The relevance of history

The title of this essay may sound odd, if not inexplicable. ‘Entering the future backwards’ —the quotation comes from the French poet, Paul Valery and it seems to me to have utility in this context in both a theoretical and practical mode. Theoretical, because the term reminds us that as scholars and teachers we have an obligation when we reflect upon a confused and alarming present to think historically, i.e., to ask ourselves what is unique about our current global circumstances. We can only do this by probing the past to determine whether there are any significant parallels which might illustrate an understanding of the present. But the idea that states and statespersons—apart from scholars—enter the future backwards also has some substance: after all, politicians—understandably—confronted by unexpected cataclysmic change attempt to understand that change in terms of traditional assumptions about the structure, process and philosophical bases of international society. They may do it intuitively, but they do it none the less. And this, one might argue, applies to the scholarly community as well.

The founding fathers of Marxism provided an analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society and an indication of the means by which its revolutionary overthrow might be accomplished. They had less to say, however, about the colonial world into which the capitalist society of their day was rapidly expanding, and in their scattered writings on the subject they leave the clear impression that they shared the views of most of their socialist contemporaries that the colonies were the objects rather than the subjects of history, and that their destiny would be determined by the success or failure of the revolutionary movement in the major metropolitan countrieSo1 Marx and Engels were generally unsentimental about the nature of imperialist rule in the colonies, and they drew attention to the plunder, corruption and destruction by which it had usually been accompanied. They had little sympathy, however, for the ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life’ in which most of the colonial peoples were believed to dwell, and they followed Hegel and much of Victorian social theory in regarding its displacement by the way of life of the major metropolitan countries as both inevitable and in accordance with a general scheme of social evolution by which ‘all, even the most barbarian nations are drawn into civilisation’, as the Communist Manifesto put it.

We find ourselves amidst an explosion of literature about how our worlds are being fundamentally changed (or not) through processes that have come to be clumped under the vague title of ‘globalisation’. As we wander our way through this literature, we might find ourselves – with others – feeling perplexed and anxious about the loss of a clear sense of what politics is, where it happens, what it is about, and what we need to know to understand and engage in it. This in turn leads many of us to contribute to a slightly smaller literature, such as this Special Issue, seeking to theorise how the space and character of politics might be changing, and how we might adapt our research strategies to accommodate these changes and maintain the confidence that we, and the disciplines we contribute to, still have relevant things to say about international politics. While this is not a difficult thing to claim, and it is not difficult to find others to reassure us that it is true, I want to suggest here that it is worth lingering a little longer in our anxiety than might be comfortable. I suggest this because it seems to me that there is, or at least should be, more on the table than we're yet grappling with. In particular, I argue here that any attempt to theorise the political today needs to take into account not only that the character and space of politics are changing, but that the way we study or theorise it – not only the subjects of our study but the very kind of knowledge we produce, and for whom – may need to change as well. As many others have argued, the project of progressive politics these days is not especially clear. It no longer seems safe to assume, for example, that the capture of the state or the establishment of benign forms of global governance should be our primary object. However, just as the project of progressive politics is in question, so is the role of knowledge, and knowledge production, under contemporary circumstances. I think there are possibilities embedded in explicitly engaging these questions together that are far from realisation. There are also serious dangers in trying to separate them, or assume the one while engaging the other, however ‘obvious’ the answers to one or the other may appear to be. Simultaneous with theorising the political ‘out there’ in the international must be an engagement with the politics of theorising ‘in here,’ in academic contexts. My project here is to explore how this challenge might be taken up in the contemporary study of politics, particularly in relation to emerging forms of political practice, such as those developed by activists in a variety of contexts. My argument is for an approach to theorising the political that shifts the disciplinary assumptions about for what purpose and for whom we should we produce knowledge in contemporary times, through an emphasis on the strategic knowledges produced through political practice. Such an approach would potentially provide us with understandings of contemporary political institutions and practices that are both more incisive and more enabling than can be produced through more familiarly disciplined approaches.

The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)'s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socioeconomic lives, such transnational activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their subject populations. However, contra Ferguson's predominantly Foucauldian methodological and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies.

This article addresses the inadequate analysis of modern social revolutions within orthodox International Relations due both to the historical context and the trajectory of the discipline. A critical review of the literature that has more recently come to acknowledge the relevance of revolutions and revolutionary states to IR reveals a number of enduring shortcomings. The present article suggests an alternative framework for the study of revolutions by conceiving them as rooted in the dynamics of the globally dominant socio-economic system, capitalism. It is argued that the uneven global expansion of this system and its peculiarity contribute to the explanation of revolutionary upheavals in the modern world. This is illustrated in the final section of the article by a case study of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which also challenges recent explanations of the revolution in terms of ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic culture’.

There has been widespread and vociferous condemnation of Somali piracy and several states have used force against the pirates. This reflects the prevailing view of pirates as belligerents and aggressors who act wrongly. In this article, I challenge this view by defending the conditional moral permissibility of piracy. More specifically, I first argue that piracy can be morally permissible when certain conditions are met. These are what I call the principles of ‘justa piratica’, that is, the principles of just piracy. Second, I claim that these conditions are likely to apply to some Somali pirates. Third, as a corollary, I argue that the case of piracy shows that one of the shibboleths of Just War Theory – that a war cannot be just on both sides – is mistaken.

The term disruption has become a buzzword for our times, although there is little clarity over what the term means, how it is deployed, and towards what ends. In order to understand the analytical and political stakes that are embedded in the deployment of ‘disruption’ as a rationale for various sources of upheaval, in this article I argue that these three terrains of disruption should be understood as theories of governance, and term them ‘disruption from above’, ‘disruption from the middle’, and ‘disruption from below’. Each terrain of disruption embodies different ethoses, actors, and goals: the first connoting elite-driven creative destruction and innovation; the second obfuscating the capitalist imperative that produces world-systemic upheavals; and the third seeking to expose the structures of violence and inequality built into such practices. I illustrate these three terrains through a structural account that traces the popularity of the disruption discourse from its origins to its material application; analyse an illustrative example of the assetisation of infrastructure and how it bureaucratises governance and shifts relations of power; and conclude by examining infrastructural forms of protest against such forms. I argue that the confusion over what disruption means, who exercises it, and upon whom is not a coincidence: rather, disruption's polysemy is structurally produced as a way to disguise ongoing capitalist crisis as a technical problem that market innovations can solve.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a brief overview of the theory and practice of counterinsurgency in the Third World since World War II. Given the obvious limitations of space, descriptions of particular COIN (counterinsurgency) campaigns have been avoided except to illustrate an argument. Furthermore, this essay concentrates primarily on U.S. counterinsurgency doctrines and methods. This is not to underestimate the contributions – both theoretical and practical – made by the former colonial powers in attempting to crush the impulse to national liberation in the Third World. But the European powers – with the recent exception of Portugal – had, by the beginning of the 1960s, neither the capability nor (following a number of humiliating setbacks) much enthusiasm for further military adventures in the Third World. There have, of course, been exceptions – the French in Mali, Britain in Borneo and the Anguilla affair – but these pale into insignificance when compared with the American counterinsurgency effort in the Third World, which began to gather impetus just as the major European colonial powers were abdicating their former role as Third World policemen.1

This article argues that minority rights developed as an indemnity offered to defeated parties. As a grudging and begrudged calculus of compensation, considered inadequate by the vanquished and offensive by the victors, minority rights have been unable to compete in terms of legitimacy with either an increasingly robust international human rights regime or with the right of national self-determination. After reviewing some explanations for the weakness of the existing minority rights regime, this article traces the rationale of what may be described anachronistically as minority rights provisions in international treaties from the Peace of Westphalia to the Versailles settlement, concluding with a consideration of present-day implications of the argument elaborated here.

This article is interested in the impact of a singular international phenomenon, namely the global securitisation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, on the domestic structure of three Southern African states: Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa. These countries are geographically located in the epicenter of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, Southern Africa. However, notwithstanding their common HIV/AIDS burden, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa present quite different political cultures and institutions which reflected upon the distinctive way they responded to the influence of international HIV/AIDS actors and norms. So, by investigating the latter's impact in these rather diverse settings, the present analysis aims to empirically demonstrate and compare variations in the effects of norm adaptation across states. To carry out this evaluation, the study provides a framework for understanding the securitisation of HIV/AIDS as an international norm defined and promoted mainly by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the US government and transnational HIV/AIDS advocacy networks. The HIV/AIDS securitisation norm (HASN) is an intellectual attempt of the present work to synthesise in a single analytical concept myriad of ideas and international prescriptions about HIV/AIDS interventions.

This article provides an ‘engaged’ introduction to this forum on Andrew Linklater’s recently published book, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. I call this ‘engaged’ because I seek to adjudicate between the critics and Linklater’s book in the hope of building a bridge over troubled water. Given that the key word that underpins many of this forum’s contributions is Eurocentrism, I explore whether, and if so to what extent, Linklater’s book is Eurocentric. While I too identify various Eurocentric cues, I also provide various defences for Linklater. In particular, the final section advances two definitions of Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism. Although I identify elements of ‘Eurocentrism I’ (the elision of non-Western agency and reification of the West) in his book, Linklater might respond to the principal forum complaint that he accords little or no role to non-Western actors and processes in the Western or global civilizing process by appealing to an alternative anti-Eurocentric approach: ‘anti-Eurocentrism II’ (which focuses squarely on Western imperial power and ignores or heavily downplays non-Western agency). I close by critiquing his left-liberal cosmopolitan politics, arguing that his Eurocentric-universalist normative posture cannot create the kind of peaceful and harmonious world that he (and Kant) so desires.

This article analyses the early American commitment to maintaining its neutral rights from several theoretical perspectives. Rejecting recent constructivist interpretations as unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, it concludes that early American leaders largely mirrored traditional eighteenth century mercantilist practices to suit the interests of the United States. In particular, Jefferson's ‘two-tiered’ approach to the international system was based on astringent calculations of power rather than prevailing notions of ‘republicanism’. This ideology, while manifest in partisan rhetoric, had little measurable impact on the conduct of early American neutral rights policy. By focusing on the relationship of theory and practice in this context, this article offers a case study of the role of norms and ideology in the shaping of foreign policy in a republican state.

In contemporary Western, liberal democratic societies, the soldier is frequently regarded as ‘the best of us’, taking on the unlimited liability for the protection and betterment of the whole. In the context of volunteer militaries and distant conflicts, the construction of men (and the universalised masculine citizen) as ‘always-already’ soldiers (or potential soldiers) poses a substantial obstacle to the identification or performance of ‘good’ civilian masculinity – particularly during wartime. The theorisation and articulation of a positive, substantive civilian masculinity, or masculinities, rather than one defined simply by an absence of military service and implication in the collective use of violence, is a central challenge of contemporary politics. As a means of illuminating the complex dynamics of this challenge, this article examines charitable practices of civilian support for the military, and corresponding constructions of masculinity, in the UK during the ‘war on terror’. In doing so, the article demonstrates the ways in which gendered ‘civilian anxiety’, through its connection to citizenship, comes to condition the political possibilities and subjectivities of all those who seek belonging in the liberal political community. The article concludes by arguing for the essentiality of a research programme oriented around ‘civilianness’, and civilian masculinity/ies.

In the EU accession literature, there is a tendency to downplay the role of discourse in facilitating norm diffusion, particularly when domestic resistance towards European norms is strong. The assumptions in this thinking are that critical deliberations and civil society activism simply lack the potency required to elicit norm conforming behaviour in accession states and that the only realistic hope for achieving this rests with the introduction of material incentives that make the costs of normative adaptation lower than its rewards. I focus on developments in the field of LGBT politics to challenge these assumptions and to specify the conditions under which discursive strategies are likely to stimulate the domestic uptake of contentious norms. I highlight shared identity as a crucial factor in the success of discursive influence, contending that under conditions of identity convergence, a cultural environment prevails in which norm promoters can more effectively ignite a process of deliberative reflection, shame norm-violators into conformance and cultivate resonance around controversial ideas. I develop these arguments through an analysis of LGBT and accession politics in Croatia and Serbia, contending that Croatia’s strong identification with Europe accelerated LGBT recognition there while Serbia’s relatively weaker identification with Europe slowed it down.

David Mltrany's functionalism has provided an inspired, if widely criticized approach to the study of international organization,1 Although originally conceived without regional restrictions in its application, it has been interpreted as a prescription for European integration hence the development of the formerly pervasive but now largely discredited neo-functionalist school.2 The contention that will be advanced here is that Mitrany's work may still usefully guide our analysis of international organization. This is especially so with regard to understanding the stubbornness of sovereignty, and the complexity of decision making in a new generation of multilateral conference diplomacy, as typified by UNCLOS and UNCTAD. These forums are likely to feature more prominently in coming attempts to develop codes and rules of conduct in fields of global conflict and co-operation such as technology transfer, economic development, basic health and other ‘common heritage’ resource management issues. The grounds for promoting Mitrany's approach are that a close reading of his principal works reveals a more subtle, conservative and realistic appreciation of sovereignty than many critics have permitted, and furthermore, within this more cautious appraisal there lie a number of procedural pointers to the constructive, if undemonstrative circumvention of the restriction of sovereignty.

How do people know how – very practically speaking – to be violent? This article explores that question through a Science and Technology Studies perspective. It does so in order to go beyond the usual location of global political violence at a structural level that attributes its emergence principally to hierarchical orders, formal training, or deep cultural, political, or ideological factors. The alternative explanation offered here draws on Bruno Latour's concept of ‘plasma’ to sketch a theory of how practices of violence are embedded at a distributed ontological level through the historical accumulation of (popular) cultural, textual, technological, and other epistemic objects. In making that claim, I seek to stress how violent knowledge circulates outside the formal domains associated with it (the military, police) and is instead preconsciously accessible to each and every person. To support this argument, the article draws on empirical examples of the use of torture, including interviews conducted with Syrian perpetrators of torture, as well as by tracing the paradoxical entanglements between scientific practice and the practice of torture. I conclude by engaging the field of preventive medicine to speculate on the need to develop modes of violence prevention that appreciate political violence as a population-level sociopolitical problem.

Policymakers and scholars have to deal with the difficult problems of variation, change, and transitions in world politics. Practitioners have to estimate the capabilities and intentions of those with whom they are interacting and need to determine the kind and extent of variety in their environments. Detecting, diagnosing, and dealing with change also is particular difficult. Scholars have shown the wide range of units and systems that human beings have created, but need to also examine the extent to which they are characterized by common processes and dynamics. The balance of power generally operates through unintended consequences and can characterize systems even when no one seeks balance. Change may be more common than scholars often appreciate. Nuclear weapons undermine much traditional international politics and even greater changes will flow from the fact that the leading powers in the world no longer contemplate war with each other.

What is the role of rhetoric and argumentation in international relations? Some argue that it is little more than ‘cheap talk’, while others say that it may play a role in persuasion or coordination. However, why states deploy certain arguments, and why these arguments succeed or fail, is less well understood. I argue that, in international negotiations, certain types of legal frames are particularly useful for creating winning arguments. When a state bases its arguments on constitutive legal claims, opponents are more likely to become trapped by the law: unable to develop sustainable rebuttals or advance their preferred policy. To evaluate this theory, I apply qualitative discourse analysis to the US arguments on the crime of aggression at the Kampala Review Conference of the International Criminal Court – where the US advanced numerous arguments intended to reshape the crime to align with US interests. The analysis supports the theoretical propositions – arguments framed on codified legal grounds had greater success, while arguments framed on more political grounds were less sustainable, failing to achieve the desired outcomes. These findings further develop our understanding of the use of international law in rhetoric, argumentation, and negotiation.

The idea that transnational dynamics challenge the regulatory capacity of the state has hardly ever received as much attention as in contemporary debates. Different voices denounce the crisis of the state and advocate the establishment of supranational institutions with legally coercive power. It is tempting to jump to the conclusion that these voices are concerned with the same cluster of problems. We think that one should resist this temptation. Firstly, not all the problems pointed out by the advocates of supranational sovereignty are of the same kind and structure. Some concern the need to limit the power of states, whereas others address the almost opposite necessity to support and strengthen their problem-solving capacity through forms of international regulation. Secondly, the corresponding solutions are different. In particular, although they may all imply the establishment of supranational institutions, not all such institutions need be global. The creation of a full-blown global rule of criminal law, for instance, would raise serious concerns of global despotism and cultural imperialism, and we therefore make a case for regional and context-sensitive solutions in this case. However, problems of supranational socioeconomic justice can only be addressed through global regulatory institutions, for regional institutions would, in this case, only recreate current problems at the interregional level.

The article revisits the problematic relationship between feminist theory and praxis through the writings of Marysia Zalewski, one of the foremost feminist theorists of IR. Zalewski has dealt with this relationship through her work on methodology. In three sections, the article explores: (a) her engagement with standpoint theory through her interventions in feminist IR debates with ‘the mainstream’; (b) her adoption of feminist postmodernism, embracing a deconstructive posture and in particular the notion of ‘hauntings’ as a methodological device; and (c) the development of a distinctive methodological attitude that seeks to involve, rather than explain or instruct. Crucially, for Zalewski, theory and praxis/politics cannot be separated methodologically: languages of mastery and an attitude of ‘doing something’ are of one cloth. The paper ends with a reflection about how L. H. M. Ling's method of ‘chatting’ could be enacted in engagements that cross the social fields of academia and policy.