Suchergebnisse

Epic, historic, momentous, transformational. In a word- saturated environment, it is hard to find a term powerful enough to describe the significance of this election for the American psyche. A few vignettes from history may help us grasp this idea better than any hyperbolic epithets. When Frederick Douglass came to the White House, which had been opened to the public to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration in 1865, he was not allowed in. The freed slave, by then a well-known author, abolitionist, activist and orator, sent his card in to the President, who immediately ordered him admitted. In 1901 President Theodore Roosevelt was severely criticized for inviting writer Booker T. Washington to a private dinner at the White House. Thirty years later, his niece, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt received the same vociferous criticism for hosting several African Americans as guests in the White House, including soprano Marion Anderson in 1939. Of course, the practice of receiving black guests in the presidential residence became much more accepted as African Americans were elected to high office in the sixties and seventies. But the journey for the inclusion of the black race has been a long and arduous one for this country, and it will culminate in poetic symbolism this coming January, as Barack and Michelle Obama and their two daughters make the White House their residence. This is a remarkable achievement that all Americans are proud of, and a powerful unifying force for the nation, as mentioned by John McCain in his gracious concession speech on Tuesday night. Barack Obama ran a brilliant, disciplined campaign which will be analyzed for years to come for its innovative use of technology, its break with traditional funding methods and the pervasive influence of the leader 's personality which set a positive tone, an optimistic aura that trickled down to millions of volunteers and contributors. Obama captured the spirit of the times, anticipated the extent to which the country was ready for a change before anyone else did, and proposed a vision that mobilized millions behind him. He was the only one able to take the pulse of the nation and grasp its mood. Eight years of unresponsive and irresponsible leadership, of a lingering war that could not be won, of unimaginable depredation of their cherished values and foundational ideals, had brought Americans to the verge of a nihilistic self-hate. If Obama's intelligence enabled him to perceive this mood, his audacity propelled him forward to seek the higher office in order to change it. Because he believes in the resilience of the country himself, he was able to spark the last bit of fire and illusion left at the bottom of the American heart. He spoke of unity and human dignity; of changing the distorted image the rest of the world has of America, of using diplomacy rather than force, of consulting with allies and talking to enemies. Leaving ideologies aside, he focused on what we all have in common and not on what divides us. And America heard him. His campaign was mainly geared toward the digital generation, and that is where he found his base. Building on Howard Dean's use of the Internet for financing and organizing his own grassroots campaign during the 2003 Democratic primary election, he perfected a technological platform from which he reached millions of citizens. His email list for daily announcements had eight million addresses, eight hundred thousand people registered in mybarackobama.com to get direct information from the campaign and the candidate himself into their mobile phone text messaging systems, and thirteen million people contributed money through the internet. He had one million and a half cyber volunteers who got special training and connected with affinity groups already in existence, such as Democracy for America and the more radical Moveon.org. His field volunteers could choose between training at local headquarters and attending "night school" on the web. By September 1st, the date of the official start of the presidential campaign once both conventions were over, he had amassed four times more money than his opponent. That led him to opt out of public financing, being the first candidate to take this decision since federal funding was established in the 1970s. He took a gamble and won: in September alone, he was able to raise 153 million from small donors on the internet, while McCain, who stopped accepting donations in order to be eligible for public funds, had to content himself with the $84 million received under that program. The contagious optimism and low-key approach that characterize the candidate was also found in every field office, every phone bank volunteer, and every neighborhood canvassing team. The lack of internal disputes and the positive atmosphere earned his campaign the nickname of "No Drama Obama" and the candidates as well as his close team of advisers deserve full credit for it. He started with a small circle of inner political advisors who had worked with him during his Senate run. Talent and serenity, no prima donnas and no big egos, were the main qualifications. In a new version of J.F. Kennedy's The Best and the Brightest, he drew on his friends from Harvard and Columbia, and his colleagues and students from the University of Chicago as the next circle of supporters and advisors. They helped him recruit five hundred paid political operatives among the best in the business, and an army of volunteers. They mounted a huge voter registration operation and a get- out -the vote campaign that would pay off immensely on Election Day. In difficult times during the campaign, David Axelrod, his chief strategist says, Obama and his team would regain their motivation focusing on what he would be able to achieve once in the White House. During the lowest point of his campaign, the Reverend Jeremy White controversy, after brainstorming for a while, Obama decided to make a speech on race as he saw it, based on his own experience and perspective. If he could not persuade Americans of his good faith, he would lose and go back to the Senate, he told his closer advisors with his usual cool detachment that belies a disciplined tenacity and a passion for his call of service to the country. That speech was hailed as exceptional, and was well-received by all races and creeds; it generated a consensus seldom forthcoming on such a divisive topic. The result of these efforts, from the vision that inspired it all to the organizational strengths, was reaped on election night, when he won over 61% of the youth vote, 98% of the African American vote, 67% of the Hispanic vote, 56% of the women's vote, 47% of white men. He also won the Independents vote, as well as the Catholic and even some of the Evangelical vote. This broad based coalition is also reflected in a geographical shift, with the inroads he made into Republican territory by winning Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado as well as Florida. There is no denying that this represents a major political realignment, even if it is too early to evaluate whether these demographic and geographical changes are permanent. But they do reflect changes in the economy, with economic power flowing away from major urban centers and into new states such as Virginia and Colorado. This transfer of economic power brings about demographic change and, ultimately, a shift in political power. Obama put it with subtlety when he said: "There are no red states and blue states; there is the United States of America." Now the major question being posed these days is whether President Obama will be able to govern as flawlessly as he campaigned and whether he will make good on his promise of bipartisanship. He has quite a few good options to do this when choosing his cabinet: moderate Republican Robert Gates could, for example, be asked to stay on as Secretary of Defense, or Chuck Hagel, a Republican Senator that was outspoken on his opposition to the Iraq war could replace him. Colin Powell's name has been suggested for Secretary of Education. Obama has already announced that his first measures will be on the economy, namely, a stimulus package to spur employment, extension on unemployment benefits and more attention to the implementation of legislation already passed on mortgage foreclosures. Given the economic crisis and the huge bailout package that will have to be administered by the incoming administration, the Treasury Secretary will be the most important cabinet member. Here Obama will probably choose a Democrat such as former Clinton Secretary Treasurers Larry Summers or Bob Rubin, or perhaps younger Timothy Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. A larger question is whether Obama will be bold or cautious in his first decisions. President Reagan was of the idea that what a president does not get done during the first year of his tenure, goes into oblivion and does not get done at all. Since the center of the political spectrum decided the election and gave him a strong mandate, he will need to address their concerns first. For example, by giving the middle class the promised tax cuts, and financing those by letting Bush's tax cuts on the wealthy elapse. Health care reform is also a possibility, to demonstrate his commitment to voters, but one that would cost a lot and take time to implement. The main difficulty he faces lies in the conundrum of how to do something bold without enlarging the trillion dollar budget deficit he is inheriting, and all without raising taxes. A neo-Keynesian approach is likely, with, for example, the government ignoring the deficit for a while, and investing in a huge renewable energy program, thereby creating thousands of green jobs and meeting two campaign promises with one bold stroke. He could also opt for highly symbolic actions, such as closing Guantánamo and delivering the prisoners to the US regular court system. Politically, he has a mandate for this, but there may be some legal sticking points that might protract the process and thus not render it so symbolically effective. Whatever he decides to do, the transition period will set the tone for the rest of his administration. He thus needs to do it right, lay out his vision of a national purpose and work towards it in a bipartisan and transparent way, avoiding the temptation of governing with the Democratic legislature only, to the exclusion of the Republican minority. The same mobilized digital-age generation that gave him this victory will be monitoring his every move, assessing the results and sharing their opinions on blogs and chat rooms. Since Obama has his sights set on the long-term, he will try his best not to disappoint. Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia

Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace



This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 






World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)







What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.



A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')



My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.



In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.



Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.



The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.



Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?



Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.



My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.



Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.



Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.



My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.



Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.



In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.



As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.



Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.



I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.



When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.



I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.



One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.



I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.



This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.

                                    



What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.



Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.



The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.





Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?



Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.



The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.



This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.



The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.





Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?



Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).



This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.



But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.

                                                                                                                

Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).



For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.



What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.





You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?

                                                                                                          

The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.



While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.



By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort.  There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.



Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.





You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?



When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.



Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.



Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.



When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.



Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.



An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.



Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.





Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?



Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.



In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.



Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.



A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics. 



My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.



But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.

                                  

Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.





Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?



The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.



Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.



Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.





My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?



American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.



The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.



Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.



The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.



It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.



Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'





Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.





Related links



Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) 
Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf) 









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

1. IntroductionOver the last decade, increased attention has been paid to terrorism, particularly to the new wave of terrorist groups, fundamentalist movements, and extremist organisations such as Al‐Qaeda. September 11 marked the beginning of a turbulent phase in which states face a new kind of threat made up of a complex network of insidious revolutionary and nationalist forces. Such transformations have given rise to an unprecedented number of publications. However, both political violence and terrorism remain sources of endless disputes and controversies because of their political implications. At the same time, in the scientific community, terrorism studies lack conceptual and methodological uniformity. In his article, Domenico Tosini synthesises and discusses some major findings from this research. Courses using such a review will be confronted with the four major topics that any analysis of terrorism, to be comprehensive, should take into account: the definition of terrorism; its history and classification; its explanations; and an assessment of the consequences of counterterrorism policies.2. Literature recommendations Bjørgo, Tore (ed.) 2005. Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Realities and Ways Forward. London, UK: Routledge.In this book, based on the analysis of numerous case studies (e.g. Palestinian armed groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, right‐wing extremists, state terrorism and state‐sponsored terrorism), experts in political violence examine the preconditions for the emergence of different types of terrorist organisations and the main factors that sustain terrorist campaigns. Cole, David 2003. Enemy Aliens: Double Standard and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York, NY: The New Press.Thanks to its analysis and evaluation of the consequences of counter‐terrorism measures, David Cole's Enemy Aliens is one of the most rigorous discussions of how states (like the United States since 2001) often combat terrorism by adopting emergency powers (such as the special detention at Guantanamo Bay), which, in turn, risk undermining civil liberties. della Porta, Donatella 1995. Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Based on empirical research that compares the origins and development of left‐wing terrorism in Italy and Germany between the 1960s and the 1990s, della Porta offers a middle‐range theory of political violence that combines an analysis of the political opportunities and ideological frames exploited by armed groups, a profile of their organisational structures, and an investigation of the typical patterns underlying their recruitment processes. Gambetta, Diego (ed.) 2006. Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.In this book, a number of distinguished social scientists, while examining the use of suicide missions by political and religious groups (such as the Japanese Kamikaze, the Tamil Tigers, Palestinian organisations, and Al‐Qaeda), specify and discuss the most important methodological questions associated with definitions, data collection, and explanations concerning this form of political struggle. Hoffman, Bruce 2006. Inside Terrorism. New York, NY: Colombia University Press.The book introduces the most important issues of terrorism studies: the controversial problem of the definition of terrorism; a history of terrorism, from anti‐colonial struggles to international terrorism; an examination and explanation of the most recent waves of religious extremists and suicide terrorism; an analysis of the ways terrorist groups exploit old and new media such as the Internet; and, finally, an overview of the strategies, tactics, and organisational aspects of modern and contemporary terrorism. Horgan, John 2005. The Psychology of Terrorism. London, UK: Routledge.Horgan presents a critical analysis of our understanding of terrorist psychology; many shortcomings emerge, particularly the limitations of personality theories in attempting to explain militancy. Based on interviews with terrorists, the book considers the most relevant psychological and social factors underlying involvement and engagement in political violence, and the process of leaving terrorist organisations. Kalyvas, Stathis 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Scholars generally distinguish between terrorism and other forms of violence against civilians – tactics of guerrilla warfare or insurgency in civil wars, for example. However, this work makes a relevant contribution to terrorism studies. Kalyvas clarifies the rationality and micro‐processes of interactions during armed conflicts that account for indiscriminate and selective uses of violence against civilian populations by political actors. Kushner, Harvey W. 2003. Encyclopedia of Terrorism. London, UK: Sage.One of the most accurate and exhaustive dictionaries focusing on terrorism, with more than 300 entries concerning terrorist groups, key events, people, terms, and statistics, as well as biographical, historical, and geographical information. Free access is available at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) (http://www.terrorisminfo.mipt.org/eBooks.asp). Laqueur, Walter 2002. A History of Terrorism. London, UK: Transaction Publishers.Along with Laqueur's Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Transaction Publishers, 1998), this constitutes a pioneering history of armed organisations, from nineteenth century Europe, to the anarchists of the 1880s and 1890s, to the left‐wing clashes during the 20th century, and up to the most recent terrorist groups. Pape, Robert A. 2005. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York, NY: Random House.Over the last decade, suicide terrorism has become an alarming political threat and a crucial challenge for social scientists. In his work, which compares a number of organisations responsible for suicide attacks, Pape rejects the explanation of suicide terrorism based on religious fundamentalism. He argues for a correlation between the use of this tactic and specific kinds of groups engaged in separatist campaigns or in struggles for liberation from foreign occupiers. Ranstorp, Magnus (ed.) 2007. Mapping Terrorism Research: State of the Art, Gaps and Future Directions. London, UK: Routledge.In this book, distinguished scholars of terrorism studies discuss state‐of‐the‐art field research. In exploring new trends in this area – the most important questions about the explanation of recent terrorist organisations such as Al‐Qaeda, and about counterterrorism – these essays shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of our current knowledge of political violence. Reich, Walter (ed.) 1998. Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.This is another seminal work on terrorism, bringing together some of the most well known experts in political violence. The variety of approaches used in the explanations of terrorist organisations and in the analysis of counterterrorism paves the way for a real interdisciplinary setting, which is absolutely crucial once the multi‐faceted nature of terrorism is clear. Sageman, Marc 2004. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Based on the analysis of biographical data for nearly 200 members of global Islamist extremism (of which Al‐Qaeda is a part), Sageman accounts for the origins and developments of this movement and specifies the crucial role played by social networks in the recruitment of individuals as Islamist militants. Wilkinson, Paul 2006. Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. London, UK: Routledge.Wilkinson examines major trends in international terrorism and liberal democratic responses. On the one hand, the book introduces the specificity of terrorism and offers a classification and explanation of the most important types of armed groups. On the other, in approaching how states deal with terrorist threats, this work discusses forms of counterterrorism, by taking into account their impact on the rule of law and on the protection of civil liberties.3. Online materials Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna (AISI) (Agency for Internal Information and Security)(http://www.aisi.gov.it)The Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna (AISI) is the branch of Italian Intelligence tasked with collecting and analysing information about any criminal and terrorist threat to security. Among other activities, the AISI distributes its own periodical, Gnosis, online, where a chronology of international as well as domestic terrorist attacks since 2004 (currently updated through 2007) is available.
Counterterrorism Blog
(http://counterterrorismblog.org)The Counterterrorism Blog is a multi‐expert blog devoted to providing a one‐stop gateway to the counterterrorism community. It offers, among other things, overnight and breaking news, with real time commentary by experts; reports on terrorist organisations; discussions of long‐term trends in counterterrorism; and summaries of and discussions about US and international law.
Center for Constitutional Rights

(CCR) (http://ccrjustice.org)Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights organisations, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a non‐profit legal and educational organisation dedicated to protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also offers information about important issues related to counterterrorism (e.g., the prolonged battle in defence of civil liberties associated with the special detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).
Global Terrorism Database
(GTD)(http://www.start.umd.edu/data/gtd)The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open‐source database on terrorist incidents around the world since 1970 (currently updated through 2004). It includes systematic data on international as well as domestic terrorist attacks. For each GTD incident, information is available on the date and location of the attack, the weapons used and nature of the target, the number of casualties, and (when possible) the identity of the perpetrator. Another important database, the Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) (http://www.mipt.org/TKB.asp), has recently ceased operations and elements of the system have been merged with the GTD. Information on terrorist groups is now available at the Terrorist Organization Profiles (http://www.start.umd.edu/data/tops).
Human Security Report Project

(HSRP) (http://www.hsrgroup.org)The HSRP conducts research on global and regional trends in political violence, exploring their causes and consequences, and then making this research accessible to the policy and research communities, the media, educators, and the interested public. The HSRP's publications include the Human Security Report, the Human Security Brief series, and the Human Security Gateway. The recent Human Security Brief 2007, online, makes a relevant contribution in discussing the methodological issues associated with collecting data on terrorism and offers a comprehensive overview of terrorist incidents in the last decade.
Middle East Media Research Institute

(MEMRI) (http://www.memri.org)The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) explores the Middle East through the region's media with respect to a variety of topics including terrorism. MEMRI provides translations of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish media, as well as analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious tendencies in the Middle East. A new section, the MEMRI's Islamist Websites Monitor Project, was launched in 2006 as part of the Jihad & Terrorism Studies project. Its aim is to keep Western audiences informed about the phenomenon of jihadist sites on the Internet, which are used by terrorist groups and their sympathisers to spread their extremist messages, to raise funds, and to recruit activists.
Uppsala Conflict Data Project

(UCDP) (http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP)The Uppsala Conflict Data Project (UCDP) collects data on armed conflicts around the world. A global conflict database is now available online. Data are useful for systematic studies of conflict origins, dynamics, and resolution.
Worldwide Incidents Tracking System
(WITS)(http://wits.nctc.gov)The Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) is the National Counterterrorism Center's (NCTC) database of terrorist incidents. NCTC serves as the primary organisation in the United States government for integrating and analysing all intelligence pertaining to terrorism and, at the same time, as the central and shared knowledge bank on terrorism information. Based on WITS, the NCTC provides an annual report and statistical information about terrorist incidents.
Additional Online Resources
Scores of additional organisations and centres (too many to list) conduct and disseminate research on issues related to armed conflicts, terrorism, terrorist groups, security, and counterterrorism. What follows is a list of some other key organisations and centres, with links to their websites:Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)(http://www.aspi.org.au)Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS)(http://www.fhs.se/en/Research/Centers‐and‐Research‐Programmes/CATS)Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)(http://www.csis.org)Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV)(http://www.st‐andrews.ac.uk/~wwwir/research/cstpv)IntelCenter(http://intelcenter.com)International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR)(http://www.pvtr.org)International Crisis Group (ICG)(http://www.crisisgroup.org)International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)(http://www.iiss.org)International Policy Institute for Counter‐Terrorism (ICT)(http://www.ict.org.il)Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT)(http://www.mipt.org)Saban Center at the Brookings Institution(http://www.brookings.edu/saban.aspx)Senlis Council(http://www.senliscouncil.net)Southern Poverty Law Center(http://www.splcenter.org)Terrorism and Homeland Security at RAND Corporation(http://www.rand.org/research_areas/terrorism)Terrorism Research Center (TRC)(http://www.terrorism.org)Transnational Radical Islamism Project at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment(http://www.mil.no/felles/ffi/english/start/research/Analysis_Division/_TERRA)United States Institute of Peace(http://www.usip.org/index.html)4. Sample syllabus Course Title: A Sociological Analysis of Terrorism and Counterterrorism Course Description In this course, we will explore the most relevant issues around terrorism and counterterrorism policies. Although we will largely approach this topic from a sociological perspective, this study is quite interdisciplinary. Consequently, we will be reading works from other academic disciplines, including history, psychology, political science, and economics. There are four major areas that any analysis of terrorism, to be comprehensive, should take into account: the definition of terrorism; its history and classification; its explanations; and an assessment of consequences related to counterterrorism. After an introduction to terrorism research (part 1), we will discuss the controversies related to the definition of terrorism (part 2) and to data collection (part 3), both necessary for an understanding of tendencies concerning terrorist incidents. A historical overview (part 4) will give us some preliminary information about the variety of terrorist campaigns – information that prepares us for the next exercise (part 5): grouping terrorist organisations by different types. Looking in more depth at the evolution of terrorism in the last decade, we will examine the case of Al‐Qaeda (part 6), and how this and other organisations exploit old and new media, especially the Internet (part 7). The next chapter will be the explanation of terrorism, that is, the specification of the main psychological, political, cultural, and religious factors underlying the emergence of a terrorist organisation and the unfolding of a terrorist campaign. Suicide terrorism will be used as a case study. More specifically, we will approach terrorism by examining the motivations and rationality of terrorist organisations (part 8), of the communities that support them (part 9), and of those who join them (part 10). We end the course by focusing on both the legal (part 11) and strategic (part 12) implications of counterterrorism measures adopted since 2001. Course outline and reading assignments Part 1. Terrorism Research An overview of the most important approaches to the study of terrorism and of the strengths and weaknesses of available analyses. Bjørgo, Tore 2005. 'Introduction' (pp. 1–15) and 'Conclusions' (pp. 256–264) in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Realities and Ways Forward, edited by Tore Bjørgo. London, UK: Routledge. Crenshaw, Martha 2000. 'The Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the 21st Century.'Political Psychology 21 (2): 405–420 (Doi: 10.1111/0162-895X.00195). Ranstorp, Magnus 2007. 'Introduction: Mapping Terrorism Research – Challenges and Priorities.' Pp. 1–28 in Mapping Terrorism Research, edited by Magnus Ranstorp. London, UK: Routledge. Silke, Andrew 2004. 'An Introduction to Terrorism Research.' Pp. 1–29 in Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures, edited by Andrew Silke. London, UK: Frank Cass. Sinai, Joshua 2007. 'New Trends in Terrorism Studies: Strengths and Weaknesses.' Pp. 31–50 in Mapping Terrorism Research, edited by Magnus Ranstorp. London, UK: Routledge. Turk, Austin T. 2004. 'Sociology of Terrorism.'Annual Review of Sociology 30: 271–286 (Doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.30.012703.110510). Wilkinson, Paul 2007. 'Research into Terrorism Studies: Achievements and Failures.' Pp. 316–328 in Mapping Terrorism Research, edited by Magnus Ranstorp. London, UK: Routledge. Part 2. What is Terrorism? A discussion of one of the most controversial issues, the definition of terrorism, focusing on its political and methodological implications. Aly, Waleed 2008. 'The Axiom of Evil.'The Guardian, 8 July, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/08/nelsonmandela.terrorism (last accessed: 8 July 2008). Hoffman, Bruce 2006. Chapter 1 (pp. 1–42). Inside Terrorism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. della Porta, Donatella 2004. 'Terror Against the State.' Pp. 208–16 in The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, edited by Kate Nash and Alan Scott. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Schmid, Alexander P. 2004. 'Frameworks for Conceptualising Terrorism.'Terrorism and Political Violence 16 (2): 197–221 (Doi: 10.1080/09546550490483134). Tilly, Charles 2004. 'Terror, Terrorism, Terrorist.'Sociological Theory 22 (1): 5–16 (Doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9558.2004.00200.x). Tosini, Domenico 2007. 'Sociology of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: A Social Science Understanding of Terrorist Threat', Sociology Compass 1 (2), 664–681 (Doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00035.x). Wilkinson, Paul 2006. Chapter 1 (pp. 1–19). Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. London, UK: Routledge. Part 3. Collecting Data on Terrorism Incidents An introduction to the challenges and solutions to the collection of terrorism data, a preliminary and crucial aspect of any scientific analysis. Buchalter, Alice R. and Glenn E. Curtis 2003. Inventory and Assessment of Databases Relevant for Social Science Research on Terrorism. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division Library of Congress, http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/frd (last accessed 10 June 2008). Enders, Walter and Todd Sandler 2006. Chapter 3 (pp. 52–83). The Political Economy of Terrorism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lafree, Gary 2007. 'Introducing the Global Terrorism Database.'Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (2): 181–204 (Doi: 10.1080/09546550701246817). HSP 2008. Human Security Brief 2007. Dying to Lose: Explaining the Decline in Global Terrorism. Simon Fraser University, Canada: Human Security Report Project, http://www.humansecuritybrief.info/HSRP_Brief_2007.pdf (last accessed 15 June 2008). Part 4. Waves of Terror: The Evolution of Terrorism A look at terrorism from a historical perspective in an attempt to identify continuities and discontinuities in the use of political violence. Abrahms, Max 2006. 'Why Terrorism Does Not Work.'International Security 31 (2): 42–78 (Doi: 10.1162/isec.2006.31.2.42). Duyvesteyn, Isabelle 2004. 'How New Is the New Terrorism?'Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27 (5): 439–454 (Doi: 10.1080/10576100490483750). Hoffman, Bruce 2006. Chapters 2–4 (pp. 43–130). Inside Terrorism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jenkins, Brian 1975. International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict. Research Paper n. 48, California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy. Kaplan, Jeffrey 2007. 'The Fifth Wave: The New Tribalism?'Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (4): 545–570 (Doi: 10.1080/09546550701606564). Laqueur, Walter 2002. Chapters 1–2 (pp. 3–78). A History of Terrorism. London, UK: Transaction Publishers. Münkler, Herfried 2005. Chapter 5 (pp. 99–116). The New Wars. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Rapoport, David C. 2004. 'Modern Terror: The Four Waves.' Pp. 46–73 in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Great Strategy, edited by Audrey Cronin and J. Ludes. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Reed, Donald J. 2008. 'Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and Conflict.'Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31 (8): 684–722 (Doi: 10.1080/10576100802206533). Part 5. Typologies of Terrorist Movements An overview of the complex task of classifying terrorist organisations on the basis of characteristics such as political objectives, ideological frames, and the cleavages between them and their enemies. Goodwin, Jeff 2006. 'A Theory of the Categorical Terrorism.'Social Forces 84 (4): 2027–2046. Gunaratna, Rohan and Graeme C. S. Steven 2004. Chapter 1 (pp. 1–98). Counterterrorism. Santa Barbara, CA: Abc Clio. Schmid, Alexander P. and Albert J. Jongman 1988. Chapter 2 (in collaboration with M. Stohl and P. A. Fleming, pp. 39–60). Political Terrorism. London, UK: Transaction Publishers. Tosini, Domenico 2007. 'Sociology of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: A Social Science Understanding of Terrorist Threat.'Sociology Compass 1 (2), 664–681 (Doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00035.x). Wilkinson, Paul 2006. Chapter 2 (pp. 20–38). Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. London, UK: Routledge. Part 6. Al‐Qaeda and its Affiliates: Ideologies, Strategies, Structures A sociological look at the ideological, strategic, and organisational aspects of Al‐Qaeda's terrorism from the 1980s to its most recent campaign in Iraq. Al‐Zayyat, Montasser 2004. The Road to Al‐Qaeda. London, UK: Pluto Press. Gunaratna, Rohan 2002. Chapters 1–2 (pp. 21–126). Inside Al‐Qaeda. New York, NY: Berkley Books. Pape, Robert A. 2005. Chapter 7 (pp. 102–125). Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York, NY: Random House. Sageman, Marc 2004. Chapters 1‐2 (pp. 1‐60). Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hafez, Mohammed M. 2007. Chapters 1–5 (pp. 35–162). Suicide Bombers in Iraq. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Part 7. Terrorism and the Media An exploration of the ways that terrorist organisations exploit old and new media, especially the Internet, as communicative channels (for staging their attacks, threats, demands, and propaganda) and as instrumental tools (for fund raising, coordination, and recruitment). Hoffman, Bruce 2006. Chapters 6–7 (pp. 173–228). Inside Terrorism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ICG 2006. In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency. International Crisis Group: Middle East Report No 50, 15 February, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3953&l=1 (last accessed 5 February 2008). Rogan, Hanna 2006. Jihadism Online: A Study of How Al‐Qaeda and Radical Islamist Groups Use Internet for Terrorist Purposes. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment: FFI/RAPPORT‐2006/00915, http://rapporter.ffi.no/rapporter/2006/00915.pdf (last accessed 5 June 2008). Sageman, Marc 2008. Chapter 6 (pp. 109–123). Leaderless Jihad. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Weimann, Gabriel 2006. Chapters 3–4 (pp. 49–145). Terror on the Internet. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Part 8. Terrorist Organisations and Their Logic An examination of the political objectives and ideologies of terrorist organisations and an overview of the rationality and strategies underlying their decision‐making in relation to the political opportunities and military events shaping their environment. Boyns, David and James David Ballard 2004. 'Developing a Sociological Theory for the Empirical Understanding of Terrorism.'American Sociologist 35 (2): 5–26 (Doi: 10.1007/BF02692394). Crenshaw, Martha 1998. 'The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behaviour as a Product of Strategic Choice.' Pp. 7–24 in Origins of Terrorism, edited by Walter Reich. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Gambetta, Diego 2006. 'Can We Make Sense of Suicide Missions?' Pp. 259–299 in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, edited by Diego Gambetta. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hafez, Mohammed and Quintan Wiktorowicz 2004. 'Violence as Contention in the Egyptian Islamic Movement.' Pp. 61–88 in Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach, edited Quintan Wiktorowicz. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Kalyvas, Stathis 2006. Chapters 6–7 (pp. 147–208). The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, Martin 1998. 'The Moral Logic of Hezbollah.' Pp. 131–157 in Origins of Terrorism, edited by Walter Reich. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Pape, Robert A. 2005. Chapters 3–5 (pp. 27–60). Dying to Win. New York, NY: Random House. Tosini, Domenico 2009. 'A Sociological Understanding of Suicide Attacks.'Theory, Culture & Society (Forthcoming). Part 9. Mechanisms of Social Support A discussion of the economic, cultural, and political conditions which make possible the support for, and collaboration with, terrorist organisations by members of certain communities. Cook, David and Olivia Allison 2007. Chapters 1–5 (pp. 1–85). Understanding and Addressing Suicide Attacks: The Faith and Politics of Martyrdom Operations. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Chernick, Marc 2007. 'FARC‐EP: From Liberal Guerrillas to Marxist Rebels to Post‐Cold War Insurgency.' Pp. 51–120 in Terror, Insurgency, and the State, edited by Marianne Heiberg et al. Philadelphia, PA: University Pennsylvania Press. Hashim, Ahmed S. 2006. Chapter 2 (pp. 59–124). Insurgency and Counter‐Insurgency in Iraq. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kalyvas, Stathis 2006. Chapter 4 (pp. 87–110). The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Merari, Ariel 2005. 'Social, Organizational and Psychological Factors in Suicide Terrorism.' Pp. 70–86 in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Realities and Ways Forward, edited by Tore Bjørgo. London, UK: Routledge. Pape, Robert A. 2005. Chapters 6–8 (pp. 79–167). Dying to Win. New York, NY: Random House. Part 10. Social Networks and Recruitment An analysis of the motivations behind the process of joining terrorist organisations and of the role played by group dynamics and social networks. della Porta, Donatella 1995. Chapter 7 (pp. 165–186). Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sageman, Marc 2004. Chapters 4–5 (pp. 99–173). Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia, PA: University Pennsylvania Press. Horgan, John 2005. Chapter 3 (pp. 47–79). The Psychology of Terrorism. London, UK: Routledge. Khosrokhavar, Fahad 2005. Chapter 3 (pp. 149–224). Suicide Bombers. London, UK: Pluto Press. Pedahzur, Ami 2005. Chapters 6–7 (pp. 118–181). Suicide Terrorism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Stern, Jessica 2003. Chapter 9 (pp. 237–280). Terror in the Name of God. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publisher. Wintrobe, Ronald 2006. Chapters 5–6 (pp. 108–157). Rational Extremism: The Political Economy of Radicalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Part 11. Counterterrorism I: Legal Implications An overview of the emergency powers of antiterrorism legislations and 'special measures', and an analysis of their legal impact on the protection of human rights. Cole, David 2003. Chapters 1–5 (pp. 17–82). Enemy Aliens. New York, NY: The Free Press. Haubrich, Dirk 2003. 'September 11, Anti‐Terror Laws and Civil Liberties: Britain, France and Germany Compared.'Government and Opposition 38 (1): 3–29 (Doi: 10.1111/1477-7053.00002). Parker, Tom 2005. 'Counterterrorism Policies in the United Kingdom.' Pp. 119–148 in Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror, edited by Philip B. Heymann and Juliette N. Kayyem. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tosini, Domenico 2007. 'Sociology of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: A Social Science Understanding of Terrorist Threat', Sociology Compass 1 (2): 664–681 (Doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00035.x). Part 12. Counterterrorism II: Strategic Limitations An examination of the most important counterterrorism policies adopted since 2001, with special reference to the occupation of Iraq, and an assessment of their advantages and risks for combating and preventing terrorism. Nesser, Peter 2006. 'Jihadism in Western Europe After the Invasion of Iraq: Tracing Motivational Influences from the Iraq War on Jihadist Terrorism in Western Europe.'Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (4): 323–342 (Doi: 10.1080/10576100600641899). Pape, Robert A. 2005. Chapter 12 (pp. 237–250). Dying to Win. New York, NY: Random House. Silke, Andrew 2005. 'Fire of Iolaus: The Role of State Countermeasures in Causing Terrorism and What Needs to Be Done.' Pp. 241–255 in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Realities and Ways Forward, edited by Tore Bjørgo. London, UK: Routledge. Smelser, Neil J. 2007. Chapter 6 (pp. 160–199). The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tosini, Domenico 2007. 'Sociology of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: A Social Science Understanding of Terrorist Threat', Sociology Compass 1 (2): 664–681 (Doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00035.x). Wilkinson, Paul 2006. Chapters 5–6 (pp. 61–102). Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. London, UK: Routledge.5. Films and videos Al‐Qaeda Film on the First Anniversary of the London Bombings. 2006 (17 min)(http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/215/1186.htm)Excerpts from a message from 2005 London bomber Shehzad Tanweer and statements by Al‐Qaeda leaders Ayman Al‐Zawahiri and Adam Gadahn, posted on http://www.tajdeed.net.tc on 8 July 2006. A typical example of the communicative use of the Internet by Islamists in their attempt to frame terrorist attacks as legitimate acts of martyrdom, committed by courageous Muslims in defence of their brothers and sisters in occupied Muslim lands (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine). Al‐Qaeda Leader in Iraq Abu Musab Al‐Zarqawi's First Televised Interview. 2006 (17 min)(http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/344/1118.htm)A video posted by the Islamist web forum http://www.alsaha.com on 25 April 2006, in which the Al‐Qaeda commander in Iraq Abu Musab Al‐Zarqawi (killed by an airstrike on 7 June 2006) outlines all the typical condemnations (by Islamist extremists) of the Iraq occupation by the US‐led coalition, and calls for a jihad against its forces and allies. Propagandising the military capabilities of Al‐Qaeda, the video culminates in footage of Al‐Zarqawi with masked fighters, firing an automatic weapon, and 'new missiles' developed by 'the brothers'. Al‐Arabiya TV Special on the Culture of Martyrdom and Suicide Bombers. 2005 (7 min)(http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/215/807.htm)Excerpts from a show about the culture of martyrdom, aired on Al‐Arabiya TV on 22 July 2005. The documentary investigates some of the most relevant religious and political justifications and symbolic representations among Islamist extremists in favour of suicide attacks. In particular, it looks at the Palestinian organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and at the Lebanese Hezbollah. The film includes an interview with Maha Ghandour, the wife of Salah Ghandour, who was responsible for a suicide attack carried out in 1995 on behalf of Hezbollah against an Israeli military convoy. Battle For Haditha. 2007 (93 min)(http://www.nickbroomfield.com/haditha.html)In this film, the director Nick Broomfield looks at the dramatic events surrounding an incident that occurred in Haditha, Iraq, when 24 Iraqis were allegedly massacred by US Marines, following the death of a Marine in a bombing perpetrated by Iraqi insurgents. The harsh reality of the war is viewed from three perspectives: that of the US troops, the insurgents who committed the attacks, and a civilian Iraqi family. Iranian Animated Film for Children Promotes Suicide Bombings. 2005 (10 min)(http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/215/906.htm)Including excerpts from an Iranian animated movie for children, aired on IRIB 3 TV on 28 October 2005, this film is an example of the mechanisms of de‐humanization of the enemy (the Israelis), based on a tale of the ferocious murder of innocent people by Israeli soldiers. This incident is followed by a bomb attack framed as an act of martyrdom by young militants in revenge of the previous assassination. Paradise Now. 2005 (91 min)In his film, the director Hany Abu‐Assad focuses on the final days of two Palestinian militants as they prepare to carry out a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. Once childhood friends Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are offered such an attack, they feel a sense of purpose in serving their people's cause, whereas a young Palestinian woman, after learning of their plan, tries to dissuade them from carrying out their missions. Paradise Now has been viewed as a controversial attempt to examine the motivations of suicide bombers. The Reach of War: Sectarian War in Iraq. 2006 (7 min)(http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/12/28/world/20061228_SECTARIAN_FEATURE.html)The New York Times journalist Marc Santora reports on some of the most violent and bloody effects of the sectarian violence perpetrated in Iraq during the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, which has followed the occupation by the US‐led coalition. The Road to Guantanamo. 2006 (92 min)(http://www.roadtoguantanamomovie.com)Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the film tells the story of four friends beginning a holiday in Pakistan. Through a series of interviews and news footage, the film shows how they end up in Afghanistan, where are then captured by American forces and kept in harsh conditions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for over 2 years. The Role of Foreign Fighters in the Iraqi Jihad. 2006 (9 min)(http://www1.nefafoundation.org/multimedia‐original.html)In this video, NEFA Foundation expert Evan Kohlmann documents the phenomenon of foreign fighters in Iraq and their role within the Sunni insurgency. The video includes footage of senior figures from Abu Musab al‐Zarqawi's terrorist group (including Lebanese, Saudi, and Kuwaiti nationals) and scenes from Al‐Qaida training camps in Iraq. The Suicide Bomber. 2005 (12 min)(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/july‐dec05/bombers_11‐14.html)In this debate aired on PBS on 14 November 2005, three experts (Mia Bloom, Mohammed M. Hafez, and Robert A. Pape) discuss what motivates suicide bombers and their terrorist organisations, with special reference to the 2005 hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, where a female militant joining these attacks was found alive after her bomb failed to detonate. The Terrorist Propaganda (three videos):
Indexing Al‐Qaeda Online.
2005 (6 min)(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/custom/2005/08/05/CU2005080501141.html?whichDay=1)
Without the Video, It's Just an Attack.
2007 (5 min)(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/video/2007/09/28/VI2007092800608.html)
Al‐Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive.
2008 (14 min)(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062302135.html)Over the last decade, terrorist propaganda on the Internet has increased dramatically. In these videos, experts discuss how insurgent groups, in particular Islamist extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, are using new media to spread their messages worldwide, to chronicle their operations (including the assembly and emplacement of roadside bombs targeting US forces), to recruit, and to raise money.6. Focus questions

What challenges do researchers interested in terrorism studies face and why? What are the most important theoretical and methodological weaknesses in current terrorism research?
How can we define terrorism? What political controversies affect the definition of terrorism? When comparing different terrorism data sets, what kinds of diagnoses can we make on the tendencies of terrorist incidents in the last decade?
How has terrorism changed in history? Based on the literature concerning Al‐Qaeda's ideology, strategies, and structures, what continuities and discontinuities can we identify with respect to previous forms of terrorism?
When dealing with the explanation of terrorism, what are the most significant factors to be taken into account? How can we learn from the current literature on suicide terrorism in order to build a comprehensive model for its explanation?
Given the legislative and military responses to September 11 and subsequent attacks (e.g. the 2005 London bombings), what have been the legal consequences affecting our societies and the strategic implications for combating and preventing terrorist violence?

7. SeminarsParticipants will be divided into small groups of about three persons. Each group will be asked to make a contribution to a sociological analysis (either written or presented) of a specific armed organisation, such as:Al‐Gama'a Al‐IslamiyyaAl‐QaedaAl‐Qaeda in IraqAl‐Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (formerly Salafist Group for Call and Combat)Ansar Al‐SunnahAnsar Al‐IslamArmed Islamic Groups (GIA)Army of GodAum ShinrikyoChechen separatistsEgyptian Islamic JihadEuskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA)HamasHezbollahIrgun Zvai LeumiIrish Republican Army (IRA)Islamic Movement of UzbekistanJemaah IslamiyahKashmiri separatistsKu Klux Klan (KKK)Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)Lashkar‐e‐JhangviLibyan Islamic Fighting GroupPalestinian Islamic JihadPalestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)Red Army Faction (RAF)Red Brigades (BR)Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)Taliban.For each armed organisation, each group will examine the following aspects:

data on its attacks – including information that justifies the label of 'terrorist organisation';
a historical account of its origins and developments;
an analysis of the strategy underlying its terrorist campaigns;
a clarification of its social support and collaboration (if any);
a profile of its militants and patterns of recruitment;
a discussion of the counterterrorism policies adopted by states and their impact on the terrorist organisation.

Note
* Correspondence address: Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Piazza Venezia 41 – 38100 Trento, Italy, +39 0461 881324; +39 0461 881348 (fax); +39 347 2329219 (mobile); Email: domenico.tosini@soc.unitn.it http://portale.unitn.it/dpt/dsrs/docenti/tosini.htm

Disinformation Manipulates Discontent Francophone West Africa's six military seizures of power since 2020 were underpinned by waning popular support for democracy in the region. The coups—two in Burkina Faso (both in 2022), two in Mali (2020 and 2022), one in Guinea (2021), and the most recent in Niger (2023)—have often been celebrated by local populations, despite elected leaders in some instances being forcefully replaced. While citizens may prefer democracy, they also desire governments that address legitimate frustrations. Democratically elected governments in West Africa have failed to support citizens and enabled some officials to build riches from corrupt practices. Leaders claim to be democratic to maintain legitimacy but act in their self-interest to consolidate power and manipulate electoral systems, making their countries democratic in name only. Moreover, West African populaces have increasingly grappled with the insecurity of militant Islamist insurgencies that threaten lives and livelihoods, as well as more than a decade of unsuccessful domestic and international—namely French—military interventions in response. In this light, citizen support for coups can be understood. Citizens celebrate new hope for long-overdue and much-needed change while their immediate security needs trump overarching democratic values. What makes less sense, however, is the sustained support for coup leaders—even as security and economic conditions worsen under junta leadership—and how this support lends itself to further approval of Russia's destabilizing actions across the region. Russian disinformation operations across West Africa have led to an unprecedented rise in popular support for Russia, citizen demands for Russian interventions, and, in some cases, new military partnerships between African countries and Russia.Burkina Faso is an illustrative example. In 2014, the country emerged from a 27-year authoritarian government. Since then, Burkina Faso experienced political reforms and democratic gains. Until recently, Reporters Without Borders called the country "one of Africa's success stories regarding freedom of the press." Then, in 2022, the security situation proved too difficult for Burkina Faso's democratic institutions to handle, and the country experienced two coups in nine months. The coups followed protests demanding democratically-elected President Kaboré's resignation and holding him accountable for the country's deteriorating security. Traoré—the second and current post-coup leader—has suspended the country's constitution and implemented a transitional charter, which cannot be revised without his approval. Both post-coup leaders justified their takeovers by claiming they had acted to respond to the preceding leader's failure to address a strengthening jihadist insurgency. Both promised to restore security. Instead, the security and humanitarian situations in Burkina Faso have greatly worsened. The number of people killed by jihadist groups has nearly tripled since the coup, and more than 2.1 million Burkinabe have been forcibly displaced. Approximately one in four schools are not operating, increasing the vulnerability of young Burkinabe who already face an uncertain future. Adding to the jihadist threat to civilians, Burkina Faso's military has also faced credible accusations of human rights abuses, such as extrajudicial killings of children and a military-linked massacre of at least 156 civilians. Traoré issued an emergency law allowing him to take any necessary measures to counter the insurgency, including requisitioning people and restraining civil liberties. Since then, he has been accused of conscripting journalists, civil society activists, and opposition party members. However, Traoré has not yet faced widespread backlash despite a worsening security situation under his rule. Instead, popular calls have been supportive of the coup leaders and, in general, in support of authoritarianism: "No to France, yes to Russia." Complexly situated in this backdrop of domestic and French military failures against jihadist insurgencies, poverty, underdevelopment, and legitimate unanswered citizen grievances, Russia has effectively seized opportunities to manipulate citizen frustrations through disinformation campaigns. Russian disinformation operations across West Africa have led to an unprecedented rise in popular support for Russia, citizen demands for Russian interventions, and, in some cases, new military partnerships between African countries and Russia. In Burkina Faso, Russian-generated disinformation has encouraged democratic backsliding, fostered coups, and increased support for repressive regimes (domestically and abroad) regardless of their human rights records. ...there are well-documented examples of Russian disinformation campaigns across West Africa and the continent. Russia's disinformation campaign in Burkina Faso builds off the legitimate fears and frustrations of the Burkinabe population while reaffirming their concerns. Disinformation manipulates discontent, blaming France for Burkina Faso's challenges, presenting Russia as a savior, and embracing authoritarian leaders like Traoré who stand ready to partner with Russia. This disinformation takes a variety of identifiable forms. Russian operatives employ inauthentic social media accounts and pretend to be Africans with a genuine interest in Burkina Faso. These accounts play on common frustrations and place blame on France's military failures and the West more broadly. They glorify Russian President Vladimir Putin, overstate the successes of the Wagner Group, and advocate for closer relationships between Burkina Faso and Russia. Burkinabe supporters of these accounts are invited to join private messaging groups that spread more radical propaganda that authorities might otherwise censor as disinformation. In early Russian disinformation campaigns, Russia struggled to make its content look legitimate. Over time, however, Russia has recruited local African political players and influencers to form and legitimize messaging, making campaigns more credible and resonant with local populations. Russian operatives have further developed fake news sources to spread disinformation or impersonate or buy legitimate accounts to ensure a spread of information favorable to Russia. In some cases, disinformation campaigns have also sought to delegitimize dissent. In response to journalists' unfavorable investigations into Burkina Faso's military, for example, accounts and sites associated with the Wagner group began attacking the journalists to discredit them and halt their work. Unfortunately, Burkina Faso is not alone, as there are well-documented examples of Russian disinformation campaigns across West Africa and the continent. Russia's successful disinformation campaigns have resulted in greater citizen support for Russia in Burkina Faso, which is increasingly vital for Russia and the coup leaders as they move the Burkinabe-Russian partnership from rhetoric to reality, as seen with the recent reopening of the Russian embassy in Burkina Faso, the arrival of Russian military personnel, and Russian-sponsored plans to build a nuclear power plant. Russian disinformation and its influence empower leaders like Traoré because it helps legitimize coup leaders in places where the West and the United States will not engage local leadership. Instead, it is Russia that provides aid, military support, and even personal protection to coup leaders. While this is not to argue that the United States should provide material and political assistance to leaders like Traoré, it does illuminate a fundamental problem: the US response to coup leaders cannot be simply silence and sullenness. Such a response leads Traoré and the citizenry into the hands of Russia, pushing the country further from the path of democracy building and into humanitarian and insecurity crises that threaten the entire region. While Russian disinformation may play up citizen grievances, the Russian partnership does not prioritize Burkinabe citizens nor adequately address the country's worsening security situation. Russia's primary goal is to extract resources and spread influence and military power in the region. It is not interested or capable of addressing the underlying causes of Burkina Faso's economic malaise and instability. Values-based US Policy A 2021-2022 study by Afrobarometer in 36 African countries showed that two-thirds of Africans polled prefer democracy over any other system of government, and 80% rejected one-man rule. However, only 38% of respondents said they were satisfied with how democracy works in their country. These results indicate a growing perspective of skepticism toward democracy in Burkina Faso and across the continent. While most Africans want democracy, they have yet to see their countries' current democratic systems delivering on what is expected of them. Suppose the United States is to counter Russia's growing and nefarious influence in Burkina Faso and across Africa. In that case, the United States must focus on these shared values and aspirations with Africans: democracy, human rights, and the ability and vision through development efforts to support communities in addressing their root causes of instability and conflict. After all, these root causes of citizen discontent are also the basis through which disinformation takes hold. ...the US response to coup leaders cannot be simply silence and sullenness.This analysis is not to oversimplify the complexities and difficult circumstances that countries like Burkina Faso face. Instead, its goal is to underscore the way out of crisis and instability and away from actors like Russia who are fueling it. Through creative, adaptable, innovative solutions that address the underlying causes of extreme poverty and instability, the United States will succeed in these efforts. US policy must focus on root causes and prioritize people. Such an approach benefits from sustainable partnerships between the United States and local communities in ways that empower citizens and increase their resistance to jihadist recruitment. Success requires greater and longer-lasting investment in civil society organizations and social services development to improve the resilience, opportunities, and well-being of people throughout the country. Moreover, an independent, free press will be key to directly addressing disinformation. Increased support for independent media should be a foreign policy priority, considering the key role of reliable information and transparency in functioning democracies. In the short term, the United States can support local media through political support and help them develop fact-checking services in response to disinformation. In the long-term support of local media, capacity building, economic security, legitimacy, and empowerment are vital. This could include public diplomacy efforts that engender democratic values and build local media capacity. Torianna Eckles is the communications intern with the Wilson Center Africa Program. Previously, she was a staff intern (Director's Office) with the Stafford Capacity Building Internship with the Africa Program for the Fall 2023 term. She is a senior at The George Washington University, double majoring in Peace and Conflict Resolution and Political Science. The opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of the authors. They do not reflect the views of the Wilson Center or those of Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Wilson Center's Africa Program provides a safe space for various perspectives to be shared and discussed on critical issues of importance to both Africa and the United States.

Disinformation Manipulates Discontent Francophone West Africa's six military seizures of power since 2020 were underpinned by waning popular support for democracy in the region. The coups—two in Burkina Faso (both in 2022), two in Mali (2020 and 2022), one in Guinea (2021), and the most recent in Niger (2023)—have often been celebrated by local populations, despite elected leaders in some instances being forcefully replaced. While citizens may prefer democracy, they also desire governments that address legitimate frustrations. Democratically elected governments in West Africa have failed to support citizens and enabled some officials to build riches from corrupt practices. Leaders claim to be democratic to maintain legitimacy but act in their self-interest to consolidate power and manipulate electoral systems, making their countries democratic in name only. Moreover, West African populaces have increasingly grappled with the insecurity of militant Islamist insurgencies that threaten lives and livelihoods, as well as more than a decade of unsuccessful domestic and international—namely French—military interventions in response. In this light, citizen support for coups can be understood. Citizens celebrate new hope for long-overdue and much-needed change while their immediate security needs trump overarching democratic values. What makes less sense, however, is the sustained support for coup leaders—even as security and economic conditions worsen under junta leadership—and how this support lends itself to further approval of Russia's destabilizing actions across the region. Russian disinformation operations across West Africa have led to an unprecedented rise in popular support for Russia, citizen demands for Russian interventions, and, in some cases, new military partnerships between African countries and Russia.Burkina Faso is an illustrative example. In 2014, the country emerged from a 27-year authoritarian government. Since then, Burkina Faso experienced political reforms and democratic gains. Until recently, Reporters Without Borders called the country "one of Africa's success stories regarding freedom of the press." Then, in 2022, the security situation proved too difficult for Burkina Faso's democratic institutions to handle, and the country experienced two coups in nine months. The coups followed protests demanding democratically-elected President Kaboré's resignation and holding him accountable for the country's deteriorating security. Traoré—the second and current post-coup leader—has suspended the country's constitution and implemented a transitional charter, which cannot be revised without his approval. Both post-coup leaders justified their takeovers by claiming they had acted to respond to the preceding leader's failure to address a strengthening jihadist insurgency. Both promised to restore security. Instead, the security and humanitarian situations in Burkina Faso have greatly worsened. The number of people killed by jihadist groups has nearly tripled since the coup, and more than 2.1 million Burkinabe have been forcibly displaced. Approximately one in four schools are not operating, increasing the vulnerability of young Burkinabe who already face an uncertain future. Adding to the jihadist threat to civilians, Burkina Faso's military has also faced credible accusations of human rights abuses, such as extrajudicial killings of children and a military-linked massacre of at least 156 civilians. Traoré issued an emergency law allowing him to take any necessary measures to counter the insurgency, including requisitioning people and restraining civil liberties. Since then, he has been accused of conscripting journalists, civil society activists, and opposition party members. However, Traoré has not yet faced widespread backlash despite a worsening security situation under his rule. Instead, popular calls have been supportive of the coup leaders and, in general, in support of authoritarianism: "No to France, yes to Russia." Complexly situated in this backdrop of domestic and French military failures against jihadist insurgencies, poverty, underdevelopment, and legitimate unanswered citizen grievances, Russia has effectively seized opportunities to manipulate citizen frustrations through disinformation campaigns. Russian disinformation operations across West Africa have led to an unprecedented rise in popular support for Russia, citizen demands for Russian interventions, and, in some cases, new military partnerships between African countries and Russia. In Burkina Faso, Russian-generated disinformation has encouraged democratic backsliding, fostered coups, and increased support for repressive regimes (domestically and abroad) regardless of their human rights records. ...there are well-documented examples of Russian disinformation campaigns across West Africa and the continent. Russia's disinformation campaign in Burkina Faso builds off the legitimate fears and frustrations of the Burkinabe population while reaffirming their concerns. Disinformation manipulates discontent, blaming France for Burkina Faso's challenges, presenting Russia as a savior, and embracing authoritarian leaders like Traoré who stand ready to partner with Russia. This disinformation takes a variety of identifiable forms. Russian operatives employ inauthentic social media accounts and pretend to be Africans with a genuine interest in Burkina Faso. These accounts play on common frustrations and place blame on France's military failures and the West more broadly. They glorify Russian President Vladimir Putin, overstate the successes of the Wagner Group, and advocate for closer relationships between Burkina Faso and Russia. Burkinabe supporters of these accounts are invited to join private messaging groups that spread more radical propaganda that authorities might otherwise censor as disinformation. In early Russian disinformation campaigns, Russia struggled to make its content look legitimate. Over time, however, Russia has recruited local African political players and influencers to form and legitimize messaging, making campaigns more credible and resonant with local populations. Russian operatives have further developed fake news sources to spread disinformation or impersonate or buy legitimate accounts to ensure a spread of information favorable to Russia. In some cases, disinformation campaigns have also sought to delegitimize dissent. In response to journalists' unfavorable investigations into Burkina Faso's military, for example, accounts and sites associated with the Wagner group began attacking the journalists to discredit them and halt their work. Unfortunately, Burkina Faso is not alone, as there are well-documented examples of Russian disinformation campaigns across West Africa and the continent. Russia's successful disinformation campaigns have resulted in greater citizen support for Russia in Burkina Faso, which is increasingly vital for Russia and the coup leaders as they move the Burkinabe-Russian partnership from rhetoric to reality, as seen with the recent reopening of the Russian embassy in Burkina Faso, the arrival of Russian military personnel, and Russian-sponsored plans to build a nuclear power plant. Russian disinformation and its influence empower leaders like Traoré because it helps legitimize coup leaders in places where the West and the United States will not engage local leadership. Instead, it is Russia that provides aid, military support, and even personal protection to coup leaders. While this is not to argue that the United States should provide material and political assistance to leaders like Traoré, it does illuminate a fundamental problem: the US response to coup leaders cannot be simply silence and sullenness. Such a response leads Traoré and the citizenry into the hands of Russia, pushing the country further from the path of democracy building and into humanitarian and insecurity crises that threaten the entire region. While Russian disinformation may play up citizen grievances, the Russian partnership does not prioritize Burkinabe citizens nor adequately address the country's worsening security situation. Russia's primary goal is to extract resources and spread influence and military power in the region. It is not interested or capable of addressing the underlying causes of Burkina Faso's economic malaise and instability. Values-based US Policy A 2021-2022 study by Afrobarometer in 36 African countries showed that two-thirds of Africans polled prefer democracy over any other system of government, and 80% rejected one-man rule. However, only 38% of respondents said they were satisfied with how democracy works in their country. These results indicate a growing perspective of skepticism toward democracy in Burkina Faso and across the continent. While most Africans want democracy, they have yet to see their countries' current democratic systems delivering on what is expected of them. Suppose the United States is to counter Russia's growing and nefarious influence in Burkina Faso and across Africa. In that case, the United States must focus on these shared values and aspirations with Africans: democracy, human rights, and the ability and vision through development efforts to support communities in addressing their root causes of instability and conflict. After all, these root causes of citizen discontent are also the basis through which disinformation takes hold. ...the US response to coup leaders cannot be simply silence and sullenness.This analysis is not to oversimplify the complexities and difficult circumstances that countries like Burkina Faso face. Instead, its goal is to underscore the way out of crisis and instability and away from actors like Russia who are fueling it. Through creative, adaptable, innovative solutions that address the underlying causes of extreme poverty and instability, the United States will succeed in these efforts. US policy must focus on root causes and prioritize people. Such an approach benefits from sustainable partnerships between the United States and local communities in ways that empower citizens and increase their resistance to jihadist recruitment. Success requires greater and longer-lasting investment in civil society organizations and social services development to improve the resilience, opportunities, and well-being of people throughout the country. Moreover, an independent, free press will be key to directly addressing disinformation. Increased support for independent media should be a foreign policy priority, considering the key role of reliable information and transparency in functioning democracies. In the short term, the United States can support local media through political support and help them develop fact-checking services in response to disinformation. In the long-term support of local media, capacity building, economic security, legitimacy, and empowerment are vital. This could include public diplomacy efforts that engender democratic values and build local media capacity. Torianna Eckles is the communications intern with the Wilson Center Africa Program. Previously, she was a staff intern (Director's Office) with the Stafford Capacity Building Internship with the Africa Program for the Fall 2023 term. She is a senior at The George Washington University, double majoring in Peace and Conflict Resolution and Political Science. The opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of the authors. They do not reflect the views of the Wilson Center or those of Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Wilson Center's Africa Program provides a safe space for various perspectives to be shared and discussed on critical issues of importance to both Africa and the United States.

"There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one." - Alexis De Tocqueville Over the Memorial Day long weekend, the White House announced President Obama's nominee to replace retiring Judge David Souter in the Supreme Court. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, Circuit Court of Appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed by next September, in time for the new Supreme Court term starting in October of this year. Obama has pressed the Senate Judiciary Committee to start hearings and be ready to vote before the August Congress recess, but Republicans would like more time to scrutinize her sizable record and score some political points in the process.Because the nomination was announced during the Senate's Memorial weekend recess, the first reaction on the Conservative side came from anonymous blogs, from radio talk host Rush Limbaugh and from former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Needless to say, the attacks were fierce. Sotomayor was alternatively portrayed as an "activist judge" intent on making policy from the bench, a "reverse racist" and a candidate with "insufficient credentials" (the latter being the most laughable of all and the one that gives you the measure of the lack of seriousness of the rest: a Princeton summa cum laude graduate, and Yale Law Review editor, with over 17 years of experience as a federal judge, and over 3,000 decisions made, Sotomayor's credentials are anything but impeccable). This week the Republican Senators, who will actually be in charge of the process, tried to regain the initiative and significantly moderated the tone of the discourse. Indeed, the vetting process to the highest tribunal of the land should focus on Sotomayor's earlier decisions from the bench (she has been both a US district and a circuit court judge), her views on the Constitution and the law, on the rights of states and on the importance of precedent, and not , as her anonymous detractors would like us to think, on empty slogans, her taste for Puerto Rican food or the way she pronounces her name (accentuating the last syllable, which is seen by these ignorant critics as lack of assimilation to the Anglo culture). But having been born in the Bronx from poor immigrants, and risen in class and status to where she is today, Judge Sotomayor is more than ready for the fight. Her life experiences have taught her to see the world through different perspectives. She is not in the least intimidated by other groups' prejudices presented as righteousness, and by those who are targeting her, as Mary Sanchez from the Florida Sentinel so aptly puts it, "as if a weaker species had wandered into their den".The Republican Party is in such disarray that different elements within it are constantly and recklessly trying to score points with the electorate, using any tactic at hand without much consideration of its consequences. Given the solid majority of Democrats in the Senate, and the fact that several Republicans are likely to vote in favor of Sotomayor (she was, after all, nominated by George H.W Bush for the federal bench the first time (1992) and approved unanimously by the whole Senate), the question for Republican elected officials is how far to go in their attacks without producing an irreversible backlash at the polls from women and Hispanics for years to come. At the same time, they will be pressed by the extreme right to do some damage to the nominee and through her, to the President. Judicial fights are part and parcel of the political struggle over the court's direction, and even if the replacement of Souter with Sotomayor is not likely to change the balance of the court, the hearings should be used as a stage to present the philosophical differences between the two parties, rather than as a nasty squabble over personal characteristics, anonymous character attacks and meaningless slogans. The ideological mix in the Court (5 conservatives-4 liberals, with Justice Kennedy as the swing vote, sometimes voting with the liberals) will remain the same; the Democrats right now have a filibuster-proof majority, and there will be other Supreme Court nominations by this President to come, so the Republicans should recognize that the only battle worth fighting in this case is a clean one, free from vitriol and toxicity. Scholars have identified four primary selection criteria used by presidents in their appointments of Supreme Court justices: merit, ideology, friendship and representation. Obama's choice of Sotomayor was based on her impressive credentials, her experience of seventeen years in the federal judiciary, which offers some insight into her judicial philosophy (similar to Obama's), and her charisma and compelling biography as a Latina born in the Bronx. She therefore clearly meets three of those four criteria. Obama's short list included three other women with similar credentials, all close friends of his, but none of them Latinas.Sotomayor's ideology appears to match Obama's, himself a constitutional scholar, in that both share a penchant for pragmatism and a conscientious quest for justice and fairness under the law. For example, although she has a thin record on abortion cases and therefore her position is not clear, in one case concerning the right of the federal government to attach conditions to the use of its foreign aid money, she ruled against the pro-abortion group. In several cases of gender or racial discrimination she decided against the minority or female plaintiff. This makes some groups on the Left somewhat apprehensive. It would not be the first time that a President nominates a judge based on compatible ideology and is later disappointed when his appointee votes with the "other" block. But her vote affirming the decision by the city of New Haven to scrap a promotion test which only white firefighters had succeeded in (Ricci v. De Steffano) is what is making the headlines: the Right's intention is to portray her as a "reverse racist" and an unequivocal defender of affirmative action. Ironically, this case will come before the Supreme Court this summer, and many think her decision (unanimously made by a panel of three judges) could be overturned just before her hearings get under way, thus providing more ammunition to the opposition. Also making the headlines is her 2001 statement, during a La Raza Law Symposium, that "a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, would reach "better"conclusions than a white male"who hasn't lived that life." This week Obama regained control of the debate that Republicans had been craftily shaping, by excusing her for the wrong choice of the word "better" and by explaining that what she meant was that "her life experience will give her more information about the… hardships people are going through." This was an allusion to the fourth criteria listed above, that is, the one of representation, in this case, of Hispanics/Latinos. Since the Supreme Court is not an elected body, it follows that its representativeness is not a must. Credentials, wisdom and judicial temperament should suffice for judges to fulfill their role as interpreters of the Constitution and neutral arbiters of the law.However, the history of the Supreme Court suggests that Presidents do make efforts at representativeness when choosing their nominees, certainly to gain the political sympathies of new groups, but also to give legitimacy to the body and its main function of judicial review. (Indeed, such legitimacy has been disputed on and off since the Marbury v. Madison decision of 1803 gave its judges, appointed for life, unelected and unaccountable to nobody, the exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws for all spheres, including those of the other branches of government. This was a power that Thomas Jefferson vehemently opposed because it was nowhere to be found in the Constitution and it undermined the principle of checks and balances.)In the early part of the twentieth century, religious affiliation became a major focus, and by 1916 both a Catholic and a Jewish judge had been appointed. As different religious groups became more assimilated and religion became a non-issue to the appointment process, the imbalance of race and gender became the major considerations. But a quick review of the "representatives" of those categories shows that their representation can at times be symbolic or passive. While Sandra Day O'Connor, a conservative appointed by Reagan to close the "gender gap", actively represented women's interests in her jurisprudence and many times voted with the liberal block, Clarence Thomas, the second black judge to accede to the Supreme Court, has actively opposed affirmative action, which he regards as a noxious policy that undermines personal merit and creates resentment in the majority group. In contrast, the justice he replaced, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American in the court, was a leader of the civil rights movement who had made his reputation as a young lawyer, successfully arguing before the court the unconstitutionality of segregation in public education inBrown v Board of Education. Finally, both Justice Brennan and Justice Scalia are Catholic but find themselves at opposite sides of the ideological spectrum.In sum, to paraphrase Justice Day O'Connor, if human beings are the sum total and the product of their experiences, they cannot be defined by their gender, ethnicity, race or religion alone. Sonia Sotomayor is a very experienced federal judge with remarkable credentials who will, according to her own statements, attempt to decide every case based on its merits as it relates to the law, using objective legal standards. She also happens to be a woman of Puerto Rican origin, proud of her humble origins and of her cultural roots. And she meets all of the criteria Obama was looking for in a Supreme Court judge. Given the predominance of Democrats in the Senate, her confirmation is almost certain. Let us hope that the confirmation process itself is guided by honest inquiries and arguments on the merits of her appointment, on her judicial temperament and philosophy, and not turned into a media circus of innuendo, slurs and empty slogans that can scar a nominee for life, and in the process, devalue our democracy.Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia

 Detail of Rapture by Jon ReadSince it was published I have taught Kathi Weeks' book The Problem with Work in my Politics and Philosophy of work class. When I introduce the book, stressing that it is written by a political theorist and not, as in the case of many of our readings, by a philosopher, sociologist or historian, I ask the two questions that Weeks asks: namely, why should a political theory consider work? why does work seem to be outside of politics? What I am trying to provoke with these questions is a particular aporia in which work is for many people the central experience of power, authority, control and subjection, but because it is seen as private and natural it is seen as outside of politics, as apolitical. I remember very well a student responding to the second part of the question by saying that work was not political because "no one made you do it." At first I found this formulation strange given all of the ramifications and consequences of not working from homelessness to starvation, but the more I thought about his response the more it made its own particular sense. The compulsion to work, to sell one's labor power, was in some sense mute, unspoken, there was no particular agency or institution in society demanding it, and there was no particular institution or agency in society enforcing it--in part because it is diffuse spread throughout society. Since that day I have tried to think together two intersecting ideas. First, Marx's particular contribution to political thought is to think a new kind of compulsion, one that exceeds force or consent and ultimately the political institutions of society all together. The compulsions that define capitalism, not just in demanding that people go to work, to sell labor power, but the compulsions that dictate the rate and intensity of how that labor power will be put to work, are the structural conditions of capitalist accumulation. These compulsions go on behind the producers backs as Marx put it, are not decided on by anyone in particular. Moreover, while the state, law, and police are necessary conditions of capitalist accumulation, making possible the status of labor power as a commodity, these conditions exceed the state to be disseminated throughout political life. Which brings up the second point, this particular kind of compulsion is, for the most part, not experienced as compulsion but often as freedom, and to the extent that it appears as constraint, as necessity, it does so as a necessity that is not historical or instituted, but a fact of existence. Work, private property, competition, the market, etc. appear to not be institutions but, as Marx puts it, self-evident natural laws. Lastly, or to add a third idea, it is against this background of mute compulsion that the more overt compulsions or constraints of politics stand out. To give a contemporary example, one that I have been thinking about a lot, the short lived and inadequate measure of pandemic lockdown in the US, the few weeks of shutdowns, the few months of mask mandates, the sporadic vaccine requirements, etc., appear to be so intolerable because they were dictated and decided by specific people, but the far more pressing, and often deadly demand, to return to work, to discard unpopular mandates, and to go back to normal is all the more tolerable because it appears to come from no one and to be everywhere. Going back to work, going to stores to buy the things we need and want, is not a dictate or demand, but simply the way that things are. It is for this reason that I was very excited to read Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Mau takes up a position that is against the tendency in much of twentieth century Marxism which sought the basis for the reproduction of the relations of production in ideology or the state. As Mau says with respect to Althusser, there is a tendency to look for relations of power outside of economic relations, in the school or other various state apparatus. (I should say parenthetically that I am not convinced of this criticism of Althusser. It might describe his most famous essay, but Althusser also examined the way in which ideology was immanent to the relations of production, as for example in the wage relation and the labor contract). In place of this search for the reproduction of the relations of production in some external aspect, in the ideological state apparatuses, capitalist hegemony, or the culture industry, Mau examines the extent to which the capitalist social relations constitute their own conditions of reproduction. This reproduction stems in part from the unity in separation, to use Endnotes term, or as Mau puts it "In this mode of production, proletarians are temporarily connected to the conditions of their life through the very same social relations that ensure their permanent separation from them." Mau insists that he is not dispensing with ideology altogether. As he writes, "Since my aim is to say something about the economic power of capital, I will largely ignore the role played by ideology as well as violence in the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. I prevent any misunderstanding here, I want to emphasize that this does not mean that I consider these forms of power to be secondary or unimportant."Reading Mau's examination of this mute compulsion made me think of not only the central problem of Marx and capital that I outline above, but how long I had been trying to think about this problem. When one thinks about such a problem long enough one hopefully makes some progress, but that may or may not take place. What does happen, however, is that the world of thinking around you changes, the problems shift as does the world of references and texts. One of the thing that occurred to me is how, twenty years ago, I would have rejected the very turn to think the reproduction of capital from the relations of capital, with no reference to ideology as being "economism." The idea that reproduction of the relations of production necessarily passes through something like the supestructure, through ideology, and the state. To cite a long passage from The Micro-Politics of Capital:In Capital Marx argues that the reproduction of the labor force is a necessary aspect of the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production. "The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital" (CI 718/597). Althusser's own investigation into the connection between reproduction and ideology takes its bearings from this point. While both Marx and Althusser argue that any mode of production necessarily must reproduce its subjective and objective conditions, in Capital Marx primarily stresses the physical and biological dimension of the reproduction of subjectivity, the physical reproduction of the working class, and only marginally addresses the political and social dimension of reproduction. Before immediately rushing to conclude that Althusser's analysis is superior, since it includes in the "reproduction of the relations of production" the obedience and subjectification of the worker, it is necessary to pause over Marx's examination of the biological dimension of reproduction. Necessary, because as Althusser claims reproduction is always overdetermined, it encompasses the reproduction of the worker as a biological being, as a skilled and trained worker, and as a docile and obedient subject. The combination of these diverse practices, from the biological demand to consume sufficient food to the reproduction of ideological environments, under the same term would make the term seem hopelessly confused and monolithic, prompting many to reject it. Rather than reject the term "reproduction" almost in advance, it would seem to make more sense to construct its specific problematic from the diverse senses of the term, biological, technical, and political. From this reconstruction it is possible to expose the limits of the term, as well as its specific historicity. Marx argues that for the most part capital can leave reproduction to the "worker's drives for self-preservation and propagation." (CI 718/597) For Marx the reproduction of the biological existence of the worker is not examined as a process, but posited as a fact. It explains, poorly one might add, why the worker shows up for work. It does not answer the question as to why these same drives for self-preservation do not lead to revolt or insurrection. Moreover, Marx's treatment of reproduction, leaves the entire relation between reproductive labor, the work of care and housework, and productive labor, labor performed indirectly for capital, for the most part completely outside of Marx's analysis. Furthermore, by framing the biological reproduction of the working class as the brute confrontation of the worker's drive for self preservation and the capitalists drive for profits, it would appear that class struggle is an almost biological and a-historical struggle for survival. Thus, in considering the dynamic of capitalist reproduction, Marx lapses behind his critique of the supposed natural ground of need underlying classical political economy in the Grundrisse, and the recognition of the need and desire as a conflictual terrain, framed by the simultaneous demand of the capitalist mode of production to produce new needs and to reduce the cost of labor power in Capital. In these later points (covered in the previous chapters) Marx does not reduce history to the interaction of natural laws but recognizes that "nature" is thoroughly historical and "history" is thoroughly natural.This interrelation of nature and history as it relates to the reproduction of life is expounded in The German Ideology. The production of life, both of one's own in labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end…. Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is old as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a "history" independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may hold men together. In light of this assertion it becomes necessary to read against this biological ground of reproduction. Not in order to purge from Marx any reference to the biological dimension of reproduction, but to locate in this biological dimension not the simple and a-historical conflict of the needs of the working class versus the desires of the capitalist, but the historical transformation of biological existence—what we could call the "biopolitics of capitalism." Marx argues that one of the fundamental differences between the capitalist mode of production and pre-capitalist production is that in the former the conditions of reproduction are mediated by the commodity form and wage rather than directly provided. The capitalist does not feed or care for the worker, at least directly, as in the case of slavery, but provides the abstract conditions for reproduction in the form of a wage. Under formal subsumption, or generalized commodity production, one of the presuppositions of capitalist production is that the conditions for living can and ultimately must be bought in the form of commodities. Which is not to argue that there may not be some forms of pre-capitalist practices of reproduction (small gardens, homecooked meals, children cared for at home, etc.) but that the time constraints imposed by commodity production (the working day) as well as the availability of commodified substitutes work to diminish the role of these practices of reproduction in capital. The process of primitive accumulation "frees" the worker from any communal or hierarchical system that would provide for the conditions of existence, exposing him or her as "naked life" on the market. Of course this "freedom" is at best partial, if not wholly illusory. Since the wage makes possible a new hierarchy between wage work, male work, and the non-waged work of reproduction, female work. The wage and with it the commodity form become the general condition for life and existence. This means that the conditions of the reproduction of existence are subject to the economic constraints and demands imposed by the commodity form. Specifically, one of the ways to increase relative surplus is to make the costs of reproduction of labor, the basic necessities of life, cheaper, increasing the ratio of surplus labor to necessary labor. To be exposed to commodity production for the basic conditions of one's existence is to be ruthlessly exposed to the demand for cheaper commodities."That is a long citation, but like I said, I have been thinking about that book that I wrote twenty-years ago. Mau discusses the book briefly but mainly to criticize it for using the phrase "real subsumption of subjectivity by capital." I am not really interested in getting into that now. It was the early 2000s, Empire had just come out, subsumption was all the craze. It was a different time. I also used to listen to Radiohead and frequently wore a sweater vest over a t-shirt: the past is a foreign country. I am less attached to the idea of real subsumption as having explanatory power as a marker of periodization. It is a term that needs to be explained more than it explains. What I am more interested in is the way in which Marx presented his understanding of capitalism in terms of strict conceptual oppositions from what had come before it, contrasting personal and impersonal domination, unity versus separation, and the way that these conceptual distinctions are maintained and extended into the present in terms of inside and outside, ideology versus economy, and so on. It seems to me that those divisions, the divisions that Marx used to distinguish capital from pre-capitalism, and the divisions internal to Marxist theory increasingly fail us now in the current stage of "absolute capitalism" to use Balibar's phrase. Economic relations, such as selling labor power, are at once material, part of the capitalist relations of production, and ideological, part of its justification. Or, to perhaps repeat what I said above, mute compulsion is both a fact of existence and an ideological justification. 

학위논문 (석사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 철학과(서양철학전공), 2012. 2. 정호근. ; The objective of this thesis is to elucidate the concept of the general will and to make Rousseau's point clear by refuting criticisms which determine the general will as totalitarianism. To this end, I would like to reconstruct the concept of the general will by focusing on Rousseau's paradoxical expression of 'forcing to be free'. Because I think that it is possible to get a correct understanding of the general will through paying attention to this phrase. There are two kinds of 'forcing to be free' in the theory of Rousseau's General will. One is found in the notorious passage arguing that whoever refuses to obey the general will must be forced to be free in the Book 1 chapter 7 of On Social Contract. The other is implicit one in the passage discussing the conditions of the general will in the Book 2 chapter 3 and Book 2 chapter 7(part 4 chapter 8). I would like to examine these problems respectively and try to show that Rousseau's ultimate point consists in not 'forcing' but 'freedom'. Conclusively, the authentic difficulty of interpreting of Rousseau's logic is that nevertheless 'forcing to be free' is necessary to the production of the general will, he permit the possibility of failure of this process in practice. Rousseau's theory of the popular sovereignty argues that the foundation of legitimacy of the state does not consist in the divine or natural foundation but in the autonomous will of the people. Despite this theoretical postulate, the people appear to not only rational and social unity, but also always potentially the multitude as disordered gathering of individuals who are vulnerable to a capricious passion. On the one hand, the people's general will should make a society legitimate, particular deliberation of the people may be contingent and could make an erroneous decision on the other. As a result, Rousseau introduces the legislator or the civil religion which is external to a people in order to transform a multitude into unified people. However, because of the very reason that people are still and always multitude, they consequently could not obey this foreign authority so the problem regarding difficulty of self-ruling of the people remains unsolved. At a glance, Rousseau's theory of popular sovereignty seems to optimistic assertion that the people should and could govern itself. But Rousseau's pessimistic claim that the ideal people cannot be naturally given, but must be constructed by constant effort should not be overlooked as well. Finally, the introduction of the legislator or the civil religion is not contradictory to the principle of popular sovereignty because the success or failure of this heteronomous agency is uncertain and the popular sovereignty keeps still its autonomy. The problems are described as follows: the general will aiming at common good could fell to mere will of all by acquiring of a particular will possessed by some individuals. In the same way, the people who should be unitary and organic are degenerated into a blind multitude and the citizen who must be active and rational in the collective deliberation into a passive, passionate subject. The principle of the popular sovereignty claiming that good law makes a good people but the origin of the good law must be also the people, and the fact that primitive people does not have any capacity to legislate such good law is the source of the circular logic Rousseau engages. It also suggests that the self-ruling of the people is not easily attainable project by the introduction of the legislator or the civil religion because after the initial social contract, passionate, irrational and apolitical properties of the human being who had had those attributes in the state of nature cannot be completely eradicated. So the state of the society in Rousseau is more vulnerable than the traditional reading in that there is always the danger of reemergence of the state of nature. The fact that the sovereignty belongs to the people but the people do not have such capacity to exert the sovereignty is the central ambiguity derived from the theory of popular sovereignty in Rousseau. Rousseau's democracy as self-ruling of the people, therefore, remains always incomplete, contestable and unfinished democracy. This paradox of Rousseau is deduced from the consistent, thorough accomplishment of the principle of the freedom. In other words, Rousseau's premises arguing that the legitimacy of the politics does not have any transcendent and ultimate ground and its source is a unique source of will of the people as free being even permit the freedom to refuse their freedom. That is to say, individual citizens must be forced to be free but also can have the (natural) freedom not to be forced to have (civil and moral) freedom. In short, as though effective denaturalization is necessarily required to make man into citizen, it remains a process without a priori guarantee. Thus, the binary oppositions which support Rousseau's whole system, such as oppositions between the society and nature, the people and multitude and the general will and the will of all always have the possibility of confusion in practice. That danger renders the general will only transient or temporary in the conflictual process of politics. The fundamental problem of politics suggested by Rousseau is that the passage from the state of nature to the state of society is necessary, but is also very difficult and could not be achieved entirely. In conclusion, all these considerations show that Rousseau's political philosophy does not defense the alleged totalitarianism but is the philosophy of 'freedom' in the strict and consistent sense of the word. ; 본 논문의 목적은 을 중심으로 루소의 일반의지 개념의 정체를 해명하고, 이를 전체주의로 규정하는 비판들로부터 루소의 논지를 명료하게 하는 것이다. 이를 위해 나는 '자유롭도록 강제'된다는 루소의 역설적인 표현을 중심으로 일반의지 개념을 재구성하고자 하며, 이 점에 주목할 때 비로소 일반의지 개념에 대한 정확한 이해가 가능하다고 본다. 루소의 일반의지 이론에서는 크게 두 가지의 '자유롭도록 강제됨'이 나타난다. 하나는 일반의지를 거부하는 자들이 자유롭도록 강제되어야한다고 주장하는 1부 7장의 주장이며 다른 하나는 2부 3장 및 2부 7장(4부 8장)에서 일반의지의 성립 조건을 논의하는 대목에서 드러난다. 나는 이들을 각각 살펴보고 루소의 궁극적인 강조점은 강제가 아니라 자유에 있음을 보여주고자 한다. 결론적으로, 루소의 논리를 따를 때 나타나는 진정한 난점은 자유롭도록 강제하는 과정이 일반의지의 산출을 위해 필수적임에도 불구하고, 실천적으로는 이것이 실패할 수 있는 여지를 허용하는 데에 있다. 루소의 인민주권론은 국가 정당성의 토대가 신적인 것이나 자연적인 근거에 있다는 견해를 부정하고 인민의 자율적인 의지가 정치적 권위의 원천이라고 주장한다. 그런데 인민은 항상 이성적이고 사회적인 질서정연한 통일체인 것이 아니라 또한 잠재적으로 정념에 좌우되기 쉬운 개인들의 무질서한 모임으로서 다중으로 현상하기도 한다. 즉 한편으로 인민의 일반의지는 사회를 정당한 것으로 만드는 조건이지만, 다른 한편으로 인민들의 개별 심의는 우연적이며 오류를 범할 수 있는 것이다. 따라서 루소는 다중을 인민으로 만들기 위해서 입법자와 시민종교와 같은 인민 외부의 권위를 도입한다. 그러나 인민은 그들이 다중이라는 바로 그 이유로 이러한 외부적 권위에 복종하지 않을 수도 있기 때문에, 인민이 스스로를 통치하는 것에 관한 난점은 해결되지 않는다. 일견 루소의 인민주권론은 인민이 인민 자신을 통치해야 한다는 낙관적 주장으로 보이지만, 인민은 그 자체로 주어지거나 발견될 수 없으며 다만 이상적 인민으로 구성되어야 한다는 루소의 비관적 주장 역시 간과되어서는 안 된다. 결국 입법자나 시민종교의 도입은 인민주권의 원리와 상충되는 것이 아닌데, 이러한 타율적 장치의 성공 여부는 불확실하여 인민주권은 여전히 그 자율성을 지니기 때문이다. 문제는 공동이익을 지향해야 할 일반의지가 각 개인이 갖는 특수의지의 득세에 의해 한갓 전체의지로 전락할 위험, 통일적이고 유기적이어야 할 인민이 무지몽매하고 개별적인 다중으로 전락할 위험, 집단적인 심의에 있어 능동적이고 합리적이어야 할 시민이 수동적이고 정념에만 사로잡힌 신민으로 전락할 위험에 있다. 좋은 법이 좋은 인민을 만들지만 좋은 법의 출처는 또한 인민이어야 한다는 인민주권의 원리, 그리고 최초의 인민은 그러한 입법을 할 수 있는 역량을 가지지 못하는 다중이라는 상황이 루소가 사로잡힌 순환 논리의 원천이다. 그런데 사회계약 이후에도 인간이 자연 상태에서 갖던 감성적, 비합리적, 비정치적 속성은 완전히 해소되지 않으며, 이는 입법자나 시민종교 같은 장치를 통해서도 인민의 자기통치가 온전히는 달성될 수 없는 난제임을 보여준다. 이처럼 루소의 사회 상태는 항상 부분적으로나마 자연 상태가 돌발할 수도 있는 위험을 갖는다는 점에서 취약한 것이다. 주권은 인민에 속하지만 인민은 스스로를 직접 통치할 수 있는 역량을 결여한다는 것이 루소의 인민주권론이 보여주는 애매성이다. 그러므로 인민의 자기통치로서 루소의 민주주의는 항상 불완전하여 계속해서 갱신되고 수정되어야 하는 미완의 민주주의로 남는다. 루소에서 이러한 역설은 자유의 원리를 일관되게 관철시키게 됨에서 귀결된다. 즉 정치의 정당성에는 어떠한 선험적이고 궁극적인 토대도 없다는 것, 인민은 자유로운 존재로서 그들의 의지만이 정치적 정당성의 유일한 원천이라는 루소의 전제는 그들이 스스로의 자유를 거부할 자유마저도 허용한다. 다시 말해 각 개인은 일반의지의 실현을 위해서 자유롭도록 강제되어야 하지만, 이들은 '자유롭도록'(즉 시민적 자유와 도덕적 자유) 강제되지 않을 수 있는 자유(즉 자연적 자유)를 가질 수도 있다. 요컨대 인간을 시민으로 만들기 위해서는 효과적인 탈자연화가 요구되지만, 이는 보증없는 과정이다. 따라서 루소의 체계를 떠받치는 이항대립, 즉 사회와 자연, 인민과 다중, 일반의지와 전체의지는 항상 실천적으로는 혼동될 위험을 가지며 이러한 위험은 일반의지가 정치의 갈등적인 과정 속에서 단지 일시적으로만 가능한 것으로 만든다. 루소가 보여주는 정치의 근본 문제는 자연 상태로부터 사회 상태로의 이행이 필수적이지만, 동시에 이것이 매우 어렵고 온전히 달성될 수 없다는 것이다. 결론적으로 이러한 탐구는 루소의 철학이 전체주의를 대변하는 것이 아니라 여전히 '자유'의 철학이며, 그것도 매우 일관적인 의미에서 그러함을 보여준다. ; Master

Kenyan President William Ruto has confirmed that Haiti will receive 600 more Kenyan police officers next month, doubling the size of the strained international anti-gang force known as the Multinational Security Support (MSS).The announcement came less than two weeks after the U.N. Security Council unanimously agreed to extend the U.S.-coordinated mission for another year, and just days after members of Haiti's Gran Grif gang launched an unencumbered massacre on a farming village that killed at least 115 people."Haiti's future depends on the return to democratic governance," President Biden said in a statement supporting the mission's initial deployment in June. "While these goals may not be accomplished overnight, this mission provides the best chance of achieving them."Gang violence and influence in Haiti have escalated this year in the power vacuum left by its unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry — who resigned in March amid growing international and domestic pressure — further upending a nation already shaken by the assassination of his predecessor and a recent history of natural disasters."Gang violence is not new in Haiti — it is something that has always existed," said Robert Fatton, a professor in the University of Virginia's Politics Department. "What is new now is that the gangs have gained a very serious degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the people who used to nurture them financially and politically."The MSS is the most recent gambit in a long history of U.S.-led strategies in Haiti with the stated intentions of pulling the nation out of despair and into a future of stability and democracy. So far, it has not found much success.The MSS mission has liberated the capital's main airport and main public hospital from the gangs, but the force is vastly outnumbered; the nearly 200 gangs in Port-au-Prince, estimated to have around 15,000 total members, still control over 80% of the city and its main roads in and out, as well as other parts of the country. The humanitarian situation remains dire as well: as of September 27, the UN says at least 3,661 people have been killed in 2024 as a direct result of gang violence. At least 700,000 people across the country have fled their homes, and about half of the population — at least 5.4 million people — are experiencing food insecurity.Past American attempts at intervention in Haiti put the current mission into a bleak context, as some scholars have pointed out."25,000 U.S. troops in the mid-90s couldn't put Haiti back together," said Christopher Fettweis, who teaches political science at Tulane University. "I don't know how anybody can think, 'Oh, 600 more Kenyan [officers] — they'll get it done.'"While the additional numbers will provide much-needed support for the mission, Executive Director for Justice and Democracy in Haiti Brian Concannon emphasized their limited capacity to engage with and aid the Haitian population."It'll make some difference, but that doesn't replace the amount of Haitian police that have left in the last two years," Concannon said. "You're replacing them with people who don't speak French or Creole, don't know the neighborhoods, can't interact with people or do intelligence work — all these things that make a Haitian police officer much more effective than a Kenyan one."The force was initially planned to have 2,500 officers from Kenya and a smattering of other nations, but it remains undermanned and underfunded. This new deployment will bring the force's numbers to just over 1,000, consisting mostly of Kenyans, as well as two dozen Jamaicans and two officers from Belize. On top of $369 million in funding from the U.S., UN officials have reported around $85 million in other donations to the mission, primarily from Canada. Despite optimism from Biden, Ruto, and other international leaders, the MSS clearly lacks adequate funding and personnel for addressing the country's current crisis and setting Haiti on a path towards stable governance. But, as Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research Jake Johnston described, even a fully supplied MSS would not be the proper solution."The last two years have been sort of consumed by finding a force, authorizing the force, funding the force, and I think it's sort of missing the forest for the trees here. Even with a perfectly well- funded, well-armed force, there is no actual strategy to restore peace and security in Haiti, and we've seen sort of shockingly little engagement on any of the other pieces that would be critically important to actually doing so," Johnston said.It was Henry who initially requested the mission's deployment in 2022 — which many saw as an attempt to protect himself and his grip on power."Another armed foreign intervention in Haiti will not result in the necessary Haitian-led transition to a democratic government, rather it risks further destabilizing the country, endangering more innocent people, and entrenching the current, illegitimate regime," several members of Congress wrote in a December open letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Manpower and lack of planning are not the only challenges. A long history of American meddling and propping up corrupt regimes in Haiti's politics also casts an ominous shadow of doubt over the Biden administration's claims that its strategy even aligns with Haitian interests. Haiti's 2010-2011 presidential election looms particularly large. After interfering in the election on his behalf in November 2010, the U.S. imposed sanctions on former president Michel Martelly this August for charges related to drug-trafficking, with one American official citing the role he and other figures have played in "perpetuating the ongoing crisis in Haiti."Fatton underscored the legacy of Martelly's regime and its significant influence on the current situation, particularly in relation to the trade and import of small weapons used by the gangs. A U.N. report from last year also alleged that the former president financed, negotiated and established relationships with gangs — using them to expand his influence over certain neighborhoods and "contributing to a legacy of insecurity, the impacts of which are still being felt today."In this sense, the U.S.-backed interim Haitian government, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) — designed to carry out presidential duties until elections can be held — seems to be a step in the right direction. However, the Council's infancy has been racked by backroom coalition-building and corruption, controversial appointments, and unanimous support for the MSS despite widespread opposition among Haitian civil society groups. "I think the Presidential Council was welcome, because Henry had been such a disaster, and there was hope that you have very different groups and personalities in there that usually never collaborate. … But now you have divisions and a scandal in the Presidential Council, and people feel disaffected," Fatton said.To Johnston, it is the broad and enduring external influences on Haitian politics that has prevented the continent's poorest country from reaching a smoother path toward stability."The political class has become oriented towards external actors, as opposed to the internal population, and that has significant repercussions," Johnston said. "That is what exacerbates and breaks down this relationship between the state and the population, and ultimately leads to state failure."

 Today, I got stretched pretty good, as I was asked to testify before the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence.  The focus was supposed to be the Baltics/Ukraine security situation, but I ended up helping to, um, expand the conversation.  I was on with two sharp people who are far more knowledgeable about Ukraine and Baltic security stuff, so I made that clear at the top of my initial statement.Because dropbox no longer lets one share files easily, I will just summarize my opening statement: lots of uncertainty, much hinging on the US election (which had the effect of derailing the conversation a bit, I think), that Canada is contributing to NATO via the mission in Latvia, that it is no longer doing the air patrolling stuff, that my civ-mil hat is causing me to ponder how is Zelensky managing his military and how likely is it for the Russian military to mutiny.The committee was smart to keep the regional questions aimed at my colleagues.  Marta Kepe of RAND spoke about hybrid warfare and other unconventional threats facing the Baltics.  Arel was quite critical of the lack of political will on the part of the west in general in not supporting Ukraine earlier and letting its fear of escalation inhibit support now.  I found myself agreeing with them on pretty much everything they said except for that political will stuff.  The Q&A ran for nearly 2 hours with each MP getting somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes to ask questions (the MPs from the NPQ and Block got 1 minute each--smaller parties get less time).  The first question to me was by Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant asked about very specific drone capabilities and why don't we have more systems to combat higher level air threats.  My response focused on the fact that our allies have anti-aircraft capabilities to help us, and that the drone procurement thing is happening.  I forget when I mentioned that there had been opposition to weaponized drones a while back because of concerns about their being used to assassinate individuals, but that the Ukraine war has shown us of the importance on a conventional battlefield.The second question to be was by Christine Normandin of the Bloc, who is one of the Vice Chairs of the committee--wouldn't Poland paying more than 2% of its GDP on defense insure that Trump would still respond to an attack on Poland?  Nope, that Trump couldn't be counted on for anything like that given his hostility to NATO and his positive attitude towards Russia/Putin.The next question to me was from the NDP's Lindsay Mathyssen about the links between the far right and Russia, and I, well, really went to town on that one--mentioning their joint interest in eroding trust in democratic institutions, their weaponization of all kinds of hate (transphobia, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia) to divide democracies, and their joint fondness for autocracy.  I didn't mention DeSantis by name, but I did link Orban to all of this.  This got picked up by some far right media folks so here's the video of that sequence.Conservative Don Stewart pushed again on drones--whether it would be right to train our troops on them before shipping them out to our troops in Latvia and why we don't have so many.  I mentioned the procurement challenges, here or later, including the fact that with everybody wanting to buy drones, there is a supply problem.Liberal Emmanuella Lambropoulous asked a question of Arel that she then directed to me--why support Ukraine?  In addition to the stuff Arel mentioned, I pointed out that our inflation was partly caused by the commodity shock of Russia invading Ukraine's grain growing area.  I also mentioned our commitment to NATO, and this is a war that directly implicates NATO.Normandin asked again about Trump, and I forgot if I said much different from the first time.Liberal Marcus Powlowski asked about a reference I mad to Russian soldiers mutinying.  I said that what we know from civ-mil is not that we can pinpoint when one might happen, but the reckless disregard for the welfare of Russian troops might lead to units munitying.  He asked for evidence, and I had none except stories of individual soldiers attacking superior officers.  That time was not necessarily on Russia's side.Conservative Vice Chair James Bezan asked about whether we should have sent some of the LAVs to Ukraine earlier, and I basically said yes.  Liberal Chad Collins asked a long question about disinformation, which followed up from my previous answer about democratic institutions and the far right.  Either here or before, I pointed out that across the democracies, a key for preventing the rise of the far right is for right-wing parties to oppose them. My notes deteriorate from there.  We were asked about Ukraine and membership in NATO--I pointed out that won't happen until the war is over, as admitting a member mid-war is essentially NATO declaring war.  I was then asked if Ukraine could become a member if Trump was President, and I reminded folks that NATO operates by consensus, and Trump, having been impeached the first time for trying to extort Ukraine, would probably not support membership for Ukraine.One can find the video online to get the whole hearing--the other two folks were super sharp and I learned much for them.Did I tell the parliamentarians that my next book, with Phil and Dave, compares defence committees around world and found that the Canadian version was deliberately irrelevant?  No.  I will save that for the book launch.  I was very conscious that all parties were trying to play me and the others into giving them the soundbites that they wanted.  Perhaps I am biased, but the Conservatives seemed the most consistent, focusing on a particular message--that the Liberals are responsible for the CAF being under-equipped--which is not wrong, but I didn't want to get pinned down to say this was a uniquely Liberal problem--the Conservatives helped to get us here as well.  I probably gave the Liberals and the NDP the soundbites they wanted, but I did sense that there was a bit more genuine interest in the stuff and a bit less ruthless focus on point scoring.  As I said, I might be more aware of the stuff on the right than on the left.I was asked by someone later whether this was stressful or whether I was frustrated.   Nope, this was fun--talking about this stuff is what I like to do, and talking to a committee that is, um, sort of responsible for this stuff is still cool even if I am a critic of how it does its business. 

The long-anticipated move by leftist MP Sahra Wagenknecht to form a new left-populist party opens the prospect of a more active debate within Germany on the policy course taken by the now highly unpopular coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and liberal Free Democrats (FDP).The potential appeal of this new party will depend largely on whether voters agree that the policy of supporting Ukraine is responsible for Germany's economic downturn.Party ConfigurationThe German political scene has evolved in recent decades away from the alternation in power of the center right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the center left Social Democrats (SPD), often with the FDP in coalition with one or the other of these, to present a spectrum of parties including the center left Green party, the far-left Die Linke (the Left) party and the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).With the lone exception of AfD, these parties all broadly support Ukraine's war effort, until Ukraine itself is ready to seek a negotiated settlement. CDU/CSU support now stands at 29.4%. The AfD comes second with 21.2%. Support for the three governing parties together has fallen to 35.6%. The AfD's spectacular rise in polls seems to many analysts to suggest a generalized dissatisfaction with the status quo, and not necessarily the sudden conversion of many Germans to far-right extremist views. Wagenknecht has called this a "representation gap," one that her party would seek to exploit. The long-anticipated announcement on October 23 of the launch of a new party led by Die Linke MP Sahra Wagenknecht makes the course of German politics much less predictable. Even more than the AfD, the new party foregrounds its opposition to the prevailing stance on the war in Ukraine. Antiwar politics and the "representation gap"A majority of Die Linke's Bundestag delegation has backed tough sanctions against Russia, while still opposing weapons exports to Ukraine. Tensions within the parliamentary delegation grew as Wagenknecht, in public and in the Bundestag, assailed the sanctions policy and called for the opening of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. The party has hovered since the last election just below the 5% threshold of support needed to win representation in the Bundestag. The breaking away of Wagenknecht and her nine colleagues from the Die Linke faction reduces that party to a parliamentary group, rather than a faction, affecting its funding and other prerogatives in the Bundestag.Wagenknecht and the nine other Die Linke MPs who have joined her effort to form the new party have provisionally named it the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. They plan to have the party officially formed and ready to contest the European Parliament elections of June 2024 and three state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg (all in the former East Germany) later next year. This timing seems well chosen: European Parliament elections are typically favorable to smaller parties, and many voters in the eastern states are, for various reasons, favorable to the Wagenknecht initiative. A snap poll reported on October 31 found that 14% of voters could imagine themselves voting for the new party. This would immediately place it in fourth place, behind the CDU/CSU, AfD, and the SPD, and ahead of the Green party. The new party's impact would be felt mostly on the AfD, but would attract support from all parties other than the Greens and Die Linke itself. Wagenknecht's stated aim is to fill a "representation gap," which means her party will seek to represent those German voters who do not support further arming of Ukraine and who favor efforts to settle the conflict through diplomacy. Evidence of the existence of this gap is the spectacular rise of AfD which began just after Russia's invasion in February of 2022 (when AfD support stood at 9.5%) and more recent polls placing AfD support above 20% since mid 2023. As of March of this year, about 30% of Germans found the arming of Ukraine to have been excessive, and a small majority — 52% — said diplomatic efforts to end the conflict had not been adequate. More recently, a majority (52%) opposed providing Taurus missiles to Ukraine.Wagenknecht's anti-war popularityWagenknecht has been an MP since 2009 and was co-leader of Die Linke in the Bundestag from 2015 to 2019. Born in East Germany, she became active after 1989 in the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism, initially heading its leftmost, avowedly communist wing. The PDS merged with disaffected leftists of the west German SPD in 2007 and became Die Linke, which for some time enjoyed some electoral success, including in western Germany. Former SPD leader and finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, was co-founder of Die Linke and is Wagenknecht's husband.Because of her frequent appearances on political talk shows, Wagenknecht is fairly well known to the German public. Often the lone dissenter against the prevailing posture on Ukraine, her arguments are always persuasive, articulate and above all dispassionate. She is a controversial figure, but one that remains among the most popular German politicians. A recent poll showed her finishing third behind Defense Minister Pistorius and CSU leader Markus Söder in national approval ratings.Ukraine War positions: AfD and WagenknechtAlthough AfD's published program states that there can be no viable security order in Europe that excludes Russia, this issue is not often emphasized in their appeal to voters. By contrast, Sahra Wagenknecht's notoriety is entirely wedded to her very public antiwar stance. In February 2023, Wagenknecht joined Alice Schwarzer, a leading anti-war activist and editor of the feminist journal EMMA, to put forward a Manifest für Frieden (Manifesto for Peace) and inviting signatures online.The antiwar demonstration in Berlin on February 25, led by Wagenknecht and Schwarzer, attracted participation by about 10,000 people, but did not produce the momentum that the organizers might have hoped for.Wagenknecht has called herself a "conservative leftist," faulting Die Linke with having built its support base among younger, urban progressive voters while allegedly neglecting voters of the working class. This dispute has taken the form of a contest between an identity vs a class basis of leftist politics. Wagenknecht argues for the refocus of the left on defense of the interests of the German working class. She has sounded some caution about what she sees as excessive openness to flows of migrants.What does it mean?The launch of organizational efforts to form Wagenknecht's new party opens the prospect of a more active debate within Germany on the policy course taken by the weak governing coalition. Wagenknecht has stated that she and her party will not cooperate with AfD. The AfD made a very strong showing in recent state elections in the prosperous western states of Hesse and Bavaria, suggesting that its own potential is not confined to eastern Germany. By filling a tempting "gap" in German politics, the Wagenknecht alliance could endeavor to to curb the rise of AfD.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attempted to revitalize his flagging presidential campaign with a major foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation on Friday. Casting his foreign policy vision as the desirable middle ground between "post-9/11 neoconservatism" and the supposed fecklessness of Obama, DeSantis presented a familiar playbook of much higher military spending and hardline posturing mixed with some rhetoric aimed at appealing to Americans weary of constant foreign wars. Promising to make the 21st century an "American century," the governor endorsed a costly and dangerous China policy that would put the U.S. on course for a ruinous conflict in the Pacific.The governor gave the impression that he wanted nothing to do with Bush era foreign policy with his denunciation of "Wilsonian abstractions" and his criticism of nation-building projects, but when it came to the larger "war on terror" that Bush launched he had no substantive objections. He had nothing to say about reforming or repealing the 2001 AUMF, and he explicitly mentioned the Iraq war only once when he referred to his own service in it. He spoke in general terms about avoiding "murky missions" and "misguided agendas," but he chose not to identify examples of these things.The governor took his usual shots at Biden's foreign policy, predictably accusing it of being "rudderless" and "weak." This is a standard attack that hawkish opponents of an incumbent president make, and in DeSantis's case it reflects his instinct to take the more hardline position on almost every issue. He also faults Biden's foreign policy for being "solicitous" of adversaries, but this is based on a caricature of Biden's record that makes it much harder to take the rest of DeSantis's speech seriously.Among other things, he claimed that Biden "empowered Iran with sanctions relief." This is a cruel joke to anyone who has paid close attention to what the president's Iran policy has been. Far from granting sanctions relief, the administration won't even honor the terms of the prisoner exchange agreement that it reached with Iran earlier this year.The $6 billion of Iran's own money that was supposed to be released via a Qatari bank is still inaccessible in response to Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. There is no evidence that Iran "orchestrated" the attack, but DeSantis stated this as if it were certain. Pretending that non-existent sanctions relief "fueled" the Hamas attack on Israel is another one of DeSantis's false claims.On Ukraine, DeSantis repeated his previous criticisms of Biden for alleged "weakness" that "invited" the Russian invasion. He added a new twist by pretending that non-existent sanctions relief for Iran is somehow going towards funding the Russian side of the war.DeSantis boasted about his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, which he somewhat misleadingly called the "Obama-Khamenei Iran nuclear deal." The JCPOA wasn't just a bargain between the U.S. and Iran or their respective leaders, but rather involved all permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. It was the most extensive and successful nonproliferation agreement to have ever been negotiated, and it substantially and verifiably restricted Iran's nuclear program more effectively than anything before or since. DeSantis's knee-jerk hostility to the deal and to diplomacy with Iran isn't news, but the fact that he still thinks opposing the agreement is something to be proud of tells us that his foreign policy judgment remains quite poor.DeSantis is nothing if not a China hawk, and the second half of his speech was dedicated to hyping the threat from China and making every other problem seem like an extension of that purported threat. The governor said China has "grand ambitions" and "seek[s] to be the dominant power in the entire world." This is a common claim from China hawks, but it is one that has remarkably little evidence to back it up. It's more of an article of faith among supporters of rivalry and containment than a well-founded assessment of Chinese goals.The governor assumes that the Chinese government wants to export its political system to other parts of the world, but there is scant evidence that the Chinese are intent on reproducing their system elsewhere. While the Chinese government does try to expand its political and economic influence, this is no different from how any other major power has operated. Treating China as if it were the Soviet Union 2.0 in terms of its ideological goals is a serious mistake that exaggerates the threat to U.S. and allied security.Because he believes that the Chinese government is "marshalling" its society to pursue these ambitions, DeSantis proposes that the U.S. should have a "whole of society" approach in response. That suggests a degree of mobilization and regimentation in American life that would make Americans less free. It would certainly require pouring huge resources into the military-industrial complex and the national security state.Like the China hawks that have been advising him, DeSantis insists that the U.S. should prioritize the "Indo-Pacific" above all else and allocate resources accordingly. DeSantis argues that deterring China will be achieved simply through strength and that Beijing will respect strength, "especially strength in their region."It doesn't seem to occur to the governor that increasing U.S. military power in China's vicinity will be viewed as a growing threat and will cause China to grow its military to keep pace. He has nothing to say about reassuring the Chinese government about U.S. intentions, but instead he focuses entirely on trying to intimidate them. That is a guaranteed path to an arms race and puts our countries on track for war.It is true that resources are scarce, as he says, but that makes the decision to squander those resources on a massive military buildup that U.S. security does not require all the more foolish. The huge surge in shipbuilding he proposes to create, first a 355-ship, and eventually a 600-ship navy would be very expensive and unnecessary. This "four-ocean navy" would be an extravagant waste of national wealth, and it is no surprise that the governor didn't tell the audience how he would pay for it.Copying a line of Reagan, DeSantis defines the end of U.S.-China rivalry in simplistic terms: "We win and they lose." If we take DeSantis at his word, that implies either regime collapse or forcible regime change, but the governor didn't bother to spell out how that might happen or what the dangers of such an outcome might be. He proposes pursuing an intense great power rivalry with a nuclear-armed opponent, and he defines that rivalry in zero-sum terms. That is a recipe for a major war that would have catastrophic effects on America, China, and the rest of the world.DeSantis talks a good game about not wanting the U.S. to enter "into any ill-defined or unnecessary conflicts," but his China policy would put the U.S. on a collision course for the biggest unnecessary conflict of all.Finally, the governor says that Americans must "arrest our country's decline," but embracing militarized rivalry against China is one of the surest ways of hastening it.

The Eurasia Group Foundation's latest survey report, titled "Order and Disorder: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Fragmented World," covered a range of issues from sanctions and arms sales to drone strikes and the war in Ukraine, and it contains several notable findings about how Americans perceive different aspects of U.S. global engagement. According to the report, Americans are very open to diplomacy with hostile powers, but they are also supportive of going to war with China to a disturbing degree. One of the chief findings is that Americans are broadly in favor of direct diplomatic engagement with adversaries and even more support negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue. According to the poll, two-thirds of Americans favor negotiations with adversaries even if they are responsible for human rights abuses, authoritarian governments, or home to terrorist organizations, 77% support continued nuclear talks with Iran, and 58% of Americans also want the U.S. to push for a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine. Support for diplomatic solutions has majority backing of Americans from across the political spectrum, so it is remarkable how little support for those same solutions can be found among our elected representatives and policymakers in Washington.Some of the report's findings are unsurprising. There is a partisan divide over Ukraine policy with Democrats tending to be much more supportive of the administration approach than Republicans and Republicans are the most hawkish when it comes to China. But perhaps one of the most surprising and significant results is the extent to which Americans of all political camps now say that they support direct intervention in a war over Taiwan. Other surveys in recent years have found that roughly 40% of Americans back direct U.S. intervention in the event of a Chinese attack, but the EGF survey found that overall support for intervention is at 60%. That may be the result of rising tensions between China and Taiwan and the ongoing deterioration of relations between the U.S. and China over the past year since former House Speaker Pelosi's ill-advised visit to Taipei last summer. It may be caused by the constant drumbeat of anti-China rhetoric from members of both parties. It could be some combination of all three. Regardless, this represents a significant increase in public support for going to war over Taiwan, and that suggests that the public does not fully grasp how costly and dangerous such a war would be. Support for intervention is relatively soft with most of the supporters saying that they only "somewhat" support sending U.S. forces to help defend Taiwan, but it can't be denied that this is a major shift in U.S. public opinion in the last ten years. It is a measure of how dominant hawkish groupthink on China policy has become if a majority of the public now says that they support waging a major war with a nuclear-armed adversary.The public is split almost exactly in half over whether the U.S. should sell arms to other countries. Fifty-three percent believe that the U.S. should stop selling arms. The finding on arms sales is striking because the question refers only to "selling arms globally" without saying anything about the governments that are purchasing them. Most Democratic and independent respondents say that the U.S. should not continue arms sales, and even 48% of Republicans say the same. While this opposition to arms sales is likely influenced by debates over arming Saudi Arabia and other abusive authoritarian governments, it is important to note that the respondents are rejecting all arms sales no matter where they are going.While Americans are divided over the desirability of arms sales, most are generally fine with U.S. sanctions and for some reason believe them to be an effective policy tool. Just over 60% of Americans overall said that sanctions were "always" or "often" an effective tool, and only 39% said that they were "rarely" or "never" effective. That is somewhat surprising given the repeated failures of sanctions, especially broad sanctions, to achieve stated policy goals and the extensive humanitarian harm that they cause to target populations. Where would so many Americans get the impression that sanctions are an effective tool when they clearly are not? It is hard to say, but perhaps one reason for this view is the constant use of sanctions as the default government response in so many different places. It could be that the public assumes that sanctions must be effective or else they wouldn't be imposed so frequently. When they were prompted by the government's many different reasons for imposing sanctions, perhaps the respondents concluded that the tool must be useful if it is being used to address so many issues. The responses to the question on sanctions were among the most disheartening in the entire survey, because they are so divorced from reality and show no awareness of the terrible track record that economic sanctions have. Independent respondents were least likely to say that sanctions are an effective policy tool, but even here the pro-sanctions view narrowly prevailed. The public's unfounded confidence in the efficacy of sanctions is not a new development, but it is another obstacle to efforts to rein in and possibly end the use of economic warfare. One of the more encouraging results was the narrow majority support for repealing the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Fifty-four percent say they favor repealing the authorization, with support for repeal being strongest among Democrats (56%) and independents (62%). Two out of five Republicans agree that the authorization should be repealed. It is significant that they did not mention passing a new authorization to replace the old one. Most Americans appear to be done with the "war on terror," and they want to get rid of the authorization that has been used to fight it.Two years after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the public still has a generally negative assessment of the war. Most Americans understandably conclude that the war was a failure, and 30% believe that the war had a failed mission from the start. Another 32% say that the war should have ended following the death of Osama bin Laden. Only 13% believe that the withdrawal hurt U.S. credibility, and that shows that very few people in the country buy the bogus credibility argument that hawks have been selling all these years.The findings in the EGF survey point to some promising areas for policy reform. There seems to be fertile ground for pursuing AUMF repeal and a major overhaul of U.S. arms sales. Unfortunately, there are other policies, including sanctions, that will require a lot more work in terms of educating the public and changing how Americans understand these issues.

On August 20, Guatemala's anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo of the center-left Movimiento Semilla party won a resounding victory against establishment favorite Sandra Torres of the National Unity of Hope party (Unidad Nacional para la Esperanza) in the presidential run-off. Arévalo secured a 58 percent to 37 percent victory over Torres, obtaining the majority of votes in 17 of the Central American country's 22 departments, including a number of rural and indigenous communities. The new president is expected to take office on January 14.Arévalo's unexpected rise and landslide victory were a strong repudiation of the corrupt and entrenched interests that have ruled the country for decades. His triumph is a major triumph for Guatemala's democracy and offers an opportunity to tackle widespread corruption and restore the rule of law. The vote in Central America's most populous nation also marks an important victory against the wave of authoritarianism that has swept the region in recent years.The road ahead, however, will be rough. The country's political establishment appears set on using everything in its arsenal to disqualify Semilla and annul Arevalo's victory to maintain their grip on power.Challenging Road to TransitionOn August 28, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal certified Bernardo Arévalo's victory proclaiming him Guatemala's next president, and the outgoing president, Alejandro Giammattei promised an orderly and transparent transition of power. But an orderly transition remains far from certain as Semilla and Arévalo continue to face a wave of legal battles in attempts to block his rise to power.Despite Arévalo's resounding victory, the country's attorney general, Consuelo Porras, who was named to a second term by Giammattei and has been the subject of U.S. sanctions due to corrupt and undemocratic activities, is determined to push ahead with spurious cases against Semilla and election officials. Following the presidential run-off, her office also requested that charges be brought against election officials and has demanded the list of election workers.The threats do not stop there. Hours before the August 28 certification of results, the electoral registry, under mounting threats of prosecution, suspended Semilla pending further investigation, in violation of court orders that ostensibly protected the party until October 31, when the electoral process officially ends. Two days later, the leadership in Congress, led by the governing party, stripped Semilla's legislators of their party status; the move bars the party's current and incoming lawmakers from serving on committees or as part of the leadership. Given several credible threats to their lives, including two assassination plots, one involving state actors, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a resolution calling for protective measures on behalf of Arévalo and his running mate, Karin Herrera. The resolution also noted repeated threats presumably coming from individuals linked to the attorney general's office.Porras has not commented on the assassination plots but, instead, unsuccessfully filed a motion before the Constitutional Court asking for protection measures of her own and denouncing posts on social media calling for her resignation, including from journalists.At the same time, Arevalo's rival, Sandra Torres, has refused to concede, and has filed a complaint alleging fraud in the vote count. However, the electoral observation missions of the Organization of American States and the European Union have validated the results, and several countries, including the United States, have recognized Arévalo's victory.Post Inauguration ChallengesPresuming the establishment's efforts fail and Arévalo can assume office on January 14, he will face steep challenges.He will confront a strong opposition in Congress dominated by clientelist and hardline right-wing parties. Semilla obtained 23 out of 160 seats. If the establishment succeeds in permanently suspending Semilla's legal standing, Arévalo will be left without a party bloc in Congress to help advance his legislative agenda.Moreover, the establishment will continue to exercise power through the courts and the public prosecutor's office, both of which have been stacked with its allies. By law, Porras, the attorney general, will remain in office until 2026 and will likely remain hostile to the incoming administration. Those who have profited from the status quo will fight him tooth and nail.Despite these challenges, there are reasons to be hopeful. Arévalo and Semilla are genuinely committed to democratic values and tackling systemic corruption. The path forward will require careful collaboration and agreements with other sectors, including members of the private sector who share their goals and are open to supporting needed reforms, as well as with civil society.Addressing the country's deep inequalities will require working with indigenous organizations and leaders and ensuring they have a seat at the table. Arévalo will also need to rely on the support of the international community. More important, he enjoys the support of an important segment of the citizenry that is eager for change and a better future. Managing their expectations will be critical to his success.US PolicyTwo years ago, the Biden administration launched a five-point, $400-million strategy to tackle the underlying causes of irregular migration from the region, but Central American governments have been reluctant to cooperate. The independent journalists, civil society activists, and other independent actors the U.S. has supported through the strategy have been the target of attacks, threats, and spurious charges by the region's governments, forcing many into exile. The Biden administration's relationship with the Giammattei government has been difficult as, at times, it has felt the need to cooperate on immigration enforcement matters, while, at others, it has sanctioned Guatemalan public officials due to corruption concerns.Arévalo's victory opens up new possibilities for the Biden administration. The president-elect understands the deep ties between both countries and is keen on developing a shared agenda with the United States. The U.S. is Guatemala's most important economic partner, and an estimated 20 percent of the country's GDP comes from remittances.He has vowed to improve basic services — education, health, access to water, and infrastructure — as well as to purge state institutions coopted by corrupt interests. He has promised to focus development efforts on the rural areas that have been most abandoned by the government. Almost half of Guatemalans live in poverty, and that rate rises to 80 percent among indigenous peoples, who make up over 40 percent of the country's 14.9 million people. Child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world, with nearly half of children under five suffering from chronic malnutrition, 58 percent among indigenous children.The Biden administration is likely to continue pressing for border enforcement cooperation, an issue that Arévalo seems to acknowledge and has signaled an openness to working on with the U.S. government.The Biden administration should view Arévalo's victory as an opportunity to revamp its Central America Root Causes Strategy and offer its political, technical, and financial support to help him succeed. First, it must continue to work with other countries in the OAS Permanent Council to exert pressure on the current Guatemalan authorities, as it did after the first round in the elections in June, to ensure that the will of the Guatemalan people is respected and that Arévalo is able to assume office and carry out his democratic mandate.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan raised suspicions in Washington for his decision to maintain relations with the Kremlin. In a characteristically unsubtle move, Khan also visited Moscow shortly after the war began. He returned to Islamabad with a chip on his shoulder.


"What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and will do whatever you ask of us? We are friends of Russia and we are friends of the United States," Khan told a crowd of his supporters. "We are friends of China and Europe, we are not part of any alliance."


Little did Khan know that these words may have helped bring about the end of his political career. According to Pakistani diplomatic cables published by the Intercept, U.S. officials reacted to Khan's stance on the war by subtly encouraging his opponents to remove him from power.


While it is doubtful that the United States was the sole or primary actor in the events that would land the prime minister in jail and lead to a military crackdown on the country's political system (a state of affairs that remains in place today), the cables reveal that opponents of Khan were informed of U.S. anger over Khan's statements on the Ukraine War and may have moved to oust him with the expectation of being rewarded with closer ties by Washington.


Most of the reactions to this breaking story have understandably focused on the Cold War-like aspect of what seems to be brazen interference in another country's internal affairs. However, what is in danger of being overlooked is something more fundamental to how so many in D.C. conceptualize foreign policy as a whole.


While it is hardly surprising that Washington would leverage its influence to support a soft regime change of sorts in Islamabad, what is remarkable is the desire to punish a country far away from Europe and the conflict raging in Ukraine for daring to take an "aggressively neutral" stance (the State Department's terminology, according to the cables) on what to them is a regional conflict far away from their core security concerns.


The presumption among leaders in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is clear: States with less geopolitical influence have to follow Washington's lead on major global crises, whether it benefits them or not. Pakistan's neighbor India, by contrast, has charted a remarkably neutral stance over the course of the war by balancing opposition to border revisionism with a clear-eyed determination to maintain its long-standing military ties with Moscow. But New Delhi knows that its much greater power on the world stage gives it some protection from the wrath of Washington.


Smaller countries do not share this privilege. Meanwhile, it is hard to see why Pakistan's views regarding European affairs even matter to Washington any more than, say, an Eastern European country's formal stance on the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Bulgaria, to use one example, would not be expected to declare a strong position on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean.


But the U.S. foreign policy elite, so monomaniacally fixated on Ukraine, believes it is of vital importance that everyone else adopt its priorities. This assumption is not only dangerous to many of Washington's partners in various regions around the world; it is also dangerous to the grand strategy of the United States itself. By taking regional conflicts and unnecessarily globalizing them, the risk of spreading instability through the interdiction of vital raw materials or manufactured goods increases. Trade networks adversely impacted by sanctions can thus undermine developing economies. Smaller countries, whose interests must be more narrowly defined, are always going to prioritize regional concerns over the more globally-oriented positions of the major world powers.


The most likely explanation for this behavior on the part of Washington is an attempt to shore up a dedicated "international community" that it can use to blunt the ambitions of revisionist powers like Russia and China. The problem with this approach, however, is that it breeds resentment and an even greater desire for pressured countries to break out of the U.S. orbit. This helps explain why an increasing number of states are considering dropping the dollar as the default global currency. When there are multiple options available, the least invasive one is usually considered the safest.


Thankfully, a better approach is possible. A great power that can compartmentalize various regions and not assume all that its smaller compatriots must adopt its priorities is one that will actually have an advantage over its rivals in the contest for influence abroad. The more the United States allows its smaller partners to pursue their own paths, the less threatening it will seem and the more desirable a partner for voluntary association it becomes.


This was a major part of why the United States once had so much more global goodwill compared to traditional European powers, as it leveraged its geographic isolation with its economic power to be comparably less threatening than most of its rivals. If Washington is truly serious about showing the world the danger presented by the ambitions of Beijing and Moscow, then U.S. policy should be less threatening to the sovereignty of others than that of its rivals.


As the relative power of 'middle power' countries increases, many regionally anchored states will increase their autonomy of action and so greatly expand their ability to diverge from great power expectations. As this trend accelerates, their ability to choose partnerships will tilt more towards reliability and mutual respect rather than simple deference. In this polycentric and, yes, multipolar world, massive overreaches into a partner's domestic policy are far more likely to create backlash than truly constructive long-term results.


To bring about this turn of thought and increase the amount of strategic empathy in a blinkered U.S. foreign policy establishment, perhaps it would be wise to consult the words of George Washington's farewell address, which sounds notes quite similar to Imran Khan's speech about Pakistani foreign policy:



"Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."



Many countries today find themselves in the same uncertain place as the early United States once did. The U.S. foreign policy apparatus would do well to remember that.