World Politics in Translation

Power, Relationality and Difference in Global Cooperation

Tobias Berger, Alejandro Esguerra

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138630574
• eBook ISBN: 9781351806336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change.

World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance.

This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.

1
Introduction

The objects of translation

Tobias Berger and Alejandro Esguerra

Contemporary world politics is characterized by the rapid movement of people, goods, services and ideas around the globe. Virtually all the pertinent issues that the world faces today – from nuclear proliferation to climate change, the spread of infectious diseases and economic globalization – imply objects that move. While International Relations (IR) scholarship has produced sophisticated bodies of work on all of the above, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving.

In this volume, we propose the notion of translation as an analytical lens to address these questions. In its most basic definition, ‘translation’ describes simultaneous processes of transportation and transformation. Translations thus occur when, for example, specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies change as they travel from one place to another. Analysing world politics in translation thus points us to these changes, and the high degree of uncertainty that they imply as neither norms nor knowledge, policies nor instruments can ever be fully controlled by their senders; instead, they are constantly altered in the processes of translation.

The empirical case studies in this volume are concerned with moving objects in various policy fields. Objects of world politics come in different forms: there are objects such as global health, the climate or gender, as well as objects concerned with the doing of politics (Voß and Freeman 2016). Examples include the organizational form of the project within the World Health Organization (WHO), instruments such as a climate emissions trading system or documents used for equal pay campaigns of a transnational gender activist network. All of these objects share in common the fact that they are neither purely ideational nor exclusively material; rather, they are hybrid entities consisting of various actors, norms, knowledge and material components (see Allan 2017). Understanding this mix of entities as objects opens the space to inquire how these objects are constituted, how they travel and how they change while moving and settling anew. When we analyse world politics in translation, we look at these objects and ask three overarching questions:

1. What makes these objects move?
2. What do they do while moving?
3. What happens to them as they move from one place to another?

In short, we argue in response to these questions that (a) making objects move requires power. More precisely, it requires the power to represent objects in different places. Although power is a key analytical category in IR (Barnett and Duvall 2005), this specific representational dimension has received comparatively scant attention, primarily because the kind of objects that we are interested in have generally been simply taken for granted within established accounts of world politics. (b) When these objects move, they forge new relations by connecting people, as well as things and materials. This relationality is thus a key outcome of processes of translation. (c) The same applies to the production of difference. When moving from one place to another, objects are constantly recontextualized, being made sense of differently by different actors located in different contexts. Power, relationality and difference are thus key features of world politics in translation.

While we will discuss power, relationality and difference in greater depth in the conclusion, this introductory chapter sets the scene for the subsequent analysis in the following chapters. It proceeds in three steps. First, we turn to the genealogies of ‘translation’ to render central theoretical insights fruitful for our analysis of world politics. These central insights are taken from Literary Studies, Anthropology, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. While differing in their respective conceptualizations of ‘translation’, all of these approaches move beyond translation as an exclusively linguistic phenomenon. Translation is thus not something that happens only between two or more languages; instead, translations are complex social and political processes in which new meanings are created and new relations forged, they involve people and languages as much as material artefacts and they are always fraught with relationships of power and domination. While bearing invaluable insights, these conceptualizations of translation are not simply translatable into the world of IR. Theories never travel without transformation and betrayal (Best and Walters 2013, 333). Indeed, it is exactly these betrayals and their innovative potential that lies at the centre of the following analyses.

Second, we scrutinize these transformations as we investigate the ways in which the notion of translation has been received by IR scholars. On the one hand, scholars investigating the diffusion of norms and ideas have increasingly started to pay attention to the processes of translations. Whereas the diffusion literature has developed increasingly sophisticated models of the ways in which norms move from one place to another, the myriad ways in which the meaning of norms change has received rather scant attention. Building on earlier accounts of norm localization, recent norm research has thus shown how both the meaning of norms and the social and political practice of the context in which the norm is translated change in the processes of translation (Berger 2017; Zimmermann forthcoming). On the other hand, the notion of translation has also gained recent prominence in the analysis of international institutions. Here, the focus has been on the processes in which knowledge about global phenomena is (at least temporarily) consensualized and stabilized (Esguerra 2014). Making things like piracy or climate change known in the international institutions that have been designed to govern them is also a translational task, as recent scholarship at the intersection of IR and Science and Technology Studies (STS) has shown (Bueger 2015; Allan 2017). Therefore, translations unfold in two directions: first, from one to many, as in the case of norms translation where one norm is translated differently in different places; and second, in the opposite direction, from many to one, for example when a multiplicity of insights is assembled in the representation of one object (like piracy) that can be both known by and governed through international institutions.

Third, we translate ‘translation’ further. We argue that by focusing on the objects of translation, we open the intellectual space for understanding world politics differently. This different understanding is less a repudiation of canonical accounts in IR; rather, it is a change in perspective, which brings new objects, places and actors into focus. This new perspective significantly contributes to existing scholarship on modes of interaction and negotiations (Risse 2000), international organizations (Barnett and Finnemore 2004), knowledge and power (Haas 1992; Adler and Bernstein 2005), the diffusion of norms and regional organizations (Acharya 2004; Börzel and Risse 2011) as well as practice and discourse approaches (Adler and Pouliot 2011; Epstein 2008). More specifically, we explain how institutions emerge, are reproduced and known (Chapters 6, 8 and 9 this volume), how they know and practise the objects that they govern (Chapters 2 and 11 this volume) as well as how negotiations unfold in multi-actor arenas (Chapter 10 this volume). In terms of diffusion, this volume contributes to norm emergence and subsidiarity (Chapter 3 this volume) as well as the domestic politics of localization (Chapters 4 and 5 this volume). In addition, the volume adds to key issue areas of contemporary world politics such as public health, global economic governance and international security.

In all of these fields, the translation perspective forces us to more strongly appreciate the messiness, ambiguity and constant slippages that occur when people, things and materials travel from one place to another (Best 2012). On the one hand, it allows us to see how anything that travels always also changes, thus pointing us to the puzzling plurality that emerges from the diffusion or transfer of seemingly stable, tight and uniform objects like global norms or specific policies. On the other hand, ‘translation’ also points us to the myriad ways in which people, things and materials can (at least temporarily) be bound together, thus explaining how the objects that ought to be governed by global institutions like ‘the climate’, ‘migration’ or ‘global health’ are constituted in the first place. Translation is thus also a new answer to the old question of what makes the world hang together (Ruggie 1998). To start teasing out the contours of this new answer to old questions of IR in further detail, we now turn to the genealogies of ‘translation’ and start tracing the conceptual insights that they harbour.

Theories of translation

Cultural Studies and the change of meaning

Two developments have propelled the increasing prominence of the concept of ‘translation’ as an analytical category deemed suitable for the inquiry into social, political and cultural processes. On the one hand, Translation Studies have moved beyond the exclusive focus on linguistic translations and increasingly placed texts in context. Paying ever more attention to the ways in which the meaning of texts is socially embedded, translation scholars have thus moved the field into steady dialogues with adjacent disciplines (Bachmann-Medick 2009). These moves were far from isolated from broader political developments. In Europe, the end of the Cold War invariably changed the nature of Translation Studies. As Mary Snell-Hornby recalls in a beautiful and quite moving moment of personal recollection, the ways in which the fall of the Iron Curtain changed the ways in which translators thought about translation was particularly noticeable in Vienna, ‘the onetime imperial city which for four decades had occupied a remote position on the most easterly tip of Western Europe, and now found itself, geographically at least, in the centre again’ (Snell-Hornby 2006, 69). Relocated through massive shifts in global power relations to the centre of Europe, Vienna became the nodal point where not only people, goods and ideas but also languages moved back and forth between Eastern and Western Europe, the demand for people with a proficiency in languages spoken on both sides of the Iron Curtain accelerated, and Translation Studies flourished. A Translation Studies congress took place in 1992 and several so-called ‘Vienna Translation Summits’ followed, the European Society for Translation Studies was founded and, as Snell-Hornby recalls:

All in all, it was a favourable climate for the development of Translation Studies. After the paralyzing effects of the Cold War it was a time of dialogue, of rediscovering the value of human contacts, on the personal level, but also internationally, in trade and industry, in culture and politics.

(Snell-Hornby 2006, 69)

Not only translations but also translators are thus located in very specific social and political contexts and unavoidably exposed to the changes, ruptures and upheavals that these contexts undergo. This lived experience of translations and translators in context also marked its imprint on the field of Translations Studies as it moved towards increasing intellectual exchanges with Gender and Postcolonial Studies as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities.

On the other hand, as scholars within Translation Studies placed texts ever more firmly in context, the linguistic turn in the Social Sciences and Humanities led to an increasing attention to the linguistic mediation of the social world (Philp 2008). Intertwined with an overall critique of representation – popularized, for example, in Anthropology through the writing culture debate – translation is understood here as an inherently political process. Thus, James Clifford argued in the introduction to Writing Culture that ‘“translations” of culture, however subtle or inventive in textual form, take place within relations of “weak” and “strong” languages that govern the international flow of knowledge’ (Clifford 2011, 22). Rather than conceptualizing translation as the safe transfer of meaning from one language to another, it becomes primarily perceived in terms of ruptures and discontinuities. In line with the aforementioned critique of representation, the reconceptualization of translation in terms of ruptures starts from a rejection of uncontestable originals.

Central to this claim is the work of Walter Benjamin. In his famous essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’, Benjamin (1977) distinguished between two kinds of translation: on the one hand, there is the classical idea of translational fidelity, which implies an aspiration of translations to approximate whatever has been defined as the original as closely as possible in the translation; and on the other hand, Benjamin highlights the productive possibilities of translational discontinuities. This understanding dares to break with the imperative of translational fidelity, whereby it challenges the hierarchy between the original and its translation and instead reconceptualizes a good translation as the re-creating of meaning within the bounds of the receiving language. Here, every translation becomes a new original in its own right. Moreover, for Benjamin, it is the creation of these new originals that is the task of the translator. As he argues:

The translation . . . does not live within the dense forest of its own native language; instead, from the outside and without entering it, the translation calls the original into this forest, precisely at that point where the echo of its own language allows for the reverberation of the foreign language’s original.

(Benjamin 1977, 66, translation T.B.)

Therefore, the translation does not simply reproduce the meaning of the original. Nonetheless, at the same time it is also not fully independent of the original. As Benjamin argues, the original remains a reference point for the translation by invoking the image of a tangent that touches a circle:

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point – establishing, with this touch rather than with the point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity – a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.

(Benjamin 1996, 261)

As Lena Foljanty (2015, 9–10) has argued in her analysis of the passage quoted above, it is the moment of touching that is decisive for Benjamin. In this moment, the translating language grasps a glimpse of other meanings, of something that is inexpressible within one’s own language. Making the inexpressible visible in turn forces the translator to initiate a complex process of innovation that ultimately results in the creation of something new, something that is related to yet not identical with the original.

Benjamin’s congenial complication of the relationship between translation and original has been taken up more recently by anthropologists, who have added detailed attention to relationships of power and domination that accompany processes of translation (Rottenburg 2009). Thus, taking Benjamin’s argument one step further, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has argued that in processes of translation, ‘there are no originals, but only a heterogeneous continuum of translations, a continual process of rewriting in which meaning – as well as claims of originality and purity – are made’ (Tsing 1997, 253). Claims to originality and purity do not enjoy a privileged epistemological status but are – in Tsing’s account – modes of power. These modes of power have also been at the centr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: the objects of translation
• PART I Concepts
• PART II Instruments
• PART III Facts
• PART IV Projects
• PART V Expertise
• Index