International Political Sociology

Transversal Lines

Tugba Basaran, Didier Bigo, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, R. B. J. Walker, Tugba Basaran, Didier Bigo, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, R. B. J. Walker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138910706
• eBook ISBN: 9781317435891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents an overview and evaluation of contemporary research in international political sociology (IPS). Bringing together leading scholars from many disciplines and diverse geographical backgrounds, it provides unprecedented coverage of the key concepts and research through which IPS has opened up new ways of thinking about international relations. It also considers some of the consequences of such innovations for established forms of social and political analysis. It thus takes the reader on an intellectual journey engaging with questions about boundaries and limits among the many interrelated worlds in which we now live, the ways we conceptualise them, and how we continually reshape boundaries of identities, spaces, authorities and disciplinary knowledge.

The volume is organized three sections: Lines, Intersections and Directions.

The first section examines some influences that led to the formation of the project of IPS and how it has opened up avenues of research beyond the limits of an international relations discipline shaped within political science.

The second section explores some key concepts as well as a series of heated discussions about power and authority, practices and governmentality, performativity and reflexivity.

The third section explores some of the transversal topics of research that have been pursued within IPS, including inequality, migration, citizenship, the effect of technology on practices of security, the role of experts and expertise, date-driven surveillance, and the relation between mobility, power and inequality.

This book will be an essential source of reference for students and across the social sciences.

Part I

Lines

1

Only connect

International, political, sociology

R. B. J. Walker

International, political, social: three apparently simple and distinct concepts, each clothing multiple phenomena in a claim to unity. What would we do without them? What can we still do with them? They usually work for us without the need to think about how much they do for us, or about their effects on anyone else; but it is also quite clear that they often fail to work for us whenever we try to use them with some pretence to empirical precision, clarity of understanding or reliable guidance about how we should conduct ourselves. While it may be that we still need these concepts, it is also probably the case that we are far less in control of them than they are of us.

It should be obvious that none of these three concepts have achieved their capacity to express unity without many struggles, usually involving hard-won and often brutally violent accommodations with claims to multiplicity. As historically constituted phenomena themselves, these concepts have long been ‘essentially contested,’ and they remain subject to sharp disputation among both scholarly traditions and socio-political practices of many kinds. With all the cultural authority of universal nouns, they have helped to produce what they now enable us to conceptualize while simultaneously detracting our attention from what we need to know about the many conditionalities and consequences of their own production. Conceptualizations of a political, we might say, are not alone in the politics they express, enact and repress. In all three cases, their politics work to authorize what counts as a proper relationship between claims to unity and claims to diversity in space and in time, for whom it should count, and through what authorization of a capacity to authorize. We have become used to thinking about these concepts uncritically, as almost natural, but even the slightest critical abrasion is sufficient to erase the shine on their apparent simplicity and discursive elegance. Consider, for example, the very different implications one might draw from even the most conventional references to the political, to acts of politicization, to the ambivalent singularity/multiplicity of politics, or the politicizations and thus politicizations that are at work in distinctions between society and the social. Consider also the enormous consequences that follow from the ordination of social and political practices as simply natural.

It is even less controversial to say that none of these concepts are as clearly distinct from each other as they might appear when separated by commas on a page. It seems to be no great difficulty to roll them together as if the combination might also identify a singular phenomenon or project, another and more encompassing claim to unity that might overcome the limits of the old, another opportunity to take advantage of the politics of a universalizing even if compound noun. The slippage from sharp distinction to fusion and integration seems to have endless attractions, in this context as in many others, especially given the way so many orthodoxies have tended to affirm sharp distinctions while hopes for alternatives have placed huge and very risky bets on their imminent or necessary erasure.

One of the often unspoken attractions of a conjunction between these terms in particular is that it suggests possibilities for combining three universal nouns so as to reveal the even greater universality of a singular socio-political world occupying a singular planetary domain. The decisive difficulty here is that, as we have come to know and use them, all three concepts have been constituted as a principled refusal of any such possibility.

On the one hand, all three concepts privilege an understanding of humanity as a distinct species set apart from the planet we inhabit, the capacious but jealously guarded account of ‘modern’ self-determining ‘man’ ‘liberated’ from the ‘laws of nature.’ As we have known very clearly (even if reluctantly) at least since Kant simultaneously admitted that scepticism must arise once autonomous subjects distinguish themselves from an objective world from which they believe themselves liberated and, consequently, sought to overcome such scepticism through a culturally specific account of man’s capacity to realize a universal moral law, it has been enormously difficult to envisage social and political practices that might both retain the liberated (or alienated) status of modern man while re-encompassing that man within a more universalist understanding of the world as such. This has not inhibited recurrent attempts to conflate the natural and social sciences on largely epistemological grounds of course, but even modern epistemology itself developed on the basis of famous dualisms between knowing subjects and the world that they might know.

On the other hand, as affirmations of the distinctive status of modern man as its own self-creator, they all privilege claims about particularistic citizenships over claims about a common humanity. When push comes to shove, not only is secular man-made law supposed to trump any natural or transcendental authority, but values like liberty, equality, justice and security are supposed to be defined within the limits of man-made laws; and the most authoritative forms of man-made law are supposed to be those enacted within particularistic states offering national citizenships rather than an international law that might speak on behalf of a common humanity.

So in one analytical mood, one might want to rely upon these three distinct concepts as the best descriptive options we have, only to realize that the most pressing and interesting dynamics of our time refuse to be sliced apart so easily. In another mood, one might want to harness them together in order to deal more effectively with those phenomena that elude the conventional distinctions, only to realize that it doesn’t really help us to understand what those most pressing and interesting phenomena are doing to all the assumptions, commitments, organized forces and institutions that are enacted in the name of a social, a political or an international.

It should come as no surprise, for example, that the forms of research that have been taken up in the name of an international political sociology have been intensely concerned with phenomena – migrations, networks, technologies, surveillance, struggles over the relationship between liberties and securities, and so on – that seriously disrupt boundaries of all kinds: perhaps especially those through which modern man has managed to negotiate its split identity as both human being in general and politically qualified citizen in particular; and perhaps even those which distinguish the province of modern man from some other world beyond. An era in which concepts of citizenship and humanity are being contested on so many fronts is going to have great difficulty keeping track of its spatiotemporal coordinates, and confidence in concepts that express those coordinates will quickly erode. Thus for all that the distinctions between them might be taken for granted or ripe for eradication, to consider these three concepts in some kind of relationship, with or without the commas, is necessarily to appreciate both the contingency of their historical authorization and what has been at stake in the way distinctions between them have been decided, while also keeping wary eyes on contemporary transformations that seem to be challenging both the coherence of the concepts themselves and the distinctions between them.

So, the comments I want to make here, like those I made together with Didier Bigo in an essay introducing a new journal devoted to work on international political sociology broadly conceived,¹ are intended to suggest that it is as well to acknowledge and even insist at the outset that to put these three terms into conjunction is to specify an array of profound analytical difficulties rather than a convenient template for future scholarship and action. Sometimes these difficulties arise from fairly mundane but still pressing concerns about the limited resources, entrenched interests and cultivated myopias of institutionalized disciplines. After all, and contrary to some populist wisdom, academic politics is sometimes fairly intense because its authorizations of authority can involve very high stakes. But sometimes even greater stakes are in play, as I have tried to suggest elsewhere.²

Perhaps one might say something similar about almost any triad of such terms, understood as names given both to identifiable features of human existence and to scholarly disciplines advancing claims to knowledge about human existence on the basis of specific accounts of what it means to be human, or otherwise. It is difficult to avoid a sense that relations and movements of many kinds have long been scrambling cherished distinctions and boundaries, both conceptual and empirical, and in almost every arena of social and political life. The symptoms of such scrambling are certainly identifiable in the fragility of disciplinary categories and institutions that congealed as the social or human sciences over the first half of the twentieth century, and in ways that are still readily familiar despite the extraordinary transformations of the subsequent half-century or so.

Crucially, this was an era in which the claims of the nation-state, or state-nation, were becoming normalized as the proper home of both polity and society, sometimes as practice, sometimes as regulative ideal, in many though not all places. These claims presumed a further home in the structured system of nation-states and state-nations, in what I tend to call the modern international (in much the same contestable manner in which we speak about modern states and modern societies; contestable because distinctions between a modern and its others have become very slippery, and open to doctrinal abuse quite as much as to scholarly puzzlement). As a result, the troubled meanings and relations between concepts of society, politics and international resonate well beyond the specific disciplines of sociology and political science, although conceptual uncertainties have been especially explicit in these two institutionalized authorities on what it means to speak of a social or a political. Indeed, one might argue that the scholarly authority to speak about politics, society or an international has rightly begun to leach away from these specific disciplines to the social or human sciences in general, on the grounds that both remain reluctant to loosen their attachment to the statist and (inter)nationalist assumptions grounding their claims to authority; except that other disciplines tend to be in much the same boat.

Interdisciplinarity is rarely as easy to achieve as it is to identify the inadequacies of established disciplines. Indeed, any serious claim about the need for interdisciplinarity among at least the social or human sciences has to take account of complicities between prevailing disciplinary distinctions and the organization of the social and human within modern states, nations and organized relations between them. A familiar pattern is readily identifiable here: established concepts are called into question, on many plausible grounds, but some concepts prove to be remarkably resilient, for reasons that might themselves be of interest to a political sociology of some (historically sensitive) kind, one that is itself a product of the conditionalities in which it might be interested.

As the subsequent essays in this volume affirm, these three specific concepts have been brought into close conjunction over the past decade, though not for the first time, and with what seem to be fairly innovative and productive effects. Recent work under the sign of an international political sociology has pushed especially hard on the need to bring the fields of phenomena named by these terms together in ways that recognize the fluidity and contested character of the concepts themselves: to stress relations rather than distinctions; to resist the interests and forces that not only prefer to compartmentalize but also to privilege one field over another; to study phenomena that seem to be simultaneously social, political and international, but not quite in ways that make sense to analysts committed to the academic disciplines specializing in the social, the political or the international; to examine – as a methodological common denominator at work in all three contexts – practices and specificities rather than the static generalities expressed in singular concepts; to draw on metaphors of webs, networks, fields, circuits, dispersals and so on rather than the usual repertoire of containments and exclusions; even to try to push all these scholarly enterprises beyond their largely European and North American traditions – an ambition that is especially pressing whenever claims about an international are involved and remains an urgent priority for future work.

At the same time, these fields have long histories and powerful institutionalized commitments. These three apparently simple terms affirm entrenched claims about the ontological and axiological and epistemological status of what is being named, as well as distinctions not only between different phenomena but between fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. They express immense densities of historical practice and commitments to long-cherished even if contested principles, not only as expressed in the life of nations and states and relations between them but also in deep attachments to principles of time, space and human subjectivity of the kind that attract various claims about what it means to be modern. Thus, to say the obvious, it is one thing to complain about widespread inadequacies of concepts rooted in historical circumstances that fewer and fewer people remember or appreciate, but quite another to engage with complex historically constituted practices in which the status and authority of such concepts remain difficult sites of social and political contestation.

Moreover, concepts of politics, society and an international express and enable analysis of practices and principles that both presume and refuse each other. Their capacity to affirm some kind of unity among heterogeneous phenomena has been enabled by distinctions and exclusions of many kinds. Thus as academic disciplines, sociology and political science may be read as both complementary and antagonistic.

They may be read as complementary simply because they tend to share many assumptions about, just to identify a few: the classical polis as a model of both a polity and a society; what it means to be a modern subject; spatiotemporal orders, both in relation to distributions in space and abstracted conceptions of territory, property and so on, and to a characteristic understanding of linear temporality, history, and presumptions of progress and development (as well as the acceptable forms of critique of such understandings celebrating tangible forms of place or the lived experiences of social temporalities). Here we may say that both share in deeply entrenched assumptions abou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of contributors
• Transversal lines: an introduction
• PART I Lines
• 1 Only connect: international, political, sociology
• 2 International political sociology: Rethinking the international through dynamics of power
• 3 Continuity, discontinuity and contingency: Insights for international political sociology from political geography
• 4 IBO, IPS and SIP: Engaging the sociologies of International Relations
• PART II Intersections
• 5 Diagrams, dispositifs and the signature of power in the study of the international
• 6 Transnational fields and power elites: Reassembling the international with Bourdieu and practice theory
• 7 Performing methods: practice and politics
• 8 The great map of mankind
• PART III Directions
• 9 Global governance and the politics of inequality: Problematizing controversies in the field of international development
• 10 Enacting international citizenship
• 11 Technology and security practices: situating the technological imperative
• 12 Violence, war and security knowledge: Between practical theories and theoretical practices
• 13 Big data surveillance: Snowden, everyday practices and digital futures
• 14 Mobilities, ruptures, transitions
• Index