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.