermittent (most). Generation requires critical minerals and metals and lends itself to decentral generation. Transportation is generally electric in nature, not as solids, liquids or gases, as most renewable energy sources are directly transformed into electricity, with notable exceptions being hydrogen and bioenergy. There is also a host of other decarbonization options available in the form of nuclear energy, efficiency measures, home insulation or CCS that support transition efforts.

The energy transition represents a new chessboard on which countries play. Scholarly attention has hence focused on the question whether this implies a new game as well, i.e. what the geopolitical implications of the energy transition are. By and large, roughly eight clusters of expectations stand out (Scholten and Bosman 2016; Scholten 2018, 2023; Scholten et al. 2020; Hafner and Tagliapietra 2020; Vakulchuk et al. 2021; Blondeel et al. 2021; IRENA 2019; and many others).

First, renewable energy brings about more symmetrical energy relations in the long run. As all countries have access to some form of renewable energy, most will be able to source a greater share of their energy needs domestically. While the extent depends on domestic capacity, the distinction between exporters and importers blurs, creating ‘prosumer countries’ that have a make or buy option. Add to this that there are also more countries that can act as potential exporters, and we see the shaping of a buyers’ market. Trade volumes of energy sources are likely to drop considerably, reducing energy security and import dependence concerns. Intermittency will, however, create challenges for grid balance and price stability, making availability at the right time a strategic interest.

Second, electrification is likely to lead to regional communities and grid politics in the long run. Electricity suffers from long-distance losses and knows stringent operational requirements due to expensive storage and on the spot balancing of supply and demand to prevent cascading effects. The former, together with the abundance of renewable energy, favors country sized grids or continental connections at most, not global interconnection/trade. The latter implies that pipeline politics turns into grid politics, with emphasis being on where interconnectors should be built, who owns and controls the grid, flows, and storage facilities. Hydrogen is interesting in this regard as it would allow more long-distance trade and would act as a source of diversification from an overreliance on electricity as the main future energy vector. This could be convenient for those countries having less trust in their neighbors.

Third is an increasing struggle for access to critical minerals and metals and limiting supply chain dependencies by moving their processing (closer to) home. Currently, copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths markets are dominated by a few countries (Chile, Indonesia, DRC, Australia, and China respectively according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2021) while processing is strongly dominated by China across all materials. This issue is especially poignant in the coming two decades when most new capacity has to be installed. The issue differs from oil and gas imports though, as it represents a stock (not a flow), and offers options for recycling and the use of alternatives.

Fourth is a decentralization of energy production. Some renewable energy sources are very scalable, e.g. solar panels, and are likely to be generated closer to home. This changes the way current energy infrastructures operate and can empower local communities away from a reliance on energy companies and transmission grids. It can, however, also provide separatist areas with their own energy sources, strengthening their cause. It is also here where an important question lies regarding the look of future energy systems. The question how much energy will be generated and distributed centrally vs decentrally, together with the question how much alternatives to electricity we will use (new forms of heat like hydrogen, biogas, district heating), are the key question facing policy makers and grid operators in planning future energy systems. Estimates for final energy consumption across end-use sectors range around 20-25% molecules next to 75-80% electricity according to the HydrogenCouncil and McKinsey (2021), but also depends heavily on countries’ climate and industrial needs.

Fifth and sixth, the energy transition is a major and global force of creative destruction. It represents the rise of a new clean tech industry which is coveted by many nations for potential revenues and jobs and that features dominantly in national industrial strategies (e.g. US, EU, China, India, Japan). This competition is already ongoing with China leading in all things electric (solar, wind, batteries, EVs) and OECD countries in molecules (hydrogen, CCS, bioenergy) if we were to sum it up in one sentence. At the same time, the energy transition represents the decline of fossil fuels, leading to potential socio-political instability in exporting countries that rely heavily on their rents. While oil and natural gas are not disappearing anytime soon, and demand for oil based products is likely to remain even longer, it does raise the question how exporters will respond. Will they stall the oil end-game, invest in clean fossil, or diversify their economy towards renewables or something else? In any case, those countries that produce at lowest cost per barrel, mostly the Middle East, will be the last to need to switch. Moreover, rising energy demand in the global South is likely to offer new export opportunities for them while the global North is decarbonizing.

Seven, non-renewable decarbonization options such as nuclear energy, efficiency measures, home insulation, and CCS help to reduce CO2 emission in the short term but risk carbon lock-in in the longer term. Especially, the so-called hard-to-abate sectors such as the heavy industry, the chemical industry, heavy transportation, and heat will likely be relying on fossil fuels longer and decarbonize through hydrogen and CCS. Once these technologies are installed, they will not be easily replaced. Moreover, it is not certain that green hydrogen through electrolysis will come down in costs soon.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the energy transition produces winners and losers. Not all countries can and will move equally fast nor benefit equally from this transition. Some will turn their oil and gas import dependence into clean energy technology exports while others will simply replace fossil imports for clean tech imports. Current oil and gas exporters will also need to manage to diversify. However, to enjoy the economic, security, and climate benefits of renewable energy, the transition needs to be fast and just. Fast, for otherwise we will incur climate damages. Just, for we need everybody on board to limit climate change. So far, countries’ emphasis has been on national strategies to ‘win’ the transition game, far less attention has gone to achieving collective benefits and ensuring a smooth global energy transition. The role of international organizations such as OPEC, OECD, UN, IRENA, etc. in providing some form of global energy governance will be interesting to keep an eye on in this regard.

In the end, the geopolitical implications of the energy transition are a matter of two steps forward and one step back, or, if we put it in a temporal perspective, one of a challenging transition with the light at the end of the tunnel. It is also a move form concerns about energy sources to energy carriers and technologies, i.e. from sources to distribution and supply chains.

New trends, new game?

Energy (security) policy is a complex two-level game. On the one hand, domestic possibilities and politics determine energy strategies with attention turning abroad afterwards for whatever countries need to import or wish to sell. On the other hand, global politics sets parameters for policy priorities and trade possibilities. A number of trends deserve attention in this regard.

First and foremost is the trend of increasing great power rivalry. If the Cold War was marked by bipolarity, the 1990s and early 2000s by unipolarity, we are now in a phase where China’s economic and increasingly military rise is challenging US hegemony, but where many regional powers such as the EU, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil are also repositioning themselves. It is bipolar in some ways, with the US and China leading the camps, and multipolar in others, while managing Thucydides’ trap seems key to stabilizing global relations. In such a setting, energy is but one of many areas in which states compete and where energy itself can be instrumentalized to serve other political purposes. States may consider industrial competitiveness and military supremacy more important than clean energy and use energy as a way to harm potential rivals, as we have seen between Russia and the EU.

Another trend is that of increasing climate change, environmental degradation and resource depletion. The effects of past CO2 emissions are increasingly noticeable and the Paris Agreements’ 1,5°C target is out of reach despite actions having lowered projections from 4 degrees to 2,5-3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century (Climate Action Tracker 2023). The need to phase-out fossil fuels is largely driven by climate change concerns, not so much the scarcity of fossil fuels as was long feared. Currently, it is expected that there are 50 years of natural gas reserves, 60 years of oil reserves, and 140 years of coal reserves left at current consumption levels and known reserves (Energy Institute 2023). Instead of peak oil, we face peak demand. As a result, the push for an energy transition is to a great extent driven by countries’ perceptions of climate change.

A third trend, and more directly related to energy, is that global energy demand is shifting towards the Global South due to a combination of population growth and economic development (IEA 2018). It will be of importance how they intend to meet demand, e.g. through renewable energy for sustainability reasons or fossil fuels as they are proven and readily accessible for industrialization (Scholten 2024 forthcoming).

The result of this complex two-level game is that energy policy and global energy politics is marked by great diversity and many players. If we were to shamelessly generalize, we might sum up global dynamics in the following way. The Global North, by and large, sees renewable energy as a means of diversification away from fossil fuels and as a key aspect of industrial policy, i.e. as an engine for jobs and exports. They are set to compete over market shares while sharing a collective interest in abating climate change. The Global South sees in the energy transition a means to increase energy access and economic development, where they can sell own resources and materials and move up the value chain in a way they could not with fossil fuels. While they are relatively strongly affected by climate change, they lack the finance to green their energy sector and might opt for cheap fossil fuels instead. For fossil fuel exporters, like OPEC and Russia, the energy transition threatens their main revenue stream and domestic stability. They hence strategize how to cope with an eventually declining sector as mentioned earlier, but are likely to compete with renewable energy technology exports on the short term.

The diversity of trends and actors makes it hard to estimate the outcome of that interaction. In such situations, scenarios can be a helpful tool to reduce complexity to manageable proportions. The combination of great power rivalry and (perceived) climate urgency can be taken as the two core uncertainties in global energy security scenarios and strategic thinking, though clean technology breakthroughs have been used instead of climate urgency (Goldthau et al. 2019). It has also proven valuable time and again in my own courses on the geopolitics of the energy transition. By and large, we can paint four scenarios based on these two uncertainties and derive consequences for the speed and direction of the energy transition from them (see Figure 1).

Scenario B (clean tech competition) is what most would consider the current trajectory. It represents a world with a strong need for climate action (mitigation) that is increasingly politically fragmented. It is a world where rivalling great powers develop clean energy technology in a setting of strong economic competition and through protectionist if not downright mercantilist ways. This leads to a fast uptake of renewable energy in those countries ‘winning’ this competition and those aligned to them, but a slow fossil fuel phase-out in those areas likely to ‘lose’ industrially in this energy transition. If trade becomes strongly politicized, it may only occur between certain countries and/or withing certain regions or blocks.

Scenario C (other priorities) resembles the opposite of scenario B. It represents a future world of economic globalization through cooperation and global institutions, possibly under hegemonic guidance. Climate action is not a top priority as either climate impacts will be dealt with through adaptation (and not mitigation) or other, socio-economic issues, have priority. This leads to trade in both fossil fuels and renewable energy, with clean technologies seen as industrial opportunity but where rivalry is managed through markets and global institutions. Both the uptake of renewable energy and phase-out of fossil fuels are medium.

Scenarios A and D represent the two extremes. Scenario A (green proliferation) represents a world that strikes a ‘renewable energy proliferation treaty’ to mitigate climate change as global cooperation enables joint action while climate change impacts are either felt or perceived as the main policy issue. In essence, a compromise will be found between concerns in the Global North about energy and material security, protection of intellectual property rights, and industrial opportunity and worries in the Global South about finance, know-how, and economic development, while forms to compensate fossil fuel exporters or means to co-opt them in the energy transition have been found (e.g. hydrogen). The transition to renewable energy progresses very fast while fossil fuels are phased out fast.

Scenario D (political rivalry), finally, represents a world where great power rivalry overshadows climate concerns and countries focus on climate adaptation and securing energy through whatever means necessary. Emphasis is on using all available domestic sources in a setting of politicized supply chains (e.g. critical materials). Dependence on foreign supplies, especially from rivalling countries, is avoided, making some turn to domestic fossil fuels and others to renewable energy. This leads to a slow or fast uptake of renewable energy depending on countries’ resources, but a medium one overall, and slow phase-out of fossil fuels.

Overall, the impact of global politics on the speed and direction of the energy transition is bigger in times of strong great power rivalry. When economic competition and military threats become imminent, countries cannot sacrifice short term goals for long term benefits. Only direct global climate catastrophe might lead to a ‘ceasefire’, but by then, of course, it is already too late climate wise. In this sense, scenario B still offers some hope, but we must make sure not to have great power rivalry escalate further, so as not to end up in scenario D.

Achieving the Security Benefits of Renewable Energy

We started this brief by asking how the interaction between the energy transition and global politics would play out. Will the energy transition pacify global (energy) relations or will great power rivalry weaponize the energy transition? Looking at the 8 expectations and 4 scenarios, and viewing energy geopolitics as a two-level game, the answer is a bit of both. Global politics is likely to determine the speed and direction of the energy transition in the short run while renewable energy sources and technologies will reshape energy relations from the ground up in the long run. In that sense, renewable energy depoliticizes global (energy) relations over time by leading to end stage where energy self-sufficiency is greater than currently, while political competition will heighten the transitional challenges noted, e.g. access to critical materials and industrial rivalry. While it is hard to imaging global politics derailing the entire energy transition, as sooner or later we will run out of fossil fuels, climate damages will force us to ask a follow up question: how to ensure a smooth global energy transition?

A smooth global energy transition rests on understanding the complex interplay between (changes in) energy systems and global politics and finding ways for policy makers to balance national energy security and industrial interests with collective climate and stability concerns. Much research has to be done on this front, both conceptually and empirically, but also explicitly on possibilities for more global energy governance. Regarding the latter, the framing of renewable energy as having national and global security benefits next to global climate and national economic advantages seems a first step in this regard. Historically, global energy governance has only truly emerged in those instances where energy and military security were related, e.g. nuclear non-proliferation and the European Coal and Steel Community. A second step would then be a renewable energy proliferation treaty that manages to balance the interests of the Global North, Global South, and fossil fuel exporters, as mention earlier. Such things are of course much easier to write than to do, but something along those lines is required to ensure that the energy, climate, and security benefits of renewable energy are to be realized during and not only after the transition.

Figure 1. Four Scenarios on the Geopolitics of the Energy Transition

References

Blondeel, M., M. Bradshaw, G. Bridge and C. Kuzemko. 2021. The geopolitics of energy system transformation: A review. Geography Compass. DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12580.

Climate Action Tracker. 2023. December 2023 Update. Available at: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/.

Energy Institute 2023. Statistical review of world energy. Available at: www.energyinst.org/statistical-review.

Goldthau, A., K. Westphal, M. Bazilian and M. Bradshaw. 2019. How the energy transition will reshape geopolitics. Nature, 569, 29–31.

Hafner, M. and S. Tagliapietra (Eds.). 2020. The Geopolitics of the Global Energy Transition. Cham: Springer Nature.

HydrogenCouncil, & McKinsey. (2021, February). Hydrogen Insights, A Perspective on Hydrogen Investment, Market Development and Cost Competitiveness. Available at:  https://hydrogencouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Hydrogen-Insights-2021.pdf

International Energy Agency (IEA). 2018. World energy outlook 2018. www.iea.org.

International Energy Agency (IEA). 2021. World energy outlook 2023. www.iea.org

International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). 2019. A New World – The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation. Report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. Abu Dhabi: IRENA.

Scholten, D. and Bosman, R. 2016. The geopolitics of renewables; exploring the political implications of renewable energy systems. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 103, 273–283.

Scholten, D. and D. Zuckerman. 2024. The Geopolitics of the Global Energy Demand Transition. Forthcoming in the Analyses series of the Elcano Royal Institute, Madrid, Spain.

Scholten, D., Bazilian, M., Overland, I. and Westphal, K. 2020. The geopolitics of renewables: New board, new game. Energy Policy, 138, 111059.

Scholten, D. (Ed.). 2018. The Geopolitics of Renewables. Cham: Springer Nature.

Scholten, D. (Ed.). 2023. Handbook on the Geopolitics of the Energy Transition. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Vakulchuk, R., I. Overland and D. Scholten. 2020. Renewable energy and geopolitics: Literature review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 122, 109547.

Dr. Daniel Scholten is visiting assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and associate fellow at the Clingendael Institute, specializing in the geopolitics and governance of the energy transition. In the past he was strategic advisor energy and sustainability at the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, and member of the expert panel of the IRENA global commission on the geopolitics of energy transformation.

Every new semiconductor breakthrough is quickly translated into a number: 5 nanometers, 3 nanometers, 2 nanometers. These figures dominate headlines and shape perceptions of technological leadership. Yet the fixation on smaller chips risks obscuring a larger reality about the semiconductor race unfolding across Asia. Leadership in the chip industry cannot be assessed by manufacturing sophistication alone. Taiwan’s TSMC manufactures more than 90% of leading-edge chips globally, yet its domestic chip design lags behind the United States. The countries that benefit most from semiconductor innovation are not necessarily those that produce the smallest chips, but those that build resilient ecosystems around them, strengthen scientific and industrial capabilities, and convert technological advances into sustained improvements in productivity, security, and social welfare. Seen through this broader lens, Asia’s chip race produces multiple leaders across different dimensions, rather than a single undisputed champion.

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The history of semiconductor development is often presented as a story of relentless miniaturization. Because smaller transistors often improve performance and energy efficiency, the nanometer scale has become a focal point of international competition. The relevant unit of analysis cannot be an isolated transistor or fabrication plant. Creating a system that converts semiconductor innovation into usable computing capacity, highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to increase social welfare, is fundamental for sustainable growth.

The microchip industry has experienced rapid turnarounds, as miniaturization fuels advances in AI, IoT, and cloud computing. The nanometer scale has become a competitive measure of economic growth and strategic leadership. Samsung and TSMC lead in producing advanced chips (2nm and below), with TSMC supplying most of the innovative chips in 2025. China aims for 80% self-sufficiency by 2030. The United States has long possessed major strengths in semiconductor design, software, intellectual property, research, and manufacturing equipment. Intel’s introduction of high-volume production of its 18A process in 2025 strengthened the country’s position in leading-edge domestic manufacturing. Continuing investments involved are considerable. In 2025, American semiconductor companies invested more than US$76.8bn in R&D. India’s Semicon program has attracted more than US$17.31bn in capital investment to support semiconductor development. Such spending assumes that advanced chips will shape future economic power.

The semiconductor race has several leaders but no comprehensive winner. Taiwan leads in advanced fabrication (90% of leading-edge chip manufacturing); the United States maintains major strengths in design, software, intellectual property, and equipment (sales of $425 billion in semiconductors in 2025); and South Korea remains a leader in memory technologies (Samsung grew more than 1800% compared to last year given AI-driven demand). Each excels in specific functions, yet none fully dominates the entire system.

Yes, investment can accelerate innovation, but money does not remove every constraint. Semiconductor work demands technical knowledge, practical experience, and disciplined methods. A country can subsidize a fabrication plant more quickly than it can build a mature network of engineers, technicians, suppliers, and researchers. The international contest is therefore not only about who can produce advanced microchips. It is also about who can buy them, who controls the equipment required to make them, and who can use them on a scale. Semiconductor power is networked power. Countries dispute a place in global supply chains. Hence, each economy may specialize in different areas such as chip design, fabrication, manufacturing, and advanced materials. Today, the focus is on production, testing, and packaging. As a result, modern semiconductors emerge from highly specialized cross-border networks rather than a single national ecosystem.

The explosion of AI data centers has created a global microchip shortage. The rising demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) exposed a critical vulnerability in the semiconductor supply chain. Technological and manufacturing leaders could not suppress global demand for HBM. When specialized technology offers an unprofitable margin, even with global capacity, it becomes scarce because there are no incentives to produce it. This ecosystem is internationally interdependent but still fragmented. A resilient semiconductor system may remain integrated while diversifying critical dependencies and maintaining the capacity to respond to disruption.

Then, a fundamental question arises: does corporate technological success translate into broadly distributed national capability? Investment can accelerate innovation, but even a substantial investment alone is not enough. A country without a leading-edge fabrication plant can still convert imported chips into improvements in healthcare, education, research, and industrial productivity. Conversely, a manufacturing leader may struggle to spread the benefits beyond a small number of firms or regions.

From a public policy perspective, industrial development has the greatest impact when it generates social value. Social impact can be observed through technical education, workforce development, economy-wide productivity growth, regional development, access to advanced computing and technology, public infrastructure and services, healthcare and scientific research capacity, and opportunities beyond established technology clusters. India’s Semicon 2.0 program is a leading example that has reduced import dependence and has enhanced national reliance. This set of policies supports the semiconductor ecosystem, including start-ups, research, and human capital development. Yet policymakers worldwide face tensions when implementing these strategies. Measuring social value and the increase in welfare requires precision and robust metrics that, most of the time, aren’t reported. Governments must address brain drain and the lack of specialized employees by finding solutions that mitigate these human capital shortages. National firms need the country’s support to strengthen research departments and not focus only on high-margin products.

Such policies and outcomes do not occur automatically. Governments can attach workforce requirements to subsidies, support partnerships between semiconductor firms and universities or technical colleges. The increasing demand for highly skilled workers expands apprenticeships and technician training, widens access to advanced computing, and builds public-interest research capacity. AI is restructuring the labor market and increasing the demand for high-skilled workers. The education system is changing how it supplies employees with the required knowledge and skills. The competitive market can strengthen smaller suppliers, reform educational policies, and invest in regional infrastructure and commerce.

Access matters as much as production. If advanced computing is concentrated among wealthy states and large companies, gaps in social welfare will most likely increase. Scientific research centers, industrial factories, and public services will concentrate in highly developed cities, increasing inequality and social pendulum swings. To mitigate inequalities, countries must take a well-structured approach to SEZs, with broader development strategies and execute them effectively. Miniaturization may make individual devices more efficient, but total demand for computing continues to rise. The expansion of artificial intelligence, cloud services, and connected technologies can offset efficiency gains by increasing overall consumption.

A semiconductor strategy cannot be considered sustainable if efficiency gains at the chip level are offset by increased aggregate consumption or if environmental costs are shifted onto communities with weaker protections. Governments should therefore measure more than nanometers and market share. They should evaluate whether semiconductor strategies enhance technological capability, resilience, social value, higher levels of welfare, and environmental sustainability.

Bruno S. Sergi is an instructor at Harvard University’s Sustainability and Global Development Practice Graduate Programs. He is also associated with the Harvard Center for International Development, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center. He has led the launch of multiple scholarly journals and book series, including the Cambridge Elements series at Cambridge University Press and Entrepreneurship and Global Economic Growth at Emerald Publishing.

Mariana P. Gameiro is a Teaching Assistant in Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, where she is completing a Master’s in Economics as part of a double degree in Firms Strategy with the Université Catholique de Louvain. Her major research focus is on microeconomic theory and applied economics, with emphasis on understanding market ecosystems and information asymmetries relevant to public policy design.

*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.
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As global power dynamics continue to shift and traditional Western-centric theories of International Relations (IR) often fall short in explaining and addressing non-Western complexities, the need for alternative perspectives has never been more urgent. In this sense, this article explores the increasingly emerging non-Western IR efforts, with a special focus on the Islamic International Relations (IR) paradigm. The article will critically examine the motives behind the development of this paradigm, its historical evolution, and the significant challenges it faces in the contemporary academic and political landscape in the Arab World. By discussing the efforts and contributions of Arab scholars in this field, it aims to shed light on the potentials of the Islamic IR paradigm, while also addressing the criticisms that have hindered its development. This article is a continuation of ideas previously expressed in “Islam and International Relations (IR): why is there no Islamic IR theory?”

Biased Nature: From Eurocentric to US-Centric IR

Since its inception as a discipline, International Relations has been dominated by Western perspectives, with Eurocentric viewpoints serving as the foundation for its theoretical framework. However, over time, particularly after World War II, the discipline has increasingly become US-centric, reflecting the hegemonic influence of the United States in global politics. This shift became more obvious during the Cold War, where the U.S. played a central role in shaping international norms, policies, and institutions. The dominance of the U.S. reached its peak during the brief unipolar moment that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union from 1991 until the end of the 20th century.

In this U.S.-centric paradigm, global politics is often interpreted through a lens that prioritizes American interests and values. This perspective is deeply intertwined with the notion of American exceptionalism—the belief that the U.S. has a unique role to play in leading the world. The influence of U.S.-centric IR is profound, as it has shaped the global order through institutions and policies designed to align with American interests, often under the guise of promoting collective security and economic cooperation. Consequently, the dominance of US-led Western IR has led to a skewed understanding of global dynamics, reinforcing the perception that Western culture is inherently superior and Western IR is global by its nature.

Critics argue that the Eurocentric/U.S.-centric nature of IR has hindered the development of a more pluralistic approach to international relations—one that acknowledges the rise of emerging powers and incorporates diverse perspectives. Scholars advocating for a more balanced understanding of global governance emphasize the need to recognize voices and experiences outside the Western sphere of influence, thereby promoting a more equitable international system.

Decentering Western IR or Globalizing It?

Over the past two decades, a growing number of scholars have challenged the Eurocentric/U.S.-centric nature of IR. These scholars argue that discipline is inherently biased, privileging Western epistemologies and frameworks. This bias has led to significant gaps in understanding non-Western contexts, and a failure to understand, explain, or anticipate major events, developments, or phenomena in the non-Western world, such as independence movements in formerly colonized regions or the global revolutions sparked by economic crises, or the Arab Uprisings in 2011. Even when IR theories attempt to engage with issues related to colonialism, they often ignore the factor of colonialism and instead offer a Western approach based on development theories.

Scholars critical of mainstream IR have divided their efforts into two major approaches: Global IR and Post-Western IR. Both aim to expand the study of international relations beyond traditional Western-centric IR by incorporating diverse perspectives and methodologies from various parts of the world. Global IR emphasizes inclusivity by incorporating voices from all regions, challenging the dominance of Western theories. It promotes pluralism, encouraging the use of multiple methodologies to better understand global phenomena. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan have been key figures in promoting Global IR, advocating for a broader understanding that includes various intellectual traditions.

Post-Western IR, on the other hand, seeks to decenter Western perspectives by highlighting their limitations in explaining global phenomena. It emphasizes the importance of local and regional knowledge systems, arguing that a comprehensive understanding of global politics requires insights from diverse cultural, historical, and social contexts. Scholars like Tickner and Blaney have critiqued the Eurocentric biases in traditional IR theories, advocating for the inclusion of non-Western perspectives.

While both approaches present valuable attempts to challenge Western-centric IR, they also face significant criticisms. These include challenges related to coherence, practical implementation, potential for fragmentation, and the risk of overgeneralization. Addressing these criticisms is crucial for the development of a truly inclusive and representative field of International Relations and for moving beyond Western IR.

Emerging Non-Western IR Schools

One notable example of an emerging non-Western IR school is the Chinese school of International Relations. This school has introduced a specific epistemological framework rooted in Chinese history, culture, and philosophical traditions. Key contributions include Qin Yaqing's concept of rationality, Zhao Tingyang's Tianxia system, and Yan Xuetong's moral realism. These concepts draw heavily from Confucian principles and ancient Chinese political philosophy, offering an alternative to the Western-centric IR theories.[1] The Chinese school is gaining importance and attention more than other schools lately because of the US decline and the rise of China. This is another example that IR theories do not only gain influence because of their theoretical framework or content but also because there is a power behind them that elevates them to the world stage regardless of their content.

However, the Chinese school has faced criticism for potentially replacing Western centrism with a new form of Sinocentrism, where Chinese perspectives may overshadow other non-Western views. While some critics also argue that the abstract and philosophical nature of concepts like Tianxia is difficult to apply in practical IR analysis and policymaking, others see it as insular. Beyond China, other non-Western IR schools have emerged, such as the Indian, Latin American, and African schools, each offering unique perspectives rooted in their respective historical and cultural contexts. For instance, the Indian school emphasizes a civilizational approach, the Latin American school critiques global capitalism, and the African school examines the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Despite their contributions, these schools also face criticisms related to fragmentation, reliance on Western frameworks, and limited impact due to marginalization.

The Islamic IR Paradigm

What distinguishes the Islamic IR or Islamic Civilization Paradigm from other non-Western schools is its transnational and autonomous nature. Unlike geographically or nationally centered schools, the Islamic IR paradigm transcends boundaries, ethnicities, and nationalities. Islamic IR emphasizes justice and ethical conduct in international relations, challenging the state-centrism and individualism of Western IR. It integrates normative dimensions derived from Islamic Quran, Sunnah, Hadith, and Fiqh, focusing on moral and just international behavior. The contemporary examination of the complex interplay between Islam and IR can be traced back to the 1980s. A US-based institution called “The International Institute for Islamic Thought” sponsored these efforts. The center was established in 1981 by Ismail al-Faruqi and Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar Ibrahim is a Malaysian intellectual who has advocated for Islamic democracy. He rose swiftly in power and now is Malaysia’s Prime Minister. Al-Faruqi, however, was a Palestinian- American philosopher known for his contributions to Islamic studies and interfaith dialogue. He studied in Palestine, Beirut (AUB), US (Indiana & Oxford Universities), and Cairo (Al-Azhar). He taught in the US, Pakistan, and Canada.

Nadia Mustafa, a professor from Egypt led one of the first sponsored significant initiatives of the center, which aimed at presenting an Islamic perspective on IR. This endeavor, known as the "International Relations in Islam" project, was the largest of its kind at the time and was sponsored by the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Spanning nearly a decade from 1986 to 1996, the project was anchored in three foundational pillars: Islamic origins, history, and thought. It culminated in the publication of twelve volumes intended to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge from an Islamic viewpoint. In a concurrent effort, AbdulHamid Abu Sulayman initiated a discourse on Islamic IR in Western academia through the publication of his 1987 work, The Islamic Theory of International Relations: New Directions for Islamic Methodology and Thought.

In the past decade, scholars in the field of IR have increasingly contributed to this domain through academic articles and monographs. For instance, Nassef Adiong has been notably active; in 2013, he edited “International Relations and Islam: Diverse Perspectives”. Three years later, in 2016, he co-edited “Islam and International Relations: Contributions to Theory and Practice” alongside Deina Abdelkader and Raffaele Mauriello. In 2019, this collaborative group published “Islam and International Relations: Politics and Paradigms”. Additional contributions have emerged from other scholars, such as Faiz Sheikh, who authored in 2016 “Islam and International Relations: Exploring Community and the Limits of Universalism.”

This is not to say that efforts on exploring Islam and International Relations are tied to these specific scholars only or started with them. There are many other scholars who have worked on different levels of exploration including on Islam and politics, Islam and globalization, and some have managed to leverage their academic or political positions to promote new theories and concepts to Non-Western IR. For example, Ahmet Davutoğlu – former Turkish Prime Minister, professor, and scholar proposed the concept of "strategic depth" in Turkish foreign policy, incorporating Islamic civilization perspectives, and Mohammed Ayoob who introduced the concept of "subaltern realism," which emphasizes perspectives of non-Western states in global politics.

Criticism of the Islamic IR Paradigm

The Islamic International Relations paradigm is often classified as a non-Western approach of international relations. Like other non-Western approaches and schools of thought, it has faced criticism. One of the most prominent criticisms is the perceived absence of a coherent and systematic Islamic theorization. Critics argue that, although there have been attempts to integrate Islamic theories into the field, these efforts frequently lack the rigor and structure characteristic of established Western theories. Consequently, Islamic IR is sometimes characterized more as a political theology than as a fully developed theoretical framework capable of effectively explaining international phenomena.

Moreover, some critics contend that the Islamic IR paradigm tends to overemphasize the role of religion in international relations, potentially overshadowing other critical factors such as economic interests, power dynamics, and state sovereignty. This overreliance on religious texts and moral philosophy may hinder its practical applicability and diminish its representativeness of real-world complexities. Another significant critique is that Islamic IR is overly normative, concentrating on what ought to be according to Islamic principles rather than on what is observable in the international system. This normative focus restricts its utility in analyzing actual political dynamics.

Some critics argue that the representation of Islam within the context of international relations often falls into essentialist traps, portraying the religion as monolithic and inherently conflictual. This perspective neglects the rich diversity of interpretations and practices within the Muslim world, as well as the varied circumstances of individual nation-states. Furthermore, the Islamic paradigm relies heavily on traditional concepts and ideas that emerged from a pre-Westphalian context. This reliance renders the approach somewhat outdated and ill-equipped to address the complexities of the contemporary era. The dichotomy between traditionalists and reformers within this framework presents challenges in formulating a relevant and modern Islamic IR theory capable of effectively addressing current international issues.

Additionally, there is a notable lack of knowledge production at the theoretical, conceptual, and argumentative levels within the Islamic IR framework. Insufficient engagement with global IR discourses and non-Western IR efforts further limits the paradigm's influence and development within the broader academic community.

Arab efforts in the Islamic IR Paradigm

As previously noted, the contemporary examination of the intricate interplay between Islam and International Relations (IR) has been significantly advanced by Arab scholars. A notable example is the work conducted by the International Institute for Islamic Thought, where scholars from Palestine, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia contributed to this extensive and long-term endeavor. However, this initial enthusiasm and optimism for achieving a breakthrough in this area soon faded away, leading to almost a stalemate in efforts to address the complexities of this issue in the Arab World.

The establishment of the new nation-state in the region following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the western colonialism that followed engendered a profound rift between Arab nationalists, who are often secular and Arab transnationalists who are often Islamists. This divide has led to significant political, social, and educational divisions, among other consequences. The two camps engaged in a zero-sum game, which ultimately benefited neither of them. Governments that derived their legitimacy from nationalist, tribal, military, or sectarian foundations have historically viewed political Islamists with suspicion, primarily due to their organizational capabilities and potential to challenge governmental legitimacy. Consequently, these governments have sought to curtail the influence of Islamist movements and their activities through various means.

At the conclusion of what became the final phase of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR), several Arab governments—reportedly under U.S. influence—encouraged Islamic activities at various levels. This support stemmed from the fact that Islam constitutes a natural defense against the expansion of the USSR and its communist ideology into the region and the strategically significant waters of the Gulf. Consequently, during the 1970s and 1980s, Islamist movements were afforded a degree of operational space.

However, following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S. began to characterize Islam as a potential threat, often referred to as the "green threat." The landscape shifted dramatically after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, particularly within the Arab world. Under the U.S. threat and the pressures exerted by American policies, Islamic activities in all their forms faced severe restrictions in the Arab World, leading to a significant reduction in the previously available space for these movements. This encompassed advocacy, charitable initiatives, political engagement, and academic research among other things. The situation deteriorated further in the wake of the Arab Uprisings and the resurgence of authoritarian regimes, rendering any endeavors related to Islam increasingly problematic, including within the research domain and politics.

Beyond governmental agendas, political systems, and the prevailing socio-political atmosphere, the ongoing conflict between nationalists and Islamists in the Arab world continues to hinder meaningful engagement and potential cooperation. Furthermore, initiatives aimed at developing an Islamic IR paradigm face numerous challenges. The educational systems and institutions in the Arab countries have largely failed to cultivate scholars or researchers who possess a nuanced understanding of the West and a sophisticated research tools and methodologies, while maintaining their own autonomous critical thinking, cultural identity, and belonging. This dual capability is essential for challenging Western IR and advancing research in Islamic IR to new levels.

Moreover, funding for such endeavors is nearly non-existent in the Arab World; even when financial resources are available, universities—particularly in the Gulf region, where funding is more accessible—often prioritize achieving high rankings in Western academic metrics over fostering this critical research mission or any other educational missions, especially in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Additionally, Islamist groups in the Arab world, in general, tend to be less inclined to fund and promote scholars, research projects, and knowledge production, particularly those focused on politics, International Relations, and policies, in comparison to their funding to the other non-educational or research causes.

Another significant challenge for scholars working on the Islamic paradigm is the serious lack of freedom in the Arab countries, in general, to research, investigate, and disseminate critical research and work. Although this is not specific to certain disciplines in social sciences and humanities, it is mostly visible to issues related to politics, IR, and policy domains. As a result, scholars in this field tend to concentrate on critiquing Western IR without proposing viable alternatives. This inclination often leads to the pursuit of immediate results, accompanied by a lack of patience and strategic planning. Finally, the current absence of serious ijtihad (independent reasoning) in Islamic jurisprudence, especially concerning political matters, further complicates the theorization of Islamic IR. Consequently, scholars are often compelled to rely on outdated concepts and ideas that go back to the pre-Westphalian world system.

The Way Forward

There is no specific recipe for advancing the efforts related to Islamic International Relations (IR) theory. Both advocates and critics should recognize that this endeavor is inherently a process. Such processes typically require substantial time and effort, along with significant investment and expertise. Furthermore, conducive environments and appropriate conditions are essential for progress, ultimately leading to the production of valuable knowledge.

To advance the Islamic International Relations paradigm, it is essential to invest in scholars who possess a comprehensive understanding of both Western and non-Western contexts and perspectives. These scholars should be proficient in Western IR methodologies and rigorous research techniques while also engaging deeply with Islamic traditions and non-Western IR knowledge. Mastery of English, along with their native language, is crucial, as is a strong awareness of their cultural and religious identities. Additionally, they must have the freedom and resources to conduct independent research, which is vital for cultivating a robust body of knowledge that can effectively challenge the dominance of Western IR theories. At the institutional level, academic and research organizations should actively support scholars in this field by providing essential funding, resources, and platforms for investigation, research, engagement, and dissemination of their work. Institutions should also cultivate environments that promote intellectual diversity and debate, allowing scholars to explore new methodologies and perspectives.

No research agenda can attain regional or international influence without some degree of state support and endorsement. States must encourage, finance, and adopt research projects that align with the objectives of developing alternative International Relations paradigms. Furthermore, safeguarding academic freedom is essential, as it enables scholars to explore and critique existing frameworks without the fear of censorship. At the global level, scholars should collaborate across paradigms and disciplines, engaging in dialogue and exchanging ideas within the field of International Relations. This cooperation will foster a genuinely inclusive scholarly community that supports the development of diverse perspectives.

Furthermore, it is essential to foster an environment that encourages knowledge production within Muslim and other non-Western societies. This means moving away from a culture of consumption and towards one of intellectual innovation. Without a commitment to producing original knowledge, there is little hope of changing the status quo. To enhance knowledge production, scholars must increase their presence in high-impact Western journals, despite the challenges posed by gatekeepers. While concessions on content might be necessary, securing access to these venues is crucial for reaching a broader global audience. Additionally, creating professional journals that adhere to high standards—both in English language and in native languages—will help establish alternative platforms for disseminating research and knowledge.

At the epistemological level, advancing Islamic International Relations theorizing efforts does not necessitate choosing one path at the expense of another. The traditional approach, which involves elucidating existing Islamic concepts to enhance the development of IR theories, has its own merits, requirements, advantages, and disadvantages. Similarly, the revolutionary approach, which seeks to formulate entirely new Islamic concepts and methodologies responsive to contemporary global issues while remaining anchored to the Qur'an and Sunnah, also has its own merits, requirements, advantages, and disadvantages. Regardless of the chosen approach, scholars must recognize that this is a process, and success in this endeavor requires appropriate environments, tools, and the fulfillment of the previously outlined conditions.

Ali Bakir is a Research Assistant Professor at Qatar University, Associate Fellow at the Ibn Khaldon Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and Middle East Programs.