Interpreting International Politics

Cecelia Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136622243
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Interpreting International Politics addresses each of the major, "traditional" subfields in International Relations: International Law and Organization, International Security, and International Political Economy. But how are interpretivist methods and concerns brought to bear on these topics? In this slim volume Cecelia Lynch focuses on the philosophy of science and conceptual issues that make work in international relations distinctly interpretive. This work both legitimizes and demonstrates the necessity of post- and non-positivist scholarship.

Interpretive approaches to the study of international relations span not only the traditional areas of security, international political economy, and international law and organizations, but also emerging and newer areas such as gender, race, religion, secularism, and continuing issues of globalization. By situating, describing, and analyzing major interpretive works in each of these fields, the book draws out the critical research challenges that are posed by and the progress that is made by interpretive work. Furthermore, the book also pushes forward interpretive insights to areas that have entered the IR radar screen more recently, including race and religion, demonstrating how work in these areas can inform all subfields of the discipline and suggesting paths for future research.

1
Interpretive Concepts, Goals, and Processes in International Relations

What kinds of research in IR are interpretive?
What are the primary concepts and goals guiding interpretive research in IR?
How is interpretivism in IR different from logical positivist or critical rationalist work?
How are responses to these questions incorporated into interpretivist research in the major subfields of IR?

Interpretive research is alive, well, and expanding in international relations, examining an increasing range of substantive, theoretical, and conceptual problems. Interpretivists, for example, challenge conventional understandings of international security for promoting militarized solutions to conflicts and creating gendered hierarchies of issues considered to be significant for international politics. They call into question the liberal assumptions of truisms regarding wealth generation and poverty relief, pointing out the voices and societies left out of these assumptions. They trace the genealogy of international legal norms and institutions to demonstrate their racialized nature in contexts of decolonization. They analyze the linguistic properties, rules and norms, discourse and power relations involved in the construction and maintenance of these and a host of other practices and processes in international relations. This chapter discusses the reasons for and bases of interpretive work in IR, focusing on its goals, its differences with non-interpretive research, and the substantive problems in world politics that have prompted its various forms to take hold. In addressing these issues, the chapter also explicates the major questions in philosophy of science and social theory that make interpretive research possible, necessary, and valid.

Interpretivism has a long history in IR, although one might be forgiven today for not recognizing it. IR as a discipline was founded in Progressive Era desires to professionalize social knowledge (late nineteenth–early twentieth century, see Carr 1946), but these desires did not translate into ahistorical or nomothetic theorizing.¹ Instead, early debates about the international addressed the character, malleability, and durability of law in the international realm, as well as whether attempts to engineer progress were feasible or desirable. While classical realists criticized what they saw as the liberal biases of those they called utopians (or idealists), this first great debate in international relations (Lapid 1989) can also be seen as a struggle largely fought on interpretive grounds among a range of contested interpretations of power, security, morality, and law (Long and Wilson 1995; Long and Schmidt 2005; Ashworth 2008). Classical realists are frequently lauded for their skeptical worldview (Loriaux 1992; Shou Tjalve 2008), while their peace movement opponents are sometimes (mis)characterized as liberal positivists. I assert, however, that these opponents incorporated a fair share of skepticism as well as critical and even dystopic thinking into their debates about how to achieve a more just and peaceful global order (Lynch 1999).²

The development of nineteenth and early twentieth century social theory was also critical for interpretive work in international relations. Marx and Engels created the field of critical political economy, late nineteenth century theorists such as Wilhelm Dilthey articulated the bases of hermeneutics for the philosophy of science, early twentieth century social theorists, especially Max Weber, blazed new paths in understanding the forms of rationalization that were characteristic of modernity, and critical theorists in the Frankfurt School connected disciplinary to political forms of power and demonstrated the dangers of their normalization. Similarly, Antonio Gramsci incorporated culture and phenomenology into Marxist analysis through developing his concept of ideological and cultural hegemony, and Friedrich Nietzsche probably went the farthest in blasting open the boundaries of ethical debate through his unrelenting critique of moral foundationalism (Der Derian 1987; Gill 1993; Cox 1996). IR scholars would draw on these and many other thinkers throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries (for a more comprehensive treatment than there is space for here, see Edkins and Vaughan-Williams 2009, and Roach 2008).

Interpretivist scholarship continued to develop during and after the Second World War, including by British writers and diplomatic historians (E.H. Carr, Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield, among others), political sociologists such as Raymond Aron in France, and across the Atlantic, Karl Polanyi and Albert Wolfers. Each of these scholars related political and economic phenomena to historical and cultural contexts in ways that placed the variability of meaning at the forefront of analysis. Polanyi assessed the constitutive nature of the development of market, state, and culture in his seminal work, The Great Transformation (1944), while Wolfers (as discussed in the next chapter), acknowledged the ambiguity of the “symbol” of national security in an influential World Politics journal article (Wolfers 1952).

Thus far most of the interpretive debates and insights I have pointed to were carried out by white men in Europe and North America. Yet, interpretive interventions that shape IR come from a larger group of thinkers and scholars and reflect a much broader geographic, racial, and gender diversity. Frantz Fanon’s writings, especially The Wretched of the Earth (1961), influenced generations of postcolonial interpretivists in IR, and scholars are recovering the earlier impact of W.E.B. DuBois and Mohandas Gandhi on decolonization struggles and movements against racism, poverty, and other forms of marginalization (Muppidi 2009). Interpretive IR scholars are increasingly bringing to light the work of additional thinkers from across the globe (Grovogui 2006; Tickner 2008) who have challenged Western assumptions regarding the meanings of international phenomena and have articulated new insights regarding debates about sovereignty and human rights, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.

Nor has feminism been absent from the earliest debates in IR. Feminist writers from Virginia Woolf in the 1920s to Simone Weil in the 1930s to Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s and Elise Boulding in the 1970s made critical interventions that informed IR scholarship directly or indirectly, by challenging assumptions underlying the gendered nature of war, peace, property rights, and ethics. Feminist postcolonial theorists more recently have altered the nature of gender debates in the field. Their insights demonstrate, for example, how the theories of the colonizers dismiss the voices and experiences of the “subaltern,” challenging liberal feminist assumptions regarding what constitutes women’s oppression and influencing much contemporary postpositivist work (Spivak 1988, 1998; Kinnvall 2009). Finally, feminist research on science and philosophy has expanded interpretive IR understandings of the gendered nature of knowledge production to incorporate the concept of “embodied knowledge” (Haraway 2003).

This somewhat eclectic genealogy shows that if international relations has forgotten to a large extent its interpretivist origins and history, contemporary students interested in interpretivism should return to it for inspiration and validation regarding their assumptions, concepts, and frameworks. Interpretivists in IR appeal to a wide range of philosophers and social theorists to provide the ontological and epistemological bases for their research questions. Nineteenth and twentieth century social theory and philosophy of science shape contemporary interpretivism, but many scholars trace their concerns to ancient and medieval as well as modern theorists. Bringing in ethics, virtue, and the political nature of humans takes us back to Aristotle and the Greeks as well as Cicero and the Romans, moving through early and medieval Christian, Jewish and Muslim thought (e.g. Augustine, Maimonides, Ibn Khaldun), to Kant, Nietzsche, and Arendt. Debates about cosmopolitanism, law and world government, and peace and conflict return us to Hobbes, Kant, Grotius, and Vitoria.³ The focus on meaning, including the variability of appeals to science, steers us to Weber and feminist theorists such as Haraway. Interpretivists in IR cannot do without nineteenth and twentieth century theorists of the “linguistic turn,” especially Dilthey and Wittgenstein, and the connection to language and power necessitates bringing in Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida. Debates about agency and structure emphasize implicit or explicit notions of practice that stem from feminists as well as Giddens, Geertz, and Bourdieu. Finally, decentering the West requires critical and postcolonial analyses that draw on insights from Marx but move on to Gramsci, Fanon, Spivak, and Said, among others (Edkins and Vaughan-Williams 2009).

These and other scholars, writers, public intellectuals, and activists have articulated concepts and developed ways of thinking that allow interpretivists in international relations to explore the meaning of relations of power, race, gender, and class, the process of constructing otherness, the difference between ideal-typical classification schemes and historical layering, and the possibilities and constraints of ethical intentionality and moral action. As a result, interpretive IR continues to expand into new territories, literal and figurative.

Concepts and Goals of Interpretive Research in International Relations

The historiography of IR demonstrates that it was largely founded and developed as an interpretivist discipline. In focusing on how meanings are made, interpretivists have challenged taken-for-granted assumptions and orthodoxies, raised new questions, and articulated new ways of examining “old” questions. They have made visible the workings of power that orthodoxies covered up, exposed the contradictions in conventional explanations of world politics, and brought new and marginalized voices into the analysis of power relations. They have pointed out the conceptual and empirical problems in pursing the goal of an elusive “synthesis,” either in cosmopolitan or theoretical terms. They have addressed important questions of ethics, either implicitly or explicitly. Some have maintained that the role of research should also be emancipatory, while others have disclaimed such goals. In either case, most have insisted on reflexivity, i.e., the injunction continually to reassess and reflect on their positionality in international relations research (Alcoff 1988), including how their situated identities are related to their political (and scholarly) projects, because this positionality is part and parcel of the process and content of knowledge construction. This means they provide insight into the sociology, historiography, and ethics of the discipline, raising new conceptual and substantive questions in the process. These features lead to issues regarding philosophies of science, the role of discourse, and the workings of power.

Central Concepts in the Focus on Meaning

Turning to popular philosophers can be extremely useful for understanding the importance of meaning. In the Monty Python sketch, ‘Spectrum’— talking about things, Michael Palin plays a news announcer who brings in “the Professor” (John Cleese) and a pundit (Graham Chapman) to talk about the meaning of things, or “that old vexed question of what is going on.” To explain what is going on, the pundit excitedly shows a graph with columns representing “23 …, 28 …, and 43 percent of the population!!!” But he does not tell us what the graphs are referring to (23 percent of the United Kingdom’s population own pigs? 43 percent of the world’s population eat pasta, identify as transsexual, or have children under the age of five?), or whether he is excited by the simple existence or nonsense of the graphs. As a result, we have no referent or context to decide what the statistics might mean. As Michael Palin’s announcer says, “Telling figures indeed, but what do they mean to you, what do they mean to me, what do they mean to the average man [sic] in the street?”

This sketch again underscores the need to analyze the meaning of phenomena and the variety of human experience (as stated in the Introduction), and to do so in contexts that are relevant for such meaning. As Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow argue in the initial volume of this series, the sine qua non of interpretive research is its emphasis on meaning-making, or “knowledge about what?” Interpretivism “seeks knowledge about how human beings, scholars included, make individual and collective sense of their particular worlds,” resulting in, as Nicholas Onuf puts it, a “world of our making” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012: 46; Onuf 1989).

Interpretation is an integral part of seeking knowledge about meaning in ways that are sometimes masked by truisms in the IR field. For example, Oxford philosopher of science Mary Hesse highlights one of the central problems of social science research: events that scholars try to explain are underdetermined (Hesse 1978). This insight contrasts directly with assumptions that inform research on major turning points in international relations. In IR, events are frequently said to be overdetermined—that is, there appear to be an abundance of factors that are demonstrable “causes,” and so the task (as non-interpretivists see it) becomes sorting through them systematically to find out which one is the real cause. International relations scholars’ continued attempts to explain the First World War, for example, are frequently based on assumptions of overdetermination, given the influence of numerous factors at varying levels of analysis including the personality of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Serbian and German nationalism, British and French imperialism, military mobilizations in Central Europe, and the naval arms race between Britain and Germany (Joll 2000). Other instances of overdetermination might be the end of the Cold War, the causes of September 11, 2001, or going further back historically, the signing of the Peace of Westphalia and the development of the modern state system (Thomas 2005; Philpott 2000; Nexon 2009). Yet Hesse, following Quine, points out that phenomena are underdetermined by the available evidence. In other words, evidence can never prove without a doubt that a given social or political event emanates from a specific cause, which is why, for example, all of the above “causes” of the First World War continue to be debated. As a result, the attempt by conventional social science to view “overdetermination” as a problem, and multiple factors as in need of winnowing down to a single “necessary and sufficient” cause, is misplaced. For our purposes, this insight means that we cannot isolate a single, determinative cause for world-changing events like the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the beginning of World War I, or the end of the Cold War. The upshot of this problem—which cannot be completely overcome, despite the existence of differing degrees of underdetermination (Laudan 1990)—is that we always rely on interpretation to assign any type of causality to the relationship between the political phenomena we think exist and the political outcomes we think we observe. (We do this through abductive reasoning, as discussed later in this chapter.) Everyone interprets, although everyone does not consider herself to be an interpretivist! For our purposes, the problem of underdetermination, giving rise to the “interpretive gap” in assessing causality, also means that dominant explanations—shaped by the workings of power—generally take over, filling the spaces between events and our understandings of them and growing in influence with their continual reproduction. This is why thorough contextualization of political phenomena is important for interpretivists. One of the main objectives of much interpretive research in IR, as a result, is to denaturalize dominant explanations, exposing them not as truth but as narratives that are discursively constructed, assigned particular meanings, and reproduced from partial or limited evidence and with particular stakes or purposes in mind, and to provide evidence that indicates the possibility or plausibility of other articulations and meanings of the phenomena in question.

While all research of any epistemology relies on interpretation implicitly or explicitly, interpretivist scholarship also challenges both the fact/value distinction and the correspondence theory of truth (Taylor 1971/1977). Many who doubt the legitimacy of interpretivism incorrectly claim that postpositivists reject “facts.”⁴ Instead, scholars in interpretivist traditions strongly reject the claim that things, social facts, and events can be separated from the “value” attached to them by participants, observers, and evaluators. A glass of wine can abet the disease of alcoholism, the conviviality of a party, or the romantic attachment of a couple, depending on the prior experiences and current orientations of the observers and participants. More importantly, different groups of people think that a glass of wine can do one or several of these things, depending on how their experiences, contexts, and values shape the meanings they assign to it, and they react to, use, or reject it accordingly. The glass of wine can also represent something evil or sacred, depending on the traditions and meanings assigned by different religious and cultural communities. A nuclear warhead can be described by its shape, color, type of metal, and atomic contents, but it takes on values of protection, terror, masculinized violence, or a combination thereof depending on the interpretive community, which develops and assigns to it an “intersubjective” meaning—one that is taken as fact by its members. A World Bank-funded dam can be evaluated primarily by the amount of energy it generates or the number of homes and livelihoods its construction has destroyed. The value we place on each will shape our understanding of the “fact” of the dam and the expectations that we draw from its existence.

Non-interpretivist researchers generally prioritize the attempt to understand the essence of the phenomenon apart from any intersubjectively assigned value. Their goal, for example, is to understand the “objective” value, defined according to a specific metric, of the World Bank-funded dam. Interpretivists view this as an impossible task without taking into consideration the meanings that groups of people assign to the dam, because things and the values attached to them are inseparable. Interpretivists also see the symbiotic nature of “fact” and “value” as providing critical research questions in their own right. A simple example is that military arsenals cannot be assessed objectively as producing either safety or threat without understanding who possesses them, against whom they are targeted, and how the constr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Interpretive Concepts, Goals, and Processes in International Relations
• 2 Interpreting International Security
• 3 Interpreting International Political Economy
• 4 Interpreting International Law and Organization
• 5 Race, Religion, Histories, and Futures in International Relations
• Concluding Thoughts: Politics and Engagement in International Relations
• Bibliography
• Index