Global and Regional Problems

Towards an Interdisciplinary Study

Vilho Harle, Pami Aalto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138278714
• eBook ISBN: 9781317128137
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Distinctive due to explicit and systematically developed links between international relations (IR) and related disciplines, this book addresses global and regional interactions and the complex policy problems that often characterise this agenda. Such enhanced communication is crucial for improving the capacity of IR to engage with concrete issues that today are of high policy relevance for international organisations, states, diplomats, mediators and humankind in general. Whilst the authors do not reject the present IR, they offer a wider research agenda with new directions intended not only for those IR scholars who are unsatisfied with the analytical power of the current discipline, but also for those working on 'international', 'foreign', 'global' or 'interregional' issues in other disciplines and fields of research. In this instance they pay particular attention to linking up with peace research, international political economy (IPE) and cultural political economy (CPE), sociology, political geography, development studies, linguistics, cultural studies, environmental studies and energy research, gender studies, and traditions of area studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Pami Aalto, Vilho Harle and Sami Moisio

Global and Regional Problems: What, Why, How?

In this book we will propose new interdisciplinary directions for the study of global and regional problems and the interactions between these two scales. Today contemplating and addressing global and regional problems are bread and butter activities for many professionals interested in ‘international’ matters broadly conceived: academic analysts in several disciplines and fields, practising policy analysts, policy-makers and activists. Or more precisely, one might suggest that living in the ‘age of globalization’ has forced many of us to also examine the pressures and opportunities of regionalization.

What makes global and regional problems more unapproachable than traditional ‘international’ problems in relations among states, is that ultimately, they are about ‘life, the universe and everything’ (see Edkins and Zehfuss 2009: 1, also 5). Alongside such an ambitious scale and magnitude, global and regional problems connote further scales extending beyond relations among states and nations in several ways. Simultaneously they do involve states and nations, reaching deep inside them. In other words, the global and regional aspects are often inextricably interlinked (Krishna-Hensel 2000: x–xi), just as they are often tied to other scales. The empirical substance matter of contemporary global and regional problems is likewise frequently highly complex. It has proved difficult to understand and explain these interlinkages and complexities properly with conventional approaches, let alone to adequately envision normatively desirable end-states, and ultimately, to come up with concrete policy suggestions and solutions.

Consider, for example, examples such as global climate change and the rapid warming and other transformations that it allegedly creates in the Arctic region for the wildlife, nature, indigenous populations, and for the prospects of exploiting the natural resources there – and what we should think of all this (see Chapter 8). Or take the armed conflicts within and across some of the fragile states of sub-Saharan Africa, where the demand for their natural resources from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), for example, sustains the war economies and jeopardizes the human security of large groups of people (see Chapter 3). Both of these examples highlight the interlinked nature of the global and regional scales that are discussed in many contributions to this book. They also manifest a high degree of complexity and linkages across policy sectors and issue areas. Given that problems emerge on and cross-cut various levels, and are highly complex, necessitates drawing expertise from several disciplines (see also Bhaskar 2010: 4). On top of that, knowledge of the socio-cultural and linguistic characteristics of the regions in focus also plays a crucial role.

Global and regional problems range from environmental and resource-based problems to political, social and cultural ones; from indirect threats to the planet and its various populations, and to risks to the future of our economic and sociopolitical systems, and on to direct threats of violence, war, and ultimately nuclear annihilation (see e.g. Brown, Harris and Russell 2010, Edkins and Zehfuss 2009b). A mere attempt to list all these problems would be difficult, just as it would be difficult to prioritize among them or to try to provide a final solution to any one of them. In this book we will concentrate on improving our capacity to think of and practically approach these problems by means of systematically developed interdisciplinary approaches. By pointing out why, and how, such interdisciplinary approaches can and should be developed and what follows from that, we aim to set examples to be followed and debated in further research, training and action. Although interdisciplinarity has been part of the problem-oriented study of ‘international’ problems widely conceived, to date explicit attention to this has been rare.

Towards an Interdisciplinary Study

Interdisciplinarity has not been an obvious starting point for everyone interested in the study of global and regional problems. For some, international relations (IR) is the self-evident ‘owner discipline’ of these matters.1 Yet, many others disagree. For example, a large body of geographical, philosophical and sociological literature deals with several facets of global issues (e.g. Agnew 2009, Bauman 1998, Sassen 2007), as do many studies in international political economy (IPE) (e.g. Patomäki 2008) and economics. There is likewise in regional studies a long tradition of research on regions and regional transformations. These traditions have also become more interdisciplinary in nature. As spatial concepts such as border, network, scale, place, region and territory have become widespread in many social sciences, one may even speak about a renaissance of a regional approach. Overall, scholars in several disciplines are today working on questions of global and/or regional origin (Fawn 2009).

We suggest that this actual interdisciplinary nature of the study of global and regional problems must not only be recognized and accepted, but also enhanced and developed further alongside more discipline-oriented research that is no less important for addressing some types of problems. A very concrete expression of the proliferation of disciplines involved in this field of study, and of the need to evaluate their role in knowledge production, is the number of terms used. Scholars are tackling various dimensions of global and regional problems: the ‘international’ dimensions, which in addition to the ‘foreign affairs’ or ‘inter-state’ levels of analysis are infamously peculiar to the discipline of IR. Alongside such studies we find analyses of ‘world’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’, ‘cross-border’ and ‘interregional’ dimensions, for example. This multitude is a sign of how several disciplines have partly overlapping and partly diverging research objects in this wide field.

The multitude of terms used and dimensions examined should be taken as natural. Some problems have a truly worldly or global origin, extent or character. But this does not necessarily make them products of any faceless process of ‘globalization’. Some of the most illuminating scholarship on the phenomena which we often lump together as amounting to ‘globalization’ insists on taking into account the agents implicated in its production – i.e. those who could also challenge and alter these larger scale patterns (Hay 2002, cf. Hobson and Seabrooke 2007). Moreover, the alleged products of ‘globalization’ and their countertendencies are in many cases best seen at the lower, regional or local levels as suggested by the ‘glocalization’ thesis of the 1990s that interlinks the global and local levels into a complex process of structural transformation (e.g. Robertson 1995, cf. Rosenau 1994). In these processes, nation-states and their mutual relations may no longer constitute a primary focus point. In some cases they may be part of the problem, and/or in some others offer possible solutions. With all this, however, we do not attempt to engage in a debate on the nature of globalization, but wish to underline the absence of any a priori ‘right’ level of analysis. The relevant dimensions of global and regional problems best become visible with different research questions and theoretical literatures combined to frame and approach them.

Global and regional problems also have an ideational side. What is taken to be global may also turn out to be informed by more particular western or American ideas of international organization, which, for their part, can in many cases be traced to European ideas (cf. Harle 1990). They have in the course of the past few centuries penetrated far into various parts of the world (e.g. Watson 1992). At the same time the perspective of non-European-originated histories of ideas and the world has been taken up (Kayaoglu 2010, Patomäki 2007). Further, we need to be attentive to how the alleged ‘global’ ways of thinking may assume very different shapes in various (mega-)regional contexts, such as Asia, the Middle East or the Arctic, as is discussed in this book.

In a recent edited volume, Ole Wæver and Arlene Tickner (2009) have in this mould called for enhanced sensitivity regarding the different ‘geo-cultural epistemologies’ which in various locations shape the scholarly understandings and treatments of ‘international’ matters. As part of these diverse understandings it is found that not even the often assumed hegemony of Anglo-American scholarship in IR is exactly true as American and other Anglophone scholarship are moving to different directions (Cox and Nossal 2009). This is an important point not only in the context of IR but also vis-à-vis our aims of broadening the focus beyond IR and its key conceptions. The geodiversity mentioned above – the inevitable contextuality of political processes across various regions – is taken into account in this book. We agree that in some cases IR concepts which have evolved in particular scholarly communities are not sensitive enough to the geo-cultural contexts in which ‘international’ issues are studied. Therefore, those engaged in international studies across the world naturally come from various backgrounds (p. 16). Acknowledging this, in this book our contributors develop approaches drawing on and combining aspects of IR, history, economics, IPE, development studies, environmental studies, energy research, linguistics, political theory, feminism and gender studies, studies of governmentality, and various traditions of area studies.2 And as will also be implied, scholars and those whom they study speak several different languages both in conceptual and practical terms. This challenge of plurilinguality has serious implications for intercultural communication and for adequately understanding global/regional interlinkages (see Chapter 6).

This multitude means that interdisciplinarity will need to be carefully considered and put into practice systematically in order to adequately grasp the multifaceted nature of global and regional problems. To this end, alongside IR works we will review advances in several other disciplines and literatures and seek to bring some of them together in order to form analytically powerful approaches that help us to better understand and ultimately tackle burning issues and complex empirical problems. Concomitantly this presupposes challenging, when needed, mono-disciplinary ways of thinking that may hamper our approaches to these problems, or at worst altogether prevent us from even perceiving them properly.

An interdisciplinary agenda is particularly crucial for a discipline like IR, wherein theoretically and methodologically oriented scholarship with its alleged ‘great debates’ between rival schools of thought often fails to translate into prolonged and informative empirical studies;3 and where empirical research entails a risk of becoming lumped together with what is perceived as theory starved area studies (cf. Wæver 2007: 297–8). Indeed, interdisciplinary examination suggests that the postulated divide between (mainstream) IR and area studies is in fact a false dichotomy – they have much in common despite some evident differences (Teti 2007: 121).4 And no less is interdisciplinarity important for other disciplines that today are integral to the study of global and regional issues and problems, such as economics, IPE and geography (see Fawn 2009: 6–9). In the case of economics, this is especially so in light of studies portraying it as the most insular social scientific discipline, although not radically different from the others with regard to incorporating extra-disciplinary perspectives. Simultaneously simple statistical analysis shows that in general, some major concepts and ideas of philosophical thinkers diffuse well across the social sciences and humanities (Jacobs and Frickel 2009: 50). There thus is already a degree of interdisciplinary traffic.

Our aim is to direct attention to such interdisciplinary traffic and enhance it when needed. In this introduction we will next elaborate what the study of problems and the requirement of practical relevance – which naturally must be part of our agenda – actually entail. We will first assess what IR can offer in this respect. We then improve our analytical means by introducing the wider research agenda of interdisciplinary ‘international studies’ (see also Aalto et al. 2011). This plural field can make numerous interdisciplinary connections and converse well with fields like ‘post-international politics’, ‘global studies’ and ‘world politics’, as well as regional studies, geography and many other disciplines, not forgetting the role of area studies. Finally, we discuss different forms of interdisciplinarity and approaches to interdisciplinary collaboration while also situating our own contributions in this wide agenda and summarizing our arguments.

Policy Problems in International Relations

We have so far suggested that the study of global and regional problems by definition reaches beyond the sometimes taken for granted remit of IR – foreign affairs and policy, and inter-state relations among powers great and small, and the resulting international organization/structure. This has serious substantial, theoretical and methodological implications for that discipline which we cannot properly discuss here (Aalto 2011, Aalto et al. 2011, Long 2011). It simultaneously calls for the involvement of other disciplines and for interdisciplinary approaches to be systematically developed.

Yet, venturing beyond IR should not mean entirely disregarding its disciplinary heritage. This is because IR – by studying the tensions, conflicts and violence among states – is originally a strongly practice or problem-oriented, if not directly policy-relevant discipline that no study of global and regional problems should ignore. This important legacy of IR should be dissociated from the discipline’s own excessive state-centrism characteristic of its disciplinary development since the 1950s after its interdisciplinary foundational phase (Aalto et al. 2011). As Lucian Ashworth (2009) suggests, in the 1920s and 1930s IR was a meeting place for scholars from many disciplines with only limited attachment to political science, the discipline with which it is today closely associated especially within the USA (cf. Long 2011).

The practical legacy of IR

Kalevi Holsti (1985) reminds us how the interest in international relations and the academic discipline of IR developed in order to help us to answer important questions of peace and war. The early practices in academic IR disclosed the attempts to act as an advisor to the Prince through research on practical problems of government and rule. This Machiavellian image is important for understanding the roots of IR, even if we admit that Machiavelli had little or no influence on the field of IR in the English-speaking world until after the 1950s as a ‘post-hoc’ founder. The same interest in the burning problems of their own time is evident in the work of such classics as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx, which are indispensable reference points for modern IR (Walt 2005: 39, see also Griffiths et al. 2009).

For the modern classics of IR such as Hans Morgenthau (1985), this need was just as natural. Morgenthau’s realist approach to international politics is also known outside IR for its focus on state power and the struggle for it among individuals and groups, which for him, and during his time more generally, were represented by states. He asserts that ‘[N]o study of politics, and certainly no study of international politics … can be disinterested in the sense that it is able to divorce knowledge from action and to pursue knowledge for its own sake’ (p. 25).

In his magnum opus Politics among Nations, Morgenthau focuses on state power but alongside it the concept of peace. For him, peace could be maintained by a balance of power among states; normative limitations such as international law, morality and world public opinion; the possibility of a world state; and by taking lessons from the past (p. 27). Owing to his fundamental pessimism with regard to human conduct, he ends up viewing balance of power as a decisive mechanism while also allowing a substantial role for diplomacy in moderating the aggressive, power-driven and fearful human nature by means of wise leadership and statecraft (see Crawford 2009: 271–2). Morgenthau’s programme is profoundly educational and at its root a psychoanalytical effort to cultivate the practice of wise leadership. It stands out within the great continuum from the pre-modern to the modern classics of IR focusing on the practical needs of state conduct vis-à-vis domestic society and other societies in an anarchic environment, and which also includes normative elements such as international law and political philosophy. In Morgenthau’s own case, these are accompanied by political psychology. In other words, Morgenthau used interdisciplinary resources to compose his at heart relatively narrow, state-centric agenda of the art of statecraft, arguing his position against the behaviourist or ‘social scientific’ revolution in the then emergent IR discipline (Guihot 2008). These cursory remarks already suggest how interdisciplinarity is more integral to the practice-relevant work of IR than we often think.

But practical relevance can also become far too excessive, as happened in the case of linking IR and parts of politic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foreign Policy Meets the Non-Interstate International: The English School as a Framework of Foreign Policy Analysis
• 3 Africa and Human Security after 2010: Learning with Interdisciplinary Perspective
• 4 European/Eurasian Energy Security: From Vulnerability to Viability and Sustainability
• 5 Political Economy of US-led Financial Crisis: A World View Analysis
• 6 What is Asia? International Studies as Political Linguistics
• 7 Feminist Interdisciplinarity and Gendered Parodies of Nuclear Iran
• 8 Circumpolar Arctic in ‘Global’ Climate Change: (De)Securitizing the Ice
• 9 Creating State Competitiveness, Re-scaling Higher Education: The Case of Finland
• 10 Conclusions: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Global and Regional Relations
• Index