Autobiographical International Relations

I, IR

Naeem Inayatullah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415781428
• eBook ISBN: 9781136869051
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides a novel approach to international relations. In the course of fifteen essays, scholars write about how life events brought them to their subject matter. They place their narratives in the larger context of world politics, culture, and history.

Autobiographical International Relations believes that the fictive distancing associated with academic prose creates disaffection in both readers and writers. In contrast, these essays demonstrate how to reengage the "I" while simultaneously sustaining theoretical precision and historical awareness. Authors highlight their motives, their desires, and their wounds. By connecting their theoretical and practical engagements with their needs and wounds, and by working within the overlap between theory, history, and autobiography, these essays aim to increase the clarity, urgency, and meaningfulness of academic work.

These essays are autobiographical, but focused on the academic aspect of authors' lives. Specifically, they are set within the domain of international relations/global politics. They are theoretical, but geared to demonstrate that theoretical decisions emerge from theorists' needs and wounds. Theoretical precision, rather than being explicitly deduced, is instead immanent to the autobiographical and the historical/cultural narrative each author portrays. And, these essays are framed in historical/cultural terms, but seek to bind together theory, history, culture, and the personal into a differentiated and vibrant whole.

This book moves the field of International Relations towards greater candidness about how personal narrative influences theoretical articulations. No such volume currently exists in the field of international relations.

1
Accidental scholarship and the myth of objectivity

Stephen Chan

When, in spring 2007, I was sent an email informing me that the Mountains of the Moon University sought a new Vice-Chancellor (or President), I was nostalgic for weeks. I didn’t even know the Mountains of the Moon had a university. As it turned out, it was a young, small, private institution, but one that had already attracted a great deal of official Irish and Austrian aid; and its entire computer stock had been a gift from Liverpool Hope University in the UK. The civil war in the mountains had died down, and now was the time to begin building a bright new campus on land donated by the municipality. It would be an eco-campus and it would be full of optimism. I set about applying for the post and became, I think, the front runner – but I came to realize that nostalgia was not the best credential for a university being built on hope for the future.

The mountains are actually called the Ruwenzori Mountains – they were given the Moon tag by Victorian explorers – and they sit on the equator, on the borders of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is even a derelict ski lift on Mt Marguerita, a snow-covered peak in the heart of Africa. The current Ugandan president, Museveni, had mobilized his young soldiers in those mountains. It is said they were blessed by the magic light of the area. It is said that, during Amin’s retreat from the advancing Tanzanian forces, his soldiers ate elephants in place of normal rations – and that the elephant nation had assembled and had marched in a long refugee column over the Mountains of the Moon to safety.

When Amin fell and the reconstruction of Uganda began, all the senior institutions and ministries were assigned to senior advisers and trainers. Two years on, part of the most junior (and derelict) of the ministries – Social Development and Culture – was thrust into my hands for its reconstruction. I was barely 33 but, even then, had become a veteran of Africa’s woes and triumphs. Among many others, the Ugandan adventure was in between my early participation in the transition of Zimbabwe from Rhodesian rule to independence, and my somewhat later efforts to help ministerial and parliamentary development in post-Dergue Eritrea and Ethiopia. Somehow, looking back, all those major projects were something of a failure. Zimbabwe has slid into a catastrophic melt-down, Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war with each other, and Uganda has also begun its flirtation with authoritarian rule under the surface colours of democracy.

But the Ugandan adventure was enough at the time to convince me that the lies and deceits, false hopes and vacuous promises I had been required to spin as an international civil servant were not worth the moral asking price. Not that Uganda was a disaster to me – it was a triumph in many ways – but that the magic light got to me too, and I realized that when I came down from those mountains I could never be the same again. So I undertook to become an academic. Accidentally, there was a visiting fellowship at Oxford on offer and, after that, a lectureship at the University of Zambia. I wanted to write about the perfidies of international life, and about moral asking prices. When I left Uganda, I flew to Nairobi, took my first hot bath for quite some time, and resigned.

There was something else about asking prices too. I had seen my share of the effects of war in Zimbabwe, and would later see much more in Eritrea; there was something qualitatively different about Uganda. It wasn’t that people were prepared to die while fighting – it was that so many of the ministerial officers with whom I was working had lived in dread of being “picked,” that is led off to execution by Amin. Without having fought him or having the ability to fight for their own lives. This helpless dread was still a blanket over all of them, and I used to think about it when my academic colleagues, some time later, lectured on (and on) about moral choices, cosmopolitan values, and emancipatory theory. It’s a pretty armchair discipline, this I had chosen to join. But innocent and naïve enough. And the spires of Oxford, the (then) beautiful bougainvillea-strewn campus of the University of Zambia, the green hill-top campus of Kent, even the incomplete and patchy landscaping at Nottingham Trent, and the jumbled oasis of Bloomsbury in the heart of London – they have all made the quarter of a century since I left official international life tolerable. And, even though I soon came to combine Deaning with scholarly production, I always found enough time to maintain several private practices – advising African governments, running philanthropic projects, defending asylum seekers in court, and playing the public intellectual within the unending greed of the media for talking heads and sound-bites (within a carefully calibrated hierarchy of who gets what slots on which programmes). And a fair swag of non-academic writing too. I think that my restlessness, my razor-cutting of my time, have the same roots as my ambivalence towards the value of academic work.

And to be fair to academic life, I would probably have felt this way no matter which profession I pursued. I was the first-born son of refugee parents and grew up in story-book poverty and, upon being sent to school without any English language (in the robust and physical company of young New Zealanders), learnt English in two weeks flat. From a very early age there was a need to over-achieve to compensate being a minority of one – and to rebel, to be tolerant in the face of racism (but remember), and to protest against almost everything else. When 1968 and 1969 coincided with my first years at university, I was the natural student leader and, even in New Zealand, protest marches had a habit of “engagement” with the police. When the prime minister libelled me, and got away with it because of parliamentary immunity, I left the country in 1976 and have lived in Britain or Africa ever since. There have been 19 changes of address in that time.

But New Zealand was also an impossibly beautiful place in which to grow up. The beach in the film, The Piano, was where I used to body-surf in my late teenage years and, aged 20, I made an “easy ride” to all the locations that later featured in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, revelling in the sparseness and beauty of it all – and writing a lot of bad poetry about it, about politics, but mostly about the typical loves and laments of almost every young man. That was, however, the basic problem. You could do anything in New Zealand. By the time I had completed my MA, I had also been the national student president, a veteran of countless protests, a much published poet and playwright, a publisher and newspaper editor. These things mean little outside a small environment where, in fact, a few people must do much to service a small population that demands, all the same, the amenities and performances of a normal Western life. But it meant a culture shock when hitting England – with its work-to-rules, job demarcations, and professional jealousies.

I became most unpopular in the Commonwealth Secretariat, with its still large contingent of Britishers and, anyway, I got a lot of things wrong. When I sent up a note, as the Tanzanians were preparing to invade Amin’s Uganda, stressing that the Tanzanians could not win – Amin had far more firepower – I mentioned not a word about morale, motivation, discipline, and officership. When the Rhodesian forces stormed the Zimbabwean rear base of Chimoio, I sent to the London representatives of the guerrillas an impossibly naïve and simplistic defensive system for the future. I learnt very quickly that book learning is one thing (I had completed a second MA at King’s in War Studies) but, when you have no experience of blood and death, shut the fuck up.

And that is the key ambivalence. Should academics talk and write on a basis so textually bound and so ontologically naïve? What is produced means much to ongoing Western and, to an increasing degree, globalized debate on liberty – even if that meaning is terrifyingly mediated by the spin-doctors of those who rule (who take the trouble to learn multiple vocabularies of discourse) – and means very little to those who are impoverished and oppressed, and who die without literacy, but who might have died anyway making a futile last stand before the camel-riding militias come to slaughter their families. But that is the key difference in experiences: Horkheimer and Adorno, in their determination that the concentration camps should never be repeated, reflected the determination of a generation that had survived and who could make record of all they had undergone and all that had, throughout the future, to be avoided. As academics we depend on the record, the text; in the case of Others without text, we impute text to them or, in recording their oral histories, commit all manner of epistemological impositions (from our own texts) or impose ontological assumptions (based on our own experience) upon them. Hayden White’s proposition of a telos in our writing is not so much applicable to ourselves – for the simple reason that we interrogate writing, its contexts and meanings, and compare contrasting projects of telos. Upon the Third World we impose our own telos of concern, but are unable to test our project against actually lived suffering and sorrow.

Coming into academia basically meant leaving one set of lies for another.

Why then spend a quarter century within academia? Why take the bother to become successful within it? It may have had something to do with an infant imprinting. There are photographs of me, very small, being taken by my parents to Albert Park in Auckland, New Zealand, and posed across the road from the imitation gothic tower that marked the university. They never plucked up the nerve to enter the campus. But they were determined that I would. But I was avaricious. When I finally did enter the campus to begin my studies I didn’t want to read every book in the library, I wanted to own the Vice-Chancellor’s office and its amazing blue New Zealand wool carpet. I wanted to run the university. Dr Colin Maiden, the Vice-Chancellor, wisely took my measure and seconded me to every committee possible; nurtured my participation, indeed tutored me – while advising my student political rivals on how to out-manoeuvre me. It was a wonderful and transparent (he never made a secret of it) upbringing in procedures and treacheries. I have suffered very few knives in my back because of Colin’s tuition. And he gave me things to run. My first seven figure turnover was a responsibility within the university in 1971 or 72. I was 22, learning fast. But I think what I learnt most of all was that universities provide a platform for being a public intellectual. And that is how I have used them ever since coming down from the Mountains of the Moon.

In a way, going to the Vice-Chancellorship of the Mountains of the Moon University would have closed a lovely circle. It would also have meant – since I believe in poetic logics – the need to leave academia afterwards. But the offer came at precisely the time when the project of being a public intellectual was finally breaking through in terms of the hierarchies within the British media and their audiences. You have to learn various discourses and presentational forms of discourse. Even a sound-bite can be discursive. The spin-doctors know this. It can be learnt – even by academics. But you have to know what you’re talking about – what you mean. You can’t be an intellectual without being an academic. This may not be true of French society, but it is of English society and its snobberies. And its trans-Atlantic links. You need the academic research because so much of what academics have done, being courtiers and advising US administrations, is simply wrong. And, in England, there simply isn’t an intellectual society outside the universities which is not corrupted by its own jealousies, professional tricks and rivalries, and myriad cliques. Academic life is like that too, but learning multiple discourses need not mean multiple immersions in different vexations. And snobberies: you need an acceptable base, academic standing. In Britain, at least in England, the class society has not disappeared – but it has certainly become more complexly variegated.

In some ways I pass as exotica, a curiosity. At least, unlike New Zealand, it’s not because I’m Chinese. But there are different sorts of conformity. I remember at a recent formal function in the Lord Mayor of London’s Mansion House, arriving in my “smoking,” long hair combed back and pinned by an Alice band, and being seized by friendly hands for introduction to someone or another: “This is Stephen. He may look like an orchestra conductor, but …”Ah, I thought, at last, an acceptable style for public consumption. I’ve been mistaken twice for Kent Nagano anyway, and I think it was a fair enough compliment by way of confusion.

This is to tell a story against myself, but also against the seductions of glamour on the peripheries of London society. There are thin and fragile lines. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you say. You get recognized because you are seen saying it. The trick is to get people remembering what you say, why it was said, and why it should continue to be said, and by more people. This is a lot of very hard work. And what I am saying is the same as I have said throughout the entire quarter century of academic life – in each one of 27 books and over 100 articles (yes, even in the cheap and nasty “quickies” I’ve churned out) – that the West (and the Western discipline of International Relations) does not understand the “international,” and that a common ethics of globalization and global cooperation will always be impossible without understanding. And that means not only deeper studies of Other philosophies, cultures, religions, and languages, it also means the struggle towards a perhaps wordless empathetic engagement with the traumatized, oppressed, and hungry. It means, at least in part, a struggle away from the text and intertextual discourse. It means what Christine Sylvester first called for. She meant an empathetic engagement among women. I mean the same thing among all people. It means that International Relations scholars have got to put down Horkheimer and Adorno and spend time in the modern killing fields.

I was approached recently to advise a youngish financier. He works in Africa, raising the capital African magnates require for their projects. He’s quite good at putting together the multiple millions, even billions required. He’s lived some years in Mozambique, Angola, and Eritrea. He wears superb suits. He’s a Masters graduate of the London Business School (the closest we have to a Harvard MBA), speaks fluent Portuguese and French as well as English, was a Captain in the British army sent out to train the Mozambican forces and transferred, at the age of 27, to a Brigadier’s rank in the Mozambican forces themselves – and has a pan-African address book that took my breath away. And he knows more about the continent than most Africanist scholars I’ve met. It struck me, as I sent him politely on his way, that the “other side” are doing what we as scholars do not do, grudgingly do or, because of difficulties of funding, irregularly do. He may not have been much good at empathy (except with his very rich colleagues) but, by God, was he engaged. Oh, and he knew a few things about blood and death too. I want that sort of engagement, with empathy, on the part of all my academic colleagues. Then I would like them all to speak in the languages, if not of the world, then of the various forms of public media. Then, when everybody is doing what I am doing, and I am happily redundant, I shall go to the Mountains of the Moon, having redeemed my asking price, and never come back.

2
Objects among objects

Jenny Edkins

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

(Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: 109)

When she died in 1989 at the age of 101, my grandmother left few possessions. She had lived since she was in her sixties in a room in my parents’ various houses, so there wasn’t much space for personal property. Her most treasured objects were in a small black wooden box, and most prized among them were a few photographs. Black and white, of course, and most of them formal portraits or wedding photographs mounted on thick card. Encouraged by her granddaughter she had written the names of those featured in the main family portrait: Lizzie, Father, Annie, John, Martha, Mother, and Mary. In my conversations with her, the photographs would often be shown as we talked about her childhood, her three mile walk over the moors to school, the times when she was sent to the pub to haul her father from his drinking and bring him home, and her work as a young girl in the Lancashire cotton mills. After her mother died, at the age of 48, the family moved to the seaside town of Lytham St Anne’s. Mary also died relatively young, nursed by my grandmother through a long illness, and Martha died in childbirth. Annie married a Catholic, and bore four surviving children, one of whom is my godmother and still lives in Lytham where I was born, with her children and grandchildren. The only one of my grandmother’s siblings I met was Uncle John, who lived in the Lancashire textile town of Accrington with his daughter Cicely until his death.

I never met either of my grandfathers. I have no memories of them, only photographs. The pictures of my maternal grandfather, Richard Smith, were among the most precious of the photographs carried by my grandmother through all the 30-odd years she lived with my parents, my brother, and me. As well as two portraits of Dick, as she called him, one full-face and one in semi profile, there was a photograph of him in a hospital bed in a field hospital at the front in the First World War. She also had his army papers. He served in the Lancashire Fusiliers for one year and 103 days, and was with the British Expeditionary Force from 13 March to 20 October 1917. His papers show that he was discharged on 8 June 1918 no longer fit for war service. He had been gassed in the trenches, and never fully recovered. He came home of course, and he and my grandmother were married in 1920. By 1925 he was dead. During that period the family moved backward and forward between the industrial and shipping town of Salford, where Dick had worked before the war as a cotton packer, and Diggle, a village ...

Table of contents

• Interventions
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Falling and flying
• 1 Accidental scholarship and the myth of objectivity
• 2 Objects among objects
• 3 Stammers between silence and speech
• 4 Scenes of obscenity
• 5 I, the double soldier
• 6 Weakness leaving my body
• 7 Waiting for the revolution
• 8 Am I not that?
• 9 Listening for the elsewhere and the not-yet
• 10 To realize you’re creolized
• 11 Goodbye nostalgia!
• 12 Shaping walls
• 13 Three stories
• 14 G(r)azing the fields of IR
• 15 The sound of conversation
• Cosmography recapitulates biography
• Index