Bourdieu in International Relations

Rethinking Key Concepts in IR

Rebecca Adler-Nissen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415870757
• eBook ISBN: 9781136239236
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book rethinks the key concepts of International Relations by drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

The last few years have seen a genuine wave of publications promoting sociology in international relations. Scholars have suggested that Bourdieu's vocabulary can be applied to study security, diplomacy, migration and global environmental politics. Yet we still lack a systematic and accessible analysis of what Bourdieu-inspired IR might look like. This book provides the answer. It offers an introduction to Bourdieu's thinking to a wider IR audience, challenges key assumptions, which currently structure IR scholarship – and provides an original, theoretical restatement of some of the core concepts in the field. The book brings together a select group of leading IR scholars who draw on both theoretical and empirical insights from Bourdieu. Each chapter covers one central concept in IR: Methodology, Knowledge, Power, Strategy, Security, Culture, Gender, Norms, Sovereignty and Integration. The chapters demonstrate how these concepts can be reinterpreted and used in new ways when exposed to Bourdieusian logic.

Challenging key pillars of IR scholarship, Bourdieu in International Relations will be of interest to critical theorists, and scholars of IR theory.

1
Bourdieu’s concepts

Political sociology in international relations

Vincent Pouliot and Frédéric Mérand

Until recently, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu exerted a limited influence in the field of International Relations.¹ Apart from his late work on the “international circulation of ideas,” Bourdieu himself focused mostly on the domestic arena. Yet, as we argue in this chapter, his rich and provocative social theory suggests concrete responses to the epistemological, methodological, and conceptual inquiries that have preoccupied minds across the social sciences, including in IR.

In this chapter, we want to outline six specific contributions that Bourdieu’s social theory brings to the study of world politics. Our analysis is not meant to be exhaustive, and does not pretend to verse the reader in the totality of Bourdieu’s sociology in a few pages – the complexity of his approach renders such a simplification unthinkable. Our aim, rather, is to revisit and enrich the grand theoretical debates in IR through a Bourdieusian perspective. In widening the sphere of Bourdieu’s thought and positing it against that of the principal debates in IR, we walk in the footsteps of a number of “critical” IR authors. The work of Richard Ashley (1984) and Michael Williams (2007, see also this volume), to cite two examples, uses Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power as a tool to interrogate the fundamental elements of neorealist theory. In a similar vein, Didier Bigo and the “Paris School” combine Bourdieu’s field with Foucauldian discourse to demonstrate the practice of danger and threat production by (in)security professionals (Bigo 1996, 2005, see also this volume; Huysmans 2002). A handful of other authors, several of whom are contributors to this volume, also attempt to demonstrate the rapport between Bourdieu’s sociology and world politics.

Our objective in this chapter is to push these reflections further by concentrating on two principal points of engagement. First, as rich as these contributions are, existing efforts to wed Bourdieu and IR tend to employ only one aspect of his social theory without interrogating the way in which the whole could possibly complement a number of diverse perspectives in IR. In contrast, we take as broad a view as possible when considering the intellectual challenges of the discipline through the lens developed by Bourdieu. Our objective is not to propose ready-made solutions or provide definitive answers but rather to cast a new light on the complex theoretical debates that circulate throughout world politics. Second, the authors who refer to Bourdieu in IR often belong to so-called critical schools. While there is no denying that Bourdieu saw himself as a critical, even at times a polemical scholar who put forward a reflexive approach to uncover modes of domination, the conceptual and methodological tools that he used were actually quite conventional for a sociologist. Bourdieu’s obsession with empirical work, and resolute opposition to armchair theorizing, justifies in our view putting him in conversation with “mainstream” approaches, with which he shared a number of common research questions, namely the sources of cohesion, conflict, power, and domination. For him, there is no contradiction between juggling with data, on the one hand, and criticizing society, on the other.

From a social scientific point of view, Bourdieu is a classical scholar, not a radical one. As a case in point, it is far from evident which of the founders of the sociological discipline – Durkheim, Marx, or Weber – has exerted the most influence on Bourdieu’s thought; indeed, his synthetic approach can be said to be equally inspired by the work of each author. For him, “to enable science to progress, one has to establish communication between opposing theories, which have often been constituted against each other” (Bourdieu 1993: 12). At the risk of simplifying, the legacy is as follows. From Marx, Bourdieu inherits a vision of a world made through domination, relations of force and conflicts over basic human needs. From Durkheim, Bourdieu retains above all a sociology of symbolic forms as well as an adherence to methodological holism. Finally, the debt to Weber is pervasive in Bourdieu’s work, most notably in his economies of social phenomena (for example, the religious field) as well as the cognitive dimension of structuring principles such as power, hierarchical organization, and legitimacy (see Brubaker 1985).

This desire not to espouse any theoretical current, along with the refusal of fashionable academic alliances, put Bourdieu in the crossfire of a number of critics. Bourdieu is a strange animal in IR because his work is premised on an a priori rejection of all the “debates” that dominate the discipline. But that is probably also what explains his appeal. Not thinking in terms of IR categories, Bourdieu (1990c: 123) described his approach as a kind of “structuralist constructivism.” Indeed, there exists within his work a marked interest in sense-making systems (culture, symbols, ideology, education, taste) which calls to mind the importance accorded to intersubjectivity by constructivism. At the same time, for Bourdieu (as well as for Marx), social conditions determine, at least in part, both individual and collective forms of thinking.

If we must try situating Bourdieu in the context of IR theories, we can probably begin with those theories that are farthest from his own. To be sure, Bourdieu is far from (neo)liberal theories (Moravcsik 1997; Keohane 1984). Not only did he vehemently refuse the political philosophy underlying methodological individualism (Bourdieu 1998b), he just as forcefully rejected the consequentialism inherent in rational choice theory. This second objection would also move Bourdieu away from neorealists such as Waltz (1979) who viewed microeconomic models as an anthropological foundation. Be that as it may, because of their focus on relations of power as well as in dialectics, the writings of several classical realists (notably those such as E.H Carr (1958) which betray a distinct penchant for Marxism) contain a number of elements that intersect with Bourdieu’s thought. More recently, by virtue of his double interest in social structures and their intersubjective composition, Alexander Wendt’s constructivism could be close to Bourdieu; however Wendt does not share the same preoccupation with relations of power and structures of domination, a lacuna meant to be compensated by “realist constructivism” (Jackson et al. 2004) and neo-Gramscian analyses. While accepting that anarchy in international politics is a social construction, realist constructivists maintain the impossibility of transcending power in world politics. Similarly, for Bourdieu relations of power only make sense as part of the struggle to make sense of the world. This analytical premise would do well to be developed within the walls of IR: “Because the truth of the social world is the object of struggles in the social world and in the sociological world which is committed to producing the truth of the social world,” Bourdieu (2004: 115) writes, “the struggle for the truth of the social world is necessarily endless.”

Bourdieu’s social theory and the foundations of IR

The first section deals with the three metatheoretical contributions that Bourdieu’s sociology offers to International Relations, which correspond to three of the fundamental debates around which the core of IR has been centred for the past two decades. First, his reflexive epistemology hints at a via media between the poles of neopositivism and antifoundationalism. Second, the relational ontology that he develops offers a conceptual solution to the structure-agent problem. Third, developing a theory based on practice allows us to move past the reified antinomy between homo sociologicus and homo economicus. In short, the world according to Bourdieu is one where our familiar metaphysical dualisms dissolve.

A reflexive epistemology

Towards the end of the 1980s the rise of postpositivist approaches such as post-modernism and constructivism initiated the third “Great Debate” concerning the epistemological bases of IR (Lapid 1989). By opposing the dominant theories of neorealism and neoliberalism, a growing number of authors denounced the prevailing positivist contention that world politics could be studied employing methods similar to those in the natural sciences, and that they purported to discover universal truths as a result. Thus the essence of the postpositivist critique was predicated on interrogating academic knowledge in the absence of any transcendental foundation upon which this knowledge could rest. This critique was also an effective means of unearthing the sociopolitical dynamics underlying scientific activity, as well as the performative nature of language; words were given their proper force, capable of both describing and defining the world we inhabit. Put differently, the social world necessitated an interpretive outlook that searched for meaning rather than trying to affirm natural laws.

More than twenty years after its birth however, it is quite clear that the Third Debate has failed to engender a new methodological consensus at the core of the discipline. Looking at certain specialized (and rather narrow) scientific journals that have emerged during this period, we might even say that the two camps have become even more set in their respective ways, stuck in their respective corners. It is precisely within this dialogue of the deaf that the reflexive epistemology offered by Bourdieu resonates, and may open up a crucial line of communication. For if it is true that Bourdieu protested the positivist notion that the task of academic discourse is to give words to that which exists “in fact,” it is equally the case that many of his critiques were directed at the narrowly defined postmodernist movement, which at times categorically rejects the aspirations of science. Epistemological reflexivity might well be the “third way” that allows us to think beyond the metaphysical quandaries that have structured the discourse of IR for the past two decades (Neufeld 1993) without necessarily resolving these dilemmas.

Bourdieu’s epistemology is largely inspired by the work of Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher and advocate of the polemical action of scientific reason (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron 1991). The basic principle consists of turning reason against itself, or to subject every scientific analysis to its own scientific analysis. Epistemological reflexivity therefore involves “[providing] cognitive tools that can be turned back on the subject of the cognition” (Bourdieu 2004: 4). The trick is to “objectivate objectification”: the construction of the object of study by the analyst is the moment of an epistemological break against commonly held knowledge that must in turn be taken as its own object of study. Reflexivity thus does not constitute a field of inquiry reserved for a few marginal philosophical strands; it is at the very foundation of the sociological enterprise as it provides a basis which is epistemological rather than ontological. Taking into account also the inextricable link between the field of knowledge and that of power delineated by Michel Foucault (1997) with his notion of power/knowledge, Bourdieu insists on substituting the radical doubt of this stance with a sort of hyper-positivism, applied to the researcher him- or herself in an endless loop of “self-objectivation.” The cornerstone of Bourdieu’s critical sociology is thus to transform reflexivity into a reflex (Bourdieu 2004: 89).

This “science of science” is meant to allow us to identify the conditions under which academic discourse is produced while maintaining “epistemological vigilance.” This vigilance manifests itself on three levels which correspond respectively to what Bourdieu calls the three forms of scholastic fallacy (Bourdieu 2000a). First, epistemological vigilance must be exercised against the presuppositions associated with the occupation of a position held within a given social space as well as the particular trajectory that led to it. Second, the researcher must throw back into question the doxa of the university field, which is to say the set of rules that are taken for granted and which constitute “the order of things” within academia (for example, the postulated validity of certain methodologies). Third, and the most dangerous fallacy, the “intellectualist” bias encourages the researcher to observe social life as a spectacle rather than as a series of concrete situations that require being navigated as such. The “epistemocentrism” inherent in every form of theorizing projects in practice a scholastic viewpoint that belongs to a different social logic.²

Bourdieu’s reflexive epistemology is foremost aimed at historicizing scientific reason. Rather than viewing science as a collection of transcendent truths as with the positivist position, it forces the researcher to recognize that rational scientific criteria are themselves a product of an intellectual history, rather than a primordial essence. Against the postmodern vision that, at its extreme, leads to a reduction of the social world to texts, reflexive epistemology reminds the researcher of the importance of understanding practices as practices: after all, practices are only logical to the extent that to be logical remains practical. Rejecting at the same time absolutist positivism and relativist postmodernism, Bourdieu straddles between modernist and postpositivist epistemologies (Bourdieu 2004: 106). On one hand, the “polemical action of scientific reason” brings the scientist closer to true knowledge, or an “approximated” or “rectified” knowledge (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1991: 8). Although perhaps a bit utopian, Bourdieu believed profoundly in the ability of reason to reason itself, and to explain the progressive and even cumulative nature of science. On the other hand, assuming an analytical posture based on the idea that “the most neutral science exerts effects which are anything but neutral,” Bourdieu (1991: 134) historicizes (and thus relativizes) the very notion of truth.³ In so doing, he proposes a social science founded not on reason as such but rather on reasoning (Guzzini 2000: 152). By encouraging social sciences to intake themselves the object of research, reflexive epistemology becomes a virtual Archimedes point upon which science rests.⁴

In order to turn the weapons of sociology against itself, Bourdieu applies to his own work the same conceptual and analytical devices that he forged over a number of decades. However, he decries the “narcissism” of autobiographical approaches to reflexivity. Rather, he insists that socioanalysis must focus on the social conditions of the production of knowledge, and therefore on the objective position of the researcher in the academic field, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the position of the academic field vis-à-vis others (Eagleton-Pierce 2011). As Trine Villumsen Berling shows in her chapter, the academic environment is constituted as a social field endowed with a structure wherein the struggle over the positions that actors occupy, and the dispositions that allow them to evolve as actors, are played out. It is through this depiction that we turn to the second contribution of Bourdieu’s work to IR: a relational ontology.

A relational ontology

Constructivism has found an audience in IR by highlighting a problem that has plagued the social sciences for several decades: the structure vs. agency dilemma. As Wendt aptly noted (1987: 337–8), this fundamental debate originates in “two truisms about social life”:

1) human beings and their organizations are purposeful actors whose actions help reproduce or transform the society in which they live; and 2) society is made up of social relationships, which structure the interactions between their purposeful actors. Taken together these truisms suggest that human agents and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bourdieu’s concepts
• 2 Methodology
• 3 Knowledges
• 4 Power
• 5 Strategy
• 6 Security
• 7 Culture
• 8 Gender
• 9 Norms
• 10 Sovereignty
• 11 Integration
• 12 Citizenship
• Index