Sara Gormley - Entry No. 7 (Final Post)

This class began its process to challenge the commonly accepted way of thinking in the first assignment when Tolstoy argued that historical moments are not created by the Great Men that history praises, but rather an interweaving of events that would bring about this precise moment to be seized upon by men in the right place at the right time. This alone creates a wormhole that can be delved into to analyze the multifaceted history that has often gone unexplored. Latour has built off this idea by introducing an addition notion to the experience of viewing history. He rejects the notion of human supremacy and encourages the acceptance of the environment as an actor in the world’s affairs. These affairs have been tied into the world stage so I have been able to apply it to debates over things such as the international security system and drone strikes that I often face in my area of study. Technology has created a new actor in the drone and it should be analyzed in a political basis but also with a moral perspective, which is what this class has done. As the course discussion has evolved, we find ourselves considering the idea of the ‘’trickster.” I have appreciated the debate on the validity and impact the trickster can have as someone who acts as mediator between cultures, by being an expert in one area and its ambassador to another. As someone would hopes to work in the field of Foreign Service, this has given me a new perspective on the work I could be going. How others will receive an outsider as an expert within their sphere is something that must be considered. 

My last presentation gave me a new perspective on how to consider the anthropologists and the stories told by fieldworkers. I have long considered the perspective of policy makers and the field of elite politicians and how they navigate the stories they tell, but it has been a new experience for me to consider its impact on how history will be remembered.  Tolstoy refers to the way we consider stories of history, and now we are finishing by considering the way in which we can give history stories a voice to the world. This class has encouraged me to think dynamically and view history in a more multilayered approach. I do not simply consider the events of our world, but everything that is encompassed within a story like its actors and impact. War and peace is a way in which I can use this layered approach to analyze today’s society. 

Ultimately, this class tested the way I viewed the world I live in and gave me knowledge to equip myself with going into the future. It questioned every way I considered my actions in the world as well as my perspective on its history. Though it has been difficult at times to find myself discussing a topic so familiar yet from a whole new perspective at times, I think it was a necessary challenge to add an additional level of depth to my understanding that I may not have gained elsewhere. The blogs have given me an outlet to flesh out my thoughts on the topics before entering a class where I am introduced to a room full of additional opinions from which I can learn. One thing I can confidently state that I have come away with in this class is a new take on my previously unquestioned understanding on history, and a shift in the feeling of responsibility I have in providing knowledge to the world.

Danièle Saint-Ville-Leplé - Entry n.6 (Khalili)

Laleh Khalili’s text is an extract from her book Time in the Shadows, Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. The text is the fourth chapter of this work. This chapter is titled "Invisible prisons, proxy-run prisons". Laleh Khalili investigates here the illeberal secret processes put in place by the US (War on terror against terrorism) and Israel (occupation of Palestine). Both sovereign states are in a logic of counterinsurgency.

The very definition of insurgency is to be hard to isolate from the surrounding population. The processes implied by both states include incarceration without trials and  even torture (for example in Khiyam). The use of proxy is characteristic. 

Proxies provide the mechanisms of concealment and denial by the State. A proxy may be an informal militia or  a sovereign state’s secret services. Proxies create a space of uncertainty where responsibilities for actions do not appear easily. The sovereign state itself does not appear to take in charge violent actions and uses  the legal ambiguities of juridiction and accountability.

The heart of the matter is to create zones of invisibility, to « relegate detainees to invisibility and inaudibility » (p.128), in unidentified black sites. The combination ofinvisibility and deniabilitu allows secret services to perform interrogations that would be considered illegal otherwise. The politics of intelligence needs such a space to which the press has no access.

Hannah Berwian - entry no. 7 (Final post)

As a student of International Relations (IR), one of the first things you learn about is the origin of the discipline itself. If political science already exists, why is there the need for a separate discipline that pertains to the realm of international politics?  The response to this question itself is surrounded by a good deal of myth. The favoured way of putting it, is probably the liberal or what later has come to be termed the “idealist” origin. After the First World War people noticed: Millions of us have died for virtually no significant reason. This is bad. We are all human beings capable of reasonable thinking and acting. We want to and should be able to prevent such calamities from reoccurring ever again.

In light of this not unambitious project a group of anglo-saxon scholars set out to find the causes of war and eliminate them along with their effects. In this tradition, the study of International relations has been understood as the study of the causes of war founded upon the admirable belief in a potentially peaceful future for humankind. This was amongst other things to be achieved through international diplomacy and cooperation, intergovernmental intuitions and co. Of course, with the occurrence of the second world war, the “idealists” were brutally awakened from their dream and the realist paradigm embarked upon its hegemony within the discipline that is simply more pessimistic about the potentialities of human nature in the absence of an overarching authority.

If you take a class termed “The making of War and Peace” as student of international relations you would expect the course to be set in the framework above. States are the main actors, war is something like “a state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties”. However, this class has contributed to my endeavour and furthered my capacity to challenge the traditional framework of international relations in many respects. In other words, it has helped me to deconstruct the IR discourse. 

To this goal, an essential step is the questioning of underlying assumptions. To start with the methodological dimension, a critique of the positivist, scientific framework ran like a thread though many of our sessions and is reflected in the famous third debate in the discipline of IR (explaining vs. understanding).  As I pointed out before, IR likes to study the causes of war. The study of causes is linked to a scientific methodology, establishing law-like generalizations on the basis of quantifiable data within. The aim is explanation, why did an event occur? Most importantly, it relies on the assumption that the theorist is outside of the phenomenon that he is investigating, that she is objective.

 However, as we learnt form Tolstoy we will never be able to grasp the infinite amount of causal factors that play into such complex events as the victory and defeat of Napoleon, or any kind of minor and major conflict. Every event is unique and can change with a tiny detail, depending on a variety of forces coming together. As these complex relationships transcend the human capacity, we will never be able to grasp them fully. Tolstoy’s emphasis on the limits of the human capacities and impossibility of objectivity are significant insights.  Denouncing human agency, however, Tolstoy still seems to succumb to a different force, that is science.  He still accepts the causal and explanatory framework.

At the same time, his epilogue also bears a hint to a different approach: “How are people capable of slewing fellow man?”. This is the fundamental question that Tolstoy identifies in his writing. Rather then asking why (to assert causes), Tolstoy asks “how” is it possible that human beings kill one another. In my view, given the original intention of the discipline this is the very question that IR should endeavour to respond to. “How” suggests an interpretive, bottom-up approach, that aims at understanding a phenomenon in terms of the meaning that has been attributed to it. After all, war is a social phenomenon. In a discipline that deals with the human realm, understanding the meaning, motivations and intentions that underlie human actions is indispensable.

Likewise, Foucault has challenged the scientific discourse by drawing attention to the micro-mechanics of power, the production of knowledge and truth. The methodological underpinnings of a discipline as outlined above relate to his argument as they bear assumptions on how we can know and what counts as proper form of knowledge. In a positivist framework, this is only what we can sense and measure.

Arguably, the interpretive approach still suffers from anthropocentrism. The decentering of the study of war and peace away from the human is another red thread that has been running through our course. Addressing the ontological dimension, Latour, Masco and Kosmatopolous have drawn our attention to non-human sources of agency and power, again on micro-mechanics: The microbe, the nuclear bomb, the report, technopolitics.

When it comes to the climate change debate that Latour is very committed to and that represents one of the biggest challenges to contemporary International Relations, a less anthropocentric approach is invaluable. Latour addressed the death of the god of science, and its implications for the controversy. The reports of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change is an interesting candidate for analysis of technopolitics. Can it function as a counter-narrative to the enlightenment myth of human dominion over nature?

Other questions an alternative ontology may raise are: Could nature be considered a political actor in itself? Can nature speak? For example through natural disasters? Or, more importantly, can it be heard? Then again, the very concept of “nature” already assumes an anthropocentric perspective in the way that it is constructed in opposition to the “human”.  How can we deconstruct this dichotomy? Can we deconstruct this dichotomy given that we’ll never be able to rid ourselves off the anthropocentric lens and as Thomas Nagel (1974) put it, will never know what it is like to be a bat?

If International Relations is to contribute to the mitigation of a climatic catastrophe, it has to thoroughly rethink its methodological and ontological assumptions and has to confront a war foreign to its own terms: the war over the legitimate sources of knowledge.

Dea Closson- Final Post

I’m going to be really honest when I say I had no idea what I was getting my self into when I decided to join this class. I can say it’s partially because of the unnecessarily difficult registration process with Science Po and partially because I like jumping head first into academics without knowing much about it, but I had no idea what this class was going to be about.  The title “War and Peace: the Making of” greatly intrigued my international relations brain. I was assuming, based off the title, (and we all know never judge a book by it’s title, but yet I judge my classes by their titles…) that this would be a prescriptive International relations class discussing the different classifications for war and peace and how we can achieve those classifications.  This was not quite what I found on that first day of class. But that is for all the better; because this class is unlike many of the classes I have, and probably will ever, take. At George Washington University (my home institution) we approach international relations with practical, real world approach.  This class was very much out of my comfort zone and sometimes significantly over my head in its focus on more theoretical, philosophical takes on IR topics. But it is classes like this that are the reason I chose to study abroad in the first place, to get a new, different view on my studies of choice. 

            I’ll be the first to admit that my understanding of philosophic themes extends no further than the one philosophy class I took in high school, so reading our first two readings on Tolstoy and Foucault was quite the experience for me. But these first readings blew me away; Tolstoy and Foucault opened up a whole new way of thinking about everything I have been studying in university. To think about history, and mankind as something that is essentially constantly at war with itself, and to shift my classification of history from great men to trends was completely new to me. And then to top this off with Foucault’s idea of power, my way of thinking had been totally blown off course.  When I apply this new way of thinking to the previous things I have learned in my International Relations courses it has been eye opening the different levels of understanding I can gain. At the same time as this course I was taking a course on the Ethics of War, and a course on U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration and it was really interesting to discuss the same actions, for example drone warfare, in three different lights; from a philosophical, anthropological stand point, from a ethical, legal standpoint, and from a practical, policy standpoint.  Taking this class has allowed me to be able to question actions from a whole different point of view.

From a practical standpoint, in regards to the functionality of the class, I enjoyed the way it was set up. I wished many times that there been a way to overview the reading before we did them, or wrote our essays after the discussion, but this is only because I had troubles understanding the readings. This is obviously not the point of the essays, as they we’re supposed to evaluate our own comprehension of the readings, so I understand the limited guidance. To me the discussions we’re incredibly interesting, but as I was not confidant in my understanding of the texts I did not feel comfortable speaking up many times.  I think this could be remedied with a forced question set up, similar to Collin’s (sorry I peeked at everyone’s essays).  Overall I think the class was really interesting, and very much worth taking. I even thought the reading amount wasn’t that bad either. I learned a lot, but the most valuable thing I learned was a new way of viewing information.  It is through many lenses that you can get the whole picture.

Georgina Kilborn- Final Entry (no. 7)

To view this course as if it were a text is to go beyond the conventional theories of war and peacemaking as grand achievements orchestrated by “great men”. Rather, this course offers insight into the polycentric nature of both violent and peaceful events, in which viruses, drones, reports and surveillance mechanisms are as capable as human agency in accomplishing such outcomes. 

By beginning with Tolstoy’s pluralistic and less rational and actor-centred interpretation of history-making, the foundations were laid for exploring how ‘great movements of people’ throughout history come about. He employs inharmonious elements such as inevitability and freewill, the State and Power, morality and physical strength, freedom and necessity and consciousness and reason, to describe how the antagonistic dualism between these forces can be used to analyse our conception of history. In doing so, he initiates polemics against “historians” who idealise the role of powerful men.

Fittingly complementing and serving as an extension of the Tolstoyan model, was the inclusion of Latour’s, “The Pasteurisation of France” into the course. Latour restores to history the role of unreason and chance. He widens the range of actors and gives war a scientific analogy, through an analysis of Pasteur’s scientific revolution and it’s engineering as a key social transformation in France. Interestingly, Latour takes issue with sociologists and how the division of society and nature has been organised in modern times, therefore destructing the walls between society and science. He thus eschews many social scientist methods, preferring an inductive approach- analysing the problem from below. He emphasises the importance of associations between ‘actants’ and how the movements of these networks function to create power. HIs introduction of medicine and biopolitics to study power resembles Foucauldian method. However, where Latour enters his analysis of power relations through the laboratory, Foucault commences with the study of powerful discourse and knowledge.

Thus, Foucault’s “Society must be defended”, serves as a perfect link to the content of the course thus far. Foucault offers an insightful theory for our conception of human society, in which war functions as a model through which social relations can be interpreted in times of both peace and war. His "historico-political” discourse, on perpetual war, is evident in all instruments of power, therefore offering a robust assessment of sovereignty. Foucault focuses on power at the level where it is invested in real intentions and practices. So, where Foucault is interested in the ‘how’ of power and looks to its micro levels, he is essentially against liberal and Marxist deductive methods of analysis.

The idea that war is never averted but is an ever-present undercurrent in our ‘peaceful’ society, infiltrating the fabric of modern politics, institutions and its discourses, is evident in our inquiry into the ‘report’. The technology of the ‘report’ is not to be forgotten as a new mode of control and violence, as is purported by Taussig and more recently established in the decoding of NSA files by whistlelower, Edward Snowden. An interesting discussion explored in this week of study was the concept of the ‘middle man’ or ‘trickster’. Taussig cites the “muchachos” as occupying the middle space and similarly, whistle-blowers such as Snowden fill the invaluable position between two camps- in this case between the NSA and the population. This is a powerful position in which the actor can speak to both sides but is at high risk.

The paradigms of war and peace have been exponentially expanded by the technology of the drone, as is illuminated by Derek Gregory. For me, this enquiry was particularly pertinent as it elucidated the new ‘morals’ of the war on terror, as well as the micro processes of how the war is being waged, thereby looking beyond the ‘terrorist’ as a central agent in international war making.

Further, counterinsurgency confinements constitute fixtures of asymmetric wars elucidates Khalili. For Khalili, the state is the locus of power, and while this is contradictory to Foucault’s conception of how power arises, she nevertheless offers an interesting evaluation of how a state can be liberal but maintain illiberal practices in the context of incarceration.

The notion of ‘blurring’ can be seen to tie our studies on the report, the drone and counterinsurgency confinement, neatly together. When analysing drone wars, we noted that there are blurred boundaries and legal parameters in the international ‘war zone’. In the context of the report, covert operations and counterterrorism mechanisms constituted a blurring on behalf of the state. Moreover, in terms of incarceration, active secrecy and objects such as CIA black sites, embody the notion of blurring.

Thus, if this course were itself a text, it would be praised for linking recognised theories with post-colonial events in an insightful and thoughtfully interlaced manner. The works studied have provided a broad foundation from which the traditional notions of leaders, chains of command and strategies can be undermined in order to better understand power relations in the context of war and peace.