Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Christine Sylvester. It is the 19th installment in our “End of IR Theory” companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post refers to Sylvester’s article (PDF). A response, authored by Lauren Wilcox, will appear at 11am Eastern.
Other entries in the symposium–when available–may be reached via the “EJIR Special Issue Symposium” tag.
Other entries in the symposium–when available–may be reached via the “EJIR Special Issue Symposium” tag.
…War is human. People fight…in the years preceding our last two wars, thinking about defense undervalued the human as well as the political aspects of war.
So says H.R. McMaster, the intellectual army major general who led the American third armored cavalry regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Writing in the “Week in Review” section of the New York Times on July 21, 2013, he decries the revolution in military affairs that had the US fighting its recent wars with wishful thinking loaded onto distance computers, rather than with common sense and a common touch on the ground. It backfired: “we learned [that] American forces must cope with the political and human dynamics of war in complex, uncertain environments. Wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be waged remotely.”
McMaster and I live in different worlds: I, for one, would not be keen on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq no matter how they were waged. Nonetheless, he and I are both convinced that war is human: humans plan, prepare, arm, assault, resist, hide, trade, and flee collective armed violence. War can certainly be understood in other terms, as it usually is in IR. It can be conceptualized as an element of system dynamics, as national or military/paramilitary operations of armed conflict, as changing strategy or changing weaponry, as a set of causes and correlates, as the military-industrial media-entertainment network and so on. Such “other ways” differ in many important respects, but each one abstracts war away from humans to what McMaster indicates are illusions, leaving war’s executioners bereft of important knowledge about the “social, economic and historical factors that constitute the human dimension of war.”
That could be one punch line of my article in EJIR’s special issue –except that I’m not talking there about what the US military per se needs to learn, but what much of IR might benefit from learning; in fact, though, the military and IR could both think more about people and their experiences. In the article, I consider how IR has moved from a field of singularities to a field of great differences, as people–diverse humans with diverse ideas about the world–infiltrate a once small realm of habitation. That post-cold war repopulation of IR has been life saving for the field, I’d say. But it hasn’t gone far enough. The irony is that most new camps of IR continue the tradition of sidestepping the people question, which, stated most simply, is: in what ways do ordinary, everyday men, women, and children, as well as scholars coming to IR from countries outside the usual great powers traditions of thinking, understand, experience, and behave in key areas of international relations? Instead, the IR myth-in-practice that agency (power) is lodged at some remove from “us” and from ordinary life seems undiminished. Even critical camps eager to change IR show remarkable fascination with theorists, theories, and theorizing that take the scholar–and maybe no one else in international relations–to a more “elevated” level. As just one example, people in war zones are still largely missing as subjects of analysis in much of the new IR. Groups of people might be mentioned briefly, get substituted by college students in experiments about conflict, or be lamented as starving or raped in the DRC. But here’s the wrench: those people of war do not usually get to tell their stories and thereby help set agendas of IR research. The field knows better than they do about how to think about war and international relations (surely common people can’t have real and lasting agency in the “out there” of powerful states and militaries…). Feminist IR in some of its many incarnations provides an exception to this unfortunate habit of thought. A new generation goes to ground to view war as human experience, studying up from people rather than down from parsimoniously abstract theory.
In that regard, I believe the post-cold war end of a narrow field of IR/theory is only the beginning of an afterlife that still must take a turn d’apres. That is to say, it must consider international relations according to people who, in a variety of ways, do international relations, watch it, suffer it, win or lose as a result of it, and even shape aspects of “it” as it shapes them. The field would be advised to embrace what McMaster calls common sense, which is not the same as scholastic forms of rationality. There’s no need to throw all abstraction into the sea; after all, human experience is itself conceptual and contested with regard to its many hidden and overt dimensions. Rather, the main to-do is to bring more human presence and sense to a field that still excises people, notwithstanding “decision makers” that often come across as calculation machines. McMaster is right: war is human. It requires humans in order to operate, and presumably so do other activities of relations international. If war remains a discipline-defining element of IR, then it behooves us to supplement our knowledge base now with some truly down-to-earth research.
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
Jane Goodall did “down-to-earth” research: she literally sat on the ground and carefully observed what a small group of named individuals did. Among other things, they fought wars. But these individuals were not humans. They lived in Gombe National Park, Kenya. I regard Goodall as a leading theorist of war, partly because she showed that war is not only human. This “war is human” slogan is gratingly anthropocentric. The path to knowledge is not by sloganeering but by asking questions, like “is war human?”
As I will present at the 8th Pan-European Conference of International Relations, war is social. Politics is social. (Both are post-human as Harmonious Jones points out) As we draw lines in the sand of space and time defining those who are US and those who are them, we divide our world based upon real, perceived, and fabricated differences. Systemic and structural theories forget that, in the end, humans form the structure. Thus, life is dynamic and uncertain. If we recall our classical realism, we find the emphasis on uncertainty and the anxiety it causes. We find the skepticism of harmony of interests because of the difficulty/nigh impossibility in getting multiple actors to work toward the same goal in the same way and to keep them there in perpetuity.
We have plenty of recent examples of individuals who reject the “legitimate” sovereign to whom they are beholden by the social contract. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden refused to follow orders and accept the sovereignty of the political order – they declared a de facto war on the United States government and will likely pay the price or seek shelter in a de jure sovereign territory. Christopher Dorner waged a violent war against the LAPD; a war that ended, as absolute wars must, in the annihilation of the losing side – Dorner.
The procedural turn using Bourdieu’s theory and methods are beneficial because they provide the instruments for explaining reality rather than attempting to force reality to fit into the “predictions” of an ideological, theoretical, or methodological model.
Theory, it is often said (indeed it has been said during this symposium), simplifies. However, this is not always true. Sometimes theory complicates things. Instead of abstracting away from the concrete towards ever greater parsimony and simplicity it moves in the opposite direction, adding in more details, uncovering more entanglements and giving voice to as many perspectives as possible.
These two kinds of theory have two completely different relationships to the empirical. Simplifying theory treats the empirical as data that are tested against the theory, which, if it is a strong theory, can withstand and thus disregard the data. This kind of theory stands apart from the empirical; in a sense it is in competition with it, running away from it. Complexifying theory, by contrast, directs researchers *towards* empirical study as an end in itself – because it is only through empirical work that the details that the theory demands can be documented. The concreteness and complexity is the whole point; theory only serves to aid and enable this adventure. This kind of theory is inseparable from empirical work, it can never be thought of apart from it.
The concrete, embodied humanness of war is indeed often unduly ignored by the abstractions of simplifying IR theory. The objects and structures of the international often appear inhuman in their corporate vastness. Complexifying IR theory (and its attendant empiricism) must work, therefore, to add the soft, fragile fleshiness of human beings back in. Yes, I think that’s very true.
However, the bodily, corporeal specificities of actual human beings are not the only kind of details that are unduly ignored by theory that gets abstract too quickly and too uncritically. Also ignored is the environment, other species, the material infrastructure that makes decision making possible, etc. Complexifying theory can and should do more than refocusing attention on concrete human beings. It should refocus attention on all kinds of concrete beings – all those that pertain, all those that relate, are relevant.
I think that simplifying theory certainly has its place but it is on its own grossly insufficient morally, politically and scientifically. Drawing attention to those human bodies affected by war but not involved in its planning and execution is very important as is the fleshing out (rather literally) of those abstract subjective ‘calculation-machines’ that some theory imagines into existence. However, this is not the whole story.
‘Calculation-machines’ not only have bodies, not only are they gendered and racialised, etc., they are also enveloped in complex social and technological networks. E.g. technologies of information visualisation – from a soldier drawing in the earth with a stick to Libyan rebels using Google Maps. Science and technology studies is bursting at the seams with this kind of work, which may not quite have the moral urgency of the study of human complexities but is no less necessary for ‘fleshing out’ (slightly less literally) our understanding of international affairs.
In short, yes we need to complexify IR’s abstractions – turn bloodless subjects into fully formed humans. But that is only part of it. Turning abstract ‘objects’ into complex, worldly ‘things’ (a distinction that Bruno Latour makes somewhere) is also a worthwhile endeavour. Fleshing out not only humans but also the world in which they dwell – and fight.
The Sylvester piece wants less abstraction and more “human presence.” But:
1. “Human presence” itself sounds like an abstraction — for what news editors call the human interest angle.
2. Why does IR need to produce more “human presence” when the human interest angle is more expertly supplied by war reporters?
3. The human interest angle is not necessarily complexifying. Sometimes, it can simplify. It is particularly prone to the simplicity of seeing only good guys and bad guys, perps and victims. Abstraction can complexify, human presence can over-simplify.
You may be right. I may be projecting. I understood “down-to-earth research” to mean ’empirical research’ of the kind that I describe but I could be wrong. ‘Human presence’ in and of itself doesn’t necessarily lead towards concreteness (although the fact that it is an abstraction doesn’t mean that it cannot do so).
Having now read Christine’s article (my previous comment was responding to the summary only) I can conclude that my initial interpretation was correct – the author *is* calling for more concrete empirical research. She argues, for example, for the importance of interviews as a research method as these give individual people the ability to tell their own stories and resist or reconfigure existing interpretive frames in a way that other methods – from statistics to discourse analysis – do not. Quite right, too.
Here’s the money quote: “A turn toward people is a turn away from depoliticized abstraction.” (p.621)
I think that this is a very important point. It doesn’t necessarily contradict or undo nomothetic Theory to also insist on empirical, idiographic work that fills in the gaps and blanks that grand Theory abstracts from – many of those ‘gaps’ and ‘blanks’ are human beings, after all.
The only things I’d add to the article is basically what I said in my comment above: that idiographic research utilises theories of its own that allow it to particularise rather than generalise. Theory doesn’t only generalise, it can move in any direction.
Also, not all of the gaps and blanks are human, although perhaps the most important ones are. I’d resist the strict humanism of supposing that all grand Theory misses out is the human element, however I completely agree that this element is very important and must be documented as part and parcel of the scientific process.
The idiographic is poorly understood as antithetical to nomothetic – done properly these things are complimentary.