The Rebirth of Area Studies

Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st Century

Zoran Milutinovic, Zoran Milutinovic

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786726360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

Area Studies became increasingly common after World War II as a means of responding to perceived 'external threats' from the Soviet Union and China. After the Cold War and in the face of increasingly rapid globalisation, it seemed inevitable that Area Studies – institutionally and intellectually – would slowly degenerate. But this has not been the case, and there has recently been a resurgence of interest in it as an effective and positive research paradigm. Responding to this renewed interest, this book brings together an esteemed group of contributors at the cutting edge of the field to consider the state of Area Studies today and its prospects for the future. The Rebirth of Area Studies demonstrates that numerous aspects of the research paradigm in fact recommend it as well-suited for the present moment and the challenges posed by globalisation, both as a means to overcome disciplinary limitations and to increase self-reflexivity. Area Studies research is grounded in place-specific knowledge, yet by definition it transcends nation as the basic unit of analysis and thus empowers comparative and trans-national approaches. This book outlines a new, critical Area Studies for the 21st century – self-reflexive, aware of its limitations and conscious of its origins in geopolitical, strategic or ideological considerations – and is essential reading for historians, geographers and political scientists.

1

Introduction: Area Studies in motion

Zoran Milutinović

This volume argues not only that the declaration of Area Studies’ death was premature, but that this research field has undergone a series of significant transformations in the last few decades, and currently demonstrates signs of dynamism, vitality and strength quite unusual for the presumed post-mortem state. Instead of being frozen in their Cold War and pre-globalization past – the image frequently recalled by their critics – Area Studies have been in motion all along and presently occupy a place different from the one ascribed to them by those who see Area Studies as redundant. The contributors to this volume trace this trajectory and put forward several proposals for further development. Although they do not share a common perspective on Area Studies’ future, appropriate methods and aims – which is already obvious in their different understandings of Area Studies as a field, a discipline or a cluster of disciplines or research fields – they all agree that Area Studies are as necessary, viable and fruitful today as they have been throughout the twentieth century.

Let us recall the main points raised in criticism of Area Studies.¹ It has been claimed that the forces of globalization, which unify and homogenize the world, make the study of specific spaces redundant, and that scholarship should focus on studying global processes instead of place-specific features. Area Studies were characterized as a pseudo-academic research field, too complicit with power and serving its interests.² Further, they were compared with well-established academic disciplines, and found wanting for lacking a specific method and a clear and unique object. Moreover, Area Studies were judged to be theoretically and methodologically inferior to the disciplines, incapable of theory-building and merely descriptive. Many Area Studies specialists – most of whom, it is often forgotten, have specific disciplinary backgrounds – disagree with this criticism, and believe that place-specific knowledge is still needed, that all knowledge can be instrumentalized by power, that methodological purity is an outdated requirement in the twenty-first century and that theory-building requires contexts as much as conceptual production. Contrary to the optimism regarding globalization processes in the early 1990s, it is now difficult to deny that globalization works in contradictory ways. Global processes are implemented in place-specific ways: as Chakrabarty maintained, ‘the universal concepts of political modernity encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institutions, and practices through which they get translated and configured differently’.³ In addition to this, it is now widely accepted that globalization produces integration as well as disintegration – that it causes the disappearance of some borders and divisions, while introducing new ones at the same time.

While the narrative of the expansion of Area Studies research centres, departments, programmes and other units within US and UK academia since the beginning of the Cold War can be convincingly supported by evidence, it is not as clear that the Cold War and the funding offered by various governmental agencies and non- or near-governmental organizations was the sole root of this expansion. It coincided with the post-Second World War expansion of universities worldwide: new academic institutions were established, and already existing ones expanded by opening new programmes and forming research centres, including Area Studies ones. However, all other disciplines expanded in a similar way in that same period, many of them benefiting from various forms of strategic funding. The beginning of the opposite process – the contraction – did coincide with the end of the Cold War, and with the consequent withdrawal of governmental and non-governmental support for Area Studies, but the withdrawal of funding also affected, and continues to affect, many other areas of teaching and research. The explanation for cuts to funding for Music departments may be different, and not at all related to the end of the Cold War, but the general movement is obvious for all to see. The end of the Cold War – if an end it really was – could be just a convenient pretext for what has already been happening in other academic areas, and with different justifications. The undeniable prominence of Area Studies teaching and research during the Cold War should be seen only as one stage in the history of Area Studies as an academic enterprise, and neither as their defining feature, nor as evidence of their origin, nature and purpose.

Area Studies do not trace their genealogy to the early Cold War period, as Timothy Mitchell reminds us.⁴ Area Studies institutions – mostly ‘Oriental’ ones – had already been established in Russia and France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and similar ones soon appeared in Germany and the Habsburg Empire. The first Area Studies programmes in the USA were established immediately after the First World War: the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1919, and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Princeton in 1927. In the UK, the School of Slavonic at King’s College in London opened in 1915, consisting of four posts in Russian, Serbian, Slavonic Literature and East European History, and largely financed by foreign governments.⁵ Over the years, it began to offer other East European languages, social science and humanities disciplines, and in 1931 became the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), since 1999 a part of University College London. In 1916 the School of Oriental Studies in London opened its doors to students, with the remit of teaching languages, histories, customs, laws and literatures of the peoples of Asia. Not only was this remit of researching and teaching knowledge about an area not opposed to disciplinary knowledge, but the School of Oriental Studies actually gave birth to the first ever Department of Linguistics in the UK in 1932. The School acquired its present name, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), when a Rockefeller grant in 1938 helped it establish African studies. The establishment of these four significant Area Studies institutions in the UK and USA precede the Cold War by many years: ‘knowing the enemy’ was certainly not their raison d’être.

Knowing the world available for penetration and possession, and later Cold War use of Area Studies’ body of knowledge, is quite another matter. Linking political and academic fields is the rule rather than the exception, reserved only for Area Studies institutions. It would not be too difficult to list a number of scholars who left a deep impact on the Cold War world, but did not have an Area Studies background: Henry Kissinger came from Harvard’s Department of Government, and Zbigniew Brzezinski from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. An Area Studies background does not predispose scholars either to serve the aims of power or to oppose them. As scholars, most of them follow the old-fashioned aim of saying and writing what they believe to be truth in their respective fields of knowledge. This can always be put to good use by those in power, but abstaining from compiling a dictionary of an Asian language, simply because those in power could use it to teach their colonial army that language, is hardly what a linguist should do. Cui bono? is often a useful question, but if it becomes the only question governing our judgement it may lead to reductionist and even cynical conclusions, and unnecessarily denigrate those who engage the better part of their souls in the process of furthering our knowledge of the world. The relationship between power and Area Studies institutions is a much more complex affair than normally acknowledged by those who, in the wake of Said’s Orientalism, accuse a whole field of academic inquiry of complicity with imperialist interests. The founder of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London explicitly linked the political and academic fields underlying the School’s mission, but it was not British imperialism or colonialism that had supported its establishment: rather, it was ‘the cause of self-determination for the peoples of Eastern Europe’.⁶ In her chapter in the present volume, Wendy Bracewell argues that Area Studies scholars, as all other academics, can very effectively subvert and resist the intentions of those in power, or criticize their aims and approaches, or produce knowledge that undermines their endeavours; to extend our example above, the same Russian dictionaries used by the British intelligence community also helped Kim Philby and Geoffrey Prime learn Russian, as Bracewell reminds us. Some of the most vocal opponents of the US policies in Indo-China were a group of Asian Studies scholars in the Committee of Asian Studies, who published the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and thus gave public voice to dissenting views.⁷ If the question is whether Area Studies scholars help promote the interests of power, the answer can only be: some do, some do not. Like Pascal, many academics also bet on eternity. If, however, this question is asked on a more general level, where – following Foucault – every body of knowledge immediately creates a relationship of power, and there is no relationship of power that does not produce knowledge, we are all in the same position, as David Szanton notes, Area Studies scholars as much as those who work in the disciplines.⁸

The chasm between Area Studies and the disciplines has often been overstated. Several disciplines that contribute to Area Studies are place-bound of necessity: historians, linguists, anthropologists, geographers, and literature and culture specialists all work within disciplines that can only be area-based. Theory-building and a higher level of abstraction, as opposed to description, occur in them without any distinction between knowledge about an area and disciplinary knowledge. Sociology and Political Science are both methodologically diverse, and in addition to formal modelling and rational choice theory also use a plethora of methods that have more in common with interpretation aimed at understanding than with nomothetic approaches aimed at explanation. The former is by no means less rigorous than the latter, and is supported by a rich, complex and self-reflexive theory of understanding and interpretation. However, interpretation does not equal mere description: rather, it is directed towards meaning and significance – Gadamer would say towards truth – of the phenomenon under study, and acknowledges an interpreter’s participation in what is being studied. The interpretation of the human world assumes that, within it, the human is an issue to itself, and that every interpretation of the world is the interpretation of the webs of meanings humans have spun themselves. Hence the importance of local perspectives in Area Studies: without knowing what people from an area make of their world – or how they create their world, understood not as the mere physical environment, but as a web of meanings – there is no understanding of the social and political world we attempt to study. From this point of view, the progressive disappearance of language-based academic programmes and the decline in foreign language skills in Anglo-American academia in the last two or three decades poses a greater threat to Area Studies, and to our knowledge and understanding of the wider world, than the withdrawal of governmental and non-governmental funding. In his contribution to this volume, Mark R. Beissinger rejects the oft-repeated comparison between social science disciplines, as supposedly theoretically and methodologically superior, and Area Studies as inferior: social science work and Area Studies knowledge are complementary and reinforcing. Being research fields rather than academic disciplines, Area Studies do not strive to develop or adopt one distinct Area Studies method. Such methodological exclusiveness and purity has been abandoned in all humanities and social sciences in any event; they have for a long time acknowledged the value and fruitfulness of various, competing and sometimes contradictory methods in their own work. The relationship between disciplines and Area Studies is better understood as overlap, complementarity and pervasion, rather than outright competition and mutual exclusion.

If one distinct research method is neither desirable nor possible, should not one distinct object within each Area Studies fields be assumed? This is easier said than done: areas are hardly physical phenomena, existing naturally by themselves. They are intellectual constructs, with shifting borders, drawn at different times with different aims in mind. However, this does not mean that areas are absolutely arbitrary or fictitious: they are based on historical, political, linguistic, cultural and religious legacies, real or perceived, and often supported by the self-perception of those who inhabit them. What exactly could or should be the object of study within such constructions largely depends on the legacy we choose to focus on, or on the research problems that guide our interest. This also means that scholars – not only the imperial gaze or local identification – can propose new areas whenever social, economic, cultural or political processes create the conditions for them.⁹

The contributors to the present volume address some of these issues and put forward conceptual, methodological and institutional solutions for problems discussed within Area Studies – and outside them – over the past few decades. The first chapter brings a detailed overview of the debate on the need for Area Studies research, and of the transformations they have undergone as a response not only to explicit criticism, but also to the wider changes in scholarship during this period. The following two chapters focus on understanding the concept of area, which is central to Area Studies, and ask how it can be understood, what makes an area a viable analytical category, and which consequences follow from this understanding in Area Studies methodology. The relationship between academic disciplines and Area Studies is the topic of the next two chapters: what the place of area-specific knowledge in social sciences is, and what Area Studies can learn from Comparative Literature. The last chapter presents the methodological aspects of a specific Area Studies research project based on the idea of mobility, interaction and interdependences, and serves as a coda to the preceding discussions.

In her chapter, Susan Hodgett revisits the myth of the post-Cold War crisis of Area Studies in greater detail. Instead of becoming irrelevant and disappearing, she maintains that Area Studies underwent a rich period of transformation and reshaping, and even forging closer alliances with various academic disciplines. The criticism directed at Area Studies in the early 1990s did not fall on deaf ears, and much of it has been taken on board. Hodgett points to the most important nodal points in this debate, citing examples of criticism and explaining how Area Studies evolved in response to it. Area Studies were said to be descriptive, parochial and oblivious to global forces; they were an exponent of hegemonic cultures; they maintained artificial historical boundaries and replicated colonial cartography; they lacked rigour and shied away from broader generalizations. In addition to this, the proponents of rational choice theory questioned the need for language-based study and deep cultural knowledge. The self-examination of Area Studies resulted in a challenge: social sciences do not have a monopoly on theory, methodological rigour and scientific approach; regions or areas are grounded in long-standing historical processes and remain valuable analytical categories. Moreover, inter-regional and cross-regional approaches can supply insights and knowledge that cannot be obtained in any other way, and the local perspective – to which Area Studies are responsive thanks to their language-based approach and reliance on deep cultural knowledge – represents an invaluable contribution to understanding the issues under study. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Hodgett maintains, it is obvious not only that Area Studies can make a great contribution to academic knowledge about the world, but also that they can help improve disciplinary research methods.

This response to criticism directed at Area Studies, Hodgett points out, was at least in part enabled by the background drama that has taken place in the last three decades and concerned the traditional division of reality into regions entrusted to academic disciplines. Its outcome, however, is that we are less certain today that the traditional disciplinary divisions are necessary and that the boundaries between disciplines must be rigid and impermeable. Also, most of us agree that there is more than one way of evaluating various research methods. At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are ready to tolerate greater diversity in epistemology, knowledge sources and claims: the easing of rigid disciplinary divisions has also resulted in methodological approaches travelling from one discipline to another, being adapted for different purposes, modified and often improved in the process, and, as a consequence, shared between humanities, social sciences and Area Studies. In this context, Area Studies can raise their claim to being a theory-developing activity as much as the individual disciplines. Hodgett reiterates that the value of the local perspective – knowing how those we seek to understand interpret themselves and their world – has not been diminished, but that it remains the most urgent task of Area Studies. In order to understand a place better, a researcher must know ‘how it feels to be there’.

Jan Kubik and Wendy Bracewell address the question of Area Studies’ objects and ask how the existence of an area should be understood. Starting from the perspective of contextual holism and focusing on Central Europe, in his chapter Kubik proposes understanding areas as situations. Areas exist as discursive constructions, but they are no less real because of this. Whether the existence of an area such as Central Europe is confirmed, contested or rejected, the question is not whether Central Europe is there, but what happens when some actors construe their situation as living in Central Europe and compete with other actors who deny its existence or tell them that they actually live in Mitteleuropa, or East Europe, or New Europe, or Intermarium – that is, that they should construe their situation altogether differently. Here, building networks, both internal networks of cooperation and external networks of partnership, dominance or dependence, should be understood as the central activity that guides actors.

Kubik’s contextual holism rests on four postulates. With regard to the first of them – relationism – Central Europe is placed between areas that are discursively more solidly articulated and less questionable: Russia on one side and Western Europe on the other. The actors who construe their situation as ‘Central Europe’ do not see themselves as part of either, but as being ‘in between’. Being in between can further be understood as a source of strength, but also as a danger: the area in between can be, as Central Europe has been, claimed by both si...