Drawing on Judith Butler’s work and a series of studies associated with actor–network theory (ANT), this paper engages with political agency through the concept of performativity. Based on the empirical analysis of a hunger strike that took place in Brussels in 2012 and involved 23 illegal immigrants, we aim to achieve three things. First, we foreground physical bodies as political entities caught up in multiple modes of doing politics. Second, we show how such modes relate to one another, reinforcing citizenship, activism and party politics as specific performances of agency associated with liberal democracy. Finally, we argue that the Brussels hunger strike also challenges these performances by failing to meet certain expectations about what it is to be political/act politically. As the European refugee crisis is generating louder and louder voices, hunger strikes sensitise us to modes of doing that work by becoming passive, silent, weak and vulnerable. Such processes, we suggest, expand the standard repertoire of modes of doing and may refigure our understanding of the interaction between transnational and liberal democratic politics—in International Relations, ANT and beyond.
The epistemologies of international interventions are receiving increased attention. An emerging literature on knowledge production in peace- and statebuilding has questioned any given authority of western epistemologies in conflict contexts. However, this article argues that by not interrogating into the conditions of producing representations, the literature paradoxically leaves interveners’ representations and knowledge forms intact. The article develops a conceptual framework for a reflexive analysis of how phenomena in conflict contexts are made known and representable. The framework’s value is illustrated in an analysis of the epistemic practices and their conditions of possibility that from 1995 to 2015 produced the ‘informal economy’ as interventionary object in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The multifaceted work of production included international standard-setting procedures, survey distributions and a development of calculative techniques. Conditioned by this work, various ‘informalities’ were produced as interventionary object, with distinct stakes brought into the respective object through the acts of producing it.
Kratochwil stands out as one of those very few thinkers in international relations (IR) shose wolrk tries to understand the implications of thinking assumptions about ontology, social theory, and scientific discovery (and, indeed, ethics) in parallel. The present article reconstructs the thought of Friedrich Kratochwil to exemplify the necessary coherence of thought from politics to science to ethics, a project which is truly important for the development of theorising in IR. And at the same time, it uses this reconstruction of his multi-layered coherence for portraying a significantly different understanding of a central thinker in IR. For my reconstruction presents this very quest for coherence as Kratochwil’s underlying theme and the role of practice as the bridge between the different layers of his theorising. As a result, for him, there cannot be Realpolitik without politics, theory without reflexivity, science without judgement, or ethics without a humanist sense of responsibility.
Conceiving power relations as a subset of causal relations can be used toexpose the problems of a certain behaviouralist take on causality and develop aninterpretivist approach to explanation. The first section of this article shows that abehaviouralist approach ultimately clashes with a relational understanding of power,since the latter requires endogenising values and understandings in an analysis in whichseveral causal paths to the same outcome can exist (equifinality) with radically differentimplications for attributing power. Power relations can be non-linear, and power dispositionalor latent, as well as not translating into influence. The second section drawsthe consequences of these contradictions by conceptualising causal/social mechanismsfor and in an interpretivist framework. Such mechanisms can be part of a wider analysisof contingent processes that answer ‘how possible’ questions. Although interpretivistprocess-tracing provides explanations without strict regularity, such processes includemechanisms which are transferable to other cases, hence generalisable. Finally, thearticle establishes a specific discursive mechanism of crisis reduction in foreign policyidentity discourses, as developed in the comparative study of the processes that make usunderstand the unexpected return of geopolitical thought in Europe in the 1990s.
Research on climate change and conflict has been conducted in ways that may lead us to overlook risks of conflicts and miss opportunities to prevent them. In response, this article formulates an analytical framework based on hermeneutical perspectives on social action.The main argument is that climate factors are not the main drivers of conflict under conditions of climate change. Instead, the main mechanisms are how actors interpret their historical experiences and roles as guides for future actions and how international structures shape the scope of action in a constitutive fashion.Previous research has tended to construct the past as an objective assemblage of occurrences. However, the past can never be an ‘objective’ series of events and causal connections. Actors always interpret the past and construct it as meaning-laden history. History, in turn, is fundamentally ambiguous; it can be constructed as a story that has to be continued or one that needs to be broken with. An analysis of the relation between Ethiopia and Eritrea illustrates the theoretical framework. It concludes that despite their past enmity, there is no imminent risk of conflict in connection with climate change but strong reasons for both actors to maintain status quo.
Cooperation in international organizations (IOs) is sustained by the socialization of state agents and their internalization of the organizations’ norms and identity. This article builds on a structured comparison of the scope conditions for socialization among permanent representatives in two organs of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the Political and Security Com-mittee (PSC) and the North Atlantic Council (NAC). In this study, we present some unexpected findings: First, the NAC is experiencing greater internalization (stronger socialization) than the PSC, normally held as a critical case of international sociali-zation. Second, unambiguous norms favour socialization to a larger degree than ambiguous norms, refuting a widely held assumption about the pro-internalization effect of diffuse norms. Given that member states seem to grant their representa-tives larger “room for manoeuvre” when the norms of the IO have material stakes, the socialization effect of an IO’s norms is dependent on the perceived utility of the organization’s mission.
As a ‘rising power’, India is noted for its prominent role in contests over how the so-called ‘new’ capital â knowledge â is to be governed. Despite it being commonly seen as a proponent of free access to knowledge and technology, this article argues that the Indian state has in fact embraced the orthodox logic of private intellectual property rights as key to its competitiveness and economic growth. This article shows that the Indian state has played a decisive role in the transformation of the Indian patent regime: not only does it take the mantle of the regulator to bring India’s patent system in line with international standards; it also emerges as a propagator of patent rules that facilitate the accumulation of knowledge as capital, not least in the hands of the Indian state itself, justified in the name of growth and development for the nation as a whole.
How are threat images framed and constructed by the so-called warlord democrats (WDs)? Societies that have suffered from large-scale civil wars are commonly permeated by inter-group fear and hate. In these contexts, former military or political leaders of armed groups sometimes become involved in post-war politics. These WDs can act as reconciliation spoilers by making securitising moves, i.e. they construct threat images that are potentially very costly for fragile post-conflict democratisation processes. It is therefore crucial to explore WDs’ speech acts. Yet, the literature on post-war politics has largely overlooked these individual aspects. This article argues that the central components of securitisation theory can be useful in understanding this phenomenon if adjusted to the contextual circumstances of post-war societies. By analysing speech acts by seven WDs in post-war Liberia and Sierra Leone, two forms of framing strategies stand out as particularly relevant. First, WDs’ securitising moves are often framed as veiled threats of violence, as it is often deemed too risky for these individuals outside formal power positions to overtly express threats in a generally de-securitised setting. Second, when WDs construct threats, they often chose to frame themselves or their constituencies or followers as the referent object of security.
A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Human Nature', Science and International Political Theory" by Chris Brown published in a previous issue of the journal.