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How do we know?

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by Jarrod Hayes

30 May 2015, 1157 EDT

In her review of my 2012 IO article on identity and security in democracy, Charli asked a very important question: how do we know other states are democracies? I think this question, writ more broadly, is something IR scholars overlook to a detrimental degree. Perhaps because of the objectivist ontology that underlies much of IR scholarship (and is perhaps an extension of human psychology) I think there is a general reluctance to problematize collectively held knowledge of the world.* But, as events playing out today show, the question of ‘how do we know’ in the context of states and societies is crucially important.

I am currently teaching on my department’s 10-week EU study abroad and recently the students were confronted with an argument linking knowledge to a looming challenge for the EU. Specifically, the challenge is the potential that the UK may exit the EU. During the course of a briefing by a British MEP, some of the students asked about ‘Brexit’ and specifically why the UK, alone among the EU member countries, was confronting voluntary exit from the Union. His response focused on the role of the media in the UK. He pointed out that a substantial portion of the print press in the UK is controlled by three corporate groups: News International (Rupert Murdoch), Hollinger International (formerly headed by Conrad Black), and the Daily Mail. All three are Euro-skeptic, albeit for different reasons (Murdoch chafes at the regulatory obstacles put up by the EU while Black once urged the UK to join NAFTA).

As a result, for years major media outlets in the UK have published a constant stream of claims challenging the competence and merits of the EU. This long-term misinformation and exaggeration, according to the MEP, eventually changed what Britons know about the EU. While any given story may be dubious, or at least obviously politically slanted, over time the political agenda of those media outlets has seeped into collective British consciousness, giving rise to a relatively high level of eurosketicism. It strikes me that if the MEP is correct, there is a powerful dynamic at play here that has the potential to produce a dramatic shift in international relations, and scholars can engage theoretically and empirically.

There are other examples that as well. Russian media control and manipulation of social and traditional media throughout the Ukraine crisis has in part prompted the rise of a new term, hybrid warfare. Manipulation of media and knowledge in the security context is nothing new of course. States have used propaganda to manipulate public knowledge during times of war for a long time. But the fact that Russian manipulation surprises us should serve as a warning that perhaps we have gotten too complacent the nature of shared knowledge and the question of how we know.**

 

*Obviously there are exceptions, notably scholars working in the Foucauldian tradition. Also, those in foreign policy analysis examining misperception and intelligence failures (e.g. Iraq).

**Dan Nexon points out that knowledge is social for social scientists, too.

Jarrod Hayes

Jarrod Hayes is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research interests include the IR theory, social construction of threat, societal mechanisms of security within democracies, and the social construction of environmental problems. His first book Constructing National Security: US Relations with India and China was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press and his second, an edited volume entitled Constructivism Reconsidered, was published by University of Michigan Press 2018. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals including European Journal of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Environmental Politics, International Affairs, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Nonproliferation Review, and Security Studies.

1 Comment

  1. factoidlover
    factoidlover on 2 June 2015 at 11.01 EDT

    This is an interesting post that caused me to ask myself the following questions.

    Is America a democracy in more or less ways than the UK (to keep things simple)? The US has more large scale broadcasters, but not necessarily any greater range of media slant that the three UK examples.

    One way I thought about this was to conclude, yes both are democracies. While both have media outlets that conform to certain socio-political views, there’s still a range of those views. Russian media provides one, very manicured, outlet.

    Another way I thought about this was that there really isn’t a democracy per se in the US and UK – there are increasingly deaf bands of socio-political groups in a mutual support system with their preferred media outlet. Inside each band members increasingly see the other bands as anti-democratic, because they will no longer engage in the exchange of ideas. If each group believes this about the other, is there a democracy, or simply a Balkanized group of politically oriented parties, each vying for power, each seeing all others as anti-democratic?

    The stalemate tactics of the US government currently has reached an intensity level in which sorting agreements among views is far less likely than one group simply vying for control to shut down the other anti-democratic group. The polarization has led to most people seeing only three positions along the political spectrum – if you are Blue, you are a slimy socialist, if you are Red, you are a dangerous anarchist, if you are Purple you are a spineless idiot.