Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives On and Beyond Asia

hi everyone I'm Dina matter I am the head of the school of interdisciplinary studies within which the Center for International Studies and diplomacy is situated I'm really honored to have been asked to introduce this conversation or talk today I don't know how it's going to be going because it's really speaks to you know that the title and the book which I managed to read the introduction to before I came down is is very very exciting talking about different ways none western-centric approaches to understanding international relations so I'm like you I'm looking forward to hearing more about it and learning and it kind of speaks to what we do at so us without further ado you know so welcome everyone on behalf of sis thank you for attending we have a distinguished panel with us I'll come back to Mira right here on my right later on but we have professor Barry Buzan who is emeritus professor of international relations at the LSE he's an honorary professor at Copenhagen Dylan and China Foreign Affairs universities and he is a senior fellow at LSE ideas and a fellow of the British Academy and the neck next to him so I'm going straight on according to the seating plan is a damp leche who is director of the Center for International Studies and diplomacy here so us he researchers widely and he is a prolific writer he has researched strategic studies and currently focusing on applying lessons of for termination and peacebuilding from World War two to the 21st century and then at the end is dr. Emma Tov acharya who is the unesco chair in trance national challenges and governance and he is distinguished professor at the School of International Service American University Washington DC he is the first non-western scholar to be elected in 2014 and fifteen as the president of the International Studies Association the largest and most influential global network in International Studies previously he was professor at York University in Toronto and the chair in global governance at the University of Bristol and I come back to dr. Meara Saburo at Nam who is one of our colleagues at in international relations in the Department of politics her research interests are in the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of international relations in both theory and practice she has worked on questions of decolonization Eurocentrism race and methodology in IR but she is the face and the champion of decolonizing knowledge in general at service so I welcome the panel I don't want to speak that that much more and I ask me that to come forward to give us you know kind of an idea about how these games go ahead and thank you for asking me to introduce the event Thanks okay so thank you very much it's very exciting to have this panel here which is celebrating the publication of this book which is a collaboration between Barry and Amit have the making of global international relations the origins and evolution of IR at its centenary and Barry an ammeter will talk us through the the arguments of the book and some of the major claims and revisions it's making to the discipline of IR I suppose what I wanted to do with my introduction in a substantive sense was locate where this book is sitting in terms of recent developments within the discipline of international relations how many of you are sort of training with in international relations as a field stance okay so lots of you and one of the interesting things that's always characterized this debate around international relations is the extent to which it's an autonomous field the extent which it's maybe a sub-discipline of political science as it so often treated in the United States and one of the ways in which international relations has been tried to confront what its real mission is what its method should be what its focus should be is actually through a debate about its origins and the relationship between theory and history which is one of the major themes and the sort of productive tensions within this book so one of the contextual factors of this book I suppose coming into being is that over the last twenty to thirty years the western-centric or Eurocentric character of international relations has been investigators critiqued worked over by many scholars and prominently so by by a motive and by very and it's within a context that post-colonial critiques have been prominent and we've also seen a turn to global history global historical sociology's voices from the global South and so on and so this is a very timely book which attempts to bring together a conversation about the origins of the discipline with that conversation about it's sort of western-centric character and so it's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to debate this and to examine it I had the fortune of debating this at a panel last week at the British International Studies Association so in terms of how this event is going to be run Barry will speak first for about 15 minutes then Amitabh will speak second for about 15 minutes and and Dan will have sort of 10 to 15 minutes to respond and to discuss will give the panel maybe a short opportunity to respond to the points that they've raised to each other and then we'll very much go out open to the floor for discussion and we've got plenty of time to do that so please do think about questions issues that you would like to raise during the talks so without further ado I would like to invite Barry to come and open the discussion thank you okay so I'm going to do the bit of this from the beginning as it were way back in the 19th century up until 1945 the basic overview of what I'm going to do is to talk about the relationship between IR and small letters the practice of international relations and I are in big letters namely the discipline of international relations and I'm going to do that in two periods looking at the 19th century after the first world war and then at the interwar period and then I'll pass it on to amitabha as at the end of the second world war the theme here is that ir was global from the beginning another theme here is that although this book is timed this year to come out with the the so called centenary of the discipline because the founding myth of international relations thus most of you will know is that it sort of started out in 1919 or at least this is the Aberystwyth version of the story but it's a widely accepted myth and there is some truth in it but there's also quite a lot of not untruths in it but a lot of stuff is missing from it because as I hope to show you there was IR before I are in the nineteenth century and we tend to forget about that so one of the features of what I'm going to do is to try and revive that ok so the idea of the organizing idea for for the book is that the world has been in a corporate restructure that was largely set up in the 19th century with the onset of modernity and that this structure has shaped much of both small IR and big IR and I want to locate the roots of both kinds of IR the practice and the thinking about it in the 19th century which is a bit unconventional because there are others who will trace the intellectual history of international relations right back to the ancient Greeks and before but the view I'm taking here is that the revolutions of modernity in the 19th century reshaped practically everything International Relations and set up this very stark corporate or a system in which a small number of modernizing countries had vast amounts of wealth and power compared to the rest and we're able to set up an international system and an international political economy that reflected that disparity of power but this was an unusual kind of power gap because it was very difficult to close in talking about international relations some of you may associate me with international relations theory but a motive and I here are taking a fairly broad view of what as it were counts as international relations so we talk about people who are thinking about international relations in a systematic way they may or may not be academics and the further back you go the fewer of them actually are academics in the in the contemporary sense so we want to bring in to this idea of thinking about I our public intellectuals and political leaders and others who have had interesting big systemic things to say about about international relations so it's abroad it's a broad understanding and the other thing that's going to feature in my talk but less so in a matter part of it is that this the two sides of this conversation are both in a sense global but they don't start to integrate with each other in other words the conversation about I are in what we now call the global South and the conversation about I are in the core were very different and not at all connected or not very much connected things during during this period so one of the things I'm going to struggle against here is that most of you will probably have fixed in your minds the idea that the first world war is a big disjunction in international relations that the anniversaries of that were not so long ago and a big song and dance was made about how much the first world war changed and shaped the world well that's worth thinking about because certainly from a global south perspective it hardly changed the world but all and in in you know since it's the big impact was in this rather small group of core countries so that's going to be another one of the the myths that we're going to question so across this period 19th century right up to 1945 colonial international society that was set up in the nineteenth century continues pretty much out altering the first world war makes relatively little difference to this it's it's mainly a European and an American to some extent Japanese form of Imperial or colonial International Society the distribution of power within it remains multipolar right throughout this this period and except for japan the the centers of power are all white and Western right through this period the colonial political economy that was set up during the 19th century very much in a corporate reform that remains in operation largely unaltered and the key to this structure is that modernity which occurs in a relatively small number of countries mainly Western ones but not all Western countries and Japan at the same time as the Western countries which is not often credited that handful of countries where the revolutions of modernity were first successful they rule the roost for this period they have pretty much all of the wealth and power and can pretty much do what they want and this is a period in which those revolutions of modernity are unfolding very rapidly increasing the powers of production and destruction and communication and transportation all of this rapid technological change is is a constant during this period as in the ones that follow so the first world war is in this juncture but it's mainly a disjuncture for those countries in the core and more arguably you could say it's something of a disjuncture in that it closed down the ultra liberal global economy that was set up in the decades before 1914 so in this sense the the Great Depression and protectionism and all of that familiar stuff from the 1930s killed off the highly liberal global economy and another change consequent on this was that rival ideologies took political power and began to compete for who is going to control the future of modernity so it wasn't just liberal democracy and social democracy but communism and fascism were also out there as alternative versions alternative political representations if you will of modernity ok so if we look in the in the first period the 19th century up until the end of the First World War and we can see that the thinking about international relations about modern international relations has been much shaped by the actual practice of international relations before the First World War there's an awful lot of thinking about international relations that goes on as I say a lot of it by public intellectuals and politicians as well as by academics but academically the subject is not yet not yet particularly organized and much of the discussion that's going on in the core is not thinking about the relationship between the core and the periphery it's just thinking about relationships amongst the core countries that's the the main root of IR and it's and its Eurocentrism and that's thinking about relations between core and periphery is organized under a different heading called colonial administration it doesn't that's not thought of as being part of international relations because international relations is something that in those days happens amongst civilized states IE generally white ones with japan included in an honorary way if you actually look at the details of who's doing what in the nineteenth century there's a hell of a lot of familiar names and familiar topics up here most of the main bodies that you would now think of as part of international relations theory they're already up and up and running lots of the main framing theories are there war strategic studies - politics is all there international law international organization international society is all there you can go back and look at this stuff if you look at say ranch who is a well-known American writer before the First World War I mean he had quite a lot to say about intergovernmental organizations but if you read his stuff and nobody reads this stuff these days partly because it's incredibly racist like everything that was written in the West before the First World War it just took racism for granted five minutes okay thank you so what I'm what I'm saying there is I are before I are and there's a lot of it right the only thing that it doesn't have is the label IR so these things are all happening but they don't actually come together and get called IR until later if we look at I are thinking in the in the periphery at this at this time this is mainly about anti colonial anti-racist and therefore anti Western physicians mostly taken by public intellectuals and political leaders at the time but there are a lot of interesting IR themes here which are still going strong pan regionalism was a very major theme at this time sovereignty not intervention another theme the development of international law as a way of getting yourself into the game on equal terms there was even beginning to be a literature about development as you see here but this stuff is all going on as it were with very little contact with the the kind of thinking that are represented in the previous slide if we look at the second period right yeah and we look in the core we get the emergence of international relations then as a recognized field of study which has a name or rather several names and that debate about the name is still going on right so that's that's a debate that started a long time ago and it's still not settled the the founding myth is based around institutionalization a few chairs in international relations things like Chatham House and other kinds of think tanks got started after the first world war but this is really pretty pretty limited stuff it there's some interesting features to it which I can talk about for hours but Mira has already given me the signal so I won't but I can take that up in the Q&A if you'd like that there were interesting international organizations for the study of international relations the International Studies conference associated with the the League of Nations and the Institute of Pacific relations which some of you in Sao us may be familiar with which did big organizing work and putting together conferences and stimulated national committees for thinking about International Studies there's the so-called myth of the great debate which of course didn't happen during this period but which was supposed to 1945 construction so you get a turn in the IR thinking in the core which becomes very much obsessed with the League of Nations and the problem of war and peace and all of that and which hardly is thinking about as it were in north-south or corporate relations at all because nothing has changed in in that respect there's a little bit of the origins of what eventually becomes decolonization but not enough to to disturb the general picture in the periphery you get quite a lot of continuity the same motivation of anti-colonialism anti-racism and therefore some extent anti-western ISM remains environment large this is not being done by academics because there are relatively few universities that would have supported this in the in the periphery so it's still during this period mainly separated from the IR in the core and the periphery thinking about IR doesn't really take up the the League of Nations and the the war peace issue in the same way it still retains its own its own concerns about its subordinate position that begins to be a little bit of institutionalization in the periphery but but not much and again you get certain extensions of the kinds of thinking that I mentioned before about development about pan regionalism and various other threads that come in here this man Sarkar and his Hindu theory of international ratios publishing a PSR in 1919 is a very interesting academic exception to to the rule something that didn't get much attention at the time but might do might do now so to conclude a lot of the modern I are thinking from both the core and periphery stretches right back into the 19th century and we need to take this longer view because a lot of the kind of racist and colonial and geopolitical roots of IR think you have just been forgotten they stopped after after 1945 we need to take into account that thinkers other than academics contributed a lot to this and that we still read a lot of those people up until 1945 there was little connection between these two discourses although there should have been in sense that they they they become integrated later on uh sama Tov will will pick up there is this dark side to IR which I think we need to excavate and think about as part of the the roots from which our discipline comes and then when the Second World War comes the Second World War has a much bigger impact on the relationship between small ir and bigger because a lot of things do change that racism as an institution of international society colonialism is an issue for international society all become d legitimized and this changes then the relationship between north and south and you get the dynamic of decolonization which begins to change the practice of IR which then more slowly changes thinking about IR our argument is that in from 1945 you get a virtual second founding of I are huge institutionalization and and other things but I will Amitai pick up the story at this point [Applause] Thank You Barry and thank you so as University for inviting us and then place or organizing it kind of in an opportunistic way since the funding for my trip to London was paid by University College your friendly institution next door but Dan is a old friend and colleague and I was delighted that I could get better and I could come and do this here and also thanks to Mira formidable scholar and we are normally is hoping she would chair but also contribute her own thoughts into this field since he has done so much work on things that are very dear and central to our project so I will take up the story from a very left but are slightly in a different way I probably will put a bit more emphasis on now I atheria Western American higher theory that Barry hates but I have to live with since I work in Washington DC but I would still continue the story in the same way with the same assumptions and arguments so again we're talking about the small iron and the big ir s-- know what happens after 1945 is the big shift when ir which was kind of born in the UK no matter how you how much of it that you accept but it's sort of the center of gravity of ir moves to the united states in fact so much so that Americans like a Stanley Hoffman said aya was born and raised in the US which is very deeply offensive to the British and Taft in fact even though we don't agree that IR was actually founded in one place at one time in UK but I also feel it strange that there's no acknowledgement even of the United Kingdom or the Europe's role in this but anyway the central themes are a Cold War nuclear weapons European integration which is from the liberal side energy crisis through expansion I'm kind of the book has two chapters two sets of chapters on these themes so one and the empirics from 45 to 1989 and sorry there is one chapter then 89 to 2008 but I'm something else but there is a little bit of overlap between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post Cold War period but still those are the major theoretical developments in the field now this is something I don't need to be level with you because most of you would know this theory you know how the classical realism became me realism of structural realism Morgenthau to Walsh and how liberalism from regional integration theory a Haas and dodge to coherent na integration theories and the liberal institutions and these are probably pretty central to the traditional AIA that we are taught in our colleges and universities the so-called second debate between classical bull and singer debate between classical and scientific approach the knio knio synthesis neoliberalism and near realism very significant narrowing of aya because of that and also we also know a fair bit Lisa even the mainstream Western textbooks do make a concession to the non-western world when it comes to dependency theory most colonialism doesn't get as much recognition because it started in the other fields than IR literature and and history and like but still there is some recognition of this but generally the story is pretty well known what is less well known is that many of these theories that assumed certain universalism are that they claim to speak for the entire world were actually not they were very parochial so in our book we pay specific attention to how this theories the religion reversion and its variations constructivism was not quite there yet how this passed the test when the test being that had to what actually the capture the reality realities of the world at large and also what are the set of exclusive smart generalizations and and also analytical gaps in these theories when it comes to explaining and understanding what's happening in the in the global South or the larger world so we do have these developments also I want to put them together in 19m after well again the periodization is a little blurry so 1980s and mm I end up the Cold War or towards the end of the Cold War - maybe the global financial crisis of 2008 we also have a lot of developments in theory reflecting the practice the actual develop internal politics so after end of the Cold War liberalism takes on a new of few new dimensions Democratic peace theory becomes important liberal hegemony which is very much in news because of the debate about the end of the liberal order comes into being there was no such term called liberal order before this period by the way it is a post facto reconstruction of the world by people like Jonah Canberra and realism techsan variations like offensive and defensive realism neoclassical realism and then there are also for the at this time some interesting challenges are emerging but from within the West within the core so that will be postmodern for structural Marxist and the third debate and Inter paradigm debates feminism comes up English school comes up and of course most centrally constructionism constructivism basically has a revolutionary impact it becomes the most popular ir theory after this period according to some surveys that Alexander wend replaces Robert cohan at the most influential eye I think are according to this is a trip survey from College of William and Mary so all these things happen and again you know this theory the only major challenge from the periphery is the post colonialism which replaces dependency theory if he says lost just last year by this time because of the rise of the East Asian economic economic miracle and also post colonialism ads coming from within the periphery unlike dependency which is very economic oriented most colleges in Texas gives a central place to culture identity and our other issues but again looking at the whole package of these two periods so 1945 to 89 and the post-cold war period up to the financial crisis in 2008 we find there are significant gaps in both and this is the key theme of the book which you do not find in a lot of your writings and in some writings you do but not in all writings so the mainstream theories pretty much either ignored the non-west of whatever you call it level south or a third world either due to lack of interest a lack of knowledge or due to a belief that Western theories can explain everything so people are about coherent when he wrote a preface to his book internal institutions and state power who subtitle is called a theory of all politics he said that I know nothing about the international relations or IP of countries outside of Western Europe United States Canada Australia and he says that this reflects the American or centrism of the field but there's not a damn thing I can do about it he actually says that and record that so there's a ignorance or lack of interest in finding out I'm in a kind of a into a lack of intellectual curiosity that about these countries our belief that this country shouldn't matter but then I also I believe that like in a book Michaelmas Thunder now and John ikenberry edited they say that Western theories should apply to the Asia Pacific and everywhere else because these countries after all are picking on the Western norms and institutions so after being decolonized they have taken on Westphalian sovereignty and the the expand international society from Europe has expanded so our theories that derived initially from Europe does have global applicability so that's basically what sums up in those mainstream theories constructivism is slightly different because it focuses and ideas culture and identity you might think that they would be more sensitive to cultural differences and identity claims but it doesn't in the beginning at least in the beginning instead of saying has this own moral custom politicians in narrative the good global norms come out of the west propagated by question Nam entrepreneurs and the rest of the world ethically are passive recipients students as opposed to their taught these norms by Western unknown entrepreneurs now what about critical and alternative approaches now many of them came out of the core itself postmodern for structural impact there are some people argue that they basically replace the Anglo with the Franco so anglo-american rationalism is challenged by continental Seraphin structuralism and many of them still legitimize Western dominance especially liberal hegemony better idea sonali also constructivism which can be partly mainstream partly challenging a critical theory talks about Western Nam giving as I mentioned and epistemological as I said and us rationalism both with continental post structuralism it doesn't do very much to bring in the non-western or global South concerns and voices it's a very interesting debate between the durian and off-centre and Krishna one of my classmates from jeo where he takes on a postdoctoral scholars of ignoring the global South so the post colonialism which is the most interesting development from the global south I guess my understanding which I will be very curious to hear from Meera that there is a lot of emphasis on resistance descent and but there is also some sort of a lack of corresponding attention to agency so can subaltern speak okay but can subaltern act and that is changing more recently and there is a lot more work on agency but initially at least it was basically a critical theory in in in the true sense of the term and in a sense challenging the exclusion and marginalization of the post-colonial world and rather than investigating agency unless we take agency as a form of resistance as a form of agency which I do in some of my own writings so ideas from the periphery this is the period especially from the eighties there's a lot of developments in IR around the world so IR was global in the beginning has Barry pointed out and now IR kicks up in an uneven way in a different in a not all parts of the world sort of for taking interest in Maya theory in the same way or IR as a subject but generally you find that developments in India in China and China in particular Marxism to cultural narratives which is underpinning the Chinese school of higher Latin America moves away from dependency to autonomy and peripheral realism and the Middle East where the Pacific tech in Iran where I have started similar to many part of the world as a way of our training diplomats takes on more theoretical interest so it's kind of reverse of the practice turn so it's from practice to theory as opposed to theory to practice and and ASEAN Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War starts where part Eastern Central Europe to the West Russia initially was interested in turning to the West but then were repelled rejected and now is into civilization or discourse and much more inward looking but anyway theory is never consistent liam breasts around the world and there are there is enormous diversity between and within countries and regions when it comes to ir and even within china the chinese school is challenged by other types of approaches in china and also we find that there is neither wholesale adoption of Western theories not wholesale rejection there is a kind of localization and adaptation of our theories from the West and doing that to build concepts and theories that brings in the local and indigenous experience so what about the future sorry what about the global ayah the global IR is a construct it's not a theory it doesn't reject but tries to broaden existing IR theories it stresses the multiple foundations of IR as we have described including non-western origins of IR in discipline and theory it is rooted in global history rather than the European or American history it impresses pluralistic universalism which is a way of saying that it acknowledges and respects diversity and identity but doesn't necessarily welcome our expression enthusiastic support for cultural exceptionalism that every culture is different therefore theory has to be culturally grounded in a very rigid and narrow sense it impresses regions an area studies which will be good news to hear for example which is a substantially rich legacy in area studies and they're also very vitally the agency claims of others including post-colonial non non-western societies and actors so we can talk a little bit more about that during discussion but I would like to leave you with the about future now we see IR has made tremendous progress since the 100 years ago in the early 20th century there is more conversation between the core and the periphery but still there is a persistence of Western dominance and governors in particular and this is down three teaching publishing gatekeeping hiring citations and all kinds of intellectual practices which many of you should know but we can talk about in the global South also there are certain reasons for you know where IRA remains underdeveloped and that would be resource constraints that may be changing in some countries like China but it's very acute in other parts language barrier the dominance of the English language is a huge factor when you try to bring in scholars from Latin America or China policy preoccupation a lot of is colors are very engaged in policy they don't see Theory it's a disciplinary development is critical and the self-censorship or censorship the scholars are rather afraid to take on the government and therefore have a kind of open discourse which would advance theoretical debate and and reflection at the same time as I said I again it's come a long way there's growing global interest in Maya is glowing in growing interest in national and regional perspectives which some people are worried that might lead to fragmentation but something we generally believe that is something that is probably is going to beat around there to stay and can actually also be helpful in globalizing the discipline as long as the conversation is not too parochial and the theories that developed from national original context can travel rather than be applied only to that country of the region and finally given the ongoing shift in power and ideas might there be a this rise of the rest will lead to a growing voice of emerging powers and global South in reshaping IR we don't know the answer to that how soon this will happen but this is a factor that needs to be closely observed on Worst for so let me stop there sorry [Applause] thanks very much to bury an avatar for coming at me refer for sharing in your for turning out on a day which is threatening to look like summer slightly outside if we're very lucky so I've also delighted to be working from time to time with a meet off at American University and what I get to talk about reflects some of the ideas that we've been discussing and some of the research that I've been doing with Tom we sat in New York which was kindly supported by the Carnegie Corporation and in that context we're really talking about developing what's already been said supplemental and in no sense contradictory and I found the their work of the book very very helpful and I want to offer a phrase which I find quite helpful in framing my own thought the restorative archaeology of knowledge which I'll come back to but I think in the contemporary world the that's one of the defining issues which we need to have in mind or defining questions as we look at this work with presumably a normative intent is what in both IR and IR whether upper or lower case is most useful in a global immense emancipation project and in facing the environmental and weapons driven extinct extinction crisis what is most useful in this and this is a working definition and I'll talk to it but as a child of the counterculture Foucault and so forth were all out and all the rage and I was first in college but it seemed to me that this is a concept which helps bridge IR and social science theory and historical study as well that it's a term which perhaps can help us deal with the what professor Harold talks of as the relentless present ism in IR and sometimes the unreflective a positivism of history to help bridge that that gap civilizational self-destruction is important in international relations but is as we've heard not particularly present in IR for example a disarmament as a theme comes into just 4% of all the publications and book reviews of millennium in its entire history 4% where it is a major concern of the global south bangtong and after the secondly this is the term Western which is used in the book a lot and in discussion doesn't need a lot of deconstruction I certainly find myself an intellectually displaced person in that construction but is showing from my own background it's a very different experience both in in writing and and in practice I'm really looking at the post-world War two period but want to put it to you that the the count of presented nir of the development of international relations since world war ii is based on a very conservative us framing of the practice experience of international relations during that conflict and that leads to I think some severe misunderstandings about the construction of the post-war order and both our critiques of it and the yeast we can make of it today and I'll explore some of those issues and that present ISM even in critical studies Liat leads researchers to critique what I suppose in the colloquial term would be an arts ally a straw a straw person of a conservative paradigm being critiqued in the 70s and later which actually didn't really exist that the paradigm of the 1940s is much more radical than is presented in an IR and in only conservative history of the period some examples and Barry mentioned this to a degree that there is a clear-eyed logical competition going on with a liberal capitalist view a liberal democracy competing with fascism and communism as ideologies but also in intra American politics which is almost entirely overlooked in our view of how America came out of World War two is the good guys that was by no means certain and I've written about this to some degree and what we find is that as I discuss it in a term with with Tom Reese that the exist is of the global crisis and domestic crisis in competition means that political leaders and publics who perhaps are driven by Hobbesian realism end up regarding Kantian international cooperation as essential to social and international survival and that is a lesson I think which you can trace back from elites back to 1815 but becomes a more and more popular public concern as a result of the ensuing conflict and I think you can trace a line from the Congress of Vienna through to the threats of climate change today were more and more the self destructive potential of industrial society becomes a defining issue international politics but not so often in international relations or international history but it is what drives large parts of domestic international society the UN which exists during the Second World War and not just after is an ideology of universalism of left social democracy if you read the defining documents of the period mourn out of strong public and elite interest not simply an elite project and it's critical and I've written about this some great deal and I won't dwell on it here but we assume the outcomes of world war two as a given and in fact how far the United States ended up as it did is highly contested with the United States at the time so the fact that the Americans are providing cash free weapons to its allies that relied upon a globalist ideology to convince the American public to get that through the Congress and it wasn't a done deal the ideological ancestors of Donald Trump were looking to cut off old military assistance to the Soviet Union as soon as the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad in the beginning of 1943 I don't want to take us into too much history here but these are critical moments which define the outcome of the war international politics today and the inter the intra United States debates we see today echo those with the United States even within this period and it's this international as globalist ideology which is used to mobilize American public and its allies towards the outcome that we find and this is part of an international effort so Chinese Indians Ethiopians have we find in our research to be founders of international criminal justice before the United States in night King them in the international politics of the era but the Kuomintang not being in fashion the international efforts of his lawyers and politicians in 1940's don't get to have much hearing from anybody similarly a gender equality in the UN and therefore globally comes out always entirely through the action through the agency of Latin American women actually with the angular American women telling their carrot their Latin American colleagues not to ask for anything as vulgar as explicit genuine equality in the UN Charter and this is debate takes place on the floor and the outcome of that southern agency into the core of the glow of global international system is decisive and we all benefit from it but this is southern agency not northern agency similarly as a footnote it's worth mentioning that the Arab League is formed before the United Nations after the experience of how they were treated at Versailles the Arab countries decide they need to get their act together before the post-war order is established in order to get themselves a voice so the Arab League I think is February of 45 UN Charter October and again this doesn't fit into the received wisdom in which we have inherited the implications of the points that I so just with bullet points are I think quite profound that they provide a more useful resource for the globalized problems we face today climate emergency renewed war the reactionary resurgence if not triumph and that we take for granted the fact that the post-war order yes Nazis defeated but there were many in Washington who were very would have been very happy to have had a negotiated peace with the Nazis and gone after the Soviet Union at that period the fact that didn't happen that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not followed by the bombing of Moscow is something which frankly hardcore realists have difficulty explaining because that white supremacy supremacy from Washington supported by the atomic bomb is one might say a natural realist outcome of 1945 and the political dynamics that didn't create that and gave us the order we have didn't come out of a few intellectuals it came out of political leaders and popular movements who are contesting the conflict ideologically as well as militarily in the period and that the post-war order as I've been discussing with work with with a Matar is far more with the one which is radical social democratic and in the old sense liberal rather than the conservative liberal ideology and certainly at that period but of ricard regarded the neoliberal agenda as simply being the political agenda which created the second world war unrestrained armaments unrestrained global economics and no attention to mass unemployment were all regarded as principle drivers towards world war two something paths they could remember today or we could remind them of the UN itself provides the ditta maseeh for emancipation that comes later in decolonization today in speech acts at the UN you see climate and the bomb defining issues of international relations but IR is generally stubbornly deaf to these priorities so I think there are some themes we can use to take forward that the self destructive potential of industrial society is I think the defining issue emerging out of the period we've been analyzing not at the periphery even if it is peripheral in much international relations scholarship for the reasons that omote have pointed to there's tomalak tubers points on the presentation particularly about the development of IR I'm a great fan of Ashley neglected late work of hands Morgan fell where and his work on new American foreign policy in the late 1960s he became basically becomes an Einstein peacenik everything is checked bum has changed everything we are taking the wrong course in trying to adapt to integrate nuclear weapons into traditional politics we have to change politics culture and society and so from the point of view of Lake Morgenthau feminist foreign policy is a natural product of classical realism understanding the implications of the bomb but rather I think that the Catholic Church in trying to use Galileo to justify the Flat Earth on the basis of Galileo may have thought before he picked up a telescope I are still sites Morgan fell on the basis of what he wrote in the 50s not on the basis of what he wrote in the late 1960s and that I think is epitomizes the problem we have in the way in which IR treats itself and its own discourses but also the way in which IR does act as a political policeman for a particularly conservative ideology which frankly has become extremely dangerous thank you okay so thank you very much and thanks for those talks I'm tempted to take the kind invitation from Berrien ammeter Van Daan to also share a few of my own thoughts maybe before going into the Q&A if that's all right and I suppose I think it might be helpful at least from a didactic or pedagogical perspective and the so the positionality that I'm commenting from is from somebody who's been working within the post-colonial tradition of international relations and thinking about this from the traditions of that sort of radical critical standpoint and so I wanted to raise a few questions one of the elements I think of the narrative that Barrie set out within that I might have followed up with that I find provocative is the idea that the core and the periphery were not intellectually integrated during the 20th century and I know that in the presentation and in the book as well that say WeDo Bois is linked with Africa and and that's put together with the claim that the core and periphery are not connected now Du Bois of course was a famous advocate of pan-africanism in his life but he was an American he was born in the north the northern states in America he taught at Atlanta for 20 years got his PhD from Harvard worked in the n-double-a-cp etc etc his long career was in America he finally lost his American passport or they withdrew in it when he was in his 80s when he decided to go communist and go off to Ghana and hang out with Kwame Nkrumah so what is interesting about the story of WB Dubois not just by graphically but intellectually is about that place that he occupies between the west and the non West and one of the points that I would like to offer by way of rejoined it to bury an avatars book is that the Western the non-western much more intellectually and politically entangled than in the way that is set out in the book now one of the things that Du Bois does is directly engage with the arguments that are going on in the West about the nature of Western international relations he has public debates with figures such as Laura Stoddard who are talking about the dangers of a race war arguments which in some respects were echoed by Samuel Huntington's work in the 1990s about the clash of civilizations and what Dubois is arguing is that the nature of race is not the sort of essential quality that the white supremacist thinkers are interpreting as he's saying it's something which is essentially invented it's constructed globally and historically in order to facilitate imperial extract right race is invented so that blacks and browns and and the racist of the world can be incorporated into the global system of production and he puts that into dialogue with an analysis of Western society itself he's saying okay Western society is industrializing you suddenly got this massive working class and they need something to feel superior about something to hang on to and so he sees imperialism and colonialism as in a way a kind of political compensation for the white working classes of the world right it gives them consumer products it gives them a sense of well-being and superiority and so on its Du Bois a non Western thinker is he thinking in the periphery I don't think so I actually would consider him a core thinker talking in the core and in the periphery because these are geographically and politically in sociologically entangled spaces um and I think this is important because it also thinks it also travels forward to how we think about post colonialism within I are in the sort of post 45 period and again much of the thinking is done within the West right it's put its progressed at Columbia University and then you know in Cambridge and Oxford in places like this these are core institutions in the sort of traditional Western sense but it is mobile people transnational people diaspora people displaced people exiled who become the intellectual core of this project and their arguments are very much directly in dialogue with the Western arguments or the core arguments or there's more politically hegemonic arguments so I think this gives us a much more complicated understanding of the relationship between core and periphery Western on West colonial and anti colonial then is necessarily presented in the book and so in terms of the tradition that I write in I would I would encourage us to understand the periphery and the non-western as not parochially contained right they are actually making global they're making fundamental arguments they're talking about the big picture things they're not having an internal conversation amongst themselves about how to organize Latin America they're saying enormous structural things about how the world works and I think as Dan's presentation nicely brought out there then discussing these in transnational spaces and including this in transnational activism so dependency theory for example propagated in the UN in the 1960s by Latin American social scientists becomes a central intellectual issue in scholarship but also becomes an important political consideration in how on tad and UNESCO understands you know the organization of the world and how to deal with that so I would I mean maybe like Berrien I might have to come back a little bit on the entangled character of the global during this in this period the other thing I would like to pick up is the question about whether racism disappears after 1945 because again in the story that we've been told about international relations in international relations theory is that racism disappears I would suggest that it doesn't and to some extent that I our theories are still racialized in a great number of respects Samuel P Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis is one of the more obvious well-known examples of an account of World Order that is heavily racialized that depends on a number of racialized assumptions about how societies organized what values they have how they behave and so on and I don't think it's so easy to say that it stops so one thing again that I'd invite the authors to reflect on is the continuities of racism when it's not an explicit ideology right when you haven't got the scientific in inverted commas scientific part behind it but we still see racism as kind of pervasive within domestic societies and global societies around the world and I suppose the final question I would ask and this is something that came up a little bit in the discussion we had last week at bisa is about thinking about how the non-western itself becomes a kind of political category and how how it can facilitate quite nationalist and imperialist projects within spaces such as China and India in articulating alternative schools of IR because international relations in its formal organized sense has always been closely aligned to foreign policy establishments and one of the consequences of the emergence of stronger foreign policy establishments within China and India and Indonesia and so on is a desire for scholarship that speaks directly to and with the interests and ideologies of those establishments and so when we're thinking about where alternative thinking about world order can come from that is rooted in let's say the social structures and experiences of the world outside Europe we need to be careful about who exactly is speaking and with what voice and with what interest so I suppose that's another consideration anyway I will abuse that chair in position enough and no one to tell me to be quiet so Alan maybe stop there with the questions I think what I would like to do now is maybe ask Barry and a Matar to take a couple of minutes seats from their seats to maybe reflect on some of the things that Dan raised or anything else that they want to throw in before we go out to questions does that sound all right with everyone okay great so Barry I'll just make sure your mic is some kinds of technology I can still have losing ground okay I'll just pick up a couple of points then like Dan's phrase very much about restorative archaeological knowledge that that resonates with me I think all I would do is is elaborate a bit on some things that you said because I think those coming into international relations are broadly speaking unaware of what a habit the discipline makes of forgetting things so there's a continuous state of reinvention going on which you don't really begin to see or get until you've been looking at it for several decades and and this is a kind of structural feature of the of the discipline and it applies to lots of stuff sometimes things are systematically forgotten so geopolitics was systematically suppressed after 1945 likewise race theory as a legitimate theory because race theory was one of the most important ways of thinking about IR and it was a matter of everyday conversation and zero embarrassment to those who are engaged in the discourse about it and if you look back at that stuff it reads very oddly now but it was the normal practice of the day and that was simply forgotten after 1945 probably because it would have been cosmically embarrassing to the Americans to carry on with it feminism was forgotten there was a whole interesting development of feminist IR thinking based in the Women's International League for peace and freedom in the 20s and 30s Zipp disappeared after 1945 I think it's reinvented in the seventies and eighties as if it's for the first time I was around for that I was also around for the the discovery of international political economy in the 1970s as if it had never been thought about before but it was a normal part of thinking about IR in the interwar years and just got forgotten about suppressed in in relation to other things so I think there's a there's some big acts of forgetting there's a very interesting study to be done as to why particular things for forgotten and I think a lot of it has to do with what amitab was describing with the you know that after 1945 the United States becomes very influential in IR becomes the kind of center of gravity not so much on the basis of quality but quantity and American IR it has to be remembered is is a very peculiar species it's not representative of how the rest of the world does it the American Association of ir with political science is something that goes back well into them into the 19th century and it's not true many where else I mean I are doesn't come out of political science in this country or on the continent or in China or India or anywhere else so it's a very distinctive and peculiar American way of thinking about it I are that it should be thought of as international politics and then just one response to to mirror I mean I I don't I'll try and speak for a Murtagh here and I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong I think we agree that there wasn't zero interaction between what was going on between core and periphery because I mean from for my money the you know been i kumar so cars work which is remarkable I mean the several articles and he publishes them all in American journals and quite big American journals that at the time whether they got any residence or not I don't know but the mere fact that he's publishing them is of interest so there's certainly stuff going on but that said the mainstream taxonomy right up until 1945 keeps colonial administration and international relations amongst civilized powers as entirely separate subjects but that does seem to me to be to be significant so I also don't have any problem with your argument that the ir the thinking about ir that's going on the on in the periphery is global thinking it's it's certainly global in the way it's thinking and what it's thinking about it's not global in the sense that it's not knitted up with thinking about i are going on in the west and therefore there isn't a global I are big IR in that in that sense great thank you butoh and especially the the last point I particularly but both of us generally were very sensitive to not met make everything from global South coming as anti-this anti-that anti-western anti-colonial anti-racist you're also very much into produce and through that so in page 47 we make it very clear although I should have been developed further that I are thinking in the periphery during the interwar years was not just about anti-colonialism but also contain ideas about internationalism or order international development cooperation and justice it extended well beyond anti-imperialism in fact I the previous chapter also we look at people like Tagore who was normally he was actually not a natural nation was maintained a list it's very strange he he rejected nationalism at a time when India was fighting the British and he said nationalism is terrible it's bad he went to Japan and China to tell them that don't be nationalistic look what's happening to Europe there happened several decades before you were fell into this ultra-nationalism and fascism and destroyed people like Arnold Toynbee said that Sadler was well ahead of his time in criticizing nationalism so so that's a very important point we were very sensitive to that but but point well taken I mean I think it helps us to bring that to the fore from your other point about Amira's or the point about corporate free entanglement also again we would have no problems with that I think it's a very important point you can also make the same argument about that you make about the boy about Niro who was educated right here and ha and I was talking about you know I was many ways influenced by Lasky so many people don't accept him as a non-western I think he's a Western as it gets but at the same time he is the intellectual perspective was providing was heard for the lack of a better world in non-western perspective but he was straddling both the walls there's no question about it our main point was very simple that the ir scholarship did not recognize this and that's what was happening so the conversation that was actually happening in the real world the entanglement was never reflected in the ir discourse in the textbooks and we look at a number of textbooks where pan-asian ISM and Penn National's you must cost us some kind of it make imperialism at one book the most popular textbook out for 1930s and I are in the in the u.s. rejected and believe that there's a non progressive reactionary in our ideas so so the mainstream AIA weather yet scar hands not and how did not recognize this that there was such progressive ideas and in the world so that's why the conversation was not in tangling in that sense but not in real practice and that in Caribbean North um United States and Africa there was a genuine transnational conversation going on and finally racism again point well taken we kind of depart from that original foundational theme of racism like a journal of race development becoming Foreign Affairs and now we did that in the beginning and then kind of a little bit move away we either forget into a broader category of ethnocentrism that's the term that I have been more from I've been using in my work but some of that permeates this book as well as book as well and we do look at how exclusive marginalization happens and it's a part of it it's raised part of it is intellectual arrogance but in the end we do talk about intersectionality and race but nothing as adequately as we could have done so that's a point well taken finally a quick point and then and then all these things we are working together on a project to establish agency in the creation of the UN but what he said gives me another kind of nail to hit and the coffin of the liberal order I'm not Michael that liberal order was really liberal all right it was a socio Democratic order and I might be would have been nobody you say is it more Universal social democratic order but it's misrepresented and misappropriation as liberal and I think that's a very good point that in some of our future work will take off okay thank you wonderful I think that's probably enough from the panel for a short while ask for questions and please feel free to ask questions about this project but I'm sure berry an hour we'll be very happy to answer questions about other projects or other issues so are there any questions we have one down at the front I see that there are two roving mics being held by Alex at the back I'm fat deal are you able to grab them okay we've got quite a lot of questions so what I suggest is I will collect them in groups of three is that Alright and then we will come to the panel and we'll come back and forth so if you can make your questions relatively you know direct that will give us lots of time for them so I start with the Sri can you put your hands up again yes this lady here in the red and then I'll come around and then thank you I'll go to the back the gentleman the blue t-shirts so I'm just gonna do this kind of going this way across the room so either I see the NSE student in international Asians thank you for your talk I just wanted to ask briefly a couple of questions one being is the kind of relationship between core and periphery that you highlight in the book is it relevant to a kind of contemporary understanding of how relations are need to be understood in a single analytical field for us to kind of move forward I'm thinking about for example Sudan the Janjaweed militias that have been supported by the EU and by the Gulf states that requires a relational understanding of politics that straddles beyond area studies and beyond kind of the confines of an Indian or a Saudi Arabian IR so that's my first questions and and regarding that how can we better kind of divulge different forms of southern agency within that so one form of southern agency would be the the militant another form of southern agency would be the Indian garment workers that facilitate the rise of the Industrial Revolution so in your book do you go into detail about how we can spatialize analytical relations beyond core and periphery and and do you go into the different ways in which we can look into southern agency and my last question is very quickly my last question is about the non West as an analytical category is it useful because I don't see how it can be very useful in a world in which we've moved beyond those categories and in which things are so relationally entangled we see things that go beyond them thank you thank you okay one more question this gentleman here in the black jacket and then I'll show Nach I'm a doctoral candidate in international relations at King's College London I have two quick questions first when we are talking about the essentially the provincial ization of iron if we can call that that whether it's an anglo-saxon discipline or an european discipline how important is the methodological distinctions a lot of American International Relations is heavily quant driven so like today it could be very difficult for a Beno Akuma shortcut to publish in the American political science with you how what will be the take of the panel on that number one and my last question I'll keep it short it is that we are looking at the difference if I understood correctly as a difference between theory and thought on international relations now what is the point the analytical point where we can where we can distinguish that something which is an Universal thought emanating versus a thought which is just reflective of the societal and power political milieu of that particular point in time all right thank you great questions and I miss having Barry in whichever combination you desire maybe some tell this down would you like Conan yes ok good to pick all the questions and leave something buried the more difficult ones on the question about relational the need for relational ir and the limits of an area studies perspective is a point well taken and they said some of these schools of national or regional schools that are emerging have to be challenged on that score that they cannot simply become Exceptionalist and say a Chinese school can explain only Chinese reality they have to travel and for that we need comparative studies and the more general generalizability and and this is why we also make that point in our book and also many of her other writings that that the regional and national perspectives drawing on expert asian countries or areas are welcome they cannot be rejected but they need to also rise above being parochial or at the mirror said in an imperial in some cases which they can be so there is a danger to that but at the same time i don't personally feel comfortable rejecting them as a government propaganda or they are actually not always linked to the government there is wide variations among them the other person about two different parts of southern agency i think very well taken i mean i have actually a book called agency and change involve politics it's like it's a different book at the cambridge last year where i discuss exactly this question how many different types of agency and you have and and I start with the resistance as a form of agency but in the in this case of a this book I think the agency claims is bringing in the agency cleanse different types ideational agency material agency a registrants agency it's very important to global global IR because if you don't bring in the new bracket you leave out a lot of contributions like what Dan pointed out Latin American women responsible for single-handedly for gender equality actually for a human rights as well and Chinese and Indian development thinkers contributed a lot to the Bretton Woods institutions and we don't get to hear the stories because our concept from agency is very materialistic that big powers make big things big splash and create all these institutions all these things that happened elsewhere in the you know ICJ creation or Bretton Woods location where a lot of agency happened from the global south didn't doesn't get reflected in the literature on global governance or institutions almost perishes we can then continue down if that's right sorry first question then I can't say that I followed the speeches of the malaysian prime minister or indeed anybody's prime minister that's not my line of country but the idea that there should be the global rule of law is a pretty old idea and it goes back hundreds of years it emerges very prominently in the nineteenth century because something called international law begins to emerge and the concept of international law creates a difficulty because law requires law makers and therefore a state or a government and there isn't one so what is international law a debate that is still ongoing the view of lawyers is broadly speaking that law cannot exist without society right that there has to be some kind of society existing in order to frame make meaningful international law so what the nineteenth century international lawyers saw happening in front of them was definitely the creation of international law about trade and standards and all kinds of stuff so international law was happening therefore there must be an international society because otherwise it couldn't be happening that line of thinking takes you very much into the English school and the except of international society as a and the kinds of order that such an international society can on can and cannot support it's not a world government kind of order and the strength and weakness of it and the nature of it changes over time and that's I think where you should go and look if you want to understand that approach to to international order how contemporary is the core periphery relationship I think it's still very contemporary for two reasons one is that we're living downstream from it I mean that's core periphery relationship set up in the 19th century restructured the world and pretty much everything in it and we're still living in that structure if you want to date modernity and where we came from to some point of origin it happens there that's when practically everything in the social and political and technological world changes forever so we're still working this out and it seems to me that one of the things to go back to my theme of forgetting that's a very good theme for somebody of my age when forgetting becomes a more common part of life but it seems to me that one of the things that the West broadly speaking has forgotten is its own role in imperialism and colonialism and what it doesn't understand is the amount of resentment that still exists out there in the global south about all of this right so what's happening now I mean Hedley bull once talked about the revolt of the revolt against the West's and this was kind of in the 1950s and 60s and that revolt didn't have much consequence because it wasn't attached too well for power or much in the way of political authority now however it is because the global South is getting rich and powerful and recovering its cultural Authority you don't have to spend long in China before you start hearing about the century of humiliation and everything being blamed on what foreigners did to China that resentment is really strong and it's now got money and power and cultural Authority behind and so it matters to contemporary politics and that I think is one of the big insights of the post colonialists so I think it's still extremely relevant the methodology question that's I think links to what I said about the United States and political science and the influence of because that methodological drive comes out of American political science and is then injected into IR because in America that is political science and it's a real serious problem if you talk to some of the leading American scholars of my sort of vintage no Walton mere timer and and that sort of stuff they they're panic-stricken they think they're becoming an endangered species and they are because the methodology driven IR has produced millions of highly competent mathematically and statistically literate people who have no sense of history whatsoever ask only very small questions which they answer in very great detail and have no kind of larger sense of things at all and they've taken over the discipline in the United States and there's some danger that they will take it over here because they're exporting their surplus phd's here so if you go to the IR Department in the LSE there's a certain amount of panic there that the people who do interesting things are becoming a minority and these people do very well on all the kind of quantitative measures for academic performance that are measured in the research assessment exercises and all that so it is a problem there's an ongoing war about what the subject is about and what kind of methodologies there are that are appropriate to it and that war is not going to end any time soon and if the positive positive is quant people win then I for one will cease to take an interest in the subject mind you I'll be dead by then to a matter but it seems to me that would be a serious catastrophe it's not that those people can't do anything interesting they can't do some interesting things but if that's the only valid kind of knowledge we're in deep deep deep trouble it's a department in which I got my PhD in which I probably wouldn't be able to do it now dance please points of agreement and disagreement I think if you take a quant to qualified epidemiologist my wife is one they laugh they laugh it's junk if you take quant too serious geographers they're incredulous and laugh if you take one to the Royal College of Physicians they can't be bother to look at it I hope we might write a piece about it but then who would have read it it would be unreadable probably so I think quant is junk and I think that is it's dangerous junk it absorbs a huge amount of energy and it's deeply counterproductive my worst moments I think that one of the outcomes of McCarthyism was that America and I are I have to stop thinking about politics so they gave them theory and quant to keep them out of politics in the aftermath of McCarthyism that is about that's my more cynical reading but it's a huge problem in international politics because so many people who study it then go on to become deputy assistant under bottle washes in the Pentagon or the State Department and they are qualified in some kind of medieval mysticism frankly they're not much more so as a point of violent agreement a disagreement though I think the first question I think was the most profound I'm sorry Barry I think it matters what Prime Minister's say I think it matters what the Prime Minister of Malaysia says I think in a unitary world we're not a global village what I call earth Avenue you know you can lean out of your window and shout and everybody up the street can hear you the trouble is there are 7 billion people also shouting in this blizzard of information and that's the world unified well we have to deal with and there the construction of international law and national norms without an overriding Authority although I would take this you having the problem with the anarchic 'el societies the failure to recognize that there is a real disciplining authority the real disciplining authority is the self destructive nature potential of society the disciplining authority of the bomb and the environment of disaster means states have to behave you know the whole point of disciplining authorities you've misbehave you get punished you misbehaving international relations badly we get nuclear war you've missed behave badly with the environment we have the civilizational crisis so there is a an overriding ruler Governor on anarchical society and that is what drives people such as the minister from Malaysia empirically to say we need to develop international law to underpin international society but that dynamic is going on against in the contradiction of those who are retreating into nativism and I would say with a a last-gasp attempt on that his rates to reimpose a white patriarchal global order I don't think we've even begun to see the beginning of it frankly in terms of aggressive behavior towards China and Iran which were saying now I think this will escalate probably and that is that that is the conflict we're in thank you ok can you put your hands up if you have questions - ok so I can see five hands at the moment I might take as many as I can yes I will start with you yes thank you yeah please yeah thanks for giving me this chance to take my advantage I'm a colleague with me right on Dina here at sorts thank you very much for presentation I gonna help save time I proposed in my question directly it is of course worth noting the difference between Western and non-western theories but I believe this it's not a question of one or the other so basically to what extent do you think that you know those kind of non-western theories can be applied to understand the contemporary world politics you've mentioned something briefly about the Chinese school the emergence of the Chinese school but I think this is still kind of minor minor approach today so I'm wondering how do you actually view the influence or the potential impact of those non-western theories thank you behind you thank you very much Stafford image from Staffordshire University my question is about role of academics in academia and then maybe because a agency in IR with small letters should we just observe what's happening around us and try to provide some insights into theories or should we produce some normative approaches okay I've got two gentlemen in fact we've been waiting a very long time so I gonna send you all the way back up up to the top hi thank you my name is Gabriel I'm doing my PhD here at sauce and my question has to do with the International dimension of the rise of the far-right nowadays because we see Trump we see Boston ro we see maybe Johnson here in the UK in the next few weeks we see in India it's becoming an international trend I think so to what extent we show we have to look at it as an international trend what extent do you think that it's posing a challenge to the to the consensus that I think that was in vigor until now according to which the International powers collaborate to keep or maintain the international capitalist order do you think this nationalist trend is posing a threat to this consensus and in how that the discipline of international relations should because I think my impression is that the discipline is not concerned as it should be with this and it's not discussing it as much as it should be discussing and I'd like to know what your what's your opinion about it he'll I research in London yes I accept the the trajectory of all of the speakers and the slants particularly of dr. pleasure and dr. Busan but I would suggest that what's perhaps possibly missing is the way in which we need to integrate this kind of understanding we've been a wider institutional and mediational context and of course dr. pledge did do this in some ways and I would add another example which is interesting in this respect and that is that in Nazi Germany one of the two armed Adair groupings elevated a Jewish homosexual to leadership level within their ranks and that kind of narrative on liberalisation is something that we lost in this kind of world trajectory but the point being that in the current climate of accelerated conflict in the Geo spheres we need to hold our institutions across the board to account and the media institutions often replicate the narratives that are found in iron found in you know the US and UK kind of right trajectories if you like and perhaps you know when we look at our conceptual elaborate networks like freedom of speech and all the rest of it it would be good to reflect upon the fact that say in Japan after atomization for seven years we had a press code which precluded any discussion on what they had suffered for him so that is something I think we can elucidate in terms of our conceptual deletions if you like thank you and I'll take the question down here is hi I'm Tanya I'm doing my masters in International Studies and diplomacy at Celeste thank you your talk was very insightful and so about the book you had mentioned that an interesting point that the core countries to a certain extent during World War the world wars and colonialism shaped Disco's and knowledge and you also mentioned that there's there's come a time where that's possibly changing however to what extent do you think that these the understanding behind third world concepts such as third world the global south today is still seen through a colons and it's sort of a colonial legacy in that sense okay there it is I'll take this other question if there are other questions after that I might come back because we've already gathered quite a few hi I'm Charlie from LCI are one of the minorities and my question is perhaps on IR theory if we talk about core and periphery it somehow implies that there is an underlying binary setting that implies that you are either a core or outside the core so let's take like Chinese IR Theory for example like if it cannot produce sufficient interactions with the mainstream IR theories namely the American IR theories like realism or liberalism like it will somehow be marginalized outside of the core so does it implies that it is doomed to fail as theoretical project if it cannot like interact with the ministering theories thank you ok so I've got lots of questions I might start in the reverse of the order that I did before so start with Dan okay well I'll just pick up a couple of the questions yet the Nazis well the short answer is and I would say this wouldn't die because I write a lot about this look at the politics of the radical forties what was the politics that defeated these political forces then we don't have to reinvent things we do need to look though what was said and done then and not how it was interpreted in the writings of the 60s and Beyond and sometimes we have to go back into the stacks because not everything is digitalized from that period and I prayed to make one a quick plug there's a wonderful book which the wonderful scholar at Stockholm Rebecca Adame has written about but there's a memoir of Pakistani diplomat ambassador Akram Allah written in the late 50s talking about her experiences as an ambassador for Pakistan negotiating Universal Declaration of Human Rights this book is fortunately in Psy's library but the the sad point about how was were carrying out a decolonization work and looking to reinvigorate our studies sadly it hasn't been taken out for five years which means that noasaurus academic has put it on a reading list for students broadly speaking and that I think indicates that the problem of our present ism and not recognizing the works of those who've gone before us and if there's one thing I might sort of suggest which is that when you're doing your literature searches put the date search in for what is published in the forties what is published in the fifties what is published in the sixties rather than looking justice what is published now and Barry was talking about you know how we keep forgetting well one of the great advantages of the internet and digital ization is that you can now very easily just search for what was published in the 40s or 50s until you can rediscover some of these debates and contrast them with what's being done now but very broadly the agenda of the forties centered around the UN is the one which defeated the far right at that time and people of that era would think it was no accident that neoliberalism has reproduced nars ISM and fascism today because as I said earlier these core components of not caring about employment not caring about social protection and labor rights not having any regulation of the global economy and global finance these at the time were all universally regarded by liberals by Marxists across the political spectrum as prime drivers of the world war and of the creation of fascism so there were only only really query why it's taken us so long to get into this dreadful State given how near long neoliberalism has been has been going Thank You Barry thank you surrounded the Chinese school so yours I think I don't think this is a despairing project or one that is doomed to in any way shape or form I think it's um it's a bit of a pioneer I mean let's not argue about who agrees whether they are aren't part of the Chinese school because that's what the Chinese to sort out but it what I would suggest you do as a kind of mental gymnastic on this issue is get yourself a nice glass of wine and sit down and ask yourself the question what would international relations Theory look like if it had been invented in somewhere other than the West you can start usefully with this with the idea that Western I our theory I'm generalizing rather extravagantly but you can come back at me for that Western IR theory is very largely an abstraction from Western history with a bit of Western political theory thrown in right so what would happen if you started thinking about ir theory on the basis of Chinese history and Chinese political theory that's in the sense what the Chinese school people and I mean including people like Jung Freud hates the Chinese school label but he's doing the same thing he's mining Chinese history and Chinese political theory for insights into international relations and it's pretty clear that if you started from there ie if IR Theory had started there it wouldn't look like it does now and you can do the same exercise for India although it's a little bit difficult for India because the history is Messier I think you could do it for the Islamic world as well I mean with any of you have read who might have read the travels of Eden Battuta might come up with the idea well as if IR Theory had started in the Islamic world it would be basically transnationalism with very little of the state stuff in it at all because this guy was able to wander from Spain to China during that God knows the 13th century and be recognized and employed and accepted all the way along because he was inside a culture so I think I our theory would come out differently depend where it started and therefore as these as it were excluded cultures and histories and political theories get put back into it this is going to be to the advantage of all of us and some stuff some of the discoveries of Western IR theory might well be confirmed or modified or whatever but some new stuff might come up that West the Western way of thinking about it which is very state centric doesn't actually feature very easily so I'm looking forward to this and I think the Chinese are pioneering in this and that what's going on there deserves close attention more let's agree with with that on the rise of the far-right question that this comes out of a crisis of neoliberalism I suppose the question that interests me about this is are we heading back towards the religion amasian of race theory which played such an important part in thinking about international relations in the nineteenth century right up until 1945 there's quite a lot of implication in the neo-fascist mode of thinking that you're talking about I mean you only have to listen to Trump and others of that ilk to get the whole tinge that this is beginning to sound like race theory and there are elements of that in the Chinese school as well that you could think about that in the sense that the standard phrase in in China is Chinese characteristics it's like chips in Britain it comes with everything everything is with Chinese characteristics what's that telling us it's telling us that this is an assertion of a very deep cultural differentiation and that's not very far away from the same form of thinking that race theory had on the question from tanya is global the global south of colonial construct i think you can answer that one but but I think that's an ongoing problem for post-colonialism that it's a little bit like that some of the other questions that have exercise people about West non West or corpora free or all of these things they do tell you something important but they are kind of not perfect things I mean who's he for example what is he but you but you could spend a lot about all the time arguing about it I'm not sure where it would get you all right so I think the the the classification is a is a useful one on it and it should be it should be there it does to some extent reflect a history that was made largely by the West in the period we're talking about and therefore it does reproduce that and I know that you'll not spend inordinate amounts of time arguing and worrying and fretting about whether what they're doing is reproducing euro centrist online and there doesn't seem to me to be an escape from that other than deciding not to worry about it too much just kind of say this is a problem not going to go away because these things are mixed and difficult categories and you need to be aware of it but don't drive yourself crazy okay thank you and I'm at over Barry has addressed all the questions that I wanted to saw and I completely agree with him just a couple of additional thoughts on the question of Chinese school I will not consider it as a minor approach may be minor incomes of for the name but the the kind of writing that underpin said by people liked about senior chin it's not minor it's quite significant intellectually and I invited read his most recent book a relational theory of all politics so and also I'm sure you were aware that we didn't China and not everybody you just Chinese school in fact his colleague Ian Smith um from Tsinghua University completely reject the label Chinese school and but at the same time they the underlying sort of a idea is that Chinese tradition culture practices can be the basis for theorizing and IR is a very valid one that you have to pass some tests like as I said they must be able to travel there must be a widely applicable but we didn't join and beyond China they're not simply legitimize government policy which some cases they do some cases that don't but the same time I would not dismiss them as minor intellectually the question on international dimension are far right I up sometimes worry I wonder about that you know is there an international dimension it depends on what do we mean by international dimension if you look at actual links meaning one treating and the other and providing material support I really don't see that I don't think narendra modi gets any solar support from the Boris Johnson or his group they may speak similar languages but they're completely distinct from nod that they emerge from very distinctly different millio or context but there is a fear of contagion so is that you talk about internationalization so the the far-right are right nationalist forces populist forces may find comfort to see what is happening around them certainly some leaders of like a maybe maybe in the Philippines they find comfort looking at Donald trum they might diplomatic support from President Trump but I don't think you will find that everywhere I think these far-right movements have local and national origins and they have to be contextualized as such and they are actually in many cases not very new so finally under yeah where's non West is a perennial problem no matter how much you disavowed that we don't think West is a homogenous like non West it never never goes away now the categories in consistent or homogeneous they are a partly categories of convenience but for the lack of a better word maybe global south post-colonial third world but none of the categories are perfect as Barry said but they're also kind of significant discussing speech ads and then people use those terms and I think West you just hit more than non West so when Razia actually Ukraine and Crimea I saw I remember a headline in financial times it's that Razia has taken western territory so that in the western territory you know in a Ukraine and when this discourse is far more common in Western media nobody says in times of India that India is not in western territory so as long as there is a West there will be a non West in a discursive in a speech at as a speech at and and it's also a way of self-identification so we definitely acknowledge appreciate all the concerns that Western non West are transitional categories or they are not tough you know inconsistent homogeneous categories either either of them but they're not going to go away unless you can come up with a different world I mean so so they are good points of reference which we can actually use to if not for anything else to reject them thank you I might actually just come in on that last question of categories I think the important thing is not to think about categories but relations when we talk about a category of women we can say okay the women are so different they experience life so differently but to my understanding at least the way in which feminist discourse understands the category of women is a group of people subject to particular forms of interpolation by a patriarchal order similarly non-western or global South is a relational category it's a relational position it's not a category as such so if we think about in the social world I always prefer to think about relations because that's what we're looking at capitalism is a relation right it's not a periodization in terms history it's a set of relations so you can have capitalistic relations you can have communistic relations operating within the same social space you can have patriarchal relations you can have sort of anti patriarchal relations also trying to exist so to the extent that the global South is a thing it comes into being precisely in its relations with something that positions it in that space was something that treats it differently or even a self articulation such as you know we are practicing South South solidarity or whatever but it only and in a way it's kind of speaks to what I'm a tough was saying about categories but that's why we have to think of them as relations not categories okay we are kind of out of time and I apologize to the remaining question as perhaps you can approach the bench to ask any follow-up questions thank you all very much for attending for your excellent questions thank you very much to Barry and I Matt have for joining us here and to Dan and Fidel and all the other people involved in hosting it I hope you'll join me in a round of applause [Applause] you

Channel: SOAS University of London

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Keywords: SOAS University of London

Id: pvm8UosIFeQ

Length: 112min 12sec (6732 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019