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1 Limits of theorising about IR and security
Chapter 1 considers the limits of our theorising about International Relations and security in inquiring into others’ conceptions of the international, namely: ethnocentrism, parochialism and Eurocentrism. Each section of the chapter focuses on one such limit and highlights its implications for theorising about security. Before proceeding, let me address one question that is frequently raised by mainstream students of the field.
What limit?
Students of the social sciences are accustomed to addressing the limits of their existing explanations by identifying puzzles and seeking to answer them. We call those phenomena ‘puzzles’ that we fail to explain within our existing frameworks, using our existing concepts, categories or theories. Research projects in IR are expected to respond to puzzles. As he encouraged the students of IR to think theoretically, James N. Rosenau advised them to identify puzzles, defined as ‘perplexity over specific and patterned outcome’ (Rosenau and Durfee, 1995: 36). IR as a social science would advance through identifying and answering puzzles, he instructed the students of the field. Since then, thinking in terms of puzzles has become a recognised way of explaining how to think theoretically in IR (Guzzini, 2001).
What if we are not puzzled? That is because we presume that ‘we already understand’. We think our existing concepts and theories suffice in making sense of what we encounter in world politics. I suggest that the question of ‘what limits?’ is based on the same presumption; if we do not see the limits of our theorising about IR and security in inquiring into others’ conceptions of the international, this is because we presume that ‘we already understand’. Let me elaborate on this with reference to an example: security dynamics in the Middle East.
Steven M. Walt’s 1987 study on Middle East security entitled The Origins of Alliances focused on alliance politics in the Middle East. In this book, Walt (1987) pointed to a type of alliance behaviour that could not be accounted for by structural realist accounts. Whereas structural realist frameworks focused on power balancing, noted Walt, the dynamics of relations between Arab states suggested that they were responding to threats and not necessarily changes in military power. In response to this puzzling behaviour of Arab states, Walt offered a new concept: ‘balance of threat’.
About a decade after the publication of Walt’s study, Michael J. Barnett (1998) offered an alternative answer to the same puzzle. While Walt correctly diagnosed an aspect of Arab politics that was previously unaccounted for, argued Barnett, he could not fully explain what he observed, given the limits of the structural realist framework that he used. Instead, Barnett offered a social constructivist framework to analyse the same dynamics. If Arab states seemed to be balancing threats and not power, wrote Barnett, it is the relationship between identity and security policy that needed focusing on. As such, Barnett’s study entitled Dialogues in Arab Politics (1998) offered an alternative way of responding to Walt’s puzzle, that is, by studying the constructedness of identity and its relationship with security policy (also see Barnett, 1999, Telhami and Barnett, 2002).
There was, however, something that did not puzzle either Walt or Barnett: Arab leaders’ conceptions of security. While Walt and Barnett sought to make sense of the balancing behaviour of Arab leaders, they presumed that they already understood what ‘security’ meant for the leaders of the Arab world. Accordingly, both authors bracketed ‘security’ as they inquired into the policy behaviour of the Arab leaders (Bilgin, 2004a).
Certainly Walt and Barnett are in good company. Such lack of interest in the Arab leaders’ conceptions of security is sustained by our presumption, as students of IR and security studies, that ‘we already understand’ ‘their’ behaviour by analysing ‘their’ capabilities based on ‘our’ assumptions regarding ‘their’ intentions. As will be discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, these limits have shaped significant aspects of mainstream and critical IR. One way of responding to the ‘what limit?’ question, I suggest, is to raise our ‘contrapuntal awareness’ and draw on the insights of postcolonial studies (as well as critical IR and security studies) to learn how to identify the limits of our theorising about IR and security.
Ethnocentrism in IR theorising
The concept of ethnocentrism has its origins in anthropologists’ concern with accessing other societies’ cultures in a manner that is not ‘contaminated’ by the researcher’s own concepts and categories (Cooper, 2012). In sociology, ethnocentrism is understood as a bias encountered when one approaches the others through one’s own value system (sometimes but not necessarily) by privileging one’s own (Sumner, 1906: 13). Students of anthropology and sociology recognise that ethnocentrism may impede one’s understanding of others even when s/he does not consider him/herself to be superior (Merton, 1973: 108). Then, as a scholarly affliction, ethnocentrism occurs when scholars seek to make sense of other groups or societies through their own concepts and categories, and without necessarily reflecting on their limits (Merton, 1972).
In IR, ethnocentrism was initially problematised by students of international negotiation and conflict resolution as they sought to understand the dynamics of inter-group relations in times of conflict and/or during negotiations (LeVine and Campbell, 1972, Druckman, 1968, Campbell and LeVine, 1961, Hammond and Axelrod, 2006). Academic strategists, who are tasked with understanding the strategic ‘beliefs’ or ‘styles’ of their counterparts in other countries, followed suit (Booth, 1979, Gray, 1981, 1986, 2013).
Identifying ethnocentrism as a perennial problem for IR, Ken Booth wrote:
Societies look at the world with their own group as the centre, they perceive and interpret other societies within their own frames of reference, and they invariably judge them inferior. Ethnocentrism is a phenomenon which has ramifications in most if not all areas of international relations.
(Booth, 1979: 13)
For example, consider Quỳnh Phạm and Himadeep Muppidi’s (2013) discussion on a remark made by General Westmoreland when discussing US strategic failures in the Vietnam war. According to General Westmoreland, the difficulties encountered by the US side included the difference in emphasis placed on the ‘value’ of human life by their Vietnamese counterparts. His understanding was that the Vietnamese side was able to endure significant losses in human-power, because ‘the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner’. This was because, he opined, ‘[l]ife is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient’. He continued by making an Orientalist move to link the contemporary Vietnamese behaviour with a ‘fixed’ past driven from ancient texts (Said, 1978). He wrote: ‘And as the Philosophy of the Orient expresses it: Life is not important’ (quoted in Phạm and Muppidi, 2013: 180).
As such, General Westmoreland was not puzzled. He presumed that he already understood the Vietnamese. This was not because his parochialism (see section on ‘Parochialism in IR theorising’) prevented him from taking an interest in the Vietnamese others. He was reported to have kept a copy of his counterpart General Giap’s writings in his collection (Phạm and Muppidi, 2013: 180). Rather, the General’s remark could be viewed as an instance of ethnocentrism impeding his attempt to make sense of the value system of another group or society. The General presumed that he already understood the Vietnamese by looking through the prism of ‘pricing life or measuring its value based on “plentiful-ness” or scarcity’ (Phạm and Muppidi, 2013).
Over the years, IR scholars have taken important steps in raising students’ awareness of their ethnocentric limits in understanding ‘others’. This is considered to be the best that IR scholars can do (Cooper, 2012). As Thierry Hentsch wrote, it is widely accepted that
[e]thnocentrism is not a flaw to be simply set aside, nor is it a sin to be expunged through repentance. It is the precondition of our vision of the Other. Far from offering us absolution, this precondition compels us constantly to return to our point of departure, if only to grasp the internal and external imperatives which shape our curiosity about the Other.
(Hentsch, 1992: xiv) [original emphasis]
Be that as it may, when IR’s postcolonial critics point to ethnocentrism as a limit, they do not only point to individual researchers’ biases and the need for vigilant self-reflection. They also point to the ways in which IR trains its students not to inquire into others’ perspectives because we presume that ‘we already understand’ ‘their’ behaviour. Let me elaborate on this point by focusing on security theorising.
Ethnocentrism in theorising about security
The classical study on the ethnocentric limits of security theorising is Ken Booth’s Strategy and Ethnocentrism from 1979. In this (then pioneering and now classical) study, Booth identified ethnocentrism as ‘one of the important and pervasive sources of misjudgement which have so often affected the theory and practice of strategy’ (Booth, 1979: 180).1 Almost two decades after the first publication of his study, Booth reflected on how he first became aware of ethnocentrism’s effects on the study of strategy. ‘Trying to understand the Soviet Union, and the variety of Western thinking about it’ he noted, ‘revealed the ethnocentric character of Anglo-American strategic studies in particular and International Relations in general’ (Booth, 1997: 96).
Efforts to understand Soviet behaviour led another student of strategic studies to inquire into Soviet strategic ‘culture’. Jack Snyder’s (1977) RAND Report entitled The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operation highlighted the ethnocentric limits of deterrence theorising in the United States. That said, Snyder’s focus was on understanding Soviet behaviour and less so on identifying and addressing the limits of deterrence theorising. Colin Gray (Gray, 1981, 1986) built on the insights offered by Snyder and Booth to reflect on the limits of US strategic thinking when he wrote:
There is a discernible American strategic ‘culture’: that culture referring to modes of thought and action with respect to force, derives from perception of the national historical experience, aspiration for self-characterisation (e.g., as an American, what am I?, how should I feel, think, and behave?), and from all of the many distinctively American experiences (of geography, political philosophy, of civic culture, and ‘way of life’) that characterise an American citizen.
(Gray, 1981: 22)
However, these efforts by three forthcoming scholars of strategic studies were not integrated into deterrence theorising in the following years. Indeed, throughout the Cold War students of security studies presumed that they already understood Soviet behaviour through their existing frameworks: by analysing Soviet capabilities based on US assumptions regarding Soviet intensions. When others’ strategic beliefs were studied, these were treated as deviation from the rule. The ‘rule’ was presumed to be deterrence theorising based on rational choice assumptions. During these years, there was little evidence of questioning as to whether it was American ‘beliefs’ that shaped deterrence theorising, and whether this constituted a challenge for the claim to universal relevance.
This recounting of Cold War writings of students of strategic studies points to two aspects to the ethnocentric limits of theorising about security. In Neta Crawford’s formulation:
on the one hand ethnocentrism affects the ability of scholars to understand other societies’ strategic beliefs. On the other hand, ethnocentrism prevents scholars from critically evaluating their own strategic beliefs and looking beyond their own culture for insights into problems.
(Crawford, 1991: 302)
While Booth and Gray seemed to highlight both aspects, students of strategic studies at best focused on the first – as with Snyder and others’ studies on strategic and security culture which flourished after the end of the Cold War (see Chapter 2). However, as Crawford noted, the challenge was not only the ethnocentrism of individual researchers and/or understanding particular countries, but also the ethnocentric limits of deterrence theorising as a body of knowledge.
Among students of security studies, it was a practitioner-turned-scholar, Michael MccGwire whose analysis hinted at the intricate relationship between these two aspects, which he discussed in terms of (1) the absence of ‘serious Sovietologists’ from the policy discussions on the Soviet Union and (2) the ‘axiomatic nature’ of deterrence theorising.
MccGwire was a British Naval officer before he turned to academic studies (Booth et al., 1998). The gist of MccGwire’s argument in his 1985 study entitled ‘Deterrence: The Problem − not the Solution’ was that deterrence theorising proved less helpful in US encounters with the Soviet Union than its celebratory portrayals suggested. In this ground-breaking article, MccGwire pointed to how the Soviet policymakers devised their own precepts in nuclear strategy even as US strategists presumed the Soviets to be playing in the same ‘deterrence game’ as they did. Perhaps most devastatingly, MccGwire suggested that deterrence policies might, at times, have exacerbated the problems between the two superpowers.2
(1) To start with the absence of ‘serious Sovietologists’ from policy discussions, US strategists failed to understand the Soviet perspective on nuclear strategy partly because the area experts were not invited to join the debates on deterrence, wrote MccGwire (1985: 57). This was particularly problematic, he argued, because ‘theories of limited war and escalation depended on assumptions about the Soviet reaction under given circumstances’. It was because US strategists’ calculations were based on the capabilities of their opponents and their own assumptions regarding the opponents’ intentions that deterrence thinking became a problem rather than the solution it was assumed to be, wrote MccGwire.
Instead of building US nuclear strategy on intellige...
