Security as Practice

Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War

Lene Hansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134339600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This important text offers a full and detailed account of how to use discourse analysis to study foreign policy. It provides a poststructuralist theory of the relationship between identity and foreign policy and an in-depth discussion of the methodology of discourse analysis.

• Part I offers a detailed discussion of the concept of identity, the intertextual relationship between official foreign policy discourse and oppositional and media discourses and of the importance of genres for authors' ability to establish themselves as having authority and knowledge. Lene Hansen devotes particular attention to methodology and provides explicit directions for how to build discourse analytical research designs
• Part II applies discourse analytical theory and methodology in a detailed analysis of the Western debate on the Bosnian war. This analysis includes a historical genealogy of the Western construction of the Balkans as well as readings of the official British and American policies, the debate in the House of Commons and the US Senate, Western media representations, academic debates and travel writing and autobiography.

Providing an introduction to discourse analysis and critical perspectives on international relations, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of international relations, discourse analysis and research methodology.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203236338-1

The relationship between identity and foreign policy is at the center of poststructuralism's research agenda: foreign policies rely upon representations of identity, but it is also through the formulation of foreign policy that identities are produced and reproduced. Understanding foreign policy as a discursive practice, poststructuralism argues that foreign policy discourses articulate and intertwine material factors and ideas to such an extent that the two cannot be separated from one another. It also argues that policy discourses are inherently social because policymakers address political opposition as well as the wider public sphere in the attempt to institutionalize their understanding of the identities and policy options at stake.

This approach to identity sets poststructuralism apart from liberal and constructivist studies of ideas as a variable in foreign policy analysis by arguing that identity is not something that states, or other collectivities, have independently of the discursive practices mobilized in presenting and implementing foreign policy (Goldstein and Keohane 1993; Laffey and Weldes 1997; Katzenstein 1996). It is, as a consequence, impossible to define identity as a variable that is causally separate from foreign policy or to measure its explanatory value in competition with non-discursive material factors. Critics of poststructuralism and discourse analysis have often portrayed this absence of causal epistemology as the road to theoretical, methodological, and political anarchy, but this book will show that poststructuralist discourse analysis can indeed create a theoretically vibrant and rigorous research agenda that speaks to pertinent political issues. It is a research agenda which engages classical questions of foreign policy—how do states generate responses to the problems they face and how do politicians rally support for their calls for action?—as well as bridges to the importance of media and political opposition for how political debates unfold.

Without theory there is nothing but description, and without methodology there is no transformation of theory into analysis. Poststructuralism has traditionally not engaged in explicit methodological discussions and hence there is a need to address the methodological challenges that arise from a poststructuralist theoretical perspective. Many International Relations (IR) poststructuralists have drawn on Derrida, who declared methodology is intimately tied to positivist forms of science and his own deconstruction is a non-method, and on literary, philosophical, and sociological traditions that place less emphasis on questions of validity and reliability than do IR and political science. But if the link between methodology and positivist epistemology is loosened, and the former seen as the procedures and choices by which theory becomes analysis, then a poststructuralist methodology is not only possible, but also desirable. Many of the methodological questions that poststructuralist discourse analysis confronts are those that face all academic work: what should be the focus of analysis?, how should a research design be built around it?, and how is a body of material and data selected that facilitates a qualitatively and quantitatively reliable answer? Poststructuralism's focus on discourses as articulated in written and spoken text calls in addition for particular attention to the methodology of reading (how are identities identified within foreign policy texts and how should the relationship between opposing discourses be studied?) and the methodology of textual selection (which forums and types of text should be chosen and how many should be included?).

The goals of this chapter are to situate poststructuralist discourse analysis within the field of IR and to discuss rationalist demands for ‘real world research questions’ and causal epistemology in more detail. The first section links poststructuralism's concern with identity to the history of IR and traces the development of rationalist, constructivist, and poststructuralist approaches. The second section argues that poststructuralism can speak directly to ‘real world’ foreign policy questions from its conceptualization of identity as discursive, political, relational, and social. The third section continues the discussion of real world relevance by theorizing official foreign policy discourse as challenged or reproduced by the media, oppositional politicians, commentators, and popular culture. The chapter returns in the fourth section to the demand for causal theorizing that was issued by the most comprehensive political science introduction to qualitative causal research design, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research by King, Keohane and Verba (1994). It is argued that poststructuralism cannot be formulated as a causal theory because the relationship between identity and policy is coconstitutive or performative. The methodological demands which ensue are addressed in the fifth section, which also presents the methodological status of the case to be explored in the second part of the book, the Western debate on the Bosnian war. The chapter closes with a brief presentation of the structure of the book and the content of each chapter.

Poststructuralism and the field of IR

The question of identity has been at the center of disciplinary debate for the past 15 years, perhaps even since the inception of the field of IR. Is the abstract essence of IR not best seen as a continuous political and normative debate over the identity—the ontology—of the state, the difference between domestic politics and international relations, and the scope for transforming the latter? These questions, albeit not exactly phrased in these terms, were at the forefront of classical IR texts by E.H.Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Angell, Hans Morgenthau, John Herz, Arnold Wolfers, and Kenneth Waltz, yet buried under the epistemological cloak of the growing behavioralism and positivism of American social science in the 1950s and 1960s.

By the end of the 1970s Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) had canonized positivist and causal epistemology and combined it with an abstract, transhistorical structuralism. But as Theory of International Politics became the key text for the following decade, it provided the starting point for a burgeoning uncovering of the philosophical and political roots of IR as a discipline and a political practice. Richard Ashley praised the classical realism of John Herz and coined the term ‘neo-realism,’ which was faulted for its denigration of history and its celebration of structural determinism (Ashley 1981, 1984, 1987); Robert Walker traced the ontological and political importance of state sovereignty for the discipline of IR (Walker 1987, 1993); Friedrich Kratochwil, Nicholas Onuf and John Ruggie pointed to the importance of norms, regimes and legal reasoning (Kratochwil 1989; Onuf 1989; Ruggie 1992; Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986); Alexander Wendt brought the structure-agency debate into IR while arguing that Waltz's structuralism was paradoxically dependent upon a particular construction of the individual state (Wendt 1987); James Der Derian showed that diplomacy was not simply a convention for managing interstate relations but a cultural practice through which the foreign and the strange were mediated (Der Derian 1987); and Michael J.Shapiro held that foreign policies took place not in abstract disembodied neorealist space, but through the mobilization of particular cultural, racial, and political identities (Shapiro 1988).

After Robert Keohane's famous 1988 presidential address, this group was given a name—’reflectivists'—as well as legitimacy; ‘reflectivism,’ argued Keohane, offered important insights into the importance of institutions for international politics, insights not adequately acknowledged by realist and neoliberal approaches, which he subsumed under the juxtaposing label of ‘rationalism’ (Keohane 1988). Yet, it was crucial that reflectivism adopted an epistemology, and ensuing methodologies, which would provide it with the capacity to engage rationalism (Keohane 1988:389–93; Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998:677; Walt 1991). Keohane conceded that reflectivists were right in pointing to the importance of identity, culture, norms, regimes, and ideas, but argued that they needed to formulate causal hypotheses and subject them to more rigorous testing to assess their applicability.¹ The construction of this rationalist-reflectivist research agenda privileged a particular form of research modeled on the natural sciences and microeconomics over forms of knowledge that drew upon philosophical, historical, and humanistic traditions of understanding.

The rather amorphous group of reflectivists quickly began to splinter along constructivist and poststructuralist lines, and by the mid-1990s the constructivists had further subdivided into ‘conventional’ or ‘thin’ constructivists on the one hand and ‘critical’ or ‘thick’ constructivists on the other (Katzenstein 1996; Adler 1997; Price and Reus-Smit 1998; Wendt 1999; Zehfuss 2001). But the influence of Keohane's programmatic distinction cannot be overestimated: it had successfully privileged epistemology over ontology as the area where the importance of non-material factors should be assessed, and epistemological differences continued to be key to the construction of separate positions within the fracturing reflectivist camp. As Alexander Wendt exclaimed in his much anticipated Social Theory of International Politics, ‘when it comes to the epistemology of social inquiry I am a strong believer in science—a pluralistic science to be sure, in which there is a significant role for “Understanding,” but science just the same. I am a “positivist”’ (Wendt 1999:39).

But where constructivists had been willing—or perhaps even seen a strategic advantage—to embrace a disciplinary label, over the years very little work had declared itself to be postmodernist or posts truc turalist. When it did, it usually opted for the latter category, arguing that ‘poststructuralism’ pointed to the theoretical roots in poststructuralist (not anti-structuralist) linguistics, philosophy, social theory, and literary theory (more specifically to writers like Nietzsche, Kristeva, Foucault, and Derrida), whereas ‘postmodernism’ referred to a particular historical order (Hansen 1997; Wæver 2002). This absence of self-declaration implied that attempts to present poststructuralism as a coherent approach were carried out largely by its critics (for exceptions see Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Ashley and Walker 1990; George 1994). Rationalists chastised ‘postmodernism’ for seeking to seduce the field (Walt 1991), for being ‘self-referential and disengaged from the world,’ and for denying the ‘use of evidence to adjudicate between truth claims’ (Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998:678). Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, in their International Organization fiftieth anniversary survey of the field Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner warned that ‘it is easy to underestimate the direct importance and indirect influence of this intellectual current. Postmodernism has found many adherents both in the broader international studies field in the United States and in Europe where major journals and book series are dedicated to publishing the results of this work’ (Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998:678). By the mid-1990s, constructivists began to chime in to set themselves aside from ‘some exotic (presumably Parisian) social theory’ (Jepperson et al. 1996:34; see also Adler 1997; Wendt 1999; Wæver 1998; Price and Reus-Smit 1998) .² Even Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit, who state their ambition to be an open exploration of the terrain between constructivism and ‘postmodernism,’ fault the latter for, among other shortcomings, neglecting ‘conceptual elaboration and sustained empirical analysis,’ not explaining or predicting the end of the Cold War, and not bringing causality to the study of why one discursive formation prevails over another (Price and Reus-Smit 1998:264–5, 279).³ Constructivism was, not surprisingly, claimed to rectify these shortcomings by combining the best of the old 1980s poststructuralism with an epistemological rapprochement to rationalism (Price and Reus-Smit 1998:283–4).

The application of labels to schools of thought and academic approaches is important for how disciplinary debates are conducted (Wæver 1998). Labels function as codes to the reader and as meeting points for theory-building and research programs, and the absence of a clearly delineated programmatic poststructuralism made it harder for a non poststructuralist audience to assess the validity of these charges (for a few responses see Walker 1993:81–6; Der Derian 1992:8–11; Campbell 1998b:207–27). Indeed, as will be apparent from this book, most of what has been said about poststructuralism is misleading at best.⁴ Or, to put matters more constructively: it is indeed both possible and valuable to build a theory of identity and foreign policy which draws upon the writings of poststructuralist theorists, inside and outside of IR, but which differs significantly from the image conjured up by rationalists and conventional cons truc tivists. Poststructuralism has strengths and weaknesses, as do all theoretical approaches—no theory can pursue all relevant research questions simultaneously—but it can be drawn upon to show not only that identities matter for foreign policy, but also how they can be studied systematically through the adoption of a theory of discourse. In doing so it pursues a particular set of research questions, centered on the constitutive significance of representations of identity for formulating and debating foreign policies, and it argues that adopting a non-causal epistemology does not imply an abandonment of theoretically rigorous frameworks, empirical analyses of ‘real world relevance, ’ or systematic assessments of data and methodology.

Representations as ‘real world' research questions

How does one decide the scope of one's research project? In their authoritative study Designing Social Inquiry, King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) argue that there are essentially no rules from which to determine whether to study ethnic conflict or educational policy, NATO or the EU, poverty or war. The only criterion that one can meaningfully establish is that it ‘should pose a question that is “important” in the real world.’ That is, it ‘should be consequential for political, social, or economic life, for understanding something that significantly affects many people's lives, or for understanding and predicting events that might be harmful or beneficial’ (King et al. 1994:15, italics and quotation marks in original). This of course points to a very broad array of research projects, in fact it is hard to imagine anyone studying international politics who would not claim to be in compliance with this ‘real world programmatic.’ When poststructuralism is chastised for being removed from the study of the real world, what is at stake is thus a more specific contestation of what it means to study significant events and effects: that poststructuralism's preoccupation with philosophy and texts takes it away from concerns with ‘real foreign policy’ as it is practically conceived and implemented.

But even with a narrow definition of ‘real world relevance,’ poststructuralist analysis has a research program that speaks directly to the conduct of foreign policy. This research program is based on the assumption that policies are dependent upon representations of the threat, country, security problem, or crisis they seek to address. Foreign policies need to ascribe meaning to the situation and to construct the objects within it, and in doing so they articulate and draw upon specific identities of other states, regions, peoples, and institutions as well as on the identity of a national, regional, or institutional Self. To take an example, the Bosnian war was frequently represented by the Clinton administration as a ‘Balkan war.’ It followed from this representation that the war was seen as fought by a barbaric, violent people with a ‘Balkan identity’ who had hated each other for at least 500 years. This in turn made the war an intractable ‘problem from hell,’ as US Secretary of State Warren Christophe...