About
the article:
In the
article “Writing crisis, watching rebels: The technopolitics of the
International Crisis Group in Lebanon (and beyond)” Nikolas Kosmatopolous makes
an assessment of the role of the International Crisis Group (ICG) which is a
non-profit NGO who focuses on research on conflict issues, but with research
recommendations for diplomats, the world bank and other agencies. The paper
tries to explain the contradictions between explaining a crisis situation
within an already existing power structure – both societal and within the
framework of the already-existing sentinel (the think tank that constitutes
ICG).
The whole
article starts with the bomb as a concrete object to describe the
situation of Lebanon on the brink of crisis – also in order to describe ICG’s
practice in their monthly reports when they try to explain each crisis zone’s
situation with an upward arrow, sidelined arrow and a downward arrow. The
background of the bomb illustrating the threat of crisis in Lebanon never
erupted (figuratively and literally), but still Kosmatopolous describes how
they never removed it from the report – thus the bomb became a metaphor for the
normalization of the conflict level in Lebanon. It is from this point he
elaborates his analysis on how to understand think tanks of a specific (hybrid
kind)
in general and ICG in particular. The way to do so, according to Kosmatopolous,
is to understand how
innovations and technologies that come with the think tank
reconstitute power in general.
The main
goal of the ICG’s reports is to simplify crises to make them understandable for
those who read them (world bank, diplomats, politicans etc.), however, this
would necessarily be done within the model format and the framework of
conception of the crisis expert who does the assessment and analysis. This is
an effective model to construct an understandable method and theory of the
bigger – and thus far more complex – crises. As Kosmatopolous describes, the
report has to be easy to read, and not too complicated to understand.
The goal of
the ICG’s reports are of course not just to spread awareness to policy makers
and agents (here of course not meant as spies but as merely actors in the field
of crisis management), but to create a field of crisis prevention.
However, necessarily the subject – through its process – creates an
uncontrollable chimera where the constructed meanings, through the framework of
the analyst, where the dialectics between stimulation of action and incomplete
knowledge could create another reaction than expected (cf. “if you predict a
crisis you will always be right”)
with references to Keck and Lakoff (the sentinel device). Thus Kosmatopolous – grounded with the
previous sentence as the premise of his study – seeks to explore how the
entities that are defined as threats “are intrinsically linked to the qualities
of the sentinel device and vice versa”.
Cons in
the articles to be mentioned:
The article
is without doubt an interesting piece which does raise some important
questions. Especially on the issue of Foucault’s processes of subjectivication
where the issues raised through ICG and the information it seeks to provide
necessarily has to be developed and produced through a certain specter or
framework. This specter or/and framework is of course deployed through the
mechanism of power/knowledge of the sentinel where the different actors in the
different conflict zones are declared and identified. The best example provided
by Kosmatopolous is how it divides the world into hot and cold zones.
This is – by my opinion – far more important to understand the field which ICG
operates within and how they perceives the world.
Kosmatopolous
writes that “I choose to look at how the function of the sentinel (the
ICG/The think tank) in a particular context produces and constructs at the
same time two dialectical types of subjects: on one side the subject to be
placed under surveillance (the area of crisis) and on the other side the
subject to be responsible for that surveillance (the ICG)”. The think tank
(The ICG) creates the one it is surveying and researching. This is of course
true, where ICG necessarily has the right of definition by default. Gareth
Evans said that the real strength of the ICG is the detailed local knowledge of
particular situations. Kosmatopolous then writes: “If the CEO of the ICG
understands the organization as a particular sentinel whose major role is to
provide “gold standard reporting” to Western intelligence services, the
researchers of the organization are then constituted and selected according to
perceived or proved abilities to provide that reporting”.
However,
Kosmatopolous is forgetting another factor in this calculation between
the ICG and the research subjects, primarily the sentinel itself which is the
main agent in this production of relations and the power-relation that it
operates within (which in Antonio Gramsci’s words would be: not only the
maintaining, but also the production of hegemony). It is thus disappointing
that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is only rewarded with a footnote – and only as
a reference to mimicry of her title “Can the subaltern talk?” – when she is one
of the main critics of Foucault’s, if not totally flawed, but lacking analysis
of processes of subjectivication (Foucault, who Kosmatopolous names as
one of the most important theoreticians to reveal relations of dominations).
It would
for example be very interesting to have a more concrete elaboration by
Kosmatopolous on this power-relation dialectic between the subject being
assessed by the ICG and vice versa, the sentinel and those who it tries to
influence (the world bank, diplomats etc.) and the framework which it does this
within. Western think tanks are not and
have never been, the ones they try to introduce or (re-)represent in their
research - neither class wise, historically or intellectually. This must
necessarily affect the product (the report) in ideological ways.
On the contrary,
according to Spivak criticism of Foucault: Westerners (or in this case, Western
based think tanks) are historically specific products within a class context as
a result of the communities in which they are produced into and from. Something
else – as the post-structuralist Foucault claims – implies placing the think
tanks in the void of history without colonial heritage or ethnocentric
influence. . As Kosmatopolous writes: “I seek to explore how do the entities
that are identified as threats are intrinsically linked to the qualities of the
sentinel device and vice versa” Unfortunately, I think he should focus more on
the already established power-relations that already exist before the research
– globally and locally – which the field researcher and the ICG operates
within, and how this power-relation necessarily must affect the world crisis
reports – in highly ideological ways.
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