Critical War Studies: Emerging Field, Developing Agendas
A one-day workshop to be held at the University of Sussex
11 September 2013

What is left out when critical reflection on armed conflict is conducted under the sign of ‘security’? What are the forms of contemporary militarism? How can the discourses and practices of fighting, transition to ‘peace’, war preparation and military and strategic thought be engaged reflexively? How might militaries be understood as sites of subaltern labour, resistance and critique? How can attentiveness to experiences of war generate critical resources within international relations, sociology, geography, anthropology, history and other disciplines?

Multi-disciplinary proposals are invited for a one-day workshop convened by the University of Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research. The organisers welcome contributions engaging the idea of Critical War Studies, the themes outlined above and below, or suggesting other appropriate topics. It is envisaged that this will be the first of several events leading to opportunities for peer-reviewed publication.

Draft workshop structure:

Panel 1: What is ‘Critical War Studies’?

• What’s in a name? ‘War’, ‘security’ and the analytical status of fighting
• Critical approaches within strategic theory: who is strategy ‘for’?
• Theory and the experience of war
• War in/and society

The paper I presented at the ISA is part of a larger project in which I look at the ways in which ethics, in the context of certain political practices, is saturated with biopolitical rationalities. The (re)surfacing and framing of hitherto morally prohibited practices – torture, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassinations – as justifiable, legitimate and even necessary acts of violence, paired with rapidly advancing and increasingly autonomous military technologies that facilitate these practices, has opened new dimensions and demands for considering just what kind of ethics is used to justify these violent modalities. I’m specifically frustrated by the emerging narrative of the use of drones for targeted killing practices in the interminable fight against terror as a ‘wise’ and ‘ethical’ weapon of warfare. The prevalence of utility, instrumentality and necessity in this consideration of ethics strikes me as dubious and worthy of a closer look. This keeps leading me again and again to the perhaps foolhardy, but inevitable question: what, actually, IS ethics? And more specifically: what is ethics in a biopolitically informed socio-political (post)modern context? My quest for an answer begins with the growing divergence in scholarship and philosophical inquiry of the ethicality of ethics, or meta-ethics on one hand, and practical conceptions of ethics, applied ethics, on the other.

It has been noted by philosophers and scholars across geographical and disciplinary divides, that, in recent years, there has been a growing focus in philosophical and political thought on the application of moral and ethical principles rather than the “ethicality” of ethics itself. This trend is particularly widespread in Anglo-American philosophy, and manifests itself in the striking surge of applied ethics as a subfield of ethics, which considers the chief role of ethics to be that of providing a practical guide for moral agents, based on rational analysis, scientific inquiry and technological expertise. In other words, considerations of ethics have become preoccupied with establishing practicalities and ways of application. While the practical side of ethics should, of course, not be dismissed, the domineering focus on ethics’ practicality over considerations of meta-ethics, or the ethicality of ethics, occludes any deeper engagement with what ethics actually is, how moral content is established and how we can understand ethics in modernity as something beyond a mere set of context specific norms and legal regulations, as something other than laws and codes. To make sense of this preoccupation with ethics’ practicalities, it is worthwhile to consider how ethics might, in fact, be determined by the characteristics of a specific form of society. This brings me back to the biopolitical rationalities with which (post)modern societies are infused.

The very turn toward applied and practical ethics is, I argue, in itself biopolitically anchored whereby the shift of life into the centre of politics, paired with the technological and scientific capacities for the mathematization of life plays a crucial role, not only in the politicisation of zoe, but also in the zoeficiation of politics – the conception of politics in terms of organic life processes. Both are strands of biopolitical rationalities at work in current political practices and facilitate specific ethical narratives for the justification of acts of political violence.

Code as Ethics – Ethics as Code

Where ethics is considered in its practical and applicable aspects, the assumption that ethics, as right or wrong behaviour, can be ascertained and secured becomes paramount. Here, the role of the human as a biopolitical subject is crucial. It is the calculability of the human self, and the human other, in her physiology, biology and psychology that allows for a consideration of ethics in terms of biologically, physiologically, neurologically and psychologically established norms of right and wrong and that inform the perspective that ethics can and ought to provide solutions to calculable problems. It presumes, that the human can reliably be scientifically captured to more accurately give content to practical moral reasoning. In short, it gives credence to the priority of the scientific basis of the biological, psychological and neurological human to establish ‘accurate’ ethical content, ignoring the intrinsically plural, aleatory and uncertain character of the human in her socio-political environment and context, let alone the status quo of science to date as being unable to reliably provide any stable account of human nature. However, it is this calculability that paves the way for ethics to be considered as a possibility for securing right and wrong. It is this calculability also that obscures the investigation into the meaning of ethics with a preoccupation of applying a defined set of principles in the encounter with the other in a socio-political context of alterity. Ethics becomes a quest for certainty that the right thing can be, and is, done in the respective fields of application; that wrong behaviour is curbed, if not eliminated, through the prescription of rules, frameworks, codes, which specify and enshrine how to behave the ‘right’ way. Ethics becomes politicised, whereby, as Bayertz notes, applied ethics is understood as part of society’s problem-solving process. In a biopolitically informed society, such politicised ethics cannot but also fall under the sway of biopolitical rationalities.

Some of these biopolitical underpinnings and the desire to make an ascertainable science out of ethics are best exemplified in the biological determinism discourses that seek to mitigate the indeterminability of ethics and want to secure the “success of ethics” in the ability to predict and prevent. In his influential work on biological sciene, E. O. Wilson examines the “biological roots” of ethical behaviour and goes as far as to suggest that, in fact, the inquiry into ethics ought to be removed as a study of philosophy and become a “branch of biological science” in order to ground ethics in a “foundation of verifiable knowledge of human nature sufficient to produce cause-and-effect predictions”. Predictable ethics.

Wilson’s pursuit to ground ethics in a biological foundation so as to make it ascertainable, if not predictable is, perhaps, the extreme manifestation of the problematic of ethics in a biopolitical modernity, but, with its focus on biological underpinnings as a determinant of human behaviour, epitomizes the desire to render the human and her actions calculable, as a member of a definable species, in the search for certainty and predictability. New neurological investigations into the mental working of the human brain emphasise this drive. The can of worms that is the potentially ensuing philosophical debates on ethics and responsibility when science claims that there might, after all, not be such a thing as free will is sizeable. And it has already been opened.

Recent technological developments in warfare and military affairs echo the desire to render ethics not only finite but concretely definable and thus predicable and benefit from considerations such as Wilson’s. Academics and practitioners in the field of military technology, Ronald Arkin, roboticist at Georgia Tech fervently leading the way, are currently considering not only the very ethics of the use of lethal robotics to substitute the human in warfare but also the possibility of creating a formulized ‘ethics’ that can be implemented into military robotic structures, via an ethics module, with the lofty goal to allow robots to kill more humanely than humans, seeking to eliminate the messy unpredictability of the oh-so-fallible human. Such a perspective of ethics, one that is based on scientific formulation and codes, turns the notion of what it means to act ethically into a universalizing set of guidelines (residing in the functionality of the human, transposed onto the post-human plane), so as to make ethical behaviour, specifically in the context of war, certain.

The quest for being able to ascertain with certainty the rightness or wrongness of a solution to an ethical dilemma reflects a determination to limit, if not eradicate, the very aleatory nature of human life. By searching to prescribe ethical principles to an abstracted set of instances and occurrences, the contingent character of the encounter with another is disregarded in the assumption that ethical dilemmas can be resolved. When we understand ethics, with Levinas and others, as arising from the encounter with the, or an-other, which neither threatens to punish nor promises a reward, but simply triggers, by their sheer presence and co-existence in a specific context, an ethical moment, the decision to act ethically arises ever anew. And it is precisely in this very moment of the ethical decision that the actual indeterminacy of ethics resides; in the impossibility to know the right decision lies the very possibility for ethics, not ethics a following rules and guidelines, but as responsibility. Here, Derrida is helpful

If I know what I must do, I do not take a decision, I apply knowledge, I unfold a program. For there to be a decision, I must not know what to do … The moment of decision, the ethical moment, if you will, is independent from knowledge. It is when I don’t know the right rule that the ethical question arises. (Derrida 2004 cited in Raffoul 2008)

In other words, the ethical decision, contrary to modern aspirations of applying ethical principles as ethical laws (universal or otherwise), arises from a status of non-knowledge. It is the encounter with the other that not only bestows an implicit vulnerability on the other, but also a certain vulnerability of the self in being unable to know, to ascertain, to have certainty. For such ethical decision to occur authentically, one must thus accept the very fallibility of man. And in the acceptance of this fallibility responsibility can exist.

In this perspective of ethics, the ethical decision maker finds herself in a moment of uncertainty, which arises ever anew, with each new ethical decision. The potential ‘fallibility’ of the decision maker in each ethical decision is in tension with the perception of man as controllable, calculable and utilizable entity within project mankind. It is, however, only in the biopolitical context of man (and the species) understood as a calculable and mathematisable being that the notion of ‘fallibility’, ‘failure’ and ‘error’ of the human can emerge in the first place and ethics and moral acts can be framed in terms of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’. Considering ethics in terms of correct guidelines for a universal ethics, grounded in the quasi-scientific formulation of the biology, psychology and technology of man, delimits the recognition of ethics as the unique and momentary encounter that requires us to take responsibility for this encounter with the other rather than refer to a pre-established set of applicable rules, which can then be framed in terms of ‘success’ and ‘failure. The second aspect of a biopolitically informed ethics follows on from the first; from the mandate of prediction follows the mandate of prevention.

Ethical prophylaxis

It was this time of year, in 2012, when John Brennan – now CIA Director, then Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser – launched his campaign to make the drone the most ethical military killing machine there ever was when he claimed that drones are not only adhering to all aspects of the laws of armed conflict, but are the wise and ethical choice for warring with terrorists. Cloaking his defense of the drone in medical language he claimed: “It’s this surgical precision – the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumour called an Al-Qaida terrorist, while limiting damage to the tissue around it – that make [drones] so essential.” Dr. med. USA, stepping in to save humanity.

Increasingly, medical metaphors have come to serve as a means to assess (diagnose) what is wrong within a body politic and what can and ought to be done to remedy the ill. The biopolitical language in which societal assessments are couched is rife with pathologising terms such as sick and healthy, diagnoses and remedies, cancer and cure, prophylaxis and prevention. In August of 2011, shortly after the London riots in which mostly underprivileged parts of the UK capital suffered the consequences of the rioting acts, PM David Cameron framed the problem precisely in such biopolitical terms when he diagnosed society as being “not just broken, [but] sick” (Cameron 2011). In his public statements following the riots, Cameron laments at various points the decay of moral behaviour and the sickness of certain pockets of society. In his value judgement, the behaviour displayed by the rioting public was one of immoral (diseased) behaviour, which must be met with whichever means necessary, including physical violence. It thus is only controllable, pre-determined ‘healthy’ behaviour that is deemed moral behaviour and all other forms of action that do not meet such standards are deemed unhealthy elements that society must be cured of. This cure, Cameron emphasises, certainly includes “first and foremost … a security fight-back”, greater show of sovereign strength and tougher physical measures if need be. Cue: water cannons.

Medical language is also increasingly used in discussions on interventions and military engagements in various theatres of conflict. Even in JWT discourses, Cecile Fabre refers to medical consent / patient consent in her analysis of the justification for intervention and Ban Ki Moon in his five year plan on ‘The Future We Want’ speaks of prevention as being better than cure in an interventionist context. The same rationale is strongly reflected in a 2010 article penned by battlefield officers Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell and Capt. Mark Hagerott, published in Foreign Policy with the indicative title: “Curing Afghanistan”. In the article Caldwell and Hagerott draw a concrete analogy between a country in crisis and an ailing patient and liken Afghanistan to “a weakened person under attack by an aggressive infection” and play out the medical metaphor in great detail. In other words, Caldwell and Hagerott explain the logic of the counterinsurgency activities in Afghanistan by connoting their own position with that of a doctor, better yet, a surgeon, and the Taliban and insurgents with a diseased element, an infection of an organism, whereby military action depicts the necessary course of antibiotics.

While terms such as “surgical strike” have often been interpreted as being a rhetorical device serving to present the typically messy and erratic nature of warring in a more hygienic and controllable light, making war more palatable to the wider (unaffected) public, it betrays an underlying biopolitical mind set in contemporary politics. Such metaphors are not neutral in their cognitive power. They are, as Fabio De Leonardis notes, not merely a figure of speech and effective rhetorical device, but more so a “figure of thought” depicts the object rather than representing it. This has the capacity to create a reality whereby a similarity between two otherwise not similar concepts can be established and manifested. It is through the use of such specific metaphors that the (ethical) logos of a certain socio-political form is disclosed and circulated. Premised on a form of anthropomorphism – the state as physician, mankind as the patient – this manifests the perspective of society, in the wider sense, as corpus organicus, as De Leonardis terms it, that relies on the expertise of the physician-ruler to gain or re-gain health. The medical narrative combines knowledge with authority and thus functions effortlessly as a moralising principle in modern society preoccupied with the rationalisation and application of ethics.

Biopolitically informed ethics hold a number of challenges as an adequate framework for understanding the ethics of political violence today. They enable the prevalence of codes as ethics, on one hand, and facilitate the framing of political acts of violence in terms of medical necessity on the other, thus potentially lifting such acts from the realm of thorough ethical evaluation. Understanding ethics as a highly rationalized framework securing the rightness or wrongness of the conduct of humans, striving for predictability, is limited and limiting for a comprehensive consideration of ethics, specifically in light of practices emerging which run the risk of slipping into an ethical no-man’s-land, whereby ethics and law become confused as one. The problem is not codes of ethics per se or codes as law, but rather the reduction of the understanding of ethics as code and regulation normalizes something that cannot be normalized for its aleatory and inherently contingent nature.

To more thoroughly consider the ethics of certain acts of political violence today it is worth keeping in mind the vast potentiality of humans in a socio-political context. As Bauman so insightfully notes: “Any society is the togetherness of potentially moral beings. But a society may be a greenhouse of morality, or a barren soil …”. Methinks, more thinking about what ethics IS, is in order.

For two inter-linked, consecutive workshops under the theme of Subjects and Practices of Resistance to be held 9-11 September 2013 at University of Sussex.

The first workshop (9-10 Sept) is on Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession and the second on Counter-Conduct in Global Politics (10-11 Sept).  The workshop convenors encourage attendance at both workshops.  However, paper proposals should specify the intended workshop and which days participants would be able to attend.

The workshops are generously sponsored and supported by the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group (PPWG) and the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) at the University of Sussex 

Workshop 1: Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession

9-10 September 2013

Contemporary struggles against dispossession – from the 2011 Occupy movement to ongoing land rights conflicts in the Ecuadorian rainforest – not only remind us of existing forces of domination and exploitation, but also challenge the ready-made concepts and frameworks through which such struggles are often interpreted.   Building on a previous project – “Disciplining Dissent”* – this workshop aims to open up discussion on the intersections between the politics of resistance and the politics of knowledge. How might we conceptualise dissent or resistance in ways that are sensitive to the social and epistemic relations within which anti-systemic struggles are embedded? How might we frame the complementarity and tensions between political dissent and intellectual critique? How might available concepts and frameworks occlude the complex interplay between resistance and repression, discipline and dissent, obscuring what is at stake politically in existing practices of struggle?

We welcome contributions that consider these themes from diverse theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines, including international relations, international political economy, sociology, philosophy, geography and anthropology.

Questions that might be addressed include (but are not limited to): how is dissent rendered intelligible in ways that serve to contain, nullify or depoliticize struggles; the politics of knowledge in political dissent; the place of normative political critique in the absence of universal categories or emancipatory blueprints; the ways in which dissenting communities are building their own theories of dissent or are theorising out of their own dissenting practices; the forms of subjectivisation incited, subverted or arrested through practices of dissent and/or their relation to the types of dissenting subjects assumed by intellectuals and experts; the ways in which academic disciplines interpret, appropriate and discipline both dissent and critique; the nature and purpose of academic critique at a moment of austerity and economic “crisis”.

It is hoped that the workshop will serve as a basis for a journal special issue, as well as for further collobarations around these themes.

Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent to L.Coleman@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).

Convenors:

Lara Montesinos Coleman, University of Sussex

Doerthe Rosenow, Oxford Brookes University

Karen Tucker, University of Bristol

*published as Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.), Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) and as a special issue of Globalizations 8:3 (2011).

Workshop 2: Counter-Conduct in Global Politics: Theories and Practices

10-11 September 2013

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise. Protesting, agitating, dissenting, and occupying inter alia have received increased attention and theorisation in the past tumultuous decade since 11 September 2001. However, such academic and public attention has tended to focus on the visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty, economic exploitation, dispossession and other forms of oppression. Little systematic attention has been paid to potentially less visible practices of resistance or those who do not participate in an expressly political register but that attempt to resist ‘power that conducts’ (Foucault 2007). To this end, the Counter-Conduct in Global Politics workshop has four main, interconnected, aims. First, to theoretically develop, refine and critically interrogate the concept and theorisation of ‘counter-conduct(s)’, a term that, until recently, has received scant attention within the social sciences. We encourage the further critique, development and modification of Foucault’s initial attempts to understand subjects’ ‘possible inventions’ as counter-conduct (1982, 2007). Second, to provide a space in which empirical, multi-disciplinary investigations of counter-conduct in a variety of thematic areas and spaces of global politics can be presented. Third, to facilitate reflection on the variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power and revealing the processes of invigilation of resistance and adjustment of conducting strategies. Finally, to reflect on the methodological implications and issues, which affect the study of the variegated practices of counter-conduct.

We welcome contributions that consider these themes not only from a Foucaultian perspective but also that bring diverse theoretical perspectives  – and views from a variety of academic disciplines, including politics, international relations, international political economy, sociology, political theory and philosophy, geography and anthropology – to bear on the study of counter-conduct.

Format: consisting of longer paper presentations, followed by substantial constructive feedback from discussants and audience, the format of the Counter-Conduct in Global Politics workshop aims to facilitate intensive and extensive engagement among participants with a view to producing article length contributions to a significantly placed journal special issue. Given the lack of systematic focus on practices and subjects of counter-conduct, it is hoped that such a special issue will engender further debate and consideration of the study of counter-conduct in global politics and potentially act as a reference for postgraduate and doctoral research as well. Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent to L.Odysseos@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).

Convenors:

Carl Death, University of Manchester (as of August 2013)

Helle Malmvig, Danish Institute of International Studies

Louiza Odysseos, University of Sussex

There is something seductive about the idea of critical pedagogies. In an age where the figure of academic is beset on all sides by voracious spectres – the Taxpayer, the Minister, the Entrepreneur, the Curious Public, the Student-Consumer, the Management Consultant – it offers the idea that what happens in the classroom may still matter. More than matter: might in some way emancipate. This promise is perhaps particularly strong in academic International Relations, where those of various ‘marginal’ persuasions might argue that teaching against the grain undoes the destructive commonsense of global politics. That critical pedagogies help us bring back in the human, the ethical, the powerful, those daily experiences shot through with international politics, although our students don’t always see it. Even the titles hint at grand transformation: Pedagogy of the Oppressed!

Don’t get me wrong. I want to be seduced. More than that, I am all too ready to concur with many who also sat on the panel (‘What Do We Teach? How Do We Teach It?: Critical Pedagogies and World Politics’) convened by Meera in San Francisco (they were: Naeem Inayatullah, Laura J. Shepherd, David Blaney, Andrea Paras, Daniel Bendix and Chandra Danielzik). To agree that, since so much mainstream International Relations speaks the discourse of power, it is necessary to reveal its fictions and silences. To agree that narratives and memoirs have their place, alongside such ‘political’ terms as racism, patriarchy and class. To agree that it is better to start with Todorov and The Conquest of  America than it is to begin from a world of ahistorical self-help states. To agree with programmes for interventionist anti-racist education.

But I am also somewhat cautious. Some of that might be read as a spur to critical pedagogy by another name, and some as a delineating of criticality’s limit, at least insofar as that term is often discussed. Call these somewhat speculative micro-interventions the unapologetic curriculum, marginal resistance and real academic politics (always with the rule of three).

First, on the unapologetic curriculum. Anecdotal evidence suggests that critical teaching in IR usually proceeds via a standard method: students are exposed to the conventional edifice (Realism, Liberalism, sometimes Constructivism, very occasionally Marxism/Structuralism), which is taught somewhat askew, before being introduced to a range of critical views that undermines the canon and opens up a wider critical vista (usually taken to mean Critical Theory, Post-Structuralism, Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and then maybe a really marginal topic, like Queer Theory or Autoethnography). The point, justifiably enough, is both to convey the Mainstream and to unsettle it, setting out IR as discourse of power while providing the tools to deconstruct it.

But does this not unintentionally do ‘the critical’ a disservice? Take the post-colonial view of global history (if we can assert the unity of such a thing briefly in terms of understanding the international in terms of empires, their resistors and their aftermaths). Compared to the visions of system structure or complex inter-dependence, this story is not just more politically charged in some nebulous sense. It is also more true. Nor do we find ourselves in a historical moment where counter-narratives lack epistemic warrant. The texts exist, are legitimated by the imprimatur of academic publishing houses, and have their own substantial histories of dialogue and debate. So why not start with them? Teach the controversies, fersure. Allow for many alternative interpretations of the evidence, by all means. Push students to challenge the empire-centric account, do. But don’t apologise for it by putting it after the usual story (for “usual”, read: “the version ahistorical IR parochialists tell themselves for the sakes of parsimony”).

It would be strange for anyone to graduate from an IR programme not knowing what ‘Realism’ is (or not knowing the difference between a Carr and a Waltz, or a neo-conservative and a neo-classical). But understanding the state of the discipline isn’t the same thing as foregrounding its self-mythologies. We know, for example, that our current teaching doesn’t reflect the actual distribution of perspectives (recall that 16% of IR scholars call themselves Realists, but 37% of survey respondents use more than a quarter of their introductory courses teaching it). Let us have compulsory courses in the intellectual history of IR, but not a iterated call-and-response in which the critical always comes second. Perhaps this is a generational difference, perhaps one founded on the privilege of never being made to always progress through the ‘American Science’ in any any given argument. Either way, I want to suggest that we stop thinking of teaching as the job of conveying the same sense of embattlement against a Mainstream that frames critical IR’s story of itself. And, in the process, move from unapologetic to militant. To haunt the corridors and panels of that same Mainstream and demand explanations of why there is no empire in their course outlines.

And so, second, to marginal resistances in the classroom, cutting somewhat against the grain of unapology. Assertiveness in pedagogy reinforces the project of ‘criticality’ in teaching whilst not fetishising its terminology. The point is that repeated insistences on the ‘critical’, especially to the ears of the by-definition uninitiated (students are, after all, paying to be initiated, if not only for that), may just as easily re-inscribe marginality as overcome it. Not least when the critical gets the dregs of term’s end. In the classroom, which acts as a kind of imagined space where students will break the bonds of standard theory, this tempts us to repeat the contributions of the critical, indeed to insist on them (especially if, as for many precarious labourers, the classroom is a space of rare autonomy).

And yet this produces a paradox, one raised at ISA in the panel on teaching gender and war. As someone put it, we want our students to resist and critique all kinds of arguments, except ours. When it comes to pedagogy, I take this to mean that we cannot measure the criticality of our practice by how many students end up agreeing with us. I’m not sure that this is what anyone proposes, but is it not the implication of finding the critical not in a procedure of thought per se, but in an acceptance of certain counter-arguments to the Mainstream? I do not mean that we should live in fear of comments that our teaching is ‘political’, a judgement likely inevitable, not least in those spheres where the substance of scholarship is weighted so much against everyday commonsense. But Weber’s point about uncomfortable facts retains its value, and it goes for ‘us’ as well as ‘them’. In other words, while criticality may entail being more assertive in course design and substantive material, it may also suggest being less controlling of the classroom.

Which leaves only real academic politics (deliberatively provocative, tongue partially against cheek). There is a kind of classroom contract at play in many places, one which repeats conventional accounts of Enlightenment rationality (question everything!) but only within a prescribed space (the hour or two a week of ‘contact’ time). Although a pedagogy of the oppressed clearly goes beyond this (whoever we decide ‘the oppressed’ are), discussions of IR pedagogy seem to remain quite tightly attached to that space. And yet the pre-conditions for any criticality in pedagogy clearly exceed the classroom by orders of magnitude. They include, amongst others, questions of national secondary school curriculum, socio-economic class, fees and debt, precarity in academic labour, access to knowledge, managerialism, privatisation, instrumentalisation and global ‘knowledge economies’.

We of course know this, and sometimes say so. But if ‘pedagogy’ comes to mean mainly the what and how of teaching, and not everything that lies behind, beneath and across from it, the conversation will be an impoverished one. So when we reorganise lectures on strike days, or view the satisfaction of student wishes as unquestionably primary, we privilege the classroom at the expense of a wider understanding of the contemporary university. We get close to an expanded sense when we start talking about class sizes. There were, for example, audible gasps on the day of the panel at the contrast between David Blaney’s first year student numbers (a dozen) and Laura Shepherd’s (getting on for 600). This alone suggests that we need to keep in view the processes that bring students to the classroom in the first place, and to ask questions about our responsibilities in such arrangements.

It also raises some uncomfortable dilemmas. Many (but not all) of us teach in situations of comparative privilege: liberal arts colleges, Russell Group universities, training schools for socio-political elites, repositories for the middle-class youth of hegemonic states. What, after all, does it mean to pour emotional resources and labour time into additional provision for those students (assuming that engaging the critical often means working harder at teaching than you would otherwise have to)? If this is free labour, to whose benefit is it? And what is the implied model of action behind such a strategy? That, faced with the force of critical thinking, those students will abandon their accumulated social benefits and comfortable commonsense? That they will be won over by the force of better argument alone?

Some surely will be. And it seems churlish to dismiss that dialogue as ephemeral (nor do I mean to). But the affective labour of critical pedagogy in the more narrow sense is not without its opportunity costs. So we should perhaps be judicious, as well as bold, in our academic dreams.

Despite the burgeoning literature highlighting the significance of gender to global politics, research into international studies curricula suggests that gender is rarely dealt with extensively or even adequately by ‘top ranking’ UK Politics and International Relations (IR) departments. A cursory glance at popular, introductory undergraduate textbooks in Politics and International Relations also reveals that whilst feminism may be included as an approach, accounts of power as institutionally situated remain dominant. As such, many undergraduates only experience brief introductions to feminism, gender, and issues of sexual identity, if anything at all. So when I was given the chance to design and teach two research-led undergraduate courses in 2009, I saw it as an important opportunity: both to provide students with insights into how gender animates global politics, and to engage in a form of ‘feminist pedagogy’ by encouraging students to look at themselves and the world around them critically and analytically, through the interlocking lenses of gender, race, class and sexuality.

My experience of delivering these courses over the past few years has been largely positive. On more than one occasion students have commented that engaging with feminist theories and praxis had ‘opened their eyes’. However, in other students the experience of studying the global through gendered and postcolonial lenses elicited confusion, anger and pain on their part, at least initially. Indeed, as I have continued to teach these courses, I have often thought of student reactions as akin to Kübler-Ross and Kessler’s five stages of grief or what Patti Lather has aptly called ‘stages of feminist consciousness’.

One possible reason for this is that for feminists, the question of ‘What is Politics?’ necessarily includes accounts of power that are personal, emotional, and everyday. Given that trying to account for how power shapes and is shaped by people’s daily lives is not always readily accessible through a focus on institutions and the like – the usual stuff of politics and IR analysis – many feminist teachers are likely to encourage their students to think through how ‘the personal is political’ in their experiences and to re-personalise an often depersonalised and sanitised set of issues including war. Many of my students (though not all, and rarely, it should be said, in a linear fashion) experience moments of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance when taking my courses. Moreover, in reacting to their comments and in trying to anticipate their turmoil I often find myself angry, disbelieving, in negotiating mode, saddened and sometimes having to accept, and very grudgingly I’ll admit, that not all of them believe that gender is as significant to war as I do.

Over the years, I’ve come to reflect on how I can try to negotiate these various stages of grief or feminist consciousness so that my students are able to consider the wider significance of what they have learnt whether they are fully convinced by it or not. One such method is what I call ‘riding it out’ when faced with denial and bargaining. Though optional, my courses in gender and global politics are usually well-populated, taken by a good mix of men and women and receive positive feedback. However, I still begin every teaching year with a sense of trepidation; a feeling that I have to start these courses by ‘proving’ the value of gender as an explanatory variable and an empirical reality to my students. IR, like any other discipline, is not a culturally neutral terrain; it projects and reinforces particular ideas about men and women, about masculinities and femininities that make feminist approaches to the study of war and other global political issues so pertinent in the first place; and students are just as situated within disciplinary contexts as their teachers. In my first classes on the two research-led units in question, it became very clear that I was introducing an approach that was rather novel for most of my students, and as I have already mentioned, feminist research and syllabi are not mainstream aspects of the discipline or indeed my University.

One common reaction I have observed among students in almost each and every new cohort, especially in my Gendering World Politics course at level 2, is that whilst many recognise differential power relations between men and women, they see them as biologically given or as immutable psychological traits. My assertions that there was little to no evidence for this came as a shock to many who insisted on the significance of protective and randy ‘cavemen’ and submissive women. However, some of the most effective interventions on this seem to come from students themselves who, in my experience, get very good at pressing one another on how they have reached such conclusions and what evidence they are basing them on. As such, denial often dissipates within the first few weeks of my courses, though sometimes a linked stage of consciousness/grief, that of bargaining, suggests that doubt, if not outright denial, can still recur at later stages of the course even after sustained exposure to feminist theory, empirical evidence and sustained debate and discussion.

In my first year of teaching Gendering World Politics I remember feeling especially perturbed by the kind of ‘denial’ outlined above but also much relieved at its seeming disintegration as the course proceeded. However, this meant that I was especially shocked when in week nine of a ten week course, in a seminar on gender and the environment, my students began to question the validity of using a feminist lens not only to consider questions of environmental displacement and insecurity and matters of environmental degradation and women’s health, but of a gendered lens more widely. Such reactions from students might be explained, at least in part, by a common challenge that many feminist teachers face: though students may have already been exposed to normative perspectives on how society ‘ought to be’, telling students that there is nothing inherent or natural about the way that men and women are socially situated is not always an easy thing for them to hear.

When discussing issues such as equal pay, it’s always interesting, and often disheartening, to see tell-tale signs of disappointment in the faces of my women students and confusion in the faces of my men students; this tends to occur as the women realise they are unlikely to be paid as much as the young men sitting around them regardless of ability, and as the men realise that not every advantage they get in life may be fully ‘earned’ by them as individuals. Though denial and bargaining often slip away after the first few weeks of a gender course, feminist teachers perhaps need to be aware that moments of anxiety can resurge, and often unexpectedly. In light of the transformative possibilities of ‘opening one’s eyes to gender realities’, we need to be mindful that this can be alienating as well as liberating for some students.

The potential alienation of ‘opening one’s eyes’ to gender and its personal implications may also account for feelings of anger among students. As something that often and almost universally ‘’strikes a chord’ with their experiences, at least to some extent, feminism and gender scholarship is perhaps that much harder to reject than some other normative approaches to political analysis. It can therefore elicit pain and anger and foster controversy between students who disagree. During one seminar in my first year of teaching Gendering World Politics, two students, one man, one woman, became involved in a heated discussion witnessed by the entire group. The man student complained about a focus on women as victims of violence in peacekeeping situations, that the course was supposed to be about gender not women. The woman student attempted to explain that this focus was because women were overwhelmingly victims of violence in such situations, at the hands of peacekeepers who were overwhelmingly men. The man student was very argumentative and dominated the space by talking over the woman student who became red with anger.

My means of intervention was to split the class into small groups and ask them to take up the dispute with reference to their reading. I told them to listen respectfully to each other and to focus on critiquing ideas not individuals. I not only separated the feuding pair, I put all of the women in the class into one group. I did this partly because I noticed that the confrontation had made other women in the class uncomfortable but also because the ways that women and men are socially situated can often lead young men to perform in particularly masculine ways in the classroom, such as speaking over others. Whilst I am not in any way suggesting that there is an essentially ‘female’ or essentially ‘male’ way of interacting, I believe that it can be difficult for women to challenge masculine performances because of the ways that they are socially situated. Importantly, I told the students why I had divided the class this way which they all seemed to understand and appreciate. Indeed, though the general consensus among the women in the class was that they would not want to be divided up this way every week, they all expressed appreciation at having an opportunity to debate these issues with one another, something they had not experienced in other courses.

Ensuring that I am sensitive towards cultural and social dynamics that may affect learning is integral to my teaching philosiphy. I try to foster a learning environment where all students can air and apply their ideas with confidence. I observe how students interact, paying particular attention to who dominates the classroom, who keeps quiet, and so on. Though I think it is valuable to mix students up so they can engage with a range of viewpoints, I also frequently place students in groups where I sense that they feel comfortable working with particular peers. Sensitivity does also involve challenging students on occasion though. As Lee Warren argues, avoiding a controvesial issue “has its own consequences. Students learn that such behaviour is OK and…They miss the opportunity to learn about their own behaviour and its consequences”. This became clear to me in a seminar discussion on Katherine Moon’s insightful work on relationships between South-Korean prostitutes and US soldiers when one of my students identified prostitutes as ‘bad women’. I was stunned by this comment but a graduate student auditing the unit stepped in. She asked the student directly why he felt that way and told him that she found his comments troubling. He proceeded to reflect and unpack his comments and realised why she was offended. This very well-articulated challenge to his comment reduced tension in the classroom and helped this student, and probably others, to think through its implications. Though I was aggrieved that I had not handled this particular situation well myself as the instructor, I learnt a lot from observing the graduate student’s astute challenge.

Another challenge is depression in students. At the start of the academic year, in the first sessions of my undergraduate courses on Gendering World Politics and Gender, Militarization and Resistance, I issue all of my students a warning and an apology that some of the material that they will be asked to read during the course may be very upsetting to them. I do this because one of the key challenges of teaching students who are primarily aged between 18 and 22 years of age, with very little past exposure to in-depth political analysis, is exposing them to articles on, and inviting them to discuss, rape, genital mutilation, torture and violence of various kinds on a weekly basis. Throughout the past few years of teaching these courses, students in different cohorts have expressed that such reading can be challenging, upsetting, disturbing and in the words of one third year undergraduate, can ‘make them cry’. Though students also often express that they believe that engaging with this material is an important way for them to understand the significance of making political and social interventions, the gender and war teacher needs to be mindful of the hazards of some course content. Warning that an especially harrowing reading may have been set that week and allowing students to unpack how readings made them feel in a supportive, non-threatening way are some of the steps we can take but ultimately, there will always be the potential for emotional pain in such courses.

Another issue that warrants further consideration though is the willingness with which some students embrace issues that are deeply upsetting, opting to perhaps complete an undergraduate dissertation on them. In these circumstances it is important to be wary of students engaging in the kinds of depersonalized approaches to global political issues that feminists are so often at pains to challenge, especially when depersonalization becomes a form of fetishizing. Whilst depression can be damaging to students, fostering empathy is an important part of feminist pedagogy on gender and war and of fostering feminist consciousness.

I would be being dishonest if I were to suggest that feminist consciousness is not my overall aim. Though I would hope that I am largely able to avoid “implying ideological correctness” in the classroom, not least because my own research involves critiquing humanist thinking that insists on the universality of something called ‘progress’ and its capacity to liberate everyone, I do want my students to see gender scholarship as a valid approach to the study of IR and to recognise gender relations as something that affects their own lives. As Cindy Rosenthal argues, though many students are now “enjoying the rewards of feminism, many of today’s twenty-something undergraduates resist any association with things ‘feminist’ and [may] consider gender as a largely irrelevant construct in their lives”. This is often my experience at the start of the academic year when denial, bargaining, anger and depression most often characterise the reactions of my students. Of course, some students begin my course as feminists and remain that way but these students are rare. Others will leave still experiencing aspects of denial, bargaining, anger and depression. I agree with Lather that feminist consciousness is a process and a non-linear one at that; so whilst I hope that most of my students reach the stage of ‘acceptance’, this is not something I can ever guarantee.

However, the most rewarding aspects of teaching on gender and sensitive issues such as war are those moments when you observe that students have not only come to realise the significance of gender to their lives, but also to the wider workings of local and global power relations and how they are situated within them. As bell hooks argues, Feminism is for Everybody; but this has often come as a surprise to my students in light of the supposed ‘post-feminist’ culture they find themselves in. For some of the young women who take my classes, feminism can equip them with the language and knowledge to challenge, something they begin to do in the classroom. Some of those women students have asked the men sitting around them in the class if they think it’s fair that the women students are likely to earn less money than them. For some of the men who have taken my courses the knowledge that most feminists would agree that ‘gender is not a synonym for women’ and that it is important to examine how men as well as women can be oppressed by salient assumptions about gender is often a revelation. For many of these young men, this realisation engenders reflection on the significance of gender to their lives and relationships.

Thus, although there are many challenges in teaching gender and war and gender and other sensitive topics to undergraduates, not least those emotions and pains elicited from exposure to emotionally arresting material, I remain optimistic about the value of feminist pedagogy and my focus on gender in my teaching. It seems that among my students at least, there is an appetite for courses that engage with wider understandings of power than those that the discipline has traditionally been concerned with; even if at times that process can be a painful one.

What follows is the text of my presentation for a roundtable discussion on the use of assemblage thinking for International Relations at ISA in early April.

In this short presentation I want to try and demonstrate some of the qualities assemblage thinking brings with it, and I’ll attempt to do so by showing how it can develop the notion of epistemic communities. First, and most importantly, what I will call ‘cognitive assemblages’ builds on epistemic communities by emphasising the material means to produce, record, and distribute knowledge. I’ll focus on this aspect and try to show what this means for understanding knowledge production in world politics. From there, since this is a roundtable, I’ll try and raise some open questions that I think assemblage thinking highlights about the nature of agency. Third and finally, I want to raise another open question about how to develop assemblage theory and ask whether it remains parasitic on other discourses.

Throughout this, I’ll follow recent work on the concept and take ‘epistemic communities’ to mean more than simply a group of scientists.[1] Instead the term invokes any group that seeks to construct and transmit knowledge, and to influence politics (though not necessarily policy) via their expertise in knowledge. The value of this move is that it recognises the necessity of constructing knowledge in all areas of international politics – this process of producing knowledge isn’t limited solely to highly technical areas, but is instead utterly ubiquitous.

1 / Materiality

Constructivism has, of course, emphasised this more general process as well, highlighting the ways in which identities, norms, interests, and knowledge are a matter of psychological ideas and social forces. In Emanuel Adler’s exemplary words, knowledge for IR “means not only information that people carry in their heads, but also, and primarily, the intersubjective background or context of expectations, dispositions, and language that gives meaning to material reality”.[2] Knowledge here is both mental, inside the head, and social, distributed via communication. The problem with this formulation of what knowledge is, is that decades of research in science and technology studies, and in cognitive science, have shown this to be an impartial view of the nature of knowledge. Instead, knowledge is comprised of a heterogeneous set of materials, only a small portion of which are in fact identifiably ‘social’ or ‘in our heads’. It’s precisely this heterogeneity – and more specifically, the materiality of knowledge – that assemblage thinking focuses our attention on.

Knowledge is inseparable from measuring instruments, from data collection tools, from computer models and physical models, from archives, from databases and from all the material means we use to communicate research findings. In a rather persuasive article, Bruno Latour argues that what separates pre-scientific minds from scientific minds isn’t anything to do with a change inside of our heads.[3] There was no sudden advance in brainpower that made 17th century humans more scientific than 15th century humans, and as philosophy of science has shown, there’s no clear scientific method that we simply started to follow. Instead, Latour argues the shift was in the production and circulation of various new technologies which enabled our rather limited cognitive abilities to become more regimented and to see at a glance a much wider array of facts and theories. The printing press is the most obvious example here, but also the production of rationalised geometrical perspectives and new means of circulating knowledge – all of this contributed to the processes of standardisation, comparison, and categorisation that are essential to the scientific project. Therefore, what changed between the pre-scientific to the scientific was the materiality of knowledge, not our minds. And it’s assemblage thinking which focuses our attention on this aspect, emphasising that any social formation is always a collection of material and immaterial elements.

In this sense, questions about the divide between the material and the ideational can be recognised as false problems. The ideational is always material, and the constructivist is also a materialist.

2 / Economics and Climate Science

So what does this sharper focus on the materiality of knowledge get us?

I won’t go into generalities, but let me briefly outline two recent examples – one from economics and one from climate science – where I believe thinking in terms of cognitive assemblages can assist in explaining events.

The first case has to do with the transformation in the 1970s of UK macroeconometric modelling from a Keynesian framework to a monetarist framework.[4] Peter Kenway’s research shows that in the 1960s and early 1970s, the UK economic modelling scene was dominated by a particular Keynesian model which formed a paradigm for both research and government policy. With the crisis of stagflation in the 1970s though, the levers of government control over the economy weakened. The problem here was that the government response was to some degree hamstrung by the computer models they used to forecast the economy and test out policy options. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that a properly monetarist model was developed and capable of being put into use. As Kenway’s narrative shows, the innovations of this model were then quickly adopted by government largely because it included new variables that were modifiable by policy.[5]

The significant part here is that while individual economists were generating answers to the question of why stagflation was happening, and what could be done about it – it wasn’t until these theories were implemented into computer models, that the UK government could see and appraise the effects of monetarist policy proposals. Until then, the UK government remained largely bound to Keynesian mechanisms of government intervention, despite the failures of Keynesianism at the time. An explanation of the shift in government policy that only focused on the epistemic communities promoting monetarism would be incapable of giving a full explanation of the timing of the policy shift, and the delays in the shift despite the problems of stagflation.

The second example I want to briefly outline is of climate modelling. Since the earth’s climate system is far too complex for any mind – or even a collection of minds – to think about, all of our knowledge about it comes from computer modelling. Consequently, our knowledge of the effects of policy decisions is held in machines as well.

In the past two decades, one of the dominant trends in climate modelling has been a shift from the global to the local – increasingly modelling finer resolutions, and increasingly integrating elements of the geophysical system that are relevant to local areas – things like rivers, soil, and biological species. The consequence of this technological development in computing power is that local and long-term adaptation policies become viable. If one wants to know how to adapt rather than mitigate climate change, one needs to have an image of how climate change will affect the relevant area – and these images all come from computer models.

So while one can find statements from epistemic communities about the value of adaptation policies as early as the 1970s, it’s only in the past decade that the UK government has been able to seriously start making preparations for local and long-term adaptation. As with macroeconometric modelling, a focus on the materiality of knowledge helps in explaining the timing and shape of various policies.

From these two brief examples, I think we can draw out at least some initial conclusions. In the first case, while individuals continue to develop their fields, the technology employed by these cognitive assemblages has a momentum and stability to it that a purely social analysis of epistemic communities misses. Keynesian computer models continue on during a crisis of Keynes; and today we arguably see neoliberal computer models continuing on during a crisis of neoliberalism. The material aspect of knowledge here invokes a certain path dependency that limits options.

In the second example, we see technology producing new political options rather than restricting these options. The rise of seemingly viable adaptation policies stems not just from the desire for these policies, but also by technology making these policies possible in the first place.

In both cases, what is significant is not only the representational aspect of the models – whether they are true or not. Just as important is the affordances they offer to various political actors. New monetarist models proposed a way for the UK government to intervene in the economy and stop stagflation. New regional climate models provide the basis for intervening in the Earth system and adapting to climate change. The materiality of cognitive assemblages is significant for what they make possible.

3 / Questions

From this point, I want to conclude by raising a couple questions that I think assemblage theory opens up and highlights as critical.

The first question has to do with agency. While this is somewhat lost in the English translation, in Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s original French work, the term ‘assemblage’ has a strong connotation of agency as well. Their point – and I think they’re correct here – is that what is acting in any given situation is the entire assemblage. Agency becomes distributed in a complex way. This point is particularly significant as materialised cognition becomes increasingly ubiquitous. To give just one example, what does it mean when a surveillance algorithm mistakenly targets an innocent individual? Who is responsible? The individuals who carry out the arrest? The institution? The programmers of the algorithm? The company which sold the software? On a causal level, agency has to be attributed to the entire assemblage here – yet for political and ethical reasons this remains unsatisfying.

So a first open question that assemblage theory raises is how must our notions of agency and responsibility be transformed in order to take into account this reality?

Lastly, I want to raise a second open question – having to do with what it means to study assemblages.

In their original formulation by Deleuze, he will insist on the singular nature of assemblages. To speak of a general concept of assemblages is already to alter this original argument which stemmed from a critique of representational thought. If all assemblages are singular, then the question must be raised of how to draw out generalities from them? How to represent what Deleuze believes to be non-representable? The risk here is, on the one hand, that one attempts to fully respect the singular nature of each assemblage. Here it seems to me that one falls into a sort of Latourian methodology which believes that pure description is both possible and desirable. On the other hand, there’s also the risk that in the attempt to produce a general concept of assemblages, one empties the idea of assemblage out so much that it becomes epistemically derivative. Here one runs into empty claims about respecting becoming over being, the heterogeneous nature of every assemblage, and the ethical imperative to deterritorialise. While these points are arguably valid, the problem that arises is that assemblage thinking risks become a mere redescription of already well-defined phenomena. It becomes parasitic on other discourses – a problem which I think Manuel DeLanda’s work sometimes falls into.

So the final question here is how to study assemblages? How to chart a path between singular narratives and empty generalities, and demonstrate the added explanatory value of this concept?

References

[1] Mai’a K. Davis Cross, “Rethinking Epistemic Communities Twenty Years Later,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 137–160.

[2] Emanuel Adler, “Communities of Practice in International Relations,” in Communitarian International Relations: The Epistemic Foundations of International Relations (London: Routledge, 2005), 4.

[3] Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. H. Kuklick (Jai Press, 1986), 1–32, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/21-drawing-things-together-gb.pdf.

[4] Peter Kenway, From Keynesianism to Monetarism: The Evolution of UK Macroeconometric Models (London: Routledge, 1994).

[5] Ibid., 39.

]]> http://thedisorderofthings.com/2013/04/20/visualising-global-inequality/feed/ 0 joedyson http://thedisorderofthings.com/2013/04/19/what-we-talked-about-at-isa-afghan-masculinities-the-construction-of-the-taliban-as-sexually-deviant/ http://thedisorderofthings.com/2013/04/19/what-we-talked-about-at-isa-afghan-masculinities-the-construction-of-the-taliban-as-sexually-deviant/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:48:16 +0000 nivimanchanda http://thedisorderofthings.com/?p=7336 ]]>

The paper I presented earlier this month at the International Studies Annual Conference held in San Francisco looks at how Afghan masculinities have been represented in and by Anglo-American media. The words ‘Afghan man’ conjure up a certain image, a pathologised figure that is now associated with most males in Afghanistan. The paper analyses this figure of the ‘militant’ Afghan man, most strikingly captured by descriptions of the Taliban and juxtaposes it with the less popular, though still familiar trope of the ‘damned’ Afghan man, embodied in the figure of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai. But here I focus on a particular construction of the Taliban as sexually deviant, (improperly) homosexual men.

Jasbir Puar, in her trenchant appraisal of today’s war machine and the politics of knowledge that sustains it argues that the depictions of masculinity most widely disseminated in the post 9/11 world are terrorist masculinities:

failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and the body – homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness and disease.

Whilst representations of al-­Qaeda as pathologically perverse have permeated the Western mainstream, the Taliban because of its historically low international profile has escaped that level of media frenzy. The attention it does get, however, is almost always mired in Orientalist fantasies of Eastern men as pathologically disturbed sodomisers. The ‘high jack this fags’ scrawled on a bomb attached to the wing of an attack plane bound for Afghanistan by a USS Enterprise Navy officer, while in no way ubiquitous, is certainly an edifying example of our image of the Taliban as perverse and not quite “normal”.

This perversity of the Taliban has been largely attributed to their madrassa upbringing, an all-­male environment and their concomitant attitude towards women. Echoing anthropologist Lionel Tiger’s concerns that “it is in the crucible of all­‐male intensity that the bonds of terrorist commitment and self‐denial are formed”, Ahmed Rashid claims that the members of the Taliban had been brought up in a “totally male society”, in the “madrassa milieu”, where “control over women and their virtual exclusion was a powerful symbol of manhood and a reaffirmation of the students’ commitment to Jihad. Indeed, “denying a role for women gave the Taliban a kind of false legitimacy rooted in the political beliefs and ideologies”. Tiger focusing on al Qaeda offers the conventional and over-stated male-bonding thesis as an explanation for their failed masculinity and sexual perversity. In this imaginary, a lethal mix of male homosociality, the segregation of male and female populations and Islamic ideology carves out a space for terrorism, illicit sex and paedophilia. Both al‐Qaeda and Taliban are used as examples of this dangerous concoction.

The Talib is at once “too masculine” and repulsively effeminate. As a Pashtun, he belongs to the “martial races” – a designation invented by the British in the 19th century and is proclaimed to be inherently “warrior­‐like”. These qualities once used to extol the virtues of Afghans as a “noble” “fighting-people” are now used to denounce them as products of a culture of nasty fighting. Indeed, as with all discursive regimes, the question of power (as knowledge) is of paramount importance: we see the culturally sanctioned “hegemonic masculinity” of the 20th century Pashtuns morph into a widely-­reviled, failed masculinity of the Taliban in the 21st century.

Sensationalist reportage on paedophilia among so-called terrorist populations has become pedestrian after 9/11 and Pashtun Afghans have been painted, on more than one occasion, as queer sodomisers. The collection of photographs that Thomas Dworzak recovered in 2001 from dusty photographic studios in Kandahar capture a different side of the Taliban – dressed in colourful clothes, reading books and often with kohl applied to their eyes. However, as Faisal Devji notes in his introduction to The Poetry of the Taliban “these images are seen and described as ‘foreign’ or ‘other’”. Dworzak’s explicit aim in his work was to portray the Talibs as “human” and perhaps even “normal” in their complexity, not the one-dimensional monstrous figures they are conventionally depicted as, however, the photographs have been appropriated and interpreted as evidence of a pathological Pashtun tendency towards “queerness”.

Although Pashtun men are not authentically “homosexual” they are, so this story goes, “culturally” paedophiles. A Telegraph headline opines rather forcefully: ‘Paedophilia Culturally Accepted in South Afghanistan’ and the sentiments are echoed by the Examiner.com which cites U.S. soldiers and Reuters journalists as saying Paedophilia is a “way of life” in Afghanistan. The New York Times contends that paedophilia is the “curse” of “male-dominated Pashtun culture. Tim Reid of The Times writes of the “Pashtun obsession with sodomy”, “the Taliban’s disdain for women” and “the bizarre penchant of many for eyeliner”. In this environment of degeneracy and deviance, the construal of Pashtun men as not quite homosexual but still engaging sexually with other men (or boys) is a profoundly political act. It lets us, as Western observers, bemoan the “state of affairs” in Afghanistan, but it allows us to hope for a brighter future post- intervention. By “saving Afghan women” from Afghan men, we are therefore, also saving Afghan men from themselves in this liberal humanitarian narrative.

However, with both homosexuality (or its lack thereof) and paedophilia it is almost as though the issue at stake here is solely the discomfort experienced by the foreign troops stationed in Afghanistan. In spite of its tongue-in-cheek tone, an article by The Scotsman published in 2002 gets to the heart of the matter. “In Bagram British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat—being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers.” The reactions of the marines, even if not entirely serious, are telling: An Arbraoth marine, James Fletcher exclaims: “They were more terrifying than the al-­Qaeda [sic]. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village”. In the words of Corporal Paul Richard, the experience was “hell”: “Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing make-­up coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises”.

The inevitable pop-psychologising follows. The author Chris Stephen offers: “The Afghan hill tribes live in some of the most isolated communities in the country”. And one of his interlocutors, a marine Vaz Pickles adds: “I think a lot of the problem is that they don’t have the women around a lot… We only saw about two women in the whole six days. It was all very disconcerting.” In spite of its jocose tone, the deep-­seated homophobia and racism of these soldiers is notable – a band of effeminate Afghan men are labelled as “more terrifying than al‐Qaeda”.

The San Francisco Chronicle makes the point patently clear: “Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older walking hand­‐in­‐hand with a pretty young boy”. The choice of words is instructive: it is Western forces who “had a problem”.

And so, visibly perturbed and laden with suspicions about the perverse sexual tendencies and inclinations of the Pashtun people, the US military decided to conduct an academic enquiry into the ways of the Afghan people. The result: a Human Terrain report conducted by the US army on “Pashtun Sexuality”. Ostensibly, to help American soldiers fight better and be more culturally sensitive, the report essentially turned out to be an exercise in sensitising Western fighters to the devious ways of the Other. The report written by Anna Maria Cardanalli, a social scientist (of sorts), claims to draw on ethnographic studies and anthropological expertise argues:

Military cultural awareness training for Afghanistan often emphasizes that the effeminate characteristics of male Pashtun interaction are to considered “normal” and no indicator of a prevalence of homosexuality. This training is intended to prevent servicemembers from reacting with typically western shock or aversion to such displays. However, slightly more in‐depth research points to the presence of a culturally-­‐dependent homosexuality appearing to affect a far greater population base then [sic] some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination.

The source of the discomfort, in line with the report on Pashtun sexuality, is that homosexuality in southern Afghanistan, is a) “culturally-­‐dependent” and b) affects a greater number of people than is deemed “natural”. Since the report makes a case for “Pashtun sexuality” as neither “natural” nor “normal”, but as culturally-­‐sanctioned debauchery it becomes easy to label their homosexual interactions as “inauthentic”.

The argument is that “statistically” gay men are supposed to be a minority and given the high incidence of homosexuality in Afghanistan, there is something “deviant” and “unnatural” about this. Indeed, numerous commentaries point out that homosexuality is something “they do” and not something “they are”. Inasmuch as gay men are not a minority in Afghanistan, they are not really homosexual, they are merely deprived – of female intimacy. Similarly, paedophilia is a cultural “norm” in Afghanistan because of the lack of “freely available” women. In accordance with this reasoning, most same‐sex relationships have been reduced to a “Pashtun obsession with sodomy”. Not only does this play into a strange identity politics, whereby we decide what they are and how this makes them different from us, it also often functions in accordance with a reductive causation according to which effeminacy is equated with homosexuality. “Hugging doesn’t mean sex locals tell us, and neither does wearing kohl or colourful sandals.”

The tension in Anglophone reporting about Afghanistan surfaces yet again when grappling with the openness with which men enter into relationships with other men. On the one hand, given the ease with which male-male relationships are discussed in Kandahar one may be forgiven for thinking that Kandahar is exceptionally tolerant, on the other hand the language used by the reporters hints that these relationships are not consensual and even if they are, there is always an undertone of coercion. Indeed, while Tim Reid notes that there seems to be no “shame” or “furtiveness” about their conduct, and others are baffled by the forwardness with which marines are being propositioned, he also says that these young boys are “marked for life”. The contradiction and paradoxes are rife; Reid’s piece is titled “Kandahar comes out of the Closet” although Michael Griffins, also of The Times avers: “in Pashtun society, man­‐woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs openly.”

In another instance, faced with estimates from her informants that “between 18% and 45% of men [in Kandahar] engage in homosexual sex,” an LA Times reporter Maura Reynolds observed dryly that this is “significantly higher than the 3% to 7% of American men who, according to studies identify themselves as homosexual”. Indeed this “excess” homosexuality makes Afghans suspect and much more likely to be called queer “paedophiles” and “sodomizers” as opposed to gay men or homosexuals. It is telling that the term “bisexual” is not once used to describe these men who often have wives and themselves admit that they like both men and women. As Reynolds’ local contact, Daud himself tells her: “I like men but I like girls better”.

In the final analysis, the (western) assumption that homosexuality is a “minority identity” and therefore must be connected with secrecy is challenged in the Afghan context. The openness and lack of secrecy surrounding same sex relationships in Afghanistan is what confounds most Western observers. Yet again, it is the desire to make sense of, to make legible, these foreign practices that leads to a series of stereotypes and contradictions. That Afghan men may have polymorphous sexual desires or engage in polyamorous relationships is a possibility that lies beyond the purview of the average Anglophone reporter. The messy complexities of a repressive society with its members participating in fluid sexual relationships are too great to comprehend – they are written off as unnatural aberrations in a culture characterized by (in the words of one reporter) “gynaeophobia”.

I want to address the use of practice theory in global ethics rather than International Relations or social science broadly. I am neither a social scientist nor a social theorist. My interests are in political and ethical theory, in asking questions about the good in political life. Nonetheless, questions of ethics are an important part of the turn to practice theory because such a reorientation has much to add to how we think about questions of global ethics. I also hope that my reflections on, and uses of, practice theory may be of interest to those who see themselves as social scientists.

In global ethics there is a constant concern with the issue of justification, with determining how we know what is right or good – and especially how we know that what we know is really right or good. What is surprising is how little time is spent considering the details of what is right or good in specific situations. This question it seems is already known, either because we can deduce it through some rational rule or distill it from some social tradition. This is a crude map, but hopefully adequate to place ourselves.

Even among more dissident scholars the focus is on how justifications fail, or how our justifications reproduce undesirable social consequences – the exclusion of the other, the marginalization of women – and these are absolutely vital insights. However, what remains under-examined is what we take to be right or wrong, good or bad, the substantive and at times contradictory content of our ethics. Along with this there is a lack of concern with how we think when we are being ethical, with what social role ethical claims have and with how social institutions and traditions depend upon ethical claims.

I want to suggest that this absence of substantive discussion comes about because ethical theory, generally, is insufficiently attentive to practice – and in many cases lacks the conceptual tools to adequately grasp ethical practice and its significance. I only want to suggest this here because there is not space to argue for it with the length and care needed.

To offer more hopefully-just-adequate generalizations: consequentialist and deontological ethics offer us ends that have been rationally justified, either by the obvious desirability of “good” consequences or the rational imperative of “right” action. Stealing is wrong because it leads to bad consequences if we adopt it as a rule, or because it violates the categorical imperative, as a world of righteous thieves is a contradiction. Little time is spent considering what the good or the right are as concepts or how they fit into the complex social and political practice that is “ethics” – for example, how stealing depends upon notions of rightful ownership, which in our particular context is an essentially liberal and capitalist understanding of ownership that constructs theft as a particular type of crime, which importantly excludes necessity as a justification.

Even if we look to alternatives that point to the need for virtues, which provide practical and contextualized guides to the good life, or alternative orientations to care over rightfulness, the social practice of ethics is not pulled fully into the open. We may talk of virtues as part of a social tradition but how are these virtues held in place, changed, rejected. And an alternative end – such as care – may correct exclusions and omissions of our ethical traditions but it also remains an assertion of an end rather than an account of ethics as a social practice.

And calls to keep open the ethical discussion – in discourse or as a political contest – get us closer but underplay the psychological and sociological element of ethics, presenting us with individuals speaking for purposes of consensus or contestation, already at the point of reflection. But how did these reflective and speaking people get to that point? Calls to attend to the construction of identity and agency are again vital contributions but we are left with ethical calls to remain open, to be hospitable, to be responsible – but these injunctions begin to sound like hosannas, sung to catch the attention of our ethical sensibilities, but without giving us much insight into how we do this work – how we change custom and habit such that we can reconstruct our ethical sensibilities.

So, how does practice theory help? Well, most fundamentally it helps by turning our attention to the way that ethics both enable social change and confirm the social order. Further, practice theory places ethical thinking in a psychological context that is not populated by rational choosers, always ready to speak, and in a political context where not every one is a citizen ready to participate in political contestation. Practice theory applied to ethics pushes us to think carefully about what is assumed, unsaid, unsayable and forgotten, but which ethics nonetheless depends upon. More specifically, I want to appeal to John Dewey’s ethical thinking to suggest how a focus on practice alters our approach to global ethics.

In his early works, both Outline for a Critical Theory of Ethics and in his lectures on ethics at the University of Chicago between 1897-1902, Dewey suggested a radical departure in ethical theory that focused on the practice of ethics, both in thought and action. This work begins by looking at ethics in three ways: (1) the logic of ethics; (2) the psychology of ethics; and (3) social ethics (what we could call sociology of ethics). Dewey’s central idea is that we must understand ethics in its multiple dimensions to understand the current state of our social ethics as a practice (which is always political as well) and how our ethics motivate (or fails to motivate) action, and, finally, to know in what ways our ethics are in need of reconstruction.

In the lectures he details how different ethical concepts function: for example the relationship between goods, ends and rights. A good is some object or state of affairs that is not only enjoyed but has also been given social value, which upon reflection has been deemed an enjoyment that should be the end of our action, either individually or socially. While rights refer to institutionalized ways we have developed for securing the ends we have deemed ethically good. Other ethical concepts are also specified – the great value of this work, whether we accept its conclusions or not, is that it pulls apart conflations and reduces the gaps between false dichotomies. The traditional schools of ethical thought, for example, are quickly brought together and the impulse to separate them revealed as unhelpful at best. A right, for example, in this framing is the social institution of a relationship that guarantees the enjoyment of some end that has been deemed sufficiently valuable as a social good to devote resources to its protection and impose penalties for its violation.

The psychological aspect is then brought in to explore how individuals are affected by ethics as a social practice, as well as how they affect ethical practice in turn. Again, brief summary is all that’s possible: Dewey focuses on the way that desire and impulse motivate action, including action that we come to think of as ethical (or unethical). This is important because it undercuts the notion that ethics is a pursuit divorced from desire or interest – the things we come to value are valued through the reflective act of affirming the consequences of their enjoyment. Dewey suggests ethics in particular is concerned with how given ends form us as individuals and collectives, thus the ethical question is: “does this enjoyment lead to consequences we to want to continue to affirm?” This is the conceptual core of how ethical values are created. However, despite speaking to how individuals do this work, Dewey is absolutely clear that this work of ethical valuation takes place in a dense social context. And this is the second aspect of his psychology of ethics that I want to highlight – the things we affirm as ethical goods, the ends we pursue and the means with which we pursue them are not simply given to us by our own independent rational valuations. The majority of what we value, of our ethics – which is also the vision of ourselves we affirm in our daily actions – comes from the social order. Dewey discusses this in terms of habit and custom. Individuals do the things they do because they have been taught – trained – to do them. They have been taught these habits through the operation of social custom. This is not a primitive state of ethical development to be overcome (a la Habermas) but rather a constant condition of ethical life. We are naturally prone to habitual action and following customs, and in many cases it serves us well – we cannot rethink every moment all the way down all the time.

This, however, presents us with a problem – how do we evaluate our habits and customs? Can we even come to know them or see them as problematic? Dewey thinks this happens when our habits and customs fail us, when we are thrown into moments of crisis by the interruption of habituated experience and response. We suddenly see the world differently and become aware of our clumsiness when we act without the support of habit and custom.

And this ties into the sociological elements of Dewey’s ethics (which again will receive insufficient attention here) as he points to the way in which ethics bind us in traditional institutions and ways of responding to problems. They tell us which consequences are of concern and which are not – it is ethics that allows us to walk past human suffering on the streets of wealthy American cities. We have ready ethical response to why the suffering of the homeless woman and man on the street is not of concern – they suffer because of their personal failings, because of drug addiction, from mental illness – their irresponsibility create homelessness, not the social order or the immoral actions of powerful individuals. The failure of ethics, and Dewey emphasizes this throughout his writings, is that it does not call on us to understand such consequences in their wider context, does not push us to understand the causes before seeking remedy.

And it is those moments of disruption that provide the critical content of our ethics – for example walking through LA’s “Skid Row” where thousands of homeless women and men make their lives and the sheer numbers of people without shelter and the depth of their deprivation give lie to the habituated responses we have to such suffering. Dewey suggests that a social ethics must be one that enables us to be less inarticulate and clumsy in those moments of crisis and disruption, and that to do this our ethics must become more reflective, critical and democratic.

Skid Row, Los Angeles

Reflexivity in ethics calls on us to doubt and challenge our habits and customs, to seek to bring them out in the open before we begin making pronouncements on the good, the right and the rest. This is both an individual and a social need.

Criticality in ethics requires reconstruction of our means, ends and the very things we deem valuable in light of new experiences and the consequences of our existing ethical practice that we wish to change.

Democracy in ethics becomes necessary because, ideally, it enables the forms of reflective and critical agency required for ethics, which might then enable the transformation rather than affirmation of the social order – it enables such agency by demanding it. Again this is an individual and social need. Individuals can work on their democratic virtues, but without a social order in which the kinds of reflective agency that democracy requires are inculcated the practice of democracy is stifled.

So, this move to think of ethics in terms of practice, as I’ve drawn it out of Dewey’s work, reconfigures global ethics in important ways by turning our attention to the logic of our ethical claims as they are currently expressed, as well as the psychological and sociological conditions that structure our ethics, pre-reflectively.

Despite our justified renunciation of audit culture and academic hierarchy, we cannot not acknowledge the receipt tonight of OAIS (Outstanding Achievement in International Studies Weblogging) awards for both categories in which we were entered: best individual blog post (for John Hobson’s guest post on race and Eurocentrism) and for best group blog. How we won out over Cohen, Green and Wood on sexual violence and the Human Security Report will remain one of the great mysteries of democracy (seriously, go read), but we’re grateful nevertheless. Shout-outs too to Wronging Rights and Justice In Conflict, unjustly neglected.

May the stale halls of established academia shake with the news of our collective arrival.