This is none too pithy, but tonight (this morning?) I’m just going to toss up a whole stream of ideas that have been percolating since the first BioNote discussion and took shape while I was attending the ISA conference in San Francisco. They relate to a very problematic final chapter I’m struggling over now in which I attempt to account for the role I’ve played (by researching a non-barking dog) in inadvertently getting the dog to bark.
Many of us do this of course - interface with the real world in ways that put us inside the subject matter we’re studying – but there are not good formulas in IR scholarship for reflecting about this explicitly (much less analyzing one’s own actions as part of our dataset) as we write up our results.
(This ties into the earlier “Bionote” discussion in two ways. First, bionote norms, I’ve argued, are simply an example of how IR encourages people to think of themselves as observers rather than participants in the worlds we are studying. Second, the autobiographical nature of the ISA panel about which I blogged was due to, not a deviation from, this set of norms. The panel was organized as an autobiographical set of war stories from policy work by academics precisely because as Janice Gross Stein pointed out, autobiography is all we have to go on because we don't bother to do empirical studies of how we "bridge that divide" and with what consequences.)
But why don't we? I think it is due to the very trend I think I was trying to articulate before - IR scholars have some stake in keeping up the pretense that we exist separate from international affairs. We’re encouraged through various disciplinary norms to occlude a serious empirical analysis of the way our role in conducting research, especially if we do elite interviews, to say nothing of blogging, writing op-eds, or consulting, affects the processes we’re studying.
To be sure this is probably truer of some projects than others. I’ve concluded it’s quite true of my work on “dogs that don’t bark” in transnational advocacy networks (namely the absence of children born of war rape on the human rights agenda) and I’m trying with some difficulty to account for this as I complete my current manuscript.
Consider this anecdote from the concluding chapter: "In Spring of 2006, I presented my preliminary findings regarding the non-emergence of “children born of war” at University of Pittsburgh’s Research in International Politics (RIP) monthly brown-bag. In such circles, heavily dominated by empirical approaches, one does not present normative theory – that is, value-laden arguments about how the world should look, or policy-oriented sets of recommendations about particular problems. Rather, one identifies puzzles about the world and then goes about solving them by applying or modifying existing theories. Theories in this sense being lenses said to explain and predict major patterns in world affairs.
But how to do so systematically? In developing a literature review to ground the remarks in this chapter, I re-read with some interest Patrick Jackson and Stuart Kaufman’s Perspectives on Politics piece “Security Scholars for a Sensitive Foreign Policy.” I liked this article because it represented an example of IR scholars self-consciously engaging with the real world, and theorizing about the process of doing so. To wit, the authors document their role in SSSFP, an advocacy effort led by IR scholars to illuminate cause and effect relationships regarding the Iraq war while remaining politically agnostic, thus maintaining scholarly credibility. According to Jackson and Kaufman: “Weberian activism… is an appropriate stance for scholars who wish to engage in debate on public issues.”
Therefore, I had organized this particular paper not as a problem-focused human rights argument about children, but rather as an empirical study on “issue non-emergence” within advocacy networks. I presented the subject of “children born of war” as a negative case and demonstrated why, from the perspective of agenda-setting theory this might be considered an interesting puzzle. The case, I argued, showed that we needed a different understanding of the obstacles to issue emergence.
My colleagues provided a variety of suggestions on the theory, the methods and the structure of the argument. But one piece of advice particularly sticks out in my mind. “You’d better stop talking to international organizations about this issue until you publish,” said one of my senior colleagues. “Otherwise, before you know it you will no longer have a puzzle to explain, because these children will be on the agenda.”
Note two things about this comment. First: the idea that more attention to this population should have been less preferable to me (or anyone) than the ability to advance my career by publishing an interesting paper. Second: the acknowledgement by my colleague that in researching the non-emergence of “children born of war,” I was in fact engaged in “issue entrepreneurship” myself that could alter the research findings.
If the previous chapters illustrate anything, it is that the process of researching human rights is in fact intimately connected with the practice of constructing human rights in and around a variety of policy arenas. In other words, far from existing outside their subject matter, human rights intellectuals are part of the human rights movement and actively (if inadvertently) shape it. But my colleagues did not advise me to explicitly account for this factor in my research or discuss the academy as a source of momentum or resistance to new human rights issues. To do so would have been to breach certain professional norms within epistemic communities of political scientists, norms that suggest that “real” research is distinctive from advocacy.
As explained briefly in chapter one, I have sought to exploit the recursive relationship between academics and practitioners methodologically. The research process for me has consisted largely of poking around the human rights regime asking questions about what is not on the agenda and asking practitioners to justify their answers. This has provided insight into the regime itself, as well as its silences and the cultures within which different practitioners move.
However such a method does constitutes a notable, if modest, agenda-setting function in its own right. Simply raising a new issue in a conversational setting 'makes people think' and stirs up dialogue. Such communicative action can lead to organizational innovation. It also introduces the individual researcher to the network of gatekeepers who can stop an issue from emerging, as well at to those 'true believers' who might push for it. The practitioners may come to see the researcher, through these discussions, as an expert on the substantive topic. The researcher might be invited by true believers to consult or share findings with the practitioner community.
The choice of whether and how to exercise this role has implications both for the research and for the organizations under study, and eventually for the population of concern. It is therefore impossible and irresponsible to pretend that the research process itself has not influenced the very communities of practice we study. Acknowledging this has required me to reflect on my own role in the human rights network, and that of like-minded colleagues and of academia as a whole, as part of the subject matter of the book."
However I found their application of “Weberian Activism” too limiting to inform the problem I’m facing, since the authors’ careful incursion into political activism comes at a much later stage of the policy process. In other words, their model cannot inform the work of scholars studying cause and effect relationships in agenda-setting – that is, how “public issues” get constructed in the first place, and particularly why some get framed off the public agenda altogether. Any scholar who "pokes around" a policy domain trying to analyze this part of the policy process, even if s/he limits herself to standard methodologies and avoids “open advocacy” like the plague, will influence the thoughts of policy-makers and possibly affect the very outcomes s/he is studying despite his/her best efforts.
And yet the argument Jackson and Kaufman make reifies the very divide between academic and policymakers about which we might be so usefully explicit. The entire article is an exercise in finding some way to reconcile the authors’ different “hats” as researchers of world politics and participants in world politics. They come down on the side of privileging their scholarly identities (maybe because they were writing this article for a scholarly journal?), even though doing so meant essentially abrogating the possibility of being effective in their activist exercise. At any rate, such a solution would be impossible if they were seeking to “encourage broad acknowledgement of facts and problems” in an area where no policy debate already existed, because in such case the research itself would play an agenda-setting role that could not be summarily negated through the logic of Weberian activism.
Probably, what we need in such cases is to acknowledge what might be referred to, following Stephen Krasner as “Kingdonian Activism.” OK, I coined this term, not Krasner, but he inspired me this week at ISA. On the “Bridging the Theory/Policy Divide” Panel at ISA about which I blogged earlier, Stephen Krasner argued that bridging the gap is the wrong framework. Instead we should be using Kingdon’s garbage can model to think about how academia interfaces with politics. Krasner suggests academics are just one group among many contributing to what Kingdon describes as the policy “soup.”
The question of our moral responsibility as persons with civic identities to deliberately engage as activists in such cases is an important issues, but it is not the subject of this post. What I’m interested in here is our responsibility as scholars to account for our role, however inadvertent, in influencing the policy processes we are studying.
Here is a more recent example of what I mean. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), about whose work I blogged approvingly not so long ago, constitutes an excellent case study for my ongoing work on the dialectic between issue entrepreneurs and establishment advocacy organizations. Since I’m interested in why new ideas do or don’t get picked up by lead actors in advocacy networks, I’m curious to follow this campaign, trace CIVIC’s strategies over time and watch to see what works for them, what doesn’t and why.
However, insofar as policy elites or those within a degree of separation from them do read this blog, my blog post itself arguably has become part of the socio-political dataset on the construction of CIVIC’s platform. How / to what extent / must I account for this in my research? Do I analyze the post and comments to it as part of the total dataset? If so, should I interview myself or at least reflect on / be transparent about my motivations in posting, as I would interview others responsible for content I'm analyzing? Should I code myself as a issue entrepreneur or issue advocate for discussing this campaign, on blogs, conference panels or in the classroom? Or should I avoid any mention of such issues I'm studying in my personal or professional conduct until my research is complete?
It doesn't matter, because even if I had never blogged about CIVIC, the very process of conducting interviews with people about issue construction plays a role in constructing issues. When I interviewed the CIVIC Executive Director, the conversation itself allowed her to think through the organization's strategy in ways that may have changed her thinking. And interviews with gatekeepers about issues they’re ignoring force them to justify non-policies, which helps me understand their thought process but also places me momentarily in an issue-entrepreneur role. (I’ve noticed this particularly in my children born of war research – when I talk about my work on BBC, for example, I’m usually contributing to awareness raising about an understudied human rights problem, so my comments would arguably become part of the documentary record I’m then supposed to be tracing.)
Dan Drezner had an answer to this question in his comments last November at the “Who Are the Global Governors?” Workshop at George Washington University. His take on it is that researchers "just aren’t that important" in the global policy cycle. If true, then attempting to include our own impacts in the analysis comes off as vain and narcissistic (as many comments to an earlier post suggest).
But a lot of famous global norm entrepreneurs have been academics, and the whole epistemic communities literature documents the way in which scientists influence the policy process. Bridging the theory/policy divide may not be easy or prevalent in our discipline, but it is done, and in the absence of serious empirical studies of how it’s being done and with what effect/side-effect, it’s hard to know how to do it properly and where the methodological tradeoffs lie.
Perhaps those of us in this position should be trained to recognize it and to adopt participant-observation methods explicitly and transparently. This is standard practice in sociology, but rare in IR. For example, Peter Haas’ work on epistemic communities draws on conversations he has as a participant in global policy processes, but he does not spend time in his scholarly outputs discussing how his presence inside his subject matter influences his findings and impacts the politics he’s studying.
The problem is that people like myself (and, I think Peter) want to be reasonably positivist in our work – in other words, we’d like to observe phenomena and analyze them in a valid, objective, replicable way. But we also want to observe phenomena that we can only be observed from the inside out. Our observations of the phenomena itself may be reasonably empirical; but our observations of our own interactions will be necessarily interpretive.
I can see several possible solutions within our discipline to this seeming need to either degenerate into interpretivism or to deny our role in our subject matter in order to perpetuate an illusory dichotomy between positivist and reflectivist approaches. 1)Recognize and legitimate the complexities outlined above and incorporate ethnographic methods into standard IR methodology training. Some standard criteria would need to be developed for judging the circumstances under which a scholar should know they need to do this in order to retain credibility, since not all projects call for it.
Am I making any sense here, or are these merely the rantings of a seriously jet-lagged assistant professor nervous about including a “radical” book chapter in a manuscript to a university press, late at night, after a day of transitioning back from ISA with needy children, and too many glasses of red wine?
2)Delegate the role of analyzing one’s own interface with one’s subject matter to a third party. In the case of my current manuscript then, I would write up the analysis of the human rights regime as I observed it as an academic, but I would turn over my field notes, published work on the topic, correspondence with political players, briefing notes and slides, consulting records, any evidence of an impact by me on the policy domain I’m studying, to one or more people – coders if you will – whose assignment would be to evaluate how much I had shaped the politics of an issue simply by researching it in such a way that the findings would be independent of my own subjectivity and, ideally, reliable across observers. Often the impact found would no doubt turn out to be minimal; but where significant the author could then refer to some evidence other than their own judgment.
Reactions if you please.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Kingdonian Activism?
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Beyond "Beyond the Bio Note"
In response to our discussion about how explicitly IR scholars should reveal the personal influences on their work Dan Drezner points out that IR scholars do tend to have (and take) somewhat more leeway in book prefaces than in journal bio-notes, and that's true.
Seemingly, the norms are also somewhat relaxed for very senior IR scholars ruminating about the theory/policy divide. See below the fold.
Autobiographical Reflections on Bridging the Policy/Academy Divide
TA05 Thursday 8:30 ‐ 10:15 AM Room:Imperial B
University of Southern California
J. Ann Tickner
Chair(s)
Roundtable Discussants
Princeton University
Robert Keohane
Stanford University
Stephen Krasner
Harvard University
Joseph N. Nye
University of Toronto
Janice Gross Stein
It was a riveting riot of ruminations. Some nuggets of truth from the masters:
Stephen Krasner: "If they call you 'Professor' in Washington, you're finished."
Joseph Nye: "Nail down your academic credentials first, then go get policy experience, then come back to academia." If you do it the other way around, your academic career is finished.
Robert Keohane: Prefers "hiking and Shakespeare" to hob-nobbing with policy wonks, but says if you're going to do it you must be self-disciplined, maintain a moral character and avoid "political prostitution."
Monday, March 24, 2008
International Studies Association Convention, 2008!
As Duncan Black would say, "document the atrocities."
My pick o' the conference:Hans J. Morgenthau and the Politics Among Nations – 60 Years Later
Nothing like a roundtable on realism to have the slim potential of actually producing heated arguments. And, let's face, who wants to attend a panel unless there's some (metaphorical) blood on the floor afterwards?
WA19 Wednesday 8:30 - 10:15 AM
Chair(s):
Michael Cox
London School of Economics
Roundtable Discussants:
Nicolas Guilhot
The Social Science Research Council
John Mearsheimer
University of Chicago
Michael C. Williams
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
But for those who want to see what actual IR bloggers look like, there are a wealth offerings. I started to list them, but gave up.
The Svalbard Threat: 60 Minutes edition
Peter Howard emails me a link to the latest coverage of the threat from Svalbard.
I didn't have a chance to watch the report, but I assume it comprises another whitewash of the critical danger posed to humanity by the creation of this "Doomsday Vault" in the highly militarized territory of Svalbard. Svalbard, as readers of the Duck are already aware, is also home to many Polar Bears literally drowning in their existential hate for western, industrialized society.
The Bush Administration, obviously cowed by the Defeatocrats, continues to ignore the necessity of extending the doctrine of preemption to the threat emanating from the north. But I take comfort from the fact that they continue to stand up against the Bearofascist enablers in the environmental movement.
Remember: if we abandon rampant and unregulated consumption, the bears win!
Another Harry Potter and International Relations review
With all of the important developments in world politics in need ripe for thoughtful self-important analysis at the Duck, why am I posting another review of Harry Potter and International Relations? Because I can.
Frank A. Stengel in Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft: The study of popular culture is slowly gaining ground within the discipline of International Relations. Not only are more and more teachers discovering movies, music, and so on, as educational tools, but ever more researchers are systemically examining how pop culture influences, and is influenced by, international politics and foreign policy.2 One recent addition to this body of literature is Harry Potter and International Relations. Edited by Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann, this volume comprises nine articles written by scholars and students from different academic backgrounds who discuss various aspects of the International Relations/pop culture connection. Its aim is not only to address the »Harry Potter phenomenon« from an International Relations perspective but also – and more importantly – to demonstrate the relevance of pop culture for the study of world
politics.
Indeed, as the editors demonstrate in their introduction, the connection is stronger and more multi-faceted than one might at first expect. [...A lot of detail about the book...]
Overall, Harry Potter and International Relations is a highly convincing plea for taking seriously the role of popular culture in world politics. The volume, far from being merely an entertaining read, makes a significant contribution to the field by examining unstudied aspects of the important, but often neglected, connection between pop culture and international politics. Furthermore, using Harry Potter as a lens, the authors offer fresh perspectives on a broad range of International Relations topics. Although a concluding chapter might have added to the book’s coherence by summarizing the findings and »connecting the dots,« this does not bar the book from being highly recommendable for International Relations students and scholars alike (even those firmly rooted in the »Muggle« world). Due to the authors’ comprehensible writing style, the book is suitable not only for academics but also for non-scholarly Harry Potter fans with an interest in world politics. One caveat remains, though: while understanding most of the book does not require prior expertise in International Relations, at least some familiarity with the Harry Potter universe is indispensable.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Beyond the Bio Note
I quite liked an article I read in International Studies Review a couple of years back, a conversation between Ersel Aydinli and James Rosenau, published under the heading "Courage vs. Caution: A Dialogue on Entering and Prospering in IR."
One of the most thoughtful exchanges in the "Dialogue" has to do with academic norms regarding full disclosure of our identities as scholars / persons.
Rosenau argues, defending a "commitment to explicitness" exemplified in his concluding Distant Proximities chapter, that scholars should situate themselves in the world they are writing about so as to allow readers to better assess and evaluate their arguments:"Some might see that chapter as overly egotistic, but I see it as living by the commitment to explicitness. It is true that all too few analysts proceed in this way. One is hard pressed to find a book, or even a paragraph, in which the author sets forth the personal background factors underlying his or her work... though it would be standard procedure to have at least a paragraph in a preface that tells the reader where the author is coming from."
Aydinli goes on in the same piece to articulate Rosenau’s point more forcefully: “Perhaps we should consider a disciplinary movement to encourage our members to develop and expand the currently accepted genre of the ‘author’s bio note’ into something more revealing and explicit than simply affiliation and research interests. I would like to see, for example, some indication of the author's past history, such as wehre they have workd and lived. Has the author remained all of his or her life in one place? Did he or she take a break along the educational path to join the Peace Corps, live abroad, or work in a different field? I also think it would be valuable to know about some of the author's non-professional affiliations or interests. Of course it would be up to the individual author to determine how many or which of these affiliations to provide, but even that choice would be revealing to the readers and help them interpret the content of the text... authors [might also be] encouraged in their texts to indicate how they came to choose the research topic or particular questions they investigate. Was it simply a personal interst or were there pragmatic issues involved such as a future grant? Was the topic of global or current scholarly interest or something sparked by a dinner table conversation?”
I quite like this idea. I think it would make our research far more objective, and help us evaluate one another's work far better if such a norm of full disclosure took root. It might also help us acknowledge and make sense of our presence in the worlds we study, something which Jackson and Kaufman grappled with, for example, in their Perspectives piece on Weberian activism; and which I am grappling with now as I develop a concluding book chapter on children born of war that accounts for my influence on my own subject matter.
But I also know from first-hand experience that Rosenau is right: there is currently no such norm. Which is becoming scarily apparent to me as I complete my book, written with various efforts to follow Rosenau's advice, and now have to peddle it to mainstream IR presses who will no doubt insist I edit that kind of quasi-narcisisstic reflctivism right out.
Even efforts to bend in that direction just slightly result in disciplining moves from academic gatekeepers. (Don't know about you readers, but the last time I submitted my author's bio to a leading IR journal with mention of my children and predilections for science fiction - matters with, I argue, some bearing on the topics I study and the methods I use - I was told it wouldn't fly.)
And perhaps rightly so.
But perhaps not. Thoughts?
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Politics of Personal Integrity
The confluence this week of the Eliot Spitzer resignation and yet another round of discussions about the Barack Obama-Tony Rezko connection led me -- like, I'm sure, many of you -- to wonder a bit about the political consequences of the fact that "personal integrity" seems to have become the most important commodity that a whole slew of U.S. pundits and even large swaths of the U.S. electorate looks for in a candidate for public office. Besides the usual concerns, such as the fact that I can't for the life of me understand why participation in shady real estate deals or a habit of visiting prostitutes has anything whatsoever to do with someone's capacity for governing, the thing that really struck me in watching these stories unfold is exactly how much misunderstanding is involved in this focus on personal integrity. And I mean "misunderstanding" in a strict sense: criticizing someone's personal integrity is, literally, a misapprehension both of how political rhetoric works and of how social action arises in the first place.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that people mistakenly assume that the truth-value of the statement "X is a person of great personal integrity" tells us something about what person X is likely to do in the future. If that were the case, then knowing that someone always behaved in accordance with various ethical precepts would give us confidence that the person would go on doing so. But it's not the case, and so there's something rather absurd about trying to evaluate someone's future performance -- especially a public someone, virtually all of whose statements about everything have been carefully vetted and test-marketed and engineered to achieve a desired effect -- based on a judgment about their personal integrity. To do so strikes me as a classic example of a category mistake, in this case a misreading of a practical-moral claim as though it were an empirical description.
What does it mean to have personal integrity? In my usual Wittgensteinian / pragmatist manner, the only way I can think to cash out the operational meaning of the phrase "personal integrity" is to look at how it's used. And at least politically, "personal integrity" seems to refer to a consistency between someone's words and their actions. If someone makes a statement of principle and then undermines that principle with all of their subsequent behavior, then they get accused of not having personal integrity; if they "stick to their guns" and refuse to compromise, then they are esteemed as having great personal integrity. This is especially the case when it comes to the relationship between public statements and private behavior -- remember Nannygate? That's a good example.
If we take consistency between public words and private actions as a working definition of "personal integrity," then it seems to me that one of three things is likely the case about any public political figure esteemed for her or his personal integrity:
1) he or she has a very good set of spin doctors and PR people;
2) he or she is very good at explaining away seeming discrepancies, perhaps with the help of the aforementioned spin doctors and PR people; or
3) he or she actually does conform actions to words.
Options 1 and 2 tell us nothing whatsoever about whether the public political figure has any personal integrity, and seem a very weak basis on which to evaluate what they are likely to do in the future. Indeed, all they tell us is that if the public political figure changes her or his position, someone from the Ministry of Truth, er, the political staff, will make it appear as though the public political figure has always been strongly opposed to / strongly in favor of whatever the option now on the table is. But option 3 is hardly any better, because it is impossible to decide between
3a) he or she is really, really concerned with acting in accord with her or his declared principles
and
3b) he or she is really, really concerned with appearing to act in accord with her or his declared principles.
Once again, there's no secure basis here for making a prediction about future actions, since 3a and 3b are empirically indistinguishable -- and if 3b is the case then perhaps the public political figure might be a bit more inclined to take advantage of options 1 and 2 in an effort to shore up her or his image . . . leaving us right back where we started.
The more profound problem here is that we misread "X is a person of great personal integrity" if we regard it as an empirical proposition. If we did try to read it that way, then we'd be saying something like "X's words and actions have corresponded in the past," and the proposition could only be evaluated if no more words or actions were forthcoming, i.e. if the person were dead or otherwise completely incapacitated. But that's not how the statement functions, because it's a practical-moral claim rather than an empirical one. "Practical-moral" is a term I borrow from John Shotter; it highlights the extent to which such claims do important social and cultural work in a given context, since they arise from and participate in a whole complex ecology of commonplace notions on which people draw to make sense of things. The truth-value of a practical-moral claim is irrelevant, or undecidable, or nonsensical. Saying "X has personal integrity" is like saying "we are a just society" or "we are a compassionate and environmentally-friendly organization." On one hand, it means nothing in particular, and on the other hand, it can exercise a profound shaping effect on future action -- which is what practical-moral claims are supposed to do in the first place.
Consider "we are a just society." If "justice" exists as a commonplace among both speakers and the audience for such a statement, then the practical-moral claim functions not to describe the society, but to guide and shape subsequent discussions about possible courses of action: from here on in they have to make reference to "justice," and various participants in those contentious conversations can deploy "justice" as a way of impressing their positions on others. The same is true of "X has personal integrity," which I submit ought not to be thought of as a description but instead as a contribution to the shaping of an ongoing flow of action -- after the practical-moral claim is made and accepted, debates and discussions about options have to take "integrity" into account. This does not mean that any particular action is excluded as much as it means that the whole terrain on which actions are considered has shifted; that's the kind of effect that a successful practical-moral claim has.
It's silly to try to evaluate anyone, especially a public political figure, on the basis of their supposed internal disposition towards "integrity," visible in their past behavior. Any living breathing human being, I'd posit, has some morally questionable actions in their past someplace, actions that involve a compromise of principle; whether this looks like a violation of their "integrity" probably depends on the vim and vigor with which the media pursues their investigation, and the skill and resources of the media handlers trying to spin the story back in a direction that the person in question finds more acceptable. So we're all imperfect, we've all compromised, we're all flawed. And? Does this make all of us unfit for anything? Such would be the logical consequence of treating "personal integrity" as an empirical judgment.
Instead, if we re-think the claim in practical-moral terms, we discover that claiming to have (or being claimed to have) "personal integrity" means that future actions can and should be evaluated for consistency with previous declarations of principle. This can obviously get someone in trouble -- Eliot Spitzer is a good case -- if they are discovered to have large gaps between principles and behaviors. But you can't evaluate that in advance, because such gaps are always produced and made meaningful in the present, and the process of doing so is always social and political. It is futile to look for a person who appears to empirically manifest "personal integrity" and declare them a better candidate for public office; better by far to examine the constellation of commonplaces surrounding the candidate, size up the potentials for various courses of action to be justified, and choose the candidate whose rhetorical universe inclines in your preferred direction. And if "personal integrity" is part of the mix, watch out -- that's an avenue that opponents are almost certain to be able to exploit, most likely at a time and place of their choosing.
Friday, March 14, 2008
An Interesting New Case of Global Norm Entrepreneurship
A DC-based NGO is promulgating a novel idea: that states should compensate civilians that they legally harm during combat operations.
The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict(CIVIC) has launched a "You Harm You Help" campaign. Having succeeded in convincing the US Government to create a trust fund for victims of collateral damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, the organization is now trying to figure out how to turn this practice into a global norm.
The idea is important because the existing laws of war don't require governments to compensate war victims.Governments are often required to pay reparations for war crimes, but hitting civilians by accident is perfectly lawful. And a right to humanitarian assistance is widely recognized for all civilians, but the architecture for it constitutes little more than organized charity.
CIVIC wants to make compensation for deaths and maimings an obligation of warring governments, rather than a charity act by random donors and NGOs. And because the focus is on the outcome not the intention, CIVIC argues states should pay up whether they mean to hit civilians or not."In the past century, we’ve seen marked improvements in how we treat each other. Nations have made legally binding commitments to respect women’s and children’s rights, to abolish torture, and protect free expression. Through the Geneva Conventions and treaties banning weapons like landmines, nations have also promised to protect civilians when they go to war. But no treaty, custom or norm requires nations to help those they fail to protect. No matter how many civilians are killed in a war, no matter how many are left homeless, no matter how much property is destroyed, those who do the damage have no legal duty to help.
I see CIVIC as a fascinating example of norm entrepreneurship. Fascinating in particular for my new book on advocacy campaigns because CIVIC hasn't got very far yet, unlike most of the norm entrepreneurs identified in the advocacy networks literature who got attention because their campaigns succeeded.
We hear time after time “war is war” – the standard explanation for overlooking harm to innocent people. It’s time for a change."
What remains to be seen is whether CIVIC will become a failed campaign - whether its issue will fizzle, die or end up coopted by others' issue agendas, or whether we are witnessing the first stages in a future global norm. Stay tuned.
Monday, March 10, 2008
A less technical version
For those of you who may have found my discussion of the argument befuddling, I give you a less technical version below the fold.My argument begins with the most banal of claims: we cannot understand the political impact of the Protestant Reformations without reference to the institutional structures and dynamics of early modern European states. How, my readers might ask, could it be otherwise? Some of the most influential international-relations literature on international change in early modern Europe, I answer, pays very little attention to patterns of resistance and rule. Scholars too often content themselves with taking a "before" and "after" picture and then explaining the changes in-between primarily through an assessment of the content of new religious beliefs and identities. This kind of analysis provides us with a great many insights, but it spends too much time in the realm of the spirit—of ideas, doctrines, and what constructivists call constitutive norms—and not enough in the profane world of political disputes over taxation and governance.
Princes, magnates, urban leaders, and ordinary people in early modern Europe pursued wealth, power, security, and status through the medium of existing authority relations and well-rehearsed forms of political contention. Their political struggles, within the confines of existing political communities, almost invariably involved disputes over the extent of local rights and privileges, the scope and distribution of taxation, and the relative power of different social classes. Such conflicts often included what we would now call an "international" dimension. Princes, magnates, and even urban leaders sometimes negotiated, conspired, or allied with outside powers. Rulers exploited internal conflicts to advance their power-political interests and make good their territorial claims.
Early modern European states were neither radically decentralized "feudal" entities nor modern nation-states. Many historians now use the term "composite state" to describe the heterogeneous political communities that dominated the early modern European landscape. Whether confederative or imperial, ruled by hereditary or elected princes, or operating as autonomous republics, most early modern European states were composed of numerous subordinate political communities linked to central authorities through distinctive contracts specifying rights and obligations. These subordinate political communities often had their own social organizations, identities, languages, and institutions. Local actors jealously guarded whatever autonomy they enjoyed. Subjects expected rulers to uphold their contractual relationships: to guarantee what they perceived as "customary" rights and immunities in matters of taxation and local control.
By the end of the fifteenth century, dynastic norms and practices almost completely dominated European high politics. Rulers and would-be rulers competed to extend not only their own honor, prestige, and territory, but also that of their dynastic line. They did so through principles—marriage, conquest, inheritance, and succession—that, as Vivek Sharma argues, "were the primary organizing principles of European government for over six centuries." As Richard Mackenney notes, for "those who governed, the interests of the family were all important" and that, in consequence, "the survival or extinction of the dynasty was the difference between peace and war, and the accidents of inheritance shaped the power blocs of Europe as a whole."
Dynastic rulers enjoyed important advantages over other political leaders, including superior access to the means of warfare and greater political legitimacy in the context of political expansion and consolidation. Such advantages meant that the most significant pathway of state formation in the late medieval and early modern periods was dynastic and agglomerative. In Wayne te Brake's words, "most Europeans lived within composite states that had been cobbled together from preexisting political units by a variety of aggressive 'princes' employing a standard repertoire of techniques including marriage, dynastic inheritance, and direct conquest."
Charles of Habsburg's expansive monarchy presents the most spectacular case of dynastic agglomeration. Between 1515 and 1519, Charles acquired—as a result of contingencies of dynastic marriage, death, insanity, and political maneuvering—a realm including present-day Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium, parts of what is now Italy, Germany, and Austria, as well as Spain’s New World possessions. He became King of the Romans and, later, Emperor, which placed him in charge of the unwieldy Holy Roman Empire. His wealth, territories, and his status as Emperor, "raised the spectre of a Habsburg universal monarchy in Europe, fuelled by the bullion of the Indies and the trade of Seville."
Martin Luther began his public call for reformation of the Catholic Church in 1517. Historians and social scientists continue to debate why, and to what extent, Luther's actions sparked an explosion of heterodox challenges to the institutional structure and theological principles of the Catholic Church. But his influence, and that of other religious leaders and movements, led to over a century and a half of tumult across Latin Christendom. The Reformations did so, as I have suggested, because of the ways they intersected with the underlying dynamics of early modern European politics.
Early modern European composite states suffered from chronic instabilities. They were, as we have seen, agglomerations of different peoples and territories divided by distinctive interests and identities. They enjoyed comparatively weak coercive and extractive capacity and relied largely on indirect rule through magnates, urban oligarchs, and other elites who often pursued their own interests and agendas. Endemic dynastic conflicts, for their part, outstripped the extractive capacities of early modern states, engendering resistance and rebellion among their subjects. Dynastic composite states, moreover, experienced recurrent succession crises. Dynastic succession only functioned smoothly if a ruler lived long enough to produce a competent male heir old enough to assume the reins of power. In an era of high infant mortality and minimally effective medical care, disputed successions occurred with great frequency.
Many of these sources of instability, however, also conferred specific benefits to dynastic rulers. First, the composite quality of early modern states created strong firewalls against the spread of resistance and rebellion. Because subjects in different holdings had different identities and interests, and because they were ruled via distinctive contractual relations, they had little motivation or capacity to coordinate their resistance against the centralizing impulses of their rulers.
Second, the underlying bargains of composite states reflected and exacerbated the stratification of early modern European society along divisions of class and status. Composite states distributed rights and privileges among urban centers, aristocrats, and rural society in such a way that for one group to gain an advantage meant a diminishment in the position of another. Rulers exploited these fault lines through strategies of extending differential privileges, such as granting exemptions to nobles to secure their loyalty during periods of urban unrest.
Subjects riven by class and regional differences could not easily join together to oppose their rulers. Dynastic agglomerations, therefore, usually only suffered widespread internal conflict under three conditions: when exogenous shocks, such as famines, led to generalized unrest, when rulers severely overreached in their demands and thus provoked simultaneous uprisings, or when a succession crisis drew in contending elites from across the dynastic agglomeration in the high stakes struggle over who would control the center.
Early modern struggles over central and local control, taxation, and the distribution of rights and privileges were often contentious; they usually ended in blood and tears. But only under specific circumstances did they spiral out of control and risk collapsing central authority. The spread of heterodox religious movements intersected with sources of chronic instability in early modern Europe and made them more dangerous. At the most basic level, once a dispute over tax collection took on religious dimensions, the stakes became even higher: the ultimate fate of one's immortal soul. The interjection of religious disputes into routine political disagreements rendered them much more difficult to resolve.
The spread of heterodox religious movements also created new social ties centering around common religious identities and grievances. These ties often crossed regional, class, and even state boundaries. In doing so, they created the potential for the most dangerous kinds of resistance to rulers—insurrections that were well-funded, militarily capable, and highly motivated, and that mobilized diverse peoples and interests against their rulers.
Religious disagreements were neither necessary nor sufficient to produce such rebellions. Religious conflict played, at best, an indirect part in the Catalan (1640-1652) and Portuguese (1640-1668) revolts against the Habsburgs or the French Fronde (1648-1653). All of the major "wars of religion," in fact, involved disputes over some combination of taxation, local autonomy, succession, factional control of the court. Religious movements, particularly if they had limited class or regional appeal, might actually hinder individuals and groups from forming effective alliances against their ruler's demands. The Dutch Revolt (1572-1609), the Schmalkaldic Wars (1546-1547), the French Wars of Religion (1562-1629), and other religious-political conflicts in early modern Europe all display aspects of this complex relationship, in which the spread of reformation interacted with the structure and dynamics of resistance and rule to produce both a variety of different specific outcomes and an overall crisis in the European political order.
What then, were the ultimate implications of the Protestant Reformations on international change in early modern Europe? Not, I argue, the emergence of a sovereign-territorial state system in 1648. The Reformations stretched early modern states to their limits. They nearly collapsed the French composite state and produced an independent Dutch polity locked in conflict with their erstwhile Habsburg overlords. The Reformations directly undermined the Habsburg bid for hegemony and weakened the dynastic agglomerative path of state formation. It expanded the conditions of possibility for the future construction of national, sovereign states by linking religious differences to territory. As J.H. Elliott writes of Castile and England: "as strong core states of composite monarchies," both, "sharpened their own distinctive identities during the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, developing an acute, and aggressive, sense of their unique place in God's providential design."
As many international-relations theorists note, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the rise of new theories of sovereignty, of notions of "reason of state," and of the balance of power. The Reformations contributed to these developments. Most of the important theories of sovereignty developed in the period were reactions to the turmoil produced by religious conflict. Conflicts between dynastic and religious interests forced statesmen and scholars to justify their policies through doctrines of "necessity" and other conceptual innovations that held, in essence, that long-term religious goals should be made subservient, in the short-term, to security and power. We cannot fully appreciate such conceptual changes in the absence of an understanding the practical political consequences of the Reformations.
State institutions, if not the specific contours of dynastic agglomerations, weathered the storm of the Reformations. This fact suggests that we need to be extremely careful about overplaying the broad impact of religious contention on the emergence of the modern state. Shifts in the nature of warfare and economic relations ultimately contributed more to the emergence of a Europe composed of sovereign-territorial and national-states than did the introduction of new religious ideas. But recognizing the more subtle impact of the Reformations on European state formation should not blind us to their importance in the study of international relations and international change.
Answers for Brad DeLong
Brad reads my announcement of manuscript delivery, and raises a few important questions:
1. Do you really want to write "Franche-Compté" rather than "Franche-Comté"?Answers, of a sort, after the fold
2. Do you really want to leave blurb-readers (and us!) hanging as to what your theory of state formation and the Wars of the Reformation actually is?
3. Jan de Vries and I, after class last Wednesday, were discussing why it was that transoceanic trade seems to have done something to strengthen the forces of tolerance, economic liberty, and representative government in the United Provinces and the United Kingdom, and to have done a great deal to strengthen the forces of religious intolerance and autocracy in Spain. Jan mentioned that he had somewhere at some point in the past seen a map of the travels of Charles of Ghent, and I would dearly love to be able to track it down...
1. Of course not. I hope that remains the most embarrassing error in the materials, but I expect additional misspellings, factual problems, and other sundry mistakes remain to be discovered.
2. That's a fair point, and probably good immediate evidence for why Princeton University Press will rewrite the blurb. For semi-immediate gratification, here's a (pre-copyedited) synopsis of the argument that I've cribbed together from the book's introductory chapter:
This book addresses, first and foremost, this oversight: I provide an explanation for why the Protestant Reformations produced a crisis of sufficient magnitude to alter the European balance of power, both within and among even its most powerful political communities. I argue that the key to understanding this impact lies in the analysis of the dynamics of resistance and rule in the composite political communities that dominated the European landscape. Many of the most important political ramifications of the Protestant Reformations did not stem from any sui generis features of religious contention; they resulted from the intersection of heterogeneous religious movements with ongoing patterns of collective mobilization.3. I largely avoid the debates over state formation and "regime type," but I expect that the standard answers apply: differences in institutions, economic and fiscal strategies, and key related choices, explain much of the divergent impact of overseas trade. Jan de Vries, in fact, is far more qualified to provide answers that I am.
Religious contention, given particular formal properties and specific ideational content, triggered up to five processes extremely dangerous to the stability of early modern rule:• It overcame the institutional barriers that tended to localize resistance against the rulers of composite states, thereby making widespread mobilization against dynastic rulers more likely.Given the right circumstances—a transnational, cross-class network surrounding religious beliefs and identities—the spread of the Protestant Reformations therefore activated many of the existing vulnerabilities in early modern European rule. Not every instance of religious contention, of course, triggered all of these dynamics. Variation in institutional forms, the choices made by agents, and other contextual factors also influenced how these mechanisms and processes played out in particular times and places. And non-religious contention sometimes triggered similar processes. On balance, however, the injection of religious identities and interests into ongoing patterns of resistance and rule made cascading political crises more likely than they might otherwise have been.
• It undermined the ability of rulers to signal discrete identities to their heterogeneous subjects, thereby eroding their ability to legitimate their policies on a range of issues, from religion to taxation.
• It provided opportunities for intermediaries to enhance their own autonomy vis-à-vis dynastic rulers; religious contention complicated the tradeoffs inherent in the systems of indirect rule found in composite polities.
• It exacerbated cross pressures on rulers—by injecting religious differentiation into the equation, by increasing the likelihood of significant resistance to central demands, and by creating often intense tradeoffs between political and religious objectives.
• It expanded already existing channels, as well as generating new vectors, for the “internationalization” of “domestic” disputes and the “domestication” of inter-state conflicts.
This explanation contributes to this book’s secondary task: to assess the status of the early modern period as a case of international change. Was the early modern period, as Philpott suggests, a “revolution in sovereignty” or otherwise, as traditionally understood in international-relations theory, a key moment in the emergence of the modern state system? My answer involves two claims. On the one hand, the Protestant Reformations shaped the development of the sovereign-territorial order, but in far more modest ways than many international-relations scholars assume. On the other hand, a better analytic approach to the concepts of “continuity and change” in world politics allows us to see what kind of a case of change the Reformations Era represents: one of the rapid emergence of new actors—transnational religious movements—altering the structural opportunities and constraints of power-political competition.
The third, and final, goal of this book is to specify precisely such an analytic framework for the study of international continuity and change. I develop an approach to this problem, called “relational institutionalism,” in the second chapter. It combines key aspects of sociological-relational analysis with historical-institutionalist sensibilities. This framework provides the theoretical infrastructure for my explanation of the book’s primary puzzle, as we all as for how we should understand early modern Europe as an instance of international change. But I also intend it to serve as a novel way of approaching inquiry into continuity and transformation in world politics. Relational institutionalism, I argue, incorporates insights from the major prevailing approaches to the study of international relations; it also provides a way of reconciling some of their apparently very different claims about the fundamental dynamics that drive international relations.
A. The Spanish Habsburgs adopted policies very early on that placed a disproportionate tax burden on the productive areas of Castile's economy while creating significant exemptions for its aristocracy; their bargain, set decisively in motion after the Comuneros revolt, weakened the ability of the Cortes to effectively represent urban interests while, over time, shifting political-economic power increasingly away from them. This wasn't sufficient to render them irrelevant, but they lost the degree of influence that the "third estate" achieved in England and the Dutch Republic.
B. One would, of course, want to add a great deal about the development of early capitalism in the Low Countries, the conditions that made such developments possible, and the ways in which both England and the Dutch pursued overseas wealth via merchant capitalists intent on penetrating Spanish Habsburg monopolies in the Americas and East Asia.
C. The Spanish Habsburgs, moreover, resolved their "pluralism" problems by effectively excluding Protestants, suppressing (and then expelling the bulk of) the Moriscos, and so forth. Britain, and the Dutch in particular, ultimately accommodated--even if, by contemporary standard, in a fairly limited way--to the existence of large religious groups in their territories that did not accept the doctrines and rituals of their state churches. Significant Catholic and non-conforming populations persisted in both polities throughout this period, even, with sometimes violent results, within their state-sanctioned churches. So both developed vibrant trading classes under conditions of religious heterogeneity, while Castile developed neither.
Finally, Deborah Boucoyannis' dissertation, "Land, Courts and Parliaments: The Hidden Sinews of Power in the Emergence of Constitutionalism", provides a novel approach to some of these questions.
Re: Charles of Habsburg's travels. The important point is, as Brad suggests, that he maintained a mobile court. Philip II ended this practice, with consequences that form a part of my account of the dynamics of resistance and rule in the Spanish Monarchy.
Serbian government dissolves
Ellie Tzortzi of Reuters:
The coalition government of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica was formally dissolved on Monday, opening the way for an early parliamentary election.The key question is whether Kosovo will usher in a less EU-friendly and more nationalist government.
The decision was taken at a brief cabinet session following Kostunica's announcement on Saturday that the government could not continue in office owing to deep disunity over defending Kosovo versus pursuing a place in the European Union.
"The government did not have a united and common policy any more," a statement said, "and this kept it from performing its basic constitutional function, to define and lead Serbia's politics."
President Boris Tadic must now disband parliament and set a date for the election, probably on May 11. It will be the most important election since voters ended the era of the late autocrat Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.I don't know enough about Serbian politics to make any predictions, but it strikes me that radicalization remains a strong possibility. One could argue that the benefits of an independent Kosovo outweigh a more nationalist Serbia. After all, the Serbs remain pretty hemmed in and international forces remain in Kosovo. Any thoughts from our better-informed readers?
The vote will be a close race between the Democrats and the nationalist Radicals, the strongest party.
Kostunica, whose party lies a distant third, quit after tacitly accusing his coalition partners, the Democrats and the G17 Plus party, of giving up on Kosovo, the 90-percent Albanian province which seceded last month with Western backing.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Not deep enough? Let me hand you a shovel...
I didn't think it was possible, but if the Washington Post's summary of Douglas Feith's manuscript is accurate, Feith's attempt to rehabilitate his image is only likely to make him look worse.
The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith's office drew up a plan for the body -- to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces -- in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to implement it.Maybe Franks was right.
The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was "the mishandling of the political transition." The good that Bremer did, he concludes, "was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation."
In an interview yesterday, Bremer disputed Feith's narrative, saying he believes that Bush gave up on the idea of a quick transition shortly after Baghdad fell and widespread looting broke out in April 2003.
"By the time I sat down with the president on May 3, it was clear that he wasn't thinking about a short occupation," Bremer said. After consulting his records, Bremer also said that at a White House meeting on May 8, Vice President Cheney said, "We are not yet at the point where people we want to emerge can yet emerge." He said that Feith omits that comment. On May 22, he added, the president wrote to him, saying that he knew "our work will take time."
Others have criticized Feith's plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military's Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.
Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein's government.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Set Phaser to Torment
The Pentagon's "less-than-lethal" weaponry is finally going mainstream. Though the Active Denial System (ADS) has been under development for years, 60 Minutes has finally reported on it as if it's the newest thing around. (Click here to see the 10-minute segment from Sunday's show.)
Not exactly a hand-held phaser, and it doesn't painlessly knock you out. Instead it sends a wave of directed energy at a person or a crowd that vibrates the water molecules under the skin. This induces a feeling of being on fire. But unlike actual flamethrowers, the pain only lasts until you move out of the beam.
Pentagon officials frame this as a humanitarian weapon that will save lives by giving US troops something to blaze away with other than a gun. They particularly tout its use for riot control, an easy way to disperse crowds in stability and support ops.
Opponents have some concerns. Quoth various commenters on Crooks and Liars:"So when we have 2 groups of demonstators facing off against each other, which group will be zapped? The side that agrees with the current administration or the side that opposes it? This looks like a potentially serious threat to free speech."
A "humane" weapon? Frankly I think I'd rather be burnt to death in a space of three minutes than stuck in a "non-lethal" agonizer ray indefinitely, as might happen if I'm a small child being trampled in a panicked crowd. Although as a matter of fact, being basically a microwave beam, more likely it would eventually cook that small child inside out and kill her anyway.
"So the military is basically afraid of it’s own people is the moral of this story. The weapon won’t be used in REAL battles, but when it comes to protesters/crowd control it’s ok. So when does the US military officially take over complete control of the US in the form of a advertised coup?"
"A weapon like this is a clear infringement of our Constitutional rights to peacefully assemble for a redress of our grievances. It is unconstitutional. Period."
Perhaps revisiting of the basic just war principles of discrimination, proportionality and unnecessary suffering might be in order here.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Meet the new boss...
A focus on foreign policy has returned to the campaign, and the Washington Post had an telling series of articles yesterday and today on what the next President might do in the Foreign Policy arena. A column in Sunday’s Outlook section speculated on what lies ahead:
The next president will inherit a turbulent, intractable world that sharply constrains the room for creative new U.S. initiatives, according to many foreign policy experts of varying ideological persuasions. Despite the sharp campaign jousting, it's not hard to imagine the next president – even a Democrat – pursuing basically the same set of policies as Bush has in recent years on such big subjects as North Korea's nuclear program, Arab-Israeli peace talks, development and conflict in Africa, Russia's increasing belligerence and China's integration into the world.This may come as a surprise and a shock to fans of the candidates, all of whom have distanced themselves from the current administration. Even McCain has been critical of Bush to demonstrate his independence on key issues such as Iraq or terrorism, though admittedly not nearly as critical as Clinton or Obama. Regardless, those expecting that campaign criticisms presage a break with the past across the board in US Foreign Policy should temper their expectations.
"The truth is, a combination of realities . . . make a certain degree of continuity more likely than not," [Kurt] Campbell told me.
Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor who served for two years as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, echoed that thought. Obama and Clinton's "critique in general of the administration, aside from Iraq, is we are going to be more competent and collegial," he said. "They don't really debate many of the underlying premises of the administration's current policies."
[H]istory also tells us to be cautious about using campaign rhetoric to predict how presidents will operate on the world stage. In 1992, Bill Clinton famously attacked George H.W. Bush for coddling "the butchers of Beijing," only to revert to the long-term U.S. strategy of patiently trying to engage China. In 2000, George W. Bush sharply condemned Clinton's approach to "nation-building" -- only to engage, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in two of the biggest nation-building projects in U.S. history.Today’s paper has a full profile of Obama’s foreign policy team and his major foreign policy positions. The Post’s analysis:
Here's another good reason to be dubious about grandiose promises of foreign policy change: Bush himself has shifted course. After his wholesale repudiation of all things Clinton in his more ideologically charged first term, Bush moved to reorient his foreign policy along more traditional, realist lines, experts say. He has opened nuclear negotiations with North Korea, sought to repair frayed relations with key European allies, backed off from pressuring friendly Arab regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to democratize, and made a new diplomatic offer to Iran over its nuclear program. So far, he has resisted pressure to open a third war front by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.
Yet for all the criticisms leveled at Obama, and his own professions of being the candidate of change, most of the policies outlined in his speeches, in the briefing papers issued by his campaign and in the written answers he gave to questions submitted by The Washington Post fall well within the mainstream of Democratic and moderate Republican thinking. On a number of issues, such as the Middle East peace process, Obama advocates a continuation of Bush administration policies but promises more energetic and intense presidential involvement.Now, this expose might come as a surprise and shock to those up to their eyeballs in campaign horse-race coverage, but none of this should surprise anyone familiar with IR theory. All the major IR theories have a strong structural bias, that is to say, the ability of any one individual to shift world politics ranges from not at all to rather limited. The most liberal of foreign policy analysis theories suggest that a different President would make different policy choices, but the menu of those choices and the resulting pay-off matrix changes little from administration to administration. No presidential candidate can alter the international balance of power, and all strands of realism say that the pressures of power politics will, largely, push any president onto the same path. Even constructivists, who celebrate agency, still acknowledge that though president’s may make history, they will be doing so in circumstances not of their own making (yes, nod to Marx there….). The norms, rules, and identities that constrain and enable world politics don’t change with one Presidential election—developing new norms and identities takes and effort, limiting the number of changes any President can make.
Ergo, IR theory, writ large, suggests continuity on a wide range of key foreign policy issues. This should be neither a surprise to any observer nor a detriment to any candidate. It’s the
“combination of realities . . . make a certain degree of continuity more likely than not”What is certain to change is the tone of US foreign policy. Obama certainly sounds different than Bush. Bush is, simply, unpopular around the world, and Obama gives one heck of a good speech. The question is: Does that really matter, and how much?
I think that the answer is that it does (after some reflection, I think my scholarship naturally leads me to this answer), and I’m hoping to have a post in the near future spelling out my reason why.