C = Cecilia Lynch N = Nicholas G. Onuf B = Brent H = Harry
Harry and Brent sent Cecelia and Nick four questions to think about in advance for our discussion. What follows includes both the responses that Nick wrote out in advance, and the conversation that he and Cecelia subsequently had with Harry and Brent. In addition to thinking about the content and “method” of Constructivism, the pros and cons of framing this volume as “Tactical Constructivism,” we debated critical questions regarding the relationship between feminist IR and Constructivism, and race and whether and how Constructivism needs to move outside of Europe and North America in understanding social construction, tactics and rule(s). The interview was conducted under difficult technology circumstances. In Miami, Harry could see Brent in Salt Lake City, on his phone, and he could see Cecelia and Nick together in Irvine on the computer screen. They could not see Brent, nor could Brent see them. Audio quality was generally poor. Only later did it become clear that Brent could not always tell when Cecelia or Nick had finished a thought.
Question 1:How did you think about methods in your own work, and how has that changed (or not) to the present day?
C: This question prompted musing about my first interaction with Fritz Kratochwil regarding what I wanted to do for my dissertation (on interwar peace movements). Fritz said something like “just go do it”. And that was important, but frustrating advice, Audie Klotz and I talked a lot about that when we wrote Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (2007). Because Peter Katzenstein (her dissertation supervisor) had told her to go talk to Fritz Kratochwil, and Fritz basically told her some variant of the same thing; so neither Peter nor Fritz was able to give us much in the way of concrete direction.
I hung out a lot in archives. I was intimidated when I began because the archives were full of historians, and a peer in history at Columbia told me with some confidence how, “in history, we’re trained in archival methods”. Yet, when I related this story recently to a history job candidate, she laughed and said “No, we’re not – what does that even mean?” So it’s interesting to think about how and when methods become an issue in different disciplines.
One of the big epiphanies for me came in reading the work of feminist scholars, and then more specifically feminist IR scholars, especially on the distinction between methodology and methods. Though some dispute that distinction now, one of this book’s chapters also discusses it, and the interpretive group of the American Political Science Association has also discussed it (it is called the “Interpretive Methods and Methodology Group”). Feminist IR also helped inform how I thought about approaching research more generally, including research ethics. My thinking about methods continues to evolve, moving from Beyond Appeasement (Lynch 1999) and its use of archival methods, to Interpreting International Politics (2014), and my work on religion, to the blog, “Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa”, and finally to reading many of the contributions in this volume. What Audie and I were trying to do, I think, was to understand that Constructivism at that point had become something that was quite broad, something that allowed this umbrella, and something that allowed for the possibility of new kinds of work. I love Nick’s metaphorical discussion of umbrellas (see below). After writing Strategies together, Audie and I each did a follow-up book to say what else we really wanted to say that came out of our joint work but didn’t really fit there. Her follow-up book was a co-edited volume on research methods, and mine was Interpreting International Politics, and I like both books, each of which represents another take on the methods question. Then two former students and I wrote a chapter for Nick’s co-edited SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations (London: Sage, 2018).One of us coined the term “critical interpretivism”, which is where I’m ending up, at least for now.
What we work on opens us up in particular ways. My work on religion and on critical humanitarianism has opened up particular ways of understanding power, of understanding the world, of understanding commitments, of understanding difference, that I didn’t necessarily think about before. The various chapters of this volume continue to help my thinking evolve, too.
Let’s put some of these chapters into conversation with each other. Amy Skonieczny, Benjamin De Carvalho and Halvard Leira each address different dimensions of the question of what is the archive, which is a fascinating question that constructivists haven’t really addressed yet. I love how Amy’s chapter opens: she was actually looking at an ad in a print newspaper, which is rare these days if you read everything online. When I travel for my research project on NGOs in different parts of Africa, the Middle East and Europe, I always pick up copies of different daily papers and learn a lot from reading the ads along with the articles, so her experience resonated with me.
N: Since Brent and Harry circulated their five questions a few weeks ago, and since I had the luxury of some free time, I drafted some provisional responses and sent them around. Right now, let me insert some of what I wrote in response to their first question. I’ll insert other passages later, as needed
Now Cecelia started off today by talking about historians and archives. As a Ph.D. student, I took a field in American diplomatic history, and my brother Peter is a living, breathing historian. I think I can appreciate at an intuitive level what historians are up to, and one of the things that is interesting in this respect, and something my brother frequently talks about, is the need for historians to do archival work in order to maintain their bona fides. They don’t get any respect if they don’t spend their time in the archives. And yet they don’t get trained to do archival work in any particular way –you just go in there and you sort, and you read, and you write down things or snap pictures, and you decide how relevant they might be in the end. So there’s kind of a disjuncture between the fascination with the archive and the boredom of doing the actual work.
What I think all of this points to is a kind of naive assumption that methods will take care of themselves. You go into the archives, and you do history. When I looked over my draft responses earlier today, I see that I still have that naive attitude: methods will take care of themselves if you figure out where the archive is or what the relevant frame of reference is – a sense of the right question to spend some time on. And I’m not sure Cecelia thinks I’ve got this right, but after all my decades of not doing field work, that’s the best I can come up with.
H: Is there some element of emulating the methods of work that you like? You know without any sort of formal training, your sense of the right method is: this is the sort of work that I like, so I will do it in the way that these people do it?
C: I have to go back to the traditional notion of the archive, both Nick and I have been using thus far: obviously the archive is much more than that. This question of the archive arose in a very poignant way at our CIHA Blog conference on Biafra (the Nigerian Civil War), raised by both the archivist at the World Council of Churches, who was re-examining the WCC’s role, and some of the scholars who recalled their memories of the war as young Biafrans suffering from famine. We think of our memories as an archive, but that’s only one part as well – not being able to talk about them; erasing the history of the war within Nigeria, is another part. Each of these moves from actual paper archives. In-depth interviews and participant observation provides yet another kind of archive. The notion that everything will take care of itself is a presupposition, but I can’t agree: let me give two very different insights from even the more limited sense of [paper] archive.
The first concerns my dissertation research, on the “hard case” of interwar peace movements. I arrived at the Public Record Office (PRO) in Kew Gardens, UK, and spent a fair amount of time flailing as I tried to learn the system. I called myself an archive mole in the introduction to my first book.
N: My brother calls them archive rats.
C: Well, mole seems a bit nicer. Nick’s statement that archival work is boring reminded me that I’ve fallen asleep (or come close to it) in numerous archives: several in London, the League of Nations archive in Geneva, the Harvard law library archives, the Harry Truman archive in Independence, Missouri. At the same time, because I had undertaken this in many ways huge project –I wanted to understand peace movement actions from different perspectives, so went to foreign policy archives, peace movement archives in both the US and the UK (Swarthmore in the US; the LSE in the UK), League of Nations archives. Even though I fell asleep (or maybe I was just meditating on the material?!), I was never really bored, because I never felt that it was taking care of itself. Archives were this space of endless possibility, and, I quickly realized, of interpretation all the way down. Having read The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and then seeing E.H. Carr’s foreign policy memos when he was in the foreign office, you see him in new (and not always flattering) ways. When you read Austin Chamberlain’s papers, how he characterized the Americans as (of course) naive, the French as impossible, the Germans as headstrong, the Egyptians as “savages”, whom they could bomb, but he liked Mussolini – you sense that these places are repositories of all kinds of worlds to discover, but you also see perspectives that have become ingrained in scholarly imaginaries. That’s what’s exciting about any plumbing, any kind of archival interacting and any kind of research. And so I see the archive as a place of possibility. A place of discovery.
The second experience concerns how it started to dawn on me that some of the historians were trying to find something new from a very thin slice of time and a very specific place, while others were doing macrohistory. Those are two points on a wide range of initial positions taken vis-à-vis the archive, that can pre-ordain the method so it does not completely take care of itself. Sometimes the folks doing a macrohistory just want to find evidence for a larger framework; sometimes the people doing very thin slices are involved in endless debates over something that for some of us in IR might be harder to care about. There are a lot of in-between research questions, but the point is that how much you look and where is part of the question regarding method. While it is important to have some idea of how much of the archive to examine, I also disagree when I hear students say, “So-and-so told me just to look at this small slice of the archive; that’s enough.” That is limiting yourself and not allowing the kind of discovery I would think Constructivism is all about.
N: I have three additional comments to make. First, I think Cecelia’s advice is much, much better for students than mine is. Because even though she talks about what’s possible, she’s also more alert to the need to be disciplined about what you’re doing and not just go crazy in the archive because it’s fun.
C: Very kind of you, but I wouldn’t say “better than”.
N: Secondly, I would very much support the claim that archives are bigger than those dusty old places that we’ve been talking about, and I subscribe personally to a Foucault’s inclusive conception of an archive. I think that’s worth pointing out in the context of this book. Everybody in the book is a Foucauldian archivist. For the better. The third thing I want to say is that immersing yourself in an archive is an antidote to cherry-picking case studies, which I think is a significant pathology among people who profess to be constructivists.In my opinion, case studies are so generally anemic as to be useless. And if you do a proper job of it in the archives, then you have something to work with.
B:I have Nick’s World of Our Making (Onuf 1989) and Cecelia’s Beyond Appeasement out in front of me. Method shows up in World of Our Making, but it doesn’t show up in the index for Beyond Appeasement. I find this interesting, considering your responses to the first question.
C: You’re right. We didn’t talk about method then really. I credit Jennifer Milliken’s much-cited and very good piece, “The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods” (1999). Yet, in a way I did talk about method; I just didn’t use the term method. I talked about archival research and interpretation; I said what I was doing was akin to or part of Constructivism, and I talked about where I went to get sources. Subsequently, I’ve thought much more about method because of (as I’ve said) the work feminist scholars, as well as Dvora Yanow and Peri Schwartz-Shea in the interpretive method and methodologies group in APSA. But I’ve also kept in mind the warning of [Raymond] Bud Duval and several of the contributors to this volume. Bud said we have to be careful of “methodism”, and even though I’ve written a couple of books that have to do ostensibly with methodology or method, I always tell students to be wary of the idea that there’s a perfect method out there for your question, or that there is a natural correspondence between a particular method and a particular question. I don’t think method should be reified. And I like that this volume does not.
H: Definitely one of our aims was to make sure that it wasn’t.
Question 2 What is your own view on where Constructivism is and how methods are involved in Constructivism?
B: Cecelia, sorry to, I shouldn’t put my foot on the scale here at all but, if there’s a way that you could, if you want to, you mentioned earlier that you just taught a grad class on Constructivism, and I think that probably this question is related to the challenge of not only what you include but what you exclude, and is it all about Constructivism, or do you include the critics, so anyway. What’s your view on where Constructivism is and how methods are involved in Constructivism?
C: Every time I teach it I teach it differently. Because I think that it’s a moving target. However, I differ somewhat from Nick, who is more pessimistic on this issue: if we are going to pop-psychologize Constructivism, this volume demonstrates that is in a relatively healthy place.
This volume is inclusive of much of western IR and I want to underscore western, with one big blind spot –feminist theorizing –which Nick also flagged in his draft response (see below). I have taught Constructivism in many different ways, I’ve tried teaching Searle only once: I don’t like Searle, so I knocked him off. I’ve taught Giddens, Foucault and Wittgenstein, and of course Kratochwil and Onuf, Wendt, and maybe Finnemore or others (I have used Audie, the Critical Constructivism book, Karen Litfin, Chris Reus-Smit, Charlotte Epstein and many others). I usually begin by bringing a bottle of wine and a $20 bill to class and simply asking students what they are, and then we talk about the meanings attached to them, as a way of helping students who have a hard time intuitively getting what social construction is about. Most recently, my class did a kind of genealogy of trends and stages in Constructivism. We read Nick’s book, and we read early chapters from this volume, we read some folks on the more rationalist or mainstream side, among others. I try to present the range of Constructivism but I also don’t make too many apologies for emphasizing the work that I find most interesting.
H: Anything to add to that, Nick?
N: [Speaking to Harry]: When you were a student of mine all those years ago, we didn’t talk about Constructivism in class, right?
H: No, you were much more focused on Republicanism by that point.
N: The first Ph.D. class I taught at FIU was on epistemology, at the department’s request; in World I emphasized ontology to separate myself from Ashley and Walker.
What I’m thinking is that my own career goes far enough back before Constructivism that I never shake my sense of what I was teaching. And I never actually lost it as something that was discernibly different from everything else that we teach along the way by reference to theory in an IR course. And by the time Constructivism became a thing unto itself I was doing so much in teaching that it didn’t make any difference anyway. I am not sure myself what the value added is of teaching Constructivism as a thing unto itself. [Audio Interrupted]
C: Yet he’s done it as a guest speaker in my classes! The students love it.
N: Cecelia excoriated the tendency toward reification. And it seems to me that there’s a tendency to reify Constructivism for instructional purposes. And that’s not necessarily healthy. Oh yes, it’s a way of recruiting students to the cause and so on, but let’s give students credit for being smart enough to figure it out for themselves if you give them the backdrop. Show them what has –what forces, if I can use that term, have –shaped the unfolding IR over its alleged 100 year history. And they will see that Constructivism is, in effect, the so-called “pragmatic synthesis” that seems to be on everybody’s mind these days. I’m not a pragmatist, so I’m a little skeptical about the pragmatic synthesis, but it seems to me that it is pretty much reflected in the sensibility I find in the essays in this volume.
C: I absolutely agree – my positionality vis-a-vis “the thing” has always been interesting (maybe only to me). I’ve always felt it was a loss to take Marxism out of the picture as the third pillar and simply stick Constructivism in.
N: I agree.
C: And what is this Constructivism supposed to be? I don’t think that Constructivism cannot include Marxism, but such sweeping categorization is indicative of its liberalizing drive, that we’re all a part of in a sense. So I definitely agree with Nick’s concern.
Question 3 The volume’s chapters are organized around a ‘tactics vs. strategy’ framing, where tactics refer to methods and strategies are more open-ended depending on the contribution and contributor. Any comments on this framing, critical or otherwise?
C: I liked the idea when the two of you first broached it, and I still do. I see it more as Brent does in his chapter. Sometimes our overall strategy is clouded, or at least mine is. And it’s only by pushing through the fog, through using various tactics or methods that we come up with something interesting and useful that expands our horizons. So, I also like the different uses of the concept of tactics in the book. It does not reify them as a be all and end all; for example, Hannes Peltonen’s chapter on concepts becomes an important reminder of their [concepts’] lack of specificity. Tactics are similar. I just finished a chapter on realism and religion in which I argued something similar about both of these terms, they both lack specificity, and as a result it is important to examine what has been done with them, why and how. So Hannes’ chapter and Harry, your chapter, provide interesting overlaps and contrasts regarding the tactics vs. strategy question.
If it were reified I’d have a problem with it. As it is, I think it is an interesting discussion.
N: I have quite a bit to say about this question in my draft responses. So let me introduce some of that material right now:
I have some reservations about ‘tactics vs. strategy’ as an organizing framework. On the face of it, I would think that tactics are more open-ended than strategies. Scholars choose tactics, like tools, to suit the terrain on which they conduct the operations associated with their craft; topics and tactics exhibit an affinity that weakens with distance from any scholar’s personal concerns and commitments; any change in stance or goals has immediate tactical implications. Strategy is more general and goals tend to be fixed; strategic possibilities are more readily generalized; strategic choices are subject to rational assessment within limits.
Moreover, I don’t see how the tactics vs. strategy framing squares with the framework of successive generations. I would be inclined to argue that first-generation constructivist theorizing was a futile exercise in grand strategy. Banners flying (world of our making!), we joined other self-styled dissidents and rose up against positivist legions armed with the weapons of science. We lost, to no one’s surprise, but managed somehow to open up the terrain (as IPE had done a generation earlier). Second-generation constructivists were strategically motivated to join forces with long-disparaged liberal institutionalists and to call for middle-range theories that could help with problem-solving on a tractable scale. For third-generation constructivists, the terrain is wide open but highly irregular and challenging to traverse. Applying their craft to topics of immediate, compelling interest to them, they are tactically oriented because they see that this is what the terrain demands of them.
Obviously what I find most interesting about this question is how tactics relate to the generational sequence in constructivist IR. So I suggested that you guys, as tacticians, were making a move, not to methods, but to a tactical stance, to the choice of topics for study. This tactical-topical sensibility is quite different from strategically oriented second-generation attempts to theorize human rights –to give a prime example. Abandoning the liberal agenda meant you no longer had to strategize about it. And that got me thinking about the first generation. What were we doing? In the lingo of the time, it was meta-theory. This was grand strategy for the purpose of reorganizing how we do our business in IR. And so there’s a sequence from grand strategy to strategic thinking to a tactical orientation that your generation is invested in. In effect, this sequence corroborates the intergenerational scheme that underlies work that Brent in particular has been doing for some time.
C: I want to challenge a couple of things here, Nick.
First, why do you say it was a futile exercise? Why do you say you lost? I don’t get it. You are talking about a very narrow world of winning or losing, when ‘in fact’ you’ve been extremely influential. I do see a particular kind of anxiety in some of the chapters here (e.g. McCourt), but it also bothers me. The field has changed – not always in ways we would like, but your work has definitely had a tremendous impact.
I also want to challenge this particular generational breakdown.
H: Brent edited a book on it (Steele and Acuff 2012).
B:And David McCourt and I have a chapter in Nick’s Festschrift (2017) on generationalizing Constructivism as well.
C: Right, where’s Roxanne Doty, where’s Jutta Weldes, where am I? Where are a bunch of people and their work? You have each reached out to use some of these other folks’ work (including mine, thank you), and so why is it that they are not included in these broader outlines of conceptual frameworks? These are people who kept Constructivism open –correct? And here I would include Audie Klotz, because even though some people might collapse her work into the second generation (or whatever), she shared a very strong commitment to social constructionist ontology and epistemology. I understand the generational thing, and I think you’re right that you form a third generation, and perhaps others have become even a fourth generation. But there’s a real danger in over-generationalizing (!) and in Nick saying that this was a futile exercise in Grand Strategy. Each generation has its scholars who question strategic thinking, challenging it and moving in the directions that their theoretical commitments take them. And that has to be appreciated for the important work it is.
N: I think what we’re hearing is a generational difference. And my frame of reference…
B:Cecelia, I completely agree, you and I have had these discussions before on where I acknowledge the problems of categories, but we need some kind of vernacular or categories or ideal types to be able to have conversations. The point is not to reify them as if they are real, but to open up the conversation so that something as diverse as Constructivism can be seen not necessarily as a thing, but as a category of things, within which (moreover) there are different ways to categorize.
C: That’s fine.
B:I think that’s why I talk about comfortable vs. uncomfortable constructivists within my own generation as well. There are some folks that are really worried about the future of Constructivism, and it being more strategic and trying to keep it going, and then there’s the rest of us that are kind of like, you know what we have is good. And yeah, we owe some of that to the previous people that sort of loosened up the ground for us to be able to stumble about in the way that we’re doing right now. And so my guess is that that categorization or another sub-categorization comfortable, uncomfortable, whatever we want to call it, it is, is probably present in other generations as well. Recognizing that generations are themselves reifications that are problematic.
C: I don’t mind the use of generation; what I mind is the overly stringent understanding of what they are. I agree ideal types can be quite useful. It does matter conceptually, because it forms part of ongoing relations of power in the field. I loved the chapter that discusses Jutta Weldes. But to me this is precisely the question of what is at stake –it is work like Jutta Weldes’s. Or Roxanne [Doty’s] and many others. When I have my students read something by Roxanne Doty, for example, they’re blown away. I don’t know whether Roxanne considers herself a constructivist anymore or not.
H: Did she ever?
N: The line between critical IR and Constructivism was pretty clear once upon a time.
C: But she was in the critical constructivism book (Debrix 2003). Right?
H: She wasn’t.
N: That’s because terms have become less clear over time.
C: They have. I’m asking why some terms have become less clear over time. It is all those disciplining power moves that we know of, although many of the questions asked by those so-called “liberal constructivists” were still interesting. But on the other hand, some constructivists from more critical perspectives just basically said, ok, this is the way it is now, rather than forcing the doors back open.
N: It seems to me people have forgotten that there was something like a war going on in the 80s and 90s. The stakes were defined with reference to IR in the United States. In that context we –post-positivists in general –pretty much lost. But the story gets more complicated because IR itself globalized as a field of study, and Europeans, Asians and others found Constructivism exactly the right way to get back at US hegemony and its universalizing pretensions. Maybe what was going on in the 80s and 90s was not a war at all, or maybe there is a bigger war that is still ongoing. I’m not altogether sure about this because the context has changed so much. So I think I can get away saying what I did about losing. And yet still concede that we opened up some terrain, and the terrain was global in character. We see the consequences in this book. After all, the majority of the contributors are not from the US.
H: Maybe you didn’t lose, maybe you lit a slow fuse.
N: I’ll take that.
B:A big part of the volume is scholars reflecting on their own academic experiences. So what is your view of these reflections?
N: Take Xymena’s magnificent piece.
C: It’s amazing.
N: And she uses the word ‘anxiety’. In different ways, she and all of the rest of you exhibit some symptoms of anxiety. In my draft responses, I asked why would anyone be anxious, and rather casually I listed a whole bunch of good reasons.
What then can I say that would help? Not much, I’m afraid, but this: it’s not about methods. It is about tactics, because that is where the action is. Many of the contributors get it. Tactical choices should make one anxious; sound choices quell localized anxiety. After a while, the rest of it doesn’t matter so much.
Questions 4 and 5 Is the constructivist umbrella still useful in the context of methodological discussions, and in discussing International Relations more broadly?
A big part of the volume is (youngish) scholars reflecting on their own academic experiences and offering some guidance from that vantage point; from your own positions as more senior, experienced scholars, what do you make of their evaluations and recommendations?
N: This might be a good place for me to insert my draft response to this question.
C: At the risk of being unsettling and uncomfortable, I do have a couple of points to add.
Question 4. Let’s start with David Byrne and Talking Heads; (I’m dating myself) –is the constructivist view still useful? I would say “same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.”
Constructivism still provides space for interesting work that takes some kind of non-determinism as its starting point. It also provides space for interacting with the ‘mainstream’ whatever that moving target may be at the time. Less positively, in some cases, it provides space for trying to remake Constructivism to align in a strategic sense with one’s own or others’ careerist assumptions. Here Jelena Subotic’s chapter and David McCourt’s chapter can be put in conversation. I appreciate Jelena’s chapter because she is very frank about what it is that interests her. If the interests align with the ‘mainstream’, so be it. In David’s chapter, I’m interested in the choices and the rationale. I worry that his chapter shows that the constructivist umbrella now indicates some of the same old blind spots.
In the context of where IR and Constructivism are now, I found it painful yet important to read Anne-Marie D’Aoust’s chapter. She asks how it can be that she’s supposed to be part of the [constructivist] field, but yet in her own group, ‘in-group’, she’s exiled. Many of us have experienced this, but I’m pretty sure feminist scholars have more than most.
What would it mean, what would it really mean, to take seriously not only feminist scholarship, but the very notion that feminists had nailed many social constructivist principles at the same time that Nick and Fritz were doing it? They were also the first to address serious questions of positionality and reflexivity in ways that many constructivists have still not engaged with enough. One of the reasons why I find Xymena (Kurowska)’s and Marcos (Scauso)’s chapters to be so important is that they do engage with these questions. So what really would it mean to have constructivists allow this challenge by feminists? I can’t claim to be a scholar of feminist IR, but I can tell you that both in Audie’s and my book and in my own book on interpretation, we try and I try very hard to give feminist scholarship its due. I think that it is absolutely critical to do so. The blind spot, for me as well as others, is to engage more explicitly with the concepts, insights and implications of feminist scholarship. I should be more specific in my work about its implications for my research questions and methodology. I’d like to see Nick write something not just about having an epiphany through conversations with Spike Peterson but that engages with Spike’s work on feminist political economy: i.e., talk about what a ‘rule-based’ perspective can gain from her work, or vice versa. I would like to see that down the line, actually.
I just received the report of a major journal on whose editorial board I serve, and it appears that citations of women scholars have not really moved, despite “efforts” [to track and promote them]. So Anne-Marie’s description of the dinner in which people are talking past her, is ultimately distressing but not surprising, and we need to take seriously the idea that even in ‘my’ own [constructivist] crowd, people are talking past or not taking seriously some kinds of work.
Back to the reflections that begin each chapter. The reflections are good and even enjoyable and cathartic –we get to reflect and explain ourselves –but we need to be careful. Brent, I like the honesty of your “comfortable constructivism”, and Harry’s reflection on privilege is extremely important. This again brings me back to Anne-Marie’s chapter. In my own career, I feel very fortunate about continuing to be challenged on issues of positionality and giving credit where credit is due. On positionality, experiences with co-editing the CIHA blog (www.cihablog.com) and meeting scholars especially in Africa, but also the Middle East and elsewhere, have been crucial for thinking about what it means conceptually and substantively to engage with scholarly power and reflexivity. What do we think we know about how other people in the world approach it? When Nick talked about Constructivism going global, I would say yes – but!
Most of the work done in this book is still limited to the usual US and European debates. There are worlds to discover out there, and other ways to think about what we think we know. We’ve begun to crack bits of Asia –maybe. Regarding race, racialized conceptions of IR, and constructions of Constructivism and of the field, we have so much work to do. Ido Oren and Bob Vitalis’ work, as well as (again) feminist scholarship from Spivak on, show us how impoverished we are if we limit ourselves to the social imaginaries of Woodrow Wilson’s diplomacy or any of our own conceptualizations of what matters. One of the CIHA blog’s co-editors – a prominent gender sociologist – co-founded a new organization called the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) several years ago. The whole idea is to bring the core of African Studies back to Africa. Makes sense, right? The two conferences I’ve attended thus far have reminded me how much we in our usual IR debates do not know about the global perspectives of scholars elsewhere.
I feel very fortunate to have been, serendipitously, included in amazing intellectual experiences and discussions through the Blog and my current research. Our debates sometimes seem paltry to me, including the never-ending one about how to find new ways to be relevant to the mainstream, whoever that is. One epiphany for me now is that I am astounded by the assumption that our starting point –of social construction –is enough to understand anyone anywhere. I do not think it’s enough. We just replicate the same old paternalisms. So, I’m not sure the Wakandans (referring to the recent Black Panther film) need us, but I think we need them. I think we need them intellectually, I think we need to be willing to take a step back and learn, relinquish some control over scholarly production and direction. Returning to the chapters by Xymena and Marcos, these are the kinds of projects that try to build bridges to other worlds.
I find here a lot of kinship with Roxanne Doty’s recent work. Whether someone calls themselves a constructivist or not is less the point for me than whether they begin from the premise of social construction; the importance of how language and different kinds of archives work in tandem. And this assumption of some humility that there are other worlds to discover maybe those worlds are in our own backyards, maybe they are about the people we grew up with, or maybe they are somewhere completely different in the world. But you know we’ve still got a lot of work to do. I’ll end there.
Except that I do want to say something about feminism and Constructivism since you put it right on the table. Nick, perhaps you should you should engage someone like Spike Peterson. That is one example – I’m saying we all should.
N: Perhaps a more interesting person from this point of view would be Lisa Prügl. She was a student of mine a few years after Spike. And then we were colleagues for a number of years, in Harry’s time at FIU. Lisa wrote a very important article on feminism and Constructivism (Locher and Prügl 2001), the only one of its kind. It raises a question. Why have neither constructivists nor feminists tried to engage along that fuzzy zone where there is so much convergence? I haven’t, as Lisa reminds me periodically. I don’t know the answer, but I think it has something to do with what I’ve been calling anxiety or what Brent calls comfort. It’s uncomfortable for women to concede that men have something to say about the problem that women have in a man’s world. It’s uncomfortable for men to say, I’ve learned something from what women say about their experience in my world. We’re just all uncomfortable about this. And it’s easier just simply to say, well, we’re kind of fellow travelers, we’re in the same business together. And then not actually come to grips with what it is that makes us both alike, and in some ways so very different.
I think this situation extends to Cecelia’s extremely telling remarks about the rest of the world. IR reflects the experience of modernity, itself a very specific and narrow part of human experience. And the attempt to make that experience relevant to others has made us all uncomfortable. One reason it’s uncomfortable is that the only people who really talk about the issue are postcolonialists. And they do it in a way which seems off-putting to almost everybody for whom modernity is a taken-for-granted, lived-in experience.
B:The one thing I wanted to remark on, is the gender balance of the volume, and you know, Nick, I’m someone who’s more focused on outcomes than I am intentions. There’s a secondary issue when it comes to trying to get scholars into volumes, especially at this moment of their careers. And I think it does break down in terms of asymmetrically affecting male scholars vs. female scholars, and that is that female scholars, whether there are fewer of them, or fewer of them in certain pockets, are getting asked to do, and or are committing to lots of different things. So we had three other scholars, who were a part of this and invited into this that had to pull out that were all three women. And they’re all three great scholars at different parts of their careers, one was a junior scholar, just defended her Ph.D. And the other two are rising or, and/or established stars in international relations theory, but they had to back out. Because I think they were dealing with a lot of other commitments. And I don’t think that there’s a very savvy way to talk about this. I think they’re being approached because they are really good scholars, but I also think that the fact that they’re women means that they might also be approached because they’re women for a lot of different projects, and then when they, whether they say yes to a bunch initially or say yes to some sequentially, they eventually have to decide well I’ve got to pull out of this one or whatever. And in my case the three that pulled out of this volume are pretty good friends with Harry and me. We just told them it’s fine, if you’re not going to be able to do it for us, it’s fine. It’s up to you. We know you have a lot of commitments. So, whereas I don’t know if that is one of the reasons why secondarily there is an all-male problem in the academy, but even if you are conscious of gender balances in volumes like this, it is not just as simple as going out and trying to be sort of balanced in terms of the input going into a volume, because the output could be that people have to withdraw. And in this case the three who withdrew were all female scholars. And that still wouldn’t have provided gender equity at all, but it would have made the volume a little bit more balanced. And that’s something I’ve thought a lot about, because it has happened when I’ve organized roundtables, when I’ve organized other volumes, and when I’ve organized panels just generally.
Usually the scholar who has to withdraw is somebody who is overcommitted and they sort of have to be selective with what they ultimately agree to do.
C
I really appreciate that, and I also really appreciate all the work that both of you have done to be inclusive in numerous ways over the years. But my current involvement with forums on race at the University, and also my work on the blog, has made me think about these questions a bit differently. One of the questions that Anne-Marie asks is for us to reflect on how these imbalances happen –let’s just use the category of women, but it could be scholars from the global south. On another recent occasion, I was told that it wasn’t for lack of trying that these scholars were not included. But the more I understand about debates about race and geography, the more I realize that we tend to have our go-to people, we tend to try to broaden our networks out a little bit, and then we say ok, I’ve done my part. But we could do more –there are others who need to be included.
It takes more digging. There are always others doing really good work. We know from how Constructivism is used that certain names are circulated and cited over and over again, which becomes a feedback loop, while others are overlooked. Certainly many are over-booked, over-committed, over-asked, but in numerous other cases it’s a question of being under-asked. We need to keep that in mind. I have seen overtures by feminists to constructivists, but fewer overtures by constructivists to feminists, so…
B:I’m sorry to interrupt. I have also seen the exact opposite. In the form of journal reviewers, in the form of blind-reviewers, in the form of volumes where constructivists are invited to sort of be a part of it, but are required to cite the feminist scholarship in order to get articles passed and approved.
You and I have had this conversation before. And I have not had the opportunity to clarify that I have experienced the exact opposite direction of who must get invited and who doesn’t. Now, that’s just my experience, it could have been different in the sort of ponds that you’ve been working in over the last few years, so.
C: I think that’s important for me to hear. When we think about this huge thing called Constructivism, I have a problem with anybody (feminist, constructivist) saying nobody pays attention to me. At the same time, Constructivism in its positionality is one of the “three pillars” of western IR; feminism is not. That needs to be taken into account.
B:I completely agree with that. The only addendum I’d throw in is that for some of us who are constructivists but not necessarily ‘just’ constructivists, and who publish, for instance in Millennium or EJIR, JIRD, or RIS, we definitely have to be attuned to feminist scholarship. And we get called out by someone who wants to see more feminism or poststructuralism or postcolonialism, or even ableism now is something that’s on the front-burner regarding disability studies. We have to be in tune with that, to the point where I’ve had some reviewers say, well, this other study said all of this already, and then I read the study, and actually it didn’t. In a lot of these journals that produce really good work, you do have to be in tune with a broader spectrum of literature, and if you are not, you’re going to get called out on it. So I get it, and I think it depends on where we think some constructivists are trying to get their work published, or placed. That will determine how much or how little a pushback you’re going to get when it comes to being more inclusive.
C: I sense a fair bit of frustration here. I see these pressures partly as a wave, that has only been rising for four or five years, at best, when women started to do research on citation counts. Even though journal boards I’ve been on talked a little about the problem, they haven’t seen the numbers change much, for example to be more inclusive of women authors. People are getting the brunt of it now.
B:It’s also when I’m a fellow reviewer. And I’m fairly certain that the piece is by a junior scholar who is dealing with a reviewer like me, who’s a big sort of teddy bear when I review, and then some other reviewer who says, you’re doing work on Ontological Security, there’s nothing in here about feminism. As of course there should be, and I’ve even seen it there in the piece, and I don’t think they read it very well.
C: I feel that you have gone out of your way to cite widely and broaden in the literature from the get-go. And I hope these experiences won’t narrow that tendency. Because I think that what you’re bearing the brunt of is years and years of [women] not being included, not being asked to review or asked to be on journal boards, or if you were asked not having these issues being taken seriously.
B:Sure. Going back to my chapter for this volume, there are all kinds of strategic expressions of different isms that are out there. And feminism can be prone to the same kind of strategic calculations that some forms of Constructivism, that some form of the mainstream, and even some forms of critical theory depending on where you are, can be prone to, and even if they are not strategic it can be as Nick said for some folks depending regarding postcolonialism, it can be a little bit off-putting, to say this can only get published if ‘x’ happens, and, and you’re a fellow reviewer and you disagree.
C: But I would say again, recent experiences on race come in. It’s clearer to me now that even though, I feel that I’m conscious of my white privilege, it’s really only a few layers of consciousness.
N: Exactly.
C: And I would venture to say that it’s the same thing right now for you. I say that as someone who has been privileged in many ways, and I realize that there are times when I need to shut up and take the criticism. I’m talking right now about myself. This is how I’ve started to conceptualize it for myself. I just went through a two and a half day anti-racism workshop at UCI, and one response could easily be that some people are not allowing me to be an ally, or they’re not allowing me to do this or that, or it works both ways. But there are systemic structural obstacles, layers and layers of them, and I think they go deeper on race than gender, on the global level as well. In one discussion, the facilitators noted that the topic was going to be especially uncomfortable for people of color in the room – they said we understand that this is uncomfortable because you usually don’t talk about it with white folks around, right? Usually, it is safer to keep it among yourselves. I think this is different from what you said regarding Nick and post-colonial theory.
N: I’m not so sure.
C: I think it is very different, because different groups have different means of resort. Given power differentials, I think we’re only beginning to get at this question of discomfort, and then comfortableness (who has it, who is used to it, how and why). I feel awkward right now raising the issue because I’m the woman in our discussion, and I feel that I’m putting you all on the defensive which is not what I mean to be doing.
B:You and I have had this discussion but I felt like I’ve never been able to respond fully. I do think that we have to shut up and take it, and having Anne-Marie’s chapter, just having her voice in it is sort of an example of sitting down and taking it. She includes events that are really uncomfortable for her to say in a way and courageous for her to say, but it’s uncomfortable for us to hear. I was sitting at a table nearby and I had no idea of what was happening. I do think that we should have more conversation, but if it’s going to be a dialogue and not just a monologue then we should at least be allowed to, after you’ve taken it a little bit, be able to speak up and talk about where we can be conditioned a little bit if not necessarily falsified or refuted.
C: I think what Brent might be saying is that in our previous conversation, I had the freedom to bring this up, and he had not had the freedom to fully respond, partially perhaps because I’m a little bit more senior, or I’ve been around longer, as well as being female. And that he was paying deference to me. But that he has wanted to speak up.
N: That’s clearly the case.
C: So I don’t take it negatively.
N: Yes, I could see.
C: I am very uncomfortable, though, at being the one who comes off as righteous here. So I want to go back to postcolonial theory and say that sometimes when I’m in a room full of scholars of the diaspora, I can be uncomfortable, too. I recently gave a paper in a similar situation, and worried that some people were reading assumptions into part of what I was doing. When I tried to clarify the purpose, I think a couple of people understood that their assumptions about what I was doing were only partially right. At the same time, I needed to hear their suggestions. And I needed to remind myself how the experience of many scholars is almost always that of being challenged or told they are wrong, in paternalistic ways. One becomes conditioned to expect slights and be on one’s guard for them so as not to be surprised. I can feel excluded by some die-hard postcolonialists, and I’m saying that you can feel excluded, but we have to suspend that notion of exclusion if we really want to discover other worlds. If we really want to push Constructivism where it can go. And so, there’s a lot more work to be done on this whole question of thinking through our positionality, of figuring out ways to step back and listen. And to understand and feel our privilege. I’ve got layers of privilege, you men have other layers of privilege in addition to mine and all of that business. The world is of our making, including our privilege.
We can leave it at that.
N: What Cecelia has just said is so eloquent and so to the point, that I think it is the way to end the book.
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