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Plural International Relations in a Divided World

Stephen Chan











polity

Preface1

When James Der Derian tells the story, he is not given to embellishment, but his eyes twinkle.2 He had persuaded senior US military officers, Generals, to participate in a war game, a simulation – to which they could apply all their standard sophisticated methodologies. They had to devise a strategy that would defeat the enemy. Except that, in this case, the enemy was amorphous, had no geographical homeland, no measurable military throw-weight, and did not seem to have readily understood values and interests. After much effort over many days the Generals pleaded to be allowed to fight a conventional enemy – one with a homeland they could attack, one with values and interests they could threaten, one with conventional stockpiles of weapons they could degrade. They could not chase shadows.

In the wake of 9/11, the US and NATO found an enemy with a homeland – Afghanistan. Later, they found another – Iraq. But in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq, with the rise of Al-Qaeda and other groups, and more recently ISIS, the strategies for dealing with enemies that are not nations, with confessional beliefs that are not ‘rational’ values, with suicide bombers without calculations of cost or loss, with alliances that seem to have no headquarters, the West has fought itself to an expensive standstill. Even when the Western strategists adapt to the idea of an enemy without a fixed geographical base, the idea that something like Games Theory has no use – because the other side (if indeed it is one other side) behaves outside of rational expectations and, above all, calculations – is confounding.

In a real way, the Cold War was comforting because it gave real certainties. There was a Soviet Union; there was a China; each had armed forces and armaments not unlike one’s own; each had state interests and strategic interests which were recognizable. One might disagree with their values – to the point where no interrogation was made of them, except that they were opposed to one’s own, and indeed the Others’ values were denigrated and often demonized – but they were values that emanated from a certain guaranteed space that helped give them strength; but the very fact that there was space meant vulnerabilities, targetability, the possibilities of assault and victory.

Iran was also a state when, in the wake of its 1979 revolution, it held US diplomats hostage and began a campaign of threats against the West. The problem was that its rhetoric was somehow indecipherable, i.e. it was oppositional but religious, it gave no signals of negotiating space and therefore seemed one-dimensional, it seemed comic book but was heavily armed, it seemed implosive and dysfunctional but fought against Iraq – an Iraq spurred by the West to ‘test’ the new Iranian regime, possibly weaken it – with modern weaponry and strategic sense. It has taken until 2015 for the US to come to some negotiated accommodation with an ‘irrational’ state that, all the same, was seen as capable of developing nuclear weapons.

This conjunction – the command of sophisticated technology and sophisticated strategy, not to mention public relations and electronic communication – means that it is impossible to say that anything or anyone is ‘mad’. If ‘mad’, there is a lot of method in it – and it is a difficult analysis to sustain to say that someone is mad in intent but sanely rational in method, persistence, resilience and, finally, negotiation.

The purpose of this book is to set out the ‘rationality’ behind many parts of International Relations today that have been either dismissed as irrational or declared an enigma because there were no investigative or methodological tools that were, in the Western lexicon, fit for the purpose of understanding, or even fully explaining, them. It will look at the rise of today’s international system – but also forms of resistance to it, or forms of accommodation with resistance in reserve – and it will look at key parts of the world and their thinking about and towards the international. It will concentrate on thought within states, but also begin a disquisition about thought outside of state structures. In doing so, it undermines the basic premise of International Relations as a discipline – one that reflects the practice of statecraft – that states anchor the system because they accept the system; and that non-state actors are not part of the state system. But this is what the Generals in the opening paragraph to this Preface also thought.

I have been writing on these themes for some time. They have only recently entered the inner suburbs of the International Relations metropole, and that at the hands of better (and better organized) scholars than me. I am happy about this. Simultaneously, there is the danger of a new paradigm, new ‘school’, or new fashion developing that prioritizes, like Postcolonial Studies has done, the philosophies, virtues and scriptures of the ‘Other’ – so that, in opposition to the West, or at least as a remedy to Western domination of thought, a vast array of ‘Other’ thought is suddenly paraded by progressive International Relations scholars who are not linguists, theologians, or who have never been near the locales whence they source their new ‘thought’. There is the additional danger that the new thought thus paraded is seen as self-contained – whereas, like Western thought, it has participated in multiple miscegenations in multiple eras of globalization. This book is thus about, among other things, how things are different but also about how things mix. Deciphering difference, and deciphering the right ingredients in the right quantity for the right mixture are new disciplinary skills which International Relations does not yet have. This book gives some warning signs at least that these skills are necessary.

This has been a long journey. The late R.J. Vincent, just before his unexpected and untimely death in 1990, encouraged me – as did, in his curious off-hand way, Chris Brown. ‘Just keep doing it’, was his advice. Vivienne Jabri provided huge moral encouragement back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the material that has found its way into this book intruded upon my life. John Groom simply said (wisely), ‘if you’re going to do this, keep up your Africanist work as well’ – meaning I would have something to stand upon when Western hegemony wiped the multicultural theoretical ground from under my feet.

John Groom played a major role in organizing the European Consortium of Political Research Standing Group on International Relations convention in Heidelberg in 1992. Some 600 papers were delivered, of which only two, mine and that of James Piscatori, were on non-Western themes – although James Rosenau, having just then published his work on turbulence, came to our session and offered words of encouragement.3

At the 1995 ECPR Standing Group convention in Paris, John Groom’s organizing committee offered me four sessions. He said he could not give me any more because of the need to maintain equity among the different convenors. I had speakers for seven. My co-convenor, Osmo Apunen, arranged for the Finnish embassy to provide us with its premises for the extra three, and it was clear that interest at least, if not expertise, was beginning to be generated in what was still regarded as an off-beat project.4

As the project entered its mid-point development, Roland Bleiker,5 Naeem Inayatullah, David Blaney,6 Mustapha Pasha7 and Christine Sylvester8 became hugely empathetic colleagues or fellow-travellers. I owe all these people much for their support and like-minded research. I suspect Mustapha and Naeem were much responsible for my name being put forward for the 2010 International Studies Association award, Eminent Scholar in Global Development, and I thank them and their co-nominators.

Lately, and it had become plainly evident by the 2015 ISA Convention, the off-beat approach to International Relations has gained traction and the ISA theme of ‘worlding’, under the organizational aegis of Lily Ling and Pinar Bilgin, demonstrated this. Ling’s work with both Bilgin9 and Anna Agathangelou10 represents a new generation of highly skilled and professional scholars with a considerably more refined and rigorous approach to their work than anything I attempted.

There are, I think it is fair to say, four major approaches to the idea of ‘difference’ in International Relations today – and, by ‘difference’, I mean both in cultures and epistemologies. The question of linguistics is not yet properly approached, as International Relations is primarily Anglophonic in its discursive habitus. These four are: firstly, the work of Ling and her colleagues, under the title of ‘worlding’ – where different ‘worlds’ confront IR, interrogate it and demand that IR in turn interrogates them sympathetically; secondly, there is the work of Oliver Richmond and his Postcolonial approach to IR. ‘PoCo’, as it has become known, has been late coming to IR and Richmond is its elegant if belated usher;11 thirdly, there is Fabio Petito’s ‘post-secular’ IR, which makes room for religion and the sacralization of IR, or what I once called the ‘resacralization’ of world views;12 and fourthly, luminaries of the IR world such as Barry Buzan and Amitav Acharya have looked at primarily South Asian approaches to IR as an alternative/antidote to Western IR.13

All these inflect the book that follows – but, finally here, there should be a note of a non-academic genesis, a certain original spur to this work which is simply normative and personal. In 1977 I began visiting Altaf Gauhar, then recently relocated to London after time as a political prisoner in Pakistan. He had acquired the means to establish an ambitious publishing house high in New Zealand House, overlooking Trafalgar Square. It was not far from where I worked in the Commonwealth Secretariat at the other end of Pall Mall. It was Altaf who founded what is still the Third World Quarterly, now under the editorship of Shahid Qadir – who continues kindly and patiently to publish my work. In its early phase, it had a companion magazine simply called South, prophetically giving flesh to Julius Nyerere and Samir Amin’s slightly later idea that the ‘south’ might wish to contemplate going it alone – no longer dependent on northern, largely Western, support and approval.14 Altaf used to take me through the translations of the Quran he wrote while in prison, and exposed me to the nuances of certain verses or sura.15 But, one day, looking around the vast office and looking out at the grand view of London, I simply asked, ‘but why?’ Why all this effort and expense? He simply said, ‘but you see, Stephen, it is time after all, is it not, for the south to fight back – intellectually as well as by other means; for, after all, do we not also have our own thought, our own account of how our thought entered the world, and is this not also valuable?’

I was a very young man, then as now in fine cloth with long hair. I turned and looked at Altaf and knew I had learned a lesson for the rest of my life.

Pimlico 2016

Notes

PART I