A Non-Eurocentric Approach to Sovereignty

The idea that the concept of sovereignty emerged (first and exclusively) in Europe is so ingrained that most scholarship dealing with this issue does not even specify that its arguments are derived from European materials only. This is not to say that the sovereignty literature makes any explicit claims about the emergence of sovereignty outside of Europe (or even lack thereof); it is disinterestedly silent about other regions. This silence is then inevitably filled in the reader’s imagination with the usual assumption of the non-West temporally lagging behind the West on this issue as well. To their immense credit, organisers of this forum have not rested on such a problematic trope and have tasked me with discussing “sovereignty outside of the West”. I will therefore focus on the broad issue of how thinking comparatively and beyond the West can radically change our thinking about modern sovereignty

States and ontological security: A historical rethinking

In this brief essay, I explore the relationship between ‘states’ (or more broadly, institutions of political authority) and ontological security. Drawing from historical examples, I argue that it is a mistake to assume that all ‘states’ seek ontological security: this generalisation applies only to those polities that claim to be the main ontological security providers. I then develop a typology of institutional ontological security provision arrangements as have existed throughout history, arguing that another reason the concept of ontological security is valuable for international relations (IR) is because it offers a way to compare systems across time and space without assuming the primacy of politics or religion. In summary, IR does not have to limit its use of the concept of ontological security to a synonym for ‘state identity’ – ontological security can offer much more than that by helping the discipline reach across time and space.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via https://doi.org/10.1177/001083671665315

Hierarchies in World Politics

In this article, we argue that hierarchy-centered approaches to IR promise to deliver what anarchy-centered approaches have not: a framework for theorizing and empirically analyzing world politics as a global system—rather than just an international one. At the core of this proposition are three features of hierarchical systems as they are represented across the growing IR literature on the topic. First, the structures of differentiation at the core of hierarchical systems are deeply implicated with power. Hierarchical systems are thus intrinsically political. Second, in world politics, hierarchies stratify, rank, and organize the relations not only among states but also other kinds of actors as well, and often even a mix of different actors within a single structure of differentiation. Third, there are many different kinds of hierarchical relations in world politics, each of which generate different ‘logics’ influencing social, moral, and behavioral outcomes. This essay illustrates the promise of hierarchy-centered approaches through review and analysis of key IR scholarship. We show, first, that hierarchy has been understood in the IR literature in two ways: narrowly, i.e. as a relationship of legitimate authority; and broadly, i.e. as intersubjective manifestations of organized inequality. The scholarship also reveals that hierarchy operates in a variety of different ways that range from ordering solutions to deep structures. We identify three such ‘logics’ that have been fruitfully explored in IR scholarship and that can form the basis of a future research agenda: hierarchy as an institutionalized functional bargain between actors (a logic of trade-offs); hierarchy as differentiated social and political roles shaping behavior (a logic of positionality); and hierarchy as a productive political space or structure (a logic of productivity). In doing so, we also show how hierarchy promises a more integrated theoretical framework for IR from which will follow more cohesive analytical and empirical insights into contemporary world politics.This review essay is the product of a multi-year collaboration that has involved many contributors who work on hierarchies in IR. It grew out of a Working Group, hosted by the International Studies Association Theory section and evolved over two further workshops—at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) with the support of the Jacobs Chair of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego; and at the University of Cambridge with the support of the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant and the Department of Politics and International Studies. We thank these institutions. We also thank all of the workshop participants for their invaluable contributions but especially David Lake and Michael Barnett for their ongoing support of the project. Earlier versions of this article were presented at CEEISA 2014 and the University of Erfurt. We thank the discussants and audience members of these panels for their comments and questions. Finally, we are very grateful to the editors and the anonymous referees at International Organization for helping us improve the essay to its present state.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081831600012

TRIPping Constructivism

The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) surveys have become the authoritative source for making sense of the discipline of inter- national relations (IR) as a global field of practice. At relatively regular intervals they provide snap-shots of the discipline based on the self-reporting of IR schol- ars from 20 countries around the world. The TRIP project also includes assessments from “a new journal article database that includes every article published in the field’s 12 leading journals” (Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney 2011, 438). That the TRIP project has thus filled a significant void by providing very useful sociological information about the discipline is indisputable. In this brief forum essay, however, I want to highlight some more critical insights that emerge from the TRIP project in the hopes of generating a productive conversation about how the surveys should be understood.This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Cambridge University Press

"Je suis en terrasse": political violence, civilizational politics, and the everyday courage to be

Following the attacks against the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the subsequent acts of political violence in Paris the following November a number of memes spread swiftly across social media. Most notable of these were proclamations of Je suis Charlie, Je suis Paris, Je suis en terrasse and tricolorising one’s Facebook profile page. Although there are various ways by which this phenomenon might be explained this paper argues that, at least for some people, they seem to have operated as key mechanisms by which individuals/society sought to re-establish what Tillich calls ‘the courage to be’, and which in more contemporary terminology might be labelled a sense of ontological security – the ability to go on in the face of what would otherwise be debilitating anxieties of existential dread. The paper argues the memes did this through a number of mechanisms. These included, establishing a sense of vicarious identification with the victims; embracing increased levels of danger and seeking to confront the question of mortality head on; reasserting a sense of community and home via the re-instantiation of everyday routines now ascribed with enhanced political and existential significance; and reaffirming a new civilisationally inflected self-narrative

Queer intellectual curiosity as international relations method: developing queer international relations theoretical and methodological frameworks

This article outlines two theoretical and methodological approaches that take a queer intellectual curiosity about figurations of “homosexuality” and “the homosexual” as their core. These offer ways to conduct international relations research on “the homosexual” and on international-relations figurations more broadly, e.g. from “the woman” to “the human rights holder.” The first approach provides a method for analyzing figurations of “the homosexual” and sexualized orders of international relations that are inscribed in IR as either normal or perverse. The second approach offers instructions on how to read plural figures and plural logics that signify as normal and/or perverse (and which might be described as queer). Together, they propose techniques, devices and research questions to investigate singular and plural IR figurations – including but not exclusively those of “the homosexual” – that map international phenomena as diverse as colonialism, human rights, and the formation of states and international communities in ways that exceed IR survey research techniques that, for example, incorporate “the homosexual” into IR research through a “sexuality variable.

Performing identity: the case of the (Greek) Cypriot National Guard

Students of International Relations are taught that the modern nation-state has a monopoly on the (legitimate) use of violence. However, in the case of the Republic of Cyprus this does not seem to be the case, since its armed forces, the Cypriot National Guard (CNG), are intimately embedded within Greece’s military structure, and half the island remains under Turkish occupation. The colonization of Cyprus (1571–1960) and subsequent decolonization has led to the gradual construction of two rigid identities, Greek and Turkish, that have been institutionalized legally and imposed constitutionally. This paper seeks to answer two questions. First, how does the CNG perform and therefore constitute a ‘Greek identity’? Second, is this performance epistemically violent, hindering the formation of hybrid identities? We use autoethnography, interviews, and insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus and Judith Butler’s performativity theory to explore these two questions. We argue that the CNG performs a Greek identity in three key configurations: 1) the operational link between the Greek Army and the CNG; 2) the explicit connection to both ancient and modern Greece through various CNG insignia and practices, including parades and marching songs; and 3) the entrenchment of the Greek Orthodox Church within its practices

1989 as a mimetic revolution: Russia and the challenge of post-communism

Various terms have been used to describe the momentous events of 1989, including Jürgen Habermas’s ‘rectifying revolution,’ and my own notion of 1989 as a type of ‘anti-revolution’: repudiating not only what had come before, but also denying the political logic of communist power, as well as the emancipatory potential of revolutionary socialism in its entirety. In the event, while the negative agenda of 1989 has been fulfilled, it failed in the end to transcend the political logic of the systems that collapsed at that time. This paper explores the unfulfilled potential of 1989. Finally, 1989 became more of a counter- rather than an anti-revolution, replicating in an inverted form the practices of the mature state socialist regimes. The paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation arising from 1989 is striking. The dominant motif was ‘returnism,’ the attempt to join an established enterprise rather than transforming it. Thus, 1989 can be seen as mimetic revolution, in the sense that it emulated systems that were not organically developed in the societies in which they were implanted. For Eastern Europe ‘returning’ to Europe appeared natural, but for Russia the civilizational challenge of post-communism was of an entirely different order. There could be no return, and instead of a linear transition outlined by the classic transitological literature, Russia’s post-communism demonstrated that the history of others could not be mechanically transplanted from one society to another

Barbary Coast in the expansion of international society: piracy, privateering and corsairing as primary institutions

From the ‘long’ sixteenth century the Ottoman regencies of North Africa operated as major centres of piracy and privateering across the Mediterranean sea. Though deemed by emerging European powers to be an expression of the ‘barbarian’ status of Muslim and Ottoman rulers and peoples, piracy and corsairing in fact played a major role in the development of the ‘primary’ or ‘master’ institutions of international society such as sovereignty, war and international law. Far from representing a ‘barbarian’ challenge to the European ‘standard of civilization’, piracy and privateering in the modern Mediterranean acted as contradictory vehicles in the affirmation of that very standard. This paper explores in some historical detail the ways in which piracy and corsairing off the Barbary Coast in effect acted as ‘derivative’ primary institutions of international society, as Barry Buzan has labelled them. It argues that piracy and corsairing simultaneously contributed to the construction of north African sovereignty whilst also prompting successive wars and treaties aimed at outlawing such practices. The cumulative effect of these complex historical experiences was certainly the expansion of international society and its accompanying master institutions. Yet the manner of their consolidation – at least in the western Mediterranean - suggests that primary institutions of international society owe much more to ‘barbarism’ and ‘illegality’ than is commonly acknowledged

The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking

How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country’s international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics which allows to productively conceptualize the connection between a state’s transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and non-compliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth and justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia’s limited politics of accountability towards the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics