Ontological Entanglements, Agency and Ethics in International Relations

Exploring the Crossroads

Laura Zanotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351854108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

While the relevance of ontological commitments for epistemology and methodology in International Relations have been the subject of growing debate for several years, the implications for ethics and political agency of embracing an ontology of entanglement have remained unexplored. This work focuses on the importance of addressing the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the discipline of International Relations.

There is increased awareness of the limits of abstract principles as ways of adjudicating real life political and ethical choices regarding International Intervention and international development for both practitioners and scholars. The work challenges IR prevailing ontological imaginaries rooted upon Newtonian physics and argues that non-substantialist ontological positions nurture a political ethos that privileges 'modest' engagements of practical solidarity and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations. While the book is firmly rooted in metatheory, Zanotti also highlights the easiness with which political failures are dismissed as unintended consequences and argues that the current crisis in Syria, and genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda have shown that advocating abstract ethical principles, be they the Responsibility to Protect, impartiality, or following rules can lead to disaster and can foster violent and exclusionary practices. She also exemplifies how an alternative ethos can be practiced through the example of an international NGO in Haiti.

Highlighting the need for critically re-thinking the way we conceptualize political agency and validate ethics, this work will be of interest to scholars of International Relations theory, ethics and critical security studies.

1 Questioning substantialism in unsuspected places

Anarchy, empire and the power of ideas

The majority of IR theories are substantialist – they presume that entities precede interaction, or that entities are already entities before they enter into social relations with other entities … This analytical or ontological commitment to substances cuts across conventional divisions in the field, including theories in all major paradigms of IR.

(Jackson and Nexon 1999: 293)

IR theories and prevalent understandings of ethics and political agency more broadly are rooted within substantialist ontological starting points. This imaginary assumes a world composed of stable entities, atomistic separateness of agents and linear relations of causality. In line with the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, this imaginary also maintains a radical divide between mind and matter. While res cogitans is rational, active and creative, res extensa is flat and inert. The Enlightenment’s ontology fully embraced Greek atomism, by which reality is constituted by material entities endowed with defined characteristics (atoms). This resulted in the development of paradigms that understand reality based upon a mechanical model. For Newton, the world is made of bodies, “built from infinitely small, infinitely tough, and never changing parts, which themselves are taken to require no further explanation” (Giulini 2005: 5). Because it posits these “point masses” as its starting points, “Newtonian mechanics is able to reduce the motion of complex configurations of such point masses to their simple laws of motion” (ibid). Mechanical models constitute a powerful ontological imaginary. As Giulini points out, “If one adopts the viewpoint of naïve atomism, one might even conjecture that all physical phenomena to be eventually reducible to the laws of mechanics” (2005: 6).

In contrast to Aristotelian notions where qualitative characteristics of what exists have a key role in explaining reality, mechanistic interpretations see causality as a matter of quantifiable relations of push and pull among hard bodies. These deterministic laws are believed capable of explaining all that happens in nature. The epistemological position resulting from this ontological imaginary is that science is a form of knowledge that grasps law regularities, which are in turn representable through abstractions and mathematical models. It also affirms the validity of a particular way of knowing in fields other than physics, including biology, sociology, psychology and political sciences.

Clifford Geertz (1973), Heiiki Patomäki (2002) and Michelle Le Doeuf (1989) have all argued metaphors are relevant for establishing horizons of intelligibility. The world Newton depicted in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica remains the prevalent ontological imaginary of IR theories across schools of thought (1687). Agents, be they states or subjects, are portrayed as monads endowed with potentia. Power (or potentia), in line with a mechanistic imaginary, is by and large understood through analogy with “mass.” Substantialism shapes conceptualizations regarding ways to achieve knowledge as well as notions of subjectivity, causality and understandings of how we fit in the world as actors. In turn, these starting points shape the ways we conceptualize agency and ethics, the ways we validate our political actions and how we imagine possibilities for political change. For instance, understanding causality as a matter of law regularities endorses the notion of the world as a homogenous and flat space where the same conditions obtain. Such an understanding supports the idea that political decisions may be taken based upon universal prescriptions, that standardized solutions may be offered to complex problems and that success can be evaluated through standard benchmarking. Furthermore, by focusing on abstractions rather than practices, substantialist ontological imaginaries promote ways of justifying political action that may end up diverting responsibility for the practical and material consequences such actions entail.

Justifications of international interventions based upon abstract principles or aspirations have been exposed for inadequacy to act as the foundations upon which to respond to unfolding world crises. For instance, Brent Steele and Jack Amoureux (2014) have demonstrated that the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to intervene in Iraq was based upon principled abstractions that excluded competent considerations of conditions on the ground and of the means to achieve a stated end. As I will show in Chapter 8, the US intervention in Iraq, the unfolding crisis in Syria and the genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda have all demonstrated adopting abstract, supposedly universal, principles as justification for action has opened the way for disasters.

In the new millennium, risk and complexity have entered the vocabulary used by the United Nations to describe the security challenges it faces and its role as an international security organization (Zanotti 2010). In this vein, former under secretary general for peacekeeping operations Jean Marie Guehénno challenged the validity of planning rationalities to understand and steer international dynamics. For Guehénno (2001), the world looks like a dynamic weather system, one characterized by millions of variables that combine according to non-linear relations of causality. These critiques notwithstanding, justifications for international interventions mostly rely upon abstract principles and on the correlative assumption that desired outcomes will result from aspirational goals. In the meantime, the categorization of political failure as an “unintended consequence” results in diverting responsibility for the effects of decisions based upon unsound premises.

In the pages that follow, I will address the substantialist assumptions of different streams of structuralism in IR, from Waltz’s neorealism to some versions of governmentality theories, as well as the substantialist implant of constructivist positions about the causal power of ideas, and I will sketch the implications of these positions for conceptualizing political agency and ethics. First, Waltz’s neorealist versions of structural substantialism portrays the status quo as stable and immutable, a totality that can be understood through its organizing principle (anarchy), the law regularities that obtain under that principle and the quantity of power of its parts (i.e. states’ military capabilities). In the meantime, rigid versions of Marxism and governmentality imagine power as a totalizing might that limits and dispossesses otherwise free subjects. And constructivist-substantialist imaginaries envision ideas as forces that act like billiard balls on a pool table. This imaginary obfuscates the layered, thick and entangled constitution of meaning within practices. In different ways, all of these schools of thought share an image of the social world in which entities are endowed with qualities and properties pre-existing relations, interacting according to the laws of physical mechanics. In this ontological imaginary, questions about agency focus on how much force entities may be able to exert on other entities. I maintain that regardless of their stated political aspirations, these positions embrace causal determinism and therefore stifle possibilities for rearticulating political agency.

Before I proceed, I need to outline a few caveats. My goal here is not to demonstrate the “truth” of quantum metaphysics as opposed to the “fallacy” of the Newtonian one. Such an undertaking does not fulfill the scope of this book nor does it match my set of skills. My goal instead is to explore unstated assumptions about “reality” and how selecting entangled ontological starting points would nurture a different ethos – one that focuses on practices rather than abstractions. My goal is also not to offer a critique of all substantialist positions in IR (that would be too big of a task just for one book), nor to address the nuances and subtleties of the entirety of the theoretical production by the scholars I criticize. While my approach may seem vulnerable to criticisms of using straw persons, in my defense, I maintain that the examples I have chosen are meant to assess the similar ethico-political implications of substantialist ontologies in IR and to detect substantialism in unsuspected places.

Revisiting a long-standing debate in IR: substantialism, neorealism and their critics

In the introduction of his by now classical work debating the work of Kenneth Waltz, Robert Keohane (1986) emphasizes the necessity for a careful scrutiny of the assumptions within and proposed conditions of applicability for, any theory. Interestingly, Keohane argues that it is precisely because theories of world politics are not like the ones of Newtonian physics, that they require careful scrutiny so theorists do not remain “prisoners of unstated assumptions” (1986: 4–5). Are causes and relations, established by theory, Keohane asks, supposed to obtain under every circumstance? Or are they to be assessed in context? Is theory oriented towards representing universal truths or contextual ones? (1986: 5). I argue the debate in Keohane’s book reflects the difference in ontological and epistemological orientation between methods of inquiry that embrace substantialism regarding entities, search for regularities and explain social dynamics through a few overarching principles that govern the relations of “things” and scholarship that focuses on unsettling taken-for-granted conceptualizations of “reality” in diagnosing how what is comes to being and focus on discovering differences instead of sameness.

For Waltz (1979), scientific theorizing in IR is about devising an overarching principle (i.e. anarchy) able to explain all major forces at play within the international system. Waltz portrays states as Newtonian “point masses,” whose agency is imagined as proportional to the amount of power (i.e. mass) they possess. Like the Newtonian universe, the international system is imagined as flat and closed. The most stable condition of this system is the condition of equilibrium, where the “masses” of powerful states balance each other, like weights on a scale. The organizing principle of the system, anarchy, rewards states of different “weights” that position themselves in such a way as to achieve at least temporary stability. On this ontological horizon, the forces that can exert the stronger push or pull on others (i.e. the states with the stronger military capability) are the ones endowed with more agency. Theorizing state behavior is driven by assumptions about what function preference the state would maximize, with all states imagined as black boxes, only differing in degrees of power they are willing and able to exercise. For Waltz, theorizing is about finding the organizing principle of the system that can explain the law regularities that occur within it. The broader the principle, the sounder the theory is. In fact, Waltz’s theory of IR, like mechanistic physics, aspires to explaining all that happens in a given system according to a few basic principles and deterministic laws.

The ideological effects of neorealism’s theoretical implant have been the subjects of a long-standing debate that is worthy of summary here. I argue the main trajectories of that debate are still relevant today and can be read along the lines of the differences between substantialist and non-substantialist approaches to the study of social phenomena. Neorealism’s ideological function, both Cox (1986) and Ashley (1986) argue, is strictly connected to its claim to objectivity, primarily as a way of conducting social sciences that mimic strict positivist methodology. Cox and Ashley criticize Waltz for embracing parsimony as the best indicator of theoretical validity. Cox summarizes such methodology as follows: beginning with assumptions regarding entities and their qualities; aspiring at finding stable principles for devising interactions among entities; aiming at explaining recurrent patterns more than change; embracing, at least at the aspirational level, the idea of unity of knowledge and methods across disciplinary lines; and relying upon representationalist conceptualizations of knowledge that consider truth as a progressively accurate reflection of what is “out there.” This approach to theorizing in the social sciences, and in IR in particular, lends itself to gross oversimplifications of complex phenomena that in turn lead to ideological reinforcement of contingent social and political configurations by representing them as natural. Kenneth Waltz’s a-historical approach is not value neutral, but politically conservative because it posits as natural the permanence of the institutions and power relations that exist in the present. The commitment to ontological substantialism is central for this ideological move. In Cox’s words,

The frequent claim of problem- solving theories is to be value-free. It is methodologically value-free insofar as it treats the variables it considers as objects (as the chemist treats the molecules or the physicist forces and motion); but it is value-bound by virtue of the fact that it implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its own framework.

(1986: 209, emphasis added)

Determinism is rooted upon a commitment to “fundamental and unchanging substrata of changing and accidental manifestation or phenomena” (1986: 211). Indeed, the concern with “a continuing process of historical change” and the critical scrutiny of what we take as reality or natural processes are the two main trajectories that, for Cox, differentiate critical from problem-solving theories (1986: 210). He identifies the main limits and ideological functions of neorealism within its commitments to substantialism and causal regularity, as follows:

1. 1 A commitment to individualist substantialism – i.e. to the nature of man [sic], a power seeking monad.
2. 2 A commitment to the nature of states, which differ in capabilities and strength but embrace a similar understanding of national interest.
3. 3 And a belief in the immutable nature of the state system and its organizing principle as “anarchy” which in turn places “rational constraints” upon the pursuit of national interest.

(1986: 212)

In summary, Waltz’s determinism is rooted upon an unquestioned conceptualization of social phenomena along the lines of the laws of Newtonian physics that imagine matter as inert, made of separate atoms and connected through causal relations of push and pull. These substantialist assumptions allow for a very limited view of rationality and ethics and stifle political imagination. Rationality is defined as an actor’s “appropriate response to a postulated anarchic system” (Cox 1986: 212), and morality is only effective when it “is enforced by physical power” (1986: 213). Cox emphasizes the centrality of practices as the starting points both for theorizing and for exercising political agency. Beginning with practices, instead of abstract theorizing and assumptions about the homogenous and flat ontological character of what exists is Cox’s methodological alternative to oversimplified models, whether it is Waltz’s structuralism or Marxist IR. In this regard, Cox distinguishes a kind of Marxism, and structuralism more broadly, that “reasons historically and seeks to explain, as well as promote, changes in social relations”, from “structural Marxism,” which shares with neorealism an “a-historical, essentialist epistemology” (1986: 214–215). Both neorealism and structural Marxism are problematic because they aim at discovering the laws of motion of history, instead of attempting to understand what goes on in practice. In other words, I argue, they embrace the presuppositions of law regularities of Newtonian physics and transfer its methods of inquiry to the social sciences. While neorealism’s conservatism originates from its posting of an eternal status quo, structural Marxism stifles political imagination by embracing “an ideology underpinning revolution by revealing the certainty of a particular future” (Cox 1986: 248).

Cox’s brand of structuralism does not assume direct, constant or unchangeable relations of causation from the structure on the parts, nor does it presuppose given qualities of actors (in particular their rationality) or any overarchin...