Symposium: Walking with Migrants: Ethnography as Method in International Relations

This is a post-publication review symposium The ‘international’ is an abstract – and thus in one sense fictional – object of study, as are the other objects of social science disciplines such as ‘the economy’ or ‘society’. As scholars, part of our job is to conjure these abstract objects, and one of the ways in which we do this is through our choice of methods. Different methods therefore do not just give us a menu of choices through which to study a single, given ‘international’ object; instead, they are significant in part because they generate different incarnations of ‘the international’ as an object. This symposium on Noelle Brigden’s (2016) recent ISQ article explores the generative power of ethnography as method for studying the international, particularly as concerns mobility. Brigden’s article offers a close study of the pathways and lifeworlds of illegal transnational migrants in Mexico. Through this work, the article explores questions of identity across the migratory routes, highlighting their unstable, improvised and makeshift character. It also evokes the ways in which the presence of state and non-state violence conditions the production of identity, sovereignty and borders ‘from below’. ..

Is IR Theory White? Racialised Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts

Racism is a historically specific structure of modern global power which generates hierarchies of the human and affirms white supremacy. This has far-reaching material and epistemological consequences in the present, one of which is the production and naturalisation of white-racialised subject positions in academic discourse. This article develops a framework for analysing whiteness through subject-positioning, synthesising insights from critical race scholarship that seek to dismantle its epistemological tendencies. This framework identifies white subject-positioning as patterned by interlocking epistemologies of immanence, ignorance and innocence. The article then interrogates how these epistemological tendencies produce limitations and contradictions in international theory through an analysis of three seminal and canonical texts: Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984), and Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999). It shows that these epistemologies produce contradictions and weaknesses within the texts by systematically severing the analysis of the international system and the ‘West’ from its actual imperial conditions of possibility. The article outlines pathways for overcoming these limitations and suggests that continued inattention to the epistemological consequences of race for IR theory is intellectually unsustainable

Bring Up the Bodies: International Order, Empire, and Re-thinking the Great War (1914-18) from Below

What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the obvious consequence of efforts within International Relations (IR) to take empire, colonialism and hierarchy more seriously. This article addresses this question by examining one of IR’s most important touchstones – the Great War – through the experiences of peoples in southeast Africa. It argues that to do this, we should use the methodological approaches of histories ‘from below’ and contrapuntal analysis. When looking at the Great War from the vantage point of southeast Africa (contemporary Mozambique), the key patterns of interaction organising the international look different to those emphasised in traditional accounts of international order and hierarchy. Notable features are the significant continuities and intersections between structures of war and colonialism, the racialisation of death and suffering, the effects of white imperial prestige as a strategic preoccupation and the deep historical roots of anti-colonial resistance. Reading upwards and contrapuntally from these histories, the paper argues for a redescription of international order as reflecting not predominantly a balance of power or a normative framework for the organisation of authority, but a dynamic matrix of structural violence. Reading order from below in this way helps us better capture how the international is implicated in the production and reproduction of everyday life for many people, as well as in more dramatic political transformations such as those generated by experiences of war and resistance to colonialism