Kinship in International Relations

Kristin Haugevik, Iver B Neumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429016790
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first volume aimed at thinking systematically about kinship in IR – as an organizing principle, as a source of political and social processes and outcomes, and as a practical and analytical category that not only reflects but also shapes politics and interaction on the international political arena.

Contributors trace everyday uses of kinship terminology to explore the relevance of kinship in different political and cultural contexts and to look at interactions taking place above, at and within the state level. The book suggests that kinship can expand or limit actors' political room for maneuvereon the international political arena, making some actions and practices appear possible and likely, and others less so. As an analytical category, kinship can help us categorize and understand relations between actors in the international arena. It presents itself as a ready-made classificatory system for understanding how entities within a hierarchy are organized in relation to one another, and how this logic is all at once natural and social.

1 Kinship in international relations

Introduction and framework

Iver B. Neumann, Kristin Haugevik and Jon Harald Sande Lie

While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first book-length study, and so a bit of a first stab at thinking systematically about kinship – as an organizing principle, as a source of political and social processes and outcomes, and as a practical and analytical category that not only reflects but also shapes politics and interaction on the international political arena. Since kinship is such a ubiquitous phenomenon, it should be ‘good to think with’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966) for IR theorists. It presents itself as an alternative and fertile starting point for thinking about how the overall international system is organized, how and why states formulate and practice their foreign policies the way they do and how various actors on the international arena make sense of and contend with one another. Our collective ambition, then, is to explore how kinship – whether constituted by blood, practices or metaphors – profoundly impacts on contemporary political structures, processes and outcomes. Our point of departure is that it is insufficient to approach kinship merely as a pre-given, natural bond between individuals, one that exists independently of perception or analysis. What is needed, we suggest, is increased awareness of how blood and metaphorical kinship relations are entangled, and acquire social meaning through everyday application as well as through scholarly attempts to classify and make sense of the international relations by using kinship terminology.

The chapters in this volume examine the practical and political implications of invoking kinship in everyday speech, what it means to political interaction and to relational structures, at the same time as they also aim to add to our understanding of kinship as an analytical category. Our first aim, then, is to explore how kinship can expand or limit actors’ political room for manoeuvre in the international political arena, making some actions and practices appear more possible and likely. As kinship terms are used in politics to designate relationships within and between states, kinship should also be included to our scholarly and analytical gaze. Adding kinship to the political equation could in other words change not only the political dynamics at play, but indeed the very rules of the game (Sabean et al. 2007). Against this backdrop, the second aim of this volume is to call attention to kinship as an organizing principle and driver in the dynamics of global power politics (Goddard and Nexon 2016). As an analytical category, kinship can help us organize and make sense of relations between actors on the international arena. It presents itself as a ready-made, self-evident classificatory system for understanding how entities within a hierarchy are organized in relation to one another, and how this logic is at once natural and social.

This introductory chapter elaborates on these opening claims, and discusses some ways in which kinship may be of use to IR scholars. We begin with some examples of how kinship relations have manifested themselves historically in international relations, seeking to demonstrate how blood kinship from the beginning has been accompanied, reinforced and challenged by metaphorical kinship – that is, how certain non-blood related relations in or via practice come to be treated as kin, with the duties, obligations and expectations that entails. We then proceed to observing how kinship has been dealt with in its home discipline, social anthropology. Some early anthropologists, like Lewis H. Morgan (1877), treated kinship as a chief principle of social organization, while others, like Bronislaw Malinowski, did not. Disciplinary developments led structural-functionalists to focus on the law-like tendencies of kinship (Yanagisako 2002), and by mid-twentieth century, British anthropology focused on what we may call ‘kinshipology’: identifying kinship structures. Over the last half century or so, the focus has moved towards treating kinship from what it is to what it does. This move from the structures of kinship to kinship’s role for social organization, which may be summed up as treating kinship as an enabling metaphor, has produced a number of insights on the level of everyday political practice, which IR scholars may apply to the level of relations between polities. We conclude the chapter with a presentation of the individual contributions to this volume.

Blood and metaphorical kinship

Before we proceed, a note on terminology is needed. Whether for universal reasons that are to do with the difference between giving or receiving (Carsten 2004) or for reasons that are to do with how Western discourse on kinship foregrounds the biological (Schneider 1984), an analytical distinction between kinship that flow from biological factors on the one hand and kinship that flows from social constitution (marriage, adoption, agreement, etc.) on the other, seems to be endemic both to the practice and analysis of kinship. Even in scholarly analyses – the very aim of which is to demonstrate how this opposition is undetermined and/or hybridized – these categories make up the raw material (e.g. Baumann 1995). Not least since kinship that begins as a biologically founded relation also has to be socially confirmed on a regular basis to maintain its social relevance, the distinction is an easy one to de-differentiate. Indeed, contemporary students of kinship seem to have made the undetermined character of this distinction foundational for what we may refer to as ‘new kinship studies’.
What they have not done, however, is to replace the insufficient terminology with a less problematic one. Since practical and analytical categories tend to mutually influence one another, and since uses of ‘kinship’ in everyday speech often are with reference to individuals of common descent, we need categories that account also for this aspect – even if the distinction is to be bracketed in the subsequent analytical round.

After careful consideration, in this volume, we have chosen to present a pragmatic dichotomy between ‘blood’ and ‘metaphorical’ kinship at the outset, before we proceed to problematize this distinction and, eventually, melt the two together. While we are fully aware that neither of these two terms are perfect, as long as the people we study continue to apply such a distinction in everyday language, it is our claim that we need analytical terms to denote them as well. In lieu of agreed scientific practice, this is the best we can do. In terms of terminology, then, we set aside terms such as ‘biological’ (too entangled with social-biology) and ‘biogenetic’ (too technical) in favour of ‘blood’ kinship, which is used to denote kinship that is treated socially as (not necessarily ‘is’) having its origin in common descent. We have also set aside terms such as ‘imagined’ and ‘fictional’ in favour of ‘metaphorical’ kinship, to denote kinship that is treated socially as such, without making claim to having such shared origin in ancestry.

Why kinship?

Since the inception, humans – be they Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergiensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans or Homo sapiens – have been organized in hunter and gathering bands consisting of 20 to 200 individuals, often organized along blood kinship lines. During the tenth millennium before our era, some of these groups living in the foothills of the Fertile Crescent began to manipulate plant life and settle down, and other groups in the north of what we now call Europe began to make the sea a reliable and stable source of food. This was the beginning of sedentary life, with which came increased social complexity. Kinship, in the form of shared descent, remained an important organizing principle of these societies.¹

With the arrival of polities of some scale, what the Romans called patronism – bestowing favours on followers or clients – entered the picture. Max Weber famously elaborated his category of patrimonialism to cover those cases of social organization where the ruler claims ownership of the land and/or people that he rules. What we have here, then, is a principle of social organization that comes with increased social complexity, and that complements the principle of blood kinship in interesting ways. The crucial thing seems to be how patronage and patrimonialism grows out of kinship. We get a first lead about this already from etymology: patron comes from the Latin term patronus, protector, which itself hails from Latin patris, the genitive form of pater – father. Patrimonialism comes from Latin patrimonium, inheritance from the father. Patronage and patrimonialism started as kinship writ large, and is a reminder that, if we look at basic forms of social cohesion, kinship will lurk somewhere. The connection may be obvious, as when European settlers had to translate their political organization to native Americans by saying things like ‘Uncle Sam has thirteen sons’, or it may be more understated, but it will be there.

Everyday understandings of kinship tend to fasten on blood relations – which we in the present context see as encompassing both consanguine (i.e. genetically related) and in-law affines. However, as most of us would know from personal experience, kinship is, like all social relations, confirmed and strengthened by being exercised. Social use and practice has a recursive effect also on blood kinship. It may fasten or loosen the tie. As Peter Wilson (1988: 33, see also p. 50) generalizes about hunter-gatherers,

… commitment and formality are excluded as elements of social structure, and in this way issues of power in social relations are diminished, though not extinguished, in significance [relative to domesticated societies, that is]. Such exclusion is further revealed when one examines what anthropologists of hunter/gatherer societies agree is a universal feature; the flexibility and fluidity of relations, especially kinship relations. […] their commitments are personal, not formal, institutionalized, or rule governed. Relationships are activated and animated through proximity, and proximity is determined by affection and friendliness rather than any formal or even ideal ‘norm’ of status.

In his study of what linguistic terms may tell us about social and political structures amongst proto-Indo-Europeans, Émile Benveniste (1973) similarly reaches the conclusion that it was ongoing social relations, as opposed to biological origins, that were key. Kinship, we might argue, is the great fastener of social ties. It is usually at the core of that basic unit of everyday life, the household, and always at the core of that basic unit of social analysis, the family (which often also includes hangers-so). Families that are also dynasties or, as it were, family firms, are no exception. At the state level, an illustrative example is found in the common description of the British King Edward VII (r. 1901–1910) as ‘the Uncle of Europe’. The nickname alluded to the king’s blood relations with ‘nearly every Continental sovereign’ – ties which clearly impacted on the nature of the bilateral, political relations between Britain and the monarchies in question. Norway’s choice of Britain as its political lodestar following the independence from Sweden in 1905 would be a case in point – it is commonly argued that the blood tie between the British king and the new Norwegian royal family (he was the queen’s father and king’s uncle) helped fasten relations between the two states in the early 1900s (Haugevik 2018). The implications of tying relations with another ruler, state or people to kinship – whether founded in blood or metaphor – is nicely captured by Wilson (1988: 35, compare Lévi-Strauss 1967), who elaborates on how

[K]inship, or claiming kinship, signals friendship, while friendship realizes and confirms kinship. In the continuous pattern of coming and going that is signified by flexible social composition, there is bound to be a degree of uncertainty at the inauguration of a new proximal relationship. This uncertainty can be reduced through kinship. To claim kinship is to proclaim trustworthiness.

To exemplify further, Kathleen Burk (2007) observes how, towards the end of the 1800s, the idea of war between Britain and the United States increasingly came to be ‘unthinkable, even fratricidal’ at the same time as the term ‘American cousins’ was increasingly used in the British domestic discourse. As Burk points out, the reference to kinship in this context had components of both blood and metaphor – the two states reframed themselves as ‘racial as well as cultural cousins’ (Burk 2007: 385–386; cf. Carsten 2004: 153–161).

Agriculturally based societies of low complexity tend to demonstrate less dynamism than industrially based ones, and blood kinship is correspondingly important. When, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, German thinkers like Hamann and Herder introduced the seminal idea of the nation, they thought of it as kinship organization writ large (Eriksen 2002). In societies where people move from the countryside to the city at unprecedented rates, new communities must take over many of the practical and emotional functions that were covered by the family-based villages they left behind. These new communities – nations – are often thought of as extended families. They are motherlands, so they are mothers, and they are fatherlands, so they are fathers.

In our own time, a similar tendency to export kinship structures and language to structures beyond the traditional family can be found if we look at how some social organizations, for example student networks, are constituted and referred to as ‘fraternities’ and ‘sororities’, or how political parties across state borders refer to one another as ‘sister parties’ or members of the same ‘party family’, on the basis of related ideological underpinnings. As noted by Mair and Mudde (1998: 214) ‘Once party families come into play […] classification becomes almost a matter of conventional wisdom, and there seems little need to spell out or explain the categorizations involved.’ Further examples would include how kinship terms are used in reference to particular professions, for example when priests are referred to as ‘fathers’, nuns as ‘mothers’ or ‘sisters’, nurses as ‘sisters’ (perhaps a fading practice), military contemporaries as ‘brothers’ (see Græger, this volume) and, in certain social democracies, policemen as ‘uncles’ (also a fading practice). Even in our own professional field, academia, we find multiple examples of how kinship vocabulary is put into play so as to illustrate, order and give meaning to structures, individual relations and everyday activities. The school or sometimes even university is commonly referred to as the Alma mater (Lat. nourishing mother). Similar to a blood mother, the school-provides (intellectual) nurture for its academic offspring. In German, doctoral advisors are referred to as Doktorvater (or Doktormutter), suggesting a more personal and persistent tie between doctoral supervisors and students than one might expect. The making of academic ‘genealogies’, to trace academic networks based on the metaphorical kinship ties between doctoral advisors and students, is becoming an increasingly popular exercise.

In all these examples, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Fm
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Kinship in international relations: introduction and framework
• 2 The family of nations: kinship as an international ordering principle in the nineteenth century
• 3 Kith, kin and inter-state relations: international politics as family life
• 4 Kinship diplomacy, or diplomats of a kin
• 5 ‘Brothers in arms’: kinship, gender and military organizations
• 6 Colonized children: Chechnya in Russia
• 7 O brother, where art thou? Kinship in Turkish region-building
• 8 Kinship in Indian politics: dynasties, nepotism and imagined families
• 9 A command-chain of brothers: kinship in Chinese foreign policy
• 10 Like grandfather, like grandson: kinship as a legitimating force in Japan’s international relations
• 11 Conclusion: the heterogeneity of kinship systems and world politics
• Index