The International System of Power

Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Ideology, socialization and hegemony in Disciplinary International Relations’ International Affairs, January 2022.

Abstract

This article argues that Disciplinary International Relations (DIR) does not only explain international affairs, but it also socializes and hegemonizes publics and professionals into an ideological worldview consistent with the interest of states that underwrite the world economic and security order based on hegemonic liberalism. Considerable emphasis is placed on tracing the continuities between the early theorization of IR in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the contemporary academic/foreign policy/security ‘complex’ dedicated to the maintenance of a hegemonic world order. The article demonstrates that the call for a greater theory–policy nexus in international affairs is redundant because leading American scholars double up as policy-makers, either directly or through other avenues such as consultancies. Some of the most prominent IR scholars, such as Michael Doyle, John Lewis Gaddis, Samuel Huntington, G. John Ikenberry, Stephen Krasner, Theodore H. Moran, Joseph Nye and Anne-Marie Slaughter, among others, have served in high-level positions in the United States foreign policy and security apparatus. The article also shows the ways in which in the early days of IR theorizing in the UK, scholars such as Lionel Curtis, Alfred Zimmern and Norman Angell doubled as staunch defenders of the British Empire, albeit in the language of liberal internationalism.S

Subject International Relations Theory International History

Volume 98Issue 1January 2022

Article Contents

Ideology, socialization and hegemony in Disciplinary International Relations

Randolph B Persaud Author NotesInternational Affairs, Volume 98, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 105–123, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab200Published: 10 January 2022

Abstract

The social sciences stand at the nexus of power and knowledge in the modern world.Duncan Bell, 2009

Most debates in International Relations (IR) have been about epistemology (the process of knowledge production), ontology (the significant entities to be analysed), methodology (that is, techniques of analysis) and theory; more attention should be given to the relations of power and consequences of knowledge production within the discipline. Accordingly, the focus here is on the broader societal consequences of what IR scholars produce, and especially the relationships among theory, theorists, the state and policy.¹ I use the term Disciplinary International Relations (DIR) more as a symbol than as an acronym: a symbol, that is, of traditional and mainstream IR with strong, but implicit, ideological content. The larger construct, ‘Disciplinary International Relations’, has a double meaning. First, it refers to that body of knowledge that is recognized as properly belonging to the scholarly field of knowledge. Second, ‘disciplinary’ is used in a Foucauldian sense, to convey the fact that what is deemed legitimate IR knowledge is conditioned, shaped and delimited through the exercise of institutional power, but also enabled, circulated and rewarded in material, political and cultural terms. In sum, DIR is an effect of what I see as epistemological governance, that is, an ‘intercalating of institutions, agents and knowledge production’.²

The focus of this article goes beyond theory per se; consideration is also given to the theorists themselves most associated with DIR.³ The reason is that DIR theorists are the organic intellectuals of American global hegemony. Put differently, DIR theorists have extraordinary scope to define and delimit the parameters of debates around foreign policy and national security. Almost without fail, these debates take place among a handful of writers from a handful of universities in the United States. Theorists outside the traditions of realism and liberalism and their ‘neo’ versions, excepting constructivists, are rarely, if ever, engaged.⁴ DIR is, so to speak, a kind of theoretical oligopoly within the discipline. Much the same holds true for interdisciplinary approaches to IR. As Stephen Aris has observed, ‘disciplinary politics is characterized by the efforts to manage disciplinary closure and interaction with other disciplines’.⁵ I will show that DIR theory is in fact a foundational element of the grand strategy of hegemonic states in so far as it provides the intellectual cover and, more instrumentally, the everyday talking-points for policy-makers, think tanks, elite newspapers and retail news outlets.⁶ DIR scholars also function in the capacity of public intellectuals, a practice that, according to Bruce W. Jentleson, has had a long career, and should continue on the ‘sober talk shows on PBS, the networks, and cable’.⁷ Though often inadvertent, these public intellectuals do tend to defend the historical development of what Beckert has called ‘war capitalism’.⁸ It is important to recognize, however, that many DIR scholars have opposed wars, and have also criticized neo-liberal capitalism for its ideology of ‘personal responsibility’.

DIR theory constructs the contemporary archive that unites theory with strategy, from which, and through which, foreign policy and national security doctrine get articulated. While foreign policy and national security strategy have multiple sources of input, including corporate interests and professional lobbyists, DIR provides the framework for strategic guidance, though not necessarily for decision-making on specific issues. Further, following David Campbell, I distinguish ‘foreign policy’ from ‘Foreign Policy’, the former being general ideas and practices related to the making of core national and civilizational values, while the latter is more strongly tethered to specific state-based geopolitical and economic interests operating more on short- and medium-term time scales. Put differently, the former is, inter alia, about ‘practices of differentiation or modes of exclusion’, while the latter is not ‘equally implicated in the constitution of identity’.⁹ It is important to keep in mind that numerous high-level academics have worked directly in foreign policy-making. One of them, Joseph Nye, concurs that IR theory has had a major impact on policy.¹⁰ The full extent of the ‘complicity’ can be appreciated through examination of the Grand Strategy programme at Yale University. For instance, Aaron Jakes goes so far as to say that ‘in the early 2000s, Yale’s program played a significant, underappreciated role in helping the George W. Bush administration build its case for war in Afghanistan and Iraq’.¹¹

I use the symbol DIR to designate a particular tradition, in the sense defined by Duncan Bell, for whom ‘traditions are usually constructed around a canon of renowned thinkers, which serves simultaneously as a reservoir of arguments, an index of historical continuity, and a powerful source of intellectual authority’.¹² It is important to bear in mind that DIR is almost always concerned with (American) grand strategy, and that debates among the relevant scholars consistently focus on protecting or expanding American (and western) hegemonic power. Bell goes so far as to ask: ‘What impact have IR debates had on American foreign policy?’¹³

The article makes three general arguments. First, I argue that the policy relevance of theory partly depends on the type of theory, broadly divided between what Robert W. Cox labelled problem-solving and critical theories.¹⁴ In this case, I use the construct DIR to designate those approaches and theories that fall into what is usually described as ‘mainstream’ or ‘traditional’ IR.¹⁵ Considerable attention is directed to the associated literatures, but also those strands of DIR that have strong political and ideological content,¹⁶ and construct policy discourses and recommendations consistent with the interests of hegemonic states and the social forces that underpin them.¹⁷

The second argument is that while DIR theory does provide explanations for international phenomena, it also plays a significant socialization role, with the end goal of consolidating a set of core perspectives on world order.¹⁸ By this I mean that the scholarship in DIR is as much about influencing elites and publics as it is about theorizing foreign policy and international security, with considerable emphasis on shaping the world-view of domestic populations. I concur with Alastair Iain Johnston, for whom ‘social scientists generally agree that socialization is a process by which social interaction leads novices to endorse “expected ways of thinking, feeling, and acting”’;¹⁹ and further, that ‘socialization, then, involves the development of shared identification such that people become members in a society where the intersubjective understandings of the society become “objective facticities” that are taken for granted’.²⁰ Although Johnston applied socialization theory specifically to the ways in which institutional interaction influenced Chinese state actors in the ASEAN Regional Forum, his general argument about the process through which actors acquire new identities is apt. Following Bell, I argue that DIR disciplinary socialization practices begin in undergraduate studies and move through graduate school and into professional life. ‘To become a scholar of a particular kind—especially a scholar strongly committed to one perspective or subcultural form—requires various kinds of self-discipline, monitoring, habituation and cognitive transformation.’²¹

Isaac Kamola’s recent Making the world global provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which DIR scholars at universities and think tanks helped to define and spread the idea of globalization in ways conducive to the acceptance of neo-liberal global capitalism.²² For Kamola, globalization is an idea developed, circulated and consolidated by specific actors whose aims (in part) were to make global neo-liberalism an acceptable ‘paradigm’ of the global political economy. Similarly, in the subfield of security studies DIR scholars have essentially transformed arguments about hegemonic leadership into an undisputed fact of world order. Much the same can be said of the concept of soft power, which is now widely assumed to be a desirable practice based on rational and tactical benevolence. Moreover, broader theories such as balance of power, deterrence theory, the theory of interdependence, democratic peace theory and the theory of fragile or failed states all fluctuate between an explanatory and a socializing/ideological function.²³

The third argument is that racial and civilizational assumptions have been combined with ideological world-views in the construction of what is taken to be IR theory proper. And although this was truer in the early development of the discipline, heavy traces of civilizational ideology are still to be found in DIR. As used here, ‘ideology’ refers to both dimensions of Karl Mannheim’s formulation of the particular and the total.²⁴ Whereas the former is the perspective of individuals addressed to specific interests, the latter is noological and epistemological.²⁵ Ideology of the particular kind is also short term and geared towards protection of interests and achievement of objectives in historically determinate situations.

By contrast, total ideology is more systemic, foundational, long term and transformative of an entire social order. Finally, for Mannheim, particularistic ideologies exist somewhere between a lie and an error. Put differently, this aspect of ideology is a cover for the articulation of hidden interests. On the other hand, the practice of total ideology seeks a new ontology upon which a social order is erected. It is not only a comprehensive way of imagining and explaining the world, but an intellectual framework of strategic direction towards realizing desired goals. Personal motivation plays practically no role in ideological practice as advanced here.

Knowledge production and hegemonic socialization

While strands of DIR knowledge are indeed ideological in the longue durée, the process through which their central claims and propositions become mundane and ‘utilitarian’ are more a matter of structuration than of individual agency (of particular scholars). It is, therefore, useful to briefly review the structural components and associated dynamics of transforming theoretical knowledge for ‘end-use’ by the masses, media and other consumers of these hegemonic knowledges.

The writings of critical thinkers, ranging from Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to David Campbell, have all addressed the ways in which ideas and world-views spring from ideological practices and, further, how they become distributed and institutionalized. For both Gramsci and Althusser, the fundamental values of liberal/capitalist democracies are influenced by the core ideas and values of the ruling classes. Both stress the significant role that education plays in shaping the perspectives of the population at large. They do allow for considerable elasticity of beliefs, but also posit that variations occur within a paradigm disposed to maintain capitalist hegemony. For Gramsci there is no division between theory and practice/action.

Althusser’s theory of the state directly implicates knowledge producers in the maintenance of order, the socialization of classes of individuals into hegemonic citizenship, and the reproduction of the key values and general directionality of a society. While Althusser treated Marxism as a science, he nonetheless did not separate the material aspects of life from the educational and cultural dimensions. The connection between knowledge and individuals occurs through a process of interpellation.²⁶ Individuals (real living entities) are recruited, or ‘hailed’, into a comprehensive system (of knowledge and desire) where they are transformed into political subjects. The constitution of subjectivities takes places through workings of ideological state apparatuses including religious institutions, educational institutions, the family, political parties, trade unions and, inter alia, the press, radio, television and literary practices—literature, the arts, sports.²⁷ An outstanding example of the impact of literary practices on the emergence of a political identity can be found in the impact of Kipling’s novel Kim on Allen Dulles, director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961.²⁸

If the historical materialism of Gramsci and Althusser was principally concerned with structures and forms of knowledge, Campbell was keen on the techniques of embedding or socializing these knowledges into common sense. Campbell’s analysis of Foreign Policy calls for an understanding of how political identities are fashioned through narratives of danger emanating from various ‘others’, meaning foreign actors or sections of the domestic population deemed to be a threat. The articulation of danger is central to the creation of a dialectic of inside/outside, where the former (the national self) is to be protected against various actors. The danger is never fixed, but more importantly, the discourse of danger shifts according to conjunctural developments.

Nearly four decades ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr used a more applied approach to ideology and socialization, much of it to criticize what he termed a ‘boarding-party of ideologues’ responsible for American foreign policy in the first Reagan administration.²⁹ While he was concerned with the practices of policy-makers rather than academics, the issues raised have strong cross-over relevance for the problems under consideration in this article. This is so because Schlesinger’s arguments allow us to make the connections between the ideologized theoretical world-views immanent in DIR, and their actualization in the hands of policy-makers. It must also be noted that many policy-makers are also either from the academic milieu of DIR or have been so trained during their university education.³⁰

For Schlesinger, America, since its modern founding, had been torn ‘between an addiction to experiment and a susceptibility to ideology’.³¹ The experimental dimension was an inheritance of the European Enlightenment, in which science, rationality and the pursuit of interest underwrote innovation and pragmatism. The ideological side, on the other hand, contains the following properties: (a) America as a ‘redeemer nation’; (b) ideas lodged in a system of abstraction; (c) messianism and the assumption of righteousness; (d) a penchant for the ‘inflation of local troubles into global crises’; (e) the ‘conversion of politics into a branch of theology’; and (f) acting as if the United States ‘understands the interests of other countries better than they understand their own interests’.³²

Schlesinger himself had a political axe to grind regarding US policy in central America and US nuclear weapons strategy. Even so, the elements of ideological thinking he isolated are useful in understanding the ways in which much of DIR theorizing either knowingly or inadvertently assume that the West, and the United States in particular, has an appointment to govern the world.³³

Thus far, I have argued that DIR theories are ideological practices that go beyond explanation, in so far as they are intended to confer legitimacy on the material aspects of hegemonic practices of the dominant states. There is also sufficient evidence to claim that theorizing intensifies during periods of challenges to western, and especially to American—and, not so long ago, British—hegemony. Jeanne Morefield details this argument in her examination of the work and influence of the Roundtable, and especially the writing of Lionel Curtis. Analysis of the influence of Curtis and the Roundtable, argues Morefield, ‘can help us to better understand both the ideological and moral power wielded by Roundtable members during this transitional era and the power of historical narrative in imperial justification’.³⁴ The transitional period referred to was the early twentieth century, when the British empire was facing a global crisis of legitimacy.

Theory, policy and purpose

There is a narrower but ongoing debate concerning the relationship between IR theory and policy-making. One familiar way of framing the issue is that there is a theory–policy gap, and this gap, according to major IR figures such as Joseph Nye, has been growing.³⁵ Fellow grand strategist Stephen Walt not only accepts Nye’s diagnosis of a wide gap between theory and policy, but insists also that the complexity of policy-making makes theory less useful, and that there is an assumption of a ‘trickle-down model linking theory and practice’.³⁶ I do not think these observations can be sustained. To state my perspective as clearly as possible, I am arguing that the call for greater connectedness between theory and policy is redundant, because the most notable theorists in DIR are already connected to the national security and foreign policy establishment. Nye, Walt and other ‘bridge the gappers’ ignore the fact that many key theorists are themselves policy-makers, advisers or consultants embedded in the policy-making process. The argument about complexity misses the consideration that this factor is needed to smooth out the contradictions between American claims about world leadership and what actually transpires on the ground. Further, the existing theory–policy debates are internal, with practically all the grand strategists assuming an American-led world order, if not outright dominance. The debates around offensive and defensive realism, or between liberal internationalism and neo-classical realism, for instance, can be characterized as family disputes. On this score, Deudney and Ikenberry are quite accurate when they observe that ‘the debate about the ideological origins of the Iraq War is an intramural dispute among realists as much as a clash between realism and liberalism’.³⁷

The biggest problem with the theory–policy gap argument is that a very large number of influential scholars have been directly involved in policy-making. According to Bradley Parks and Alena Stern, many—such as Stephen Krasner, Joseph Nye, Michael Doyle, John Ikenberry, Samuel Huntington and John Ruggie—held high-level positions where they shaped the policy environment and had the capacity to make policy.³⁸ Parks and Stern also include Robert Jervis, Kenneth Waltz, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce Russett and Hans Morgenthau in the theory–policy configuration. A more comprehensive list would include Graham Allison, Robert Art, Richard Betts, Eliot A. Cohen, Michael Doran, Richard Feinberg, James Goldgeier, Richard Herrmann, G. John Ikenberry, Bruce Jentleson, Robert H. Johnson, Colin Kahl, Lawrence Korb, Matthew Kroenig, Charles Kupchan, F. Stephen Larrabee, Thomas Mahnken, Michael Mastanduno, Michael McFaul, Theodore Moran, Gideon Rose, David Shambaugh, Anne Marie Slaughter, Charles Stevenson, Richard Ullman, Celeste Wallander, Amy Zegart and, among others, Philip Zelikow.³⁹

Even this list is but a tiny fragment of the corpus of DIR scholars, some of whom have held senior positions in the United States government. The list does not consider scholars such as Francis Fukuyama or Larry Diamond, both of whom are actually influential in international affairs, though not formally in the discipline itself. Nor does it include figures such as Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice or Susan Rice, all three of whom studied International Relations, and all three of whom served as National Security Advisor. Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice also served as Secretary of State, and Susan Rice as US Ambassador to the UN. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, other notable academics such as Bernard Brodie and Thomas Schelling not only produced IR theory and worked in policy, but also participated in the formulation of strategic doctrine! In the field of international development, W. W. Rostow’s academic work was vastly influential; he too served as National Security Advisor. Similarly, Lawrence E. Harrison, a prominent scholar on international development, was also a senior official of USAID.

Parks and Stern found that 65 of the 445 scholars who had published at least two articles in the top twelve IR journals between 1980 and 2008 ‘had at some point temporarily interrupted their scholarly careers to accept full-time positions with governments or international organizations’.⁴⁰ Further, the 2008 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey found that 23 per cent of IR faculty had worked as paid consultants for governments, and 28 per cent had done the same without renumeration. An astounding 43 per cent of ‘bridge the gap’ supporters said that they ‘had recently worked in a paid capacity for a government, international organization, non-governmental organization, think tank, interest group or private sector outfit’.⁴¹

In the case of the United Kingdom, examined immediately below, the development of IR as DIR was intimately tied into governing the British empire.⁴² As noted by Acharya and Buzan, it is important to keep in mind that the early development of IR emerged in an era when Darwinism and scientific racism were linked to imperialism and colonization.⁴³ Moreover, in her investigation into the emergence of the Roundtable, Morefield has shown the direct ideological socialization of young intellectuals. Lord Milner, according to Morefield, had what was known as his ‘kindergarten’—meaning a number of young men (mostly Oxford graduates) who were under his influence. Milner’s ‘kindergarten’ ‘produced’ some of the most influential theory–policy thinkers in early British IR. They all produced works of ‘theory’ or were engaged with major International Affairs publications in support of empire. Among them were Lionel Curtis, Alfred Zimmern, Philip Kerr, Edward Grigg, Ramsay Muir and Robert Henry Brand.⁴⁴

The demand for theory to defend empire gained force during the First World War, and scholars with an imperial bent stepped up. In 1916, for instance, a British IR textbook ‘theorized’ that foreign interventions are not that bad because ‘they have also been the result of good will towards the oppressed’.⁴⁵ The point was made in explaining the causes of war, that is, under the pretence of theorizing conflict and violence.

Moreover, as Sabine Clarke has shown, the Colonial Office of the British empire was not simply an administrative unit, but also functioned as a knowledge reservoir.⁴⁶ As such, ‘the Colonial Office can be seen as a department in the vanguard of wider trends of increasing specialization, planning and rationalization; features of state organization and method identified with the idea of modernity’.⁴⁷ In this sense, research in the natural and social sciences was brought to bear on colonial ‘development’. Clarke notes that ‘Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Imperial College, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Rothamsted Experimental Station and Porton Down, were … put to work on colonial problems in unprecedented numbers’.⁴⁸

There is clear evidence that the so-called ‘gap’ between IR theory and policy-making is an inaccurate conception. Not only have the major DIR theorists worked in policy-making environments, especially in the United Kingdom and United States, but what is more, many of the central supporters and strategic thinkers of empire doubled as leading scholars in the discipline. In the case of Great Britain, early DIR and strategies for securing the interests of the British empire were different sides of the same coin. As for the United States, the hegemonic liberal international order that was consolidated in the Pax Americana was not only intellectually ‘sponsored’ by DIR academics, but has been actively managed by many of the same scholars.

Empire, imperialism and the emergence of a discipline

On 7 December 1931, Sir Norman Angell delivered a lecture at Chatham House on the topic of popular education and international affairs. It was a fine lecture in that it introduced a sophisticated analysis of economic interdependence. Angell’s task was complex because he had to fashion a scholarly theory, in this case a theory of interdependence, in the context of an empire (imperial rule being maintained under the rubric of a Commonwealth) with dependencies and protectorates. Education would be the medium. An education nourished in the classical tradition with heavy emphasis on Greece and Rome, however, had become banal for Sir Norman. What was needed was education for the commoner. What did Norman Angell, and others such as Alfred Zimmern and Harold Nicolson, want regarding international affairs?⁴⁹

The knowledge demanded was in service of empire, in the project of drafting the ‘multitudes’ into another gambit for British global hegemony. The task of the intellectual in international affairs was to mobilize and socialize these multitudes into the reproduction and maintenance of the empire. Sir Norman recognized that there must be some kind of ideological fit between the nationalism of the masses, including their civilizational nationalism, and the ways in which empire was a fulfilment of the Kantian sense of European moral responsibility.

To understand the relationship between knowledge, socialization and international affairs as articulated by Angell in December 1931, we need to backtrack to a speech he made a year earlier, on 21 October 1930.⁵⁰ This speech, to an audience of his peers, was indeed incisive, but only in so far as it brought together an amalgam of contradictory positions into an intelligible totality that was at once intellectually defensible and conducive to practical action. Here you will find your quintessential connection between DIR in the form of grand strategy and the defence of empire, where theorizing and colonizing are different dimensions of the same Hegelian dialectic.

Angell declared that ‘the claim to [national] “independence” is an “anti-social” claim’.⁵¹ How could a statesman, residing in the womb of liberal democracy and with his country assuming the role of presiding over that which is universally good and moral, so whimsically dismiss the right to national sovereignty, to freedom? The answer is perhaps predictable and, in short, comes down to another assumption: that is, that empire and imperialism serve the interest of their subjects. ‘The danger to-day is not the oppressive use, economically or otherwise, of central power. The danger is disintegration, chaos.’⁵² This threat of disintegration prompted grand strategists such as Angell to become innovative in the defence of empire and imperialism by first producing a body of theoretical work and then socializing the ideas (ideology) through more popular publications.

Challenges to the British empire and imperial decline beckoned theoretical innovation. Angell responded with a claim about the inherent goodness of liberalism in the long run, a theme that continues to resonate in DIR to this day. For Angell, ‘Imperial authority may prove tyrannical and unjust, but if it carries with it some cohesion and order, and the alternative to it is chaos, it is likely that the chaos will involve loss and hardship and injustice greater than that of Imperialism’.⁵³ Imperial failure, however, need not be a total loss, for it all depends on how one manages decline, or seeming decline. The response should be structured international cooperation that will facilitate the free movement of goods, services and capital. Angell was at least four decades ahead of his time, and this not least when you consider that he suggested the world had to move from international trade to transnational trade.⁵⁴

In the UK, the central challenge for foreign affairs thinkers was how to claim leadership in promoting democracy and freedom while denying national independence, a syndrome best described by Partha Chatterjee as the colonial exception.⁵⁵ While British DIR was concerned with the defence of empire, early American IR was absorbed in a kind of secular evangelism, in which the will of saving the coloured world from itself through tutelage was the central preoccupation. Early American DIR graduated into a fully fledged defence of the hegemonic world order once threats to that order began to surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Global white supremacy as International Relations

American theorizing in the early years in the Journal of Race Development and Journal for International Relations provides a direct glimpse of the relationship among theory, policy and ideological socialization. The first real embodiment of DIR (despite claims to the contrary about Aberystwyth) came with the founding in 1910 of The Journal of Race Development (JRD). The first issue declared that JRD ‘offers itself as a forum for the discussion of the problems which relate to the progress of races and states generally considered backward in their standards of civilization’.⁵⁶ As for the UK, Thakur, Davis and Vale have shown that Alfred Zimmern (first chair at Aberystwyth), Lionel Curtis (founder of Chatham House) and Philip Kerr, founding editor of The Roundtable, paid deliberate attention to the circulation of the journal.⁵⁷ It must be emphatically stressed that the emergence of imperial IR with strong tinges of racial hierarchy did not take place in an intellectual vacuum. Racial hierarchy did not go unchallenged. Indeed, Robert Vitalis has thoroughly documented the definitive contributions of an anti-racist, Black IR, developed through the Howard School. For Vitalis, ‘the Howard school thinkers stand out for their early and relentless critiques of the supposed truths of racial science and the role racism played in sustaining imperialism’.⁵⁸

The unity of theory, policy and socialization can also be perceived in the first issue of JRD. In the introduction, George H. Blakeslee was clear that the journal ‘may aid, in some degree, at least, in so educating public opinion, that it shall secure for the peoples of weaker civilizations a treatment marked by continually greater justice and wisdom and sympathy’.⁵⁹ Much like their counterparts in Britain, while the elites in America were certain that civilizational imperialism was a step towards the uplifting of the non-European world, they still had to bring along the local masses, who were more sceptical about foreign entanglements, in part through fear of racial contamination.

In addition to the politicians who used the pulpit to influence the public, academics working in International Relations were also drawn into the task. Their influence was more indirect but still potent, not least because they advanced the most innovative ways in which to talk intelligently about imperialism and empire. Moreover, they had the necessary scientific equipment (IR theory), backed up by their location in institutions of higher learning at a time when large sections of the population would not have been considered literate in world affairs. In the more contemporary period, DIR has been embodied in experts, a category that carries considerable cultural weight in modernity.

In the early years of DIR, the men (there were hardly any women) were actually at their best when they formulated elaborate ‘theories’ based upon some imminent threat from what today is known as the ‘other’. JRD morphed into the Journal of International Relations, and then into Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. The first volume could not have been clearer on the relationship among scholarship, policy and advocacy for purposes of orientation and socialization. In the first issue of Foreign Affairs in 1922, none other than Elihu Root, perhaps the most distinguished figure in the American national security and foreign policy establishment at the time, made what could be only considered an impassioned plea for foreign relations to be brought to the American public. ‘War is essentially a popular business,’ he wrote, sounding the call for the masses to be properly interpellated into the grand strategies of American global power.⁶⁰

Socialization of Disciplinary IR after 1945

Since I am not presenting a chronological account of the relations of ideology and socialization through the theory–policy nexus, I will first examine the writings of Thomas P. M. Barnett, who is a perfect representation of the theorist/strategist/ideologist.⁶¹ His work is a graphic display of the impossibility of divorcing DIR explanations from policy, or from aggressive ideological advocacy.⁶² In fact, Barnett, who was listed by Esquire magazine among the ‘best and brightest’, openly states that as a ‘vision guy’ (as he was described), he shifted his efforts after 9/11 ‘from theory to grand strategy’.⁶³

Barnett set out to produce New Rules Sets (NRS) for globalization and the management of world order. The NRS amount to what might be best described as grand theory/grand strategy/grand ideology. This theorist/grand strategist divided the world into two sectors—a ‘Functioning Core’ and a ‘Non-Integrating Gap’.⁶⁴ The United States is not only the leader of the Functioning Core, but the ‘source code’ for successful globalization.⁶⁵ The general argument is systematically articulated in the interrelationship among ‘ten commandments of globalization’, the most important of which for our purposes are ‘no stability, no markets’; ‘no growth, no stability’; ‘no rules, no money’; ‘no security, no rules’; ‘no Leviathan, no security’; ‘no [American] will, no Leviathan’.⁶⁶ The grand strategy (informed by the theory/policy analysis) of the Core is not optional but an imperative, somewhat like a Kantian categorial imperative. Thus,

the only global future truly worth creating involves nothing less than eliminating the Gap altogether. America can only increase its security when it extends connectivity or expands globalization’s reach, and by doing so, progressively reduces those trouble spots or off-grid locations where security problems and instability tend to concentrate.⁶⁷

As expected, Barnett presented his ‘brief’ to the ‘National Security Council, Congress, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security’.⁶⁸ These departments are state-bureaucratic consumers of Barnett’s ideas on how to eliminate the Gap. But as well as ‘consumers’, there are also targets. Barnett states the challenge of socialization in clear terms. In his view:

No matter how logical or necessary our new rule sets may appear to us, if we cannot sell them to a large chunk of the planet, we lose our credibility as a competent superpower, and our rules will invariably be dismissed by other cultures as reflecting an American bias, not universal truths.⁶⁹

Barnett was doing nothing less than combining Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ and Nye’s ‘soft power’ into a comprehensive national security doctrine. If the subjugated must be educated into the goodness of the western way of life, the masses within the Functioning Core must be prepared to play the part of global citizens, to demonstrate to the world their central values. You may recall that since the days of Angell and Kerr in the UK and Root in the US, there had been calls to make international relations available to the public, if for no other reason than to cultivate imperial desire.

Elaborate as Barnett’s post-9/11 New Rules Sets project might appear, many of the ideas had been around for quite some time, albeit expressed in more academic language, most especially in neo-realism and neo-liberal institutionalism, and some strands of positivist constructivism. For Meera Sabaratnam, DIR sets up a seemingly unproblematic interface between the European Enlightenment and the post-1945 world order through a hierarchical arrangement of authors and readers that reproduces western bias.⁷⁰ From the Enlightenment thinkers, through the theorists of imperial IR and then in the post-1945 period, DIR has been characterized by what Sabaratnam calls a ‘logic of immanence’.⁷¹ This means that the dynamic of the international has an internal grounding and leitmotiv in western civilization, and IR theorizing is simply an externalization of an essential core.

What the pre- and post-1945 DIR have in common is a singular focus on socializing free-market enterprise, maintaining the influence of the United States and Europe, protecting the default position of the West as the leader in managing world affairs, and being militarily prepared to act together to secure any or all of those ends. The logic of immanence as articulated in DIR has embedded a narrative of international cooperation and progressive development in the popular imagination, notwithstanding a number of disturbers who are outside western modernity. Though the disturbers must be dealt with through coercion, the role of force in securing cooperation and compliance is obscured in DIR.⁷²

Several scholars working in DIR have made the same arguments as Barnett, albeit within the ambit of abstract theory and method. That much became apparent in the writings of Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, working both together and independently. Their 1977 book Power and interdependence provided the broad framework for the intensification of trade networks and the strengthening of multilateral institutions through which the United States could provide ‘public goods’.⁷³ It also effectively dismissed dependency theory, then the most accepted theory within the Third World and among critical scholars of IR in the West. Keohane went on to write the very influential After hegemony: cooperation and discord in the world political economy.⁷⁴

One of the key ‘accomplishments’ of Keohane’s 1984 book is the way in which the seeming decline of American power occasioned theoretical innovation that influenced a generation of intellectuals. The book is a sophisticated rationalist theory of how America can maintain its domination (labelled leadership) of world order by clustering issues into areas of governance. The architecture of governance—meaning the norms, rules, expectations and decision-making processes—should be heavily influenced by the United States and its willing partners in Europe, again underscoring the ‘logic of immanence’ noted above.

Keohane’s theory of hegemonic leadership was followed up by Nye’s 1991 Bound to lead, which deployed a familiar claim, namely, ‘if the most powerful country fails to lead, the consequences for the rest of the world may be disastrous’.⁷⁵ Nye and Keohane were the co-founders of neo-liberal institutionalism, often referred to as neo-liberalism. Though this approach is in deep sync with its precursor, classical liberalism, which claims a Kantian foundation, it is closer still to neo-realism.⁷⁶ Classical liberalism and neo-liberal institutionalism both find expression in theories of economic development linked to 1950s modernization theory and pioneered by scholars such as David Apter.⁷⁷

The effects of DIR on the realm of political economy and global governance have been particularly intrusive through what Miles Kahler calls ‘passive voice functionalism’, a tendency in too much of the international organizations literature to rely on explanations for the design of institutions that point to some vague demand for cooperation.⁷⁸ The agents that create or design institutions are omitted (on both the ‘demand’ and the ‘supply’ side). Such use of ‘passive voice’ also ignores the disparities in power among agents that shape international institutions.⁷⁹ Passive voice functionalism can go a long way towards normalizing the biases that are foundational to the doctrines of liberalism writ large, and thus find their way into global governance through institutionally mainstreamed advocacy.

If Nye’s 1991 book carried an air of intellectual pomp regarding America’s historic role of world leadership as he saw it, his 2004 book Soft power: the means to success in world politics (New York: PublicAffairs) broke new ground. It not only introduced a new ‘master concept’ (soft power, even though he had been using the construct since 1991), which immediately gained so much approval that numerous courses and even programmes on soft power sprang up in its wake. Soft power, for Nye and his followers, such as John Ikenberry, means (and the latter writes approvingly)

the ability to coerce others as well as the ability to shape their long-term attitudes and preferences. The United States can dominate others, but it has also excelled in projecting soft power, with the help of its companies, foundations, universities, churches, and other institutions of civil society; US culture, ideals, and values have been extraordinarily important in helping Washington attract partners and supporters.⁸⁰

Socialization at the level of the individual, institutions and the broad masses is a benign form of power. Nye’s and Ikenberry’s paean to American soft power can be easily traced back to the more explicit quest to consolidate the wisdom of empire into universal truths.

The theory-cum-policy configuration developed in earnest after 9/11 with umpteen scholars, both within and beyond DIR, beckoned to the fight against global terrorism. The fight also wended its way into the invasion of and war against Iraq. Even though scores of DIR scholars (many named above) were publicly and decidedly against the war, some scholars played key roles in planning the war, defending it in academic publications and in the mass media.

Montgomery McFate, a Yale-trained anthropologist, used her skills in cultural theory and cultural analysis in the revision of the US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual (3-24).⁸¹ McFate’s counter-insurgency strategy is based on understanding the identities of local peoples. This local knowledge of peoples and their landscape is then used to attack their narratives with counter-insurgency narratives. The task is to break down the intellectual viscosity of the local resistance to foreign intervention and replace it with a narrative consistent with the language of protection, development, security, freedom, democracy and other values that the insurgents are assumed either not to know or to have rejected.

This ‘mercenary anthropology’, as Roberto J. González has labelled McFate’s contribution to FM 3-24, is backed up by David Kilcullen’s reiteration of points made by T. E. Lawrence more than a century ago in the Arab Bulletin. For González, the Pentagon has essentially contracted ‘warrior-intellectuals’ in the war against terror.⁸² McFate’s and Kilcullen’s interventions are consistent with Barnett’s New Rules Sets, as well as with the so-called ‘soft power’ of Nye and his large following. Anne Norton has shown the influence of neo-conservative intellectuals in the American security–academic complex, including links to the Iraq War.⁸³ Nivi Manchanda has also produced compelling evidence regarding the academic–security complex in the case of the war against Afghanistan. Her recently published Imagining Afghanistan ‘spotlights the interlocking and co-constitutive relations between knowledge production, racism, and war’.⁸⁴

The types of connections that exist between security theory and international security policies also exist between political economy and the global governance practised through international organizations. The stress on privatization, liberalization and deregulation in structural adjustment policies (especially in the 1980s), in the Washington Consensus and more broadly in the institutionalized forms of generalized neo-liberalism are entirely consistent with modernization theory. And while neo-liberal institutionalism does not necessarily endorse Hayekian economic neo-liberalism, it does arrogate global (economic) hegemonic ‘rights’ to the United States. Sustained criticism of the old developmentalism ensconced in the IMF and World Bank models of the 1970s–90s paved the way to a more ‘negotiated’ approach to development policies. Beginning in 1999, the international financial institutions (IFIs) implemented a new mode of determining development assistance in the form of the poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP):

In order to foster growth, PRSPs identify several policy actions that typically aim to develop human capital and infrastructure, improve competitiveness, foster economic diversification, and promote private sector development. In addition, most action plans crafted in these documents encompass cross-cutting areas that are viewed by government officials as important determinants of growth, including governance, rural development, social inclusion, and human and institutional development.⁸⁵

Notwithstanding the stress on choice as propounded by David Apter in The politics of modernization, postcolonial scholars such as Heloise Weber have shown that international development is far less about choice than it is about values such as autonomy, efficiency and rationalism in decision-making. Weber’s careful examination of the IMF and World Bank lending processes revealed that, instead of facilitating democratic participation in national development, ‘the PRSP approach [is] instrumental [in] efforts to constitutionalize a particular form of governance (for developing countries) conducive to capitalist restructuring’.⁸⁶ Constitutionalizing, of course, involves both culturally and juridically embedding the preferences of neo-liberalism into the institutional norms, processes and procedures of national development.⁸⁷

Weber’s critique goes well beyond specific IFIs. Indeed, her analysis implicates the entire apparatus of postwar development studies in maintaining the concept of the Third World as an organizing principle designating weakness and the need for development intervention. Further, the use of the concept of underdevelopment was steered away from its more critical trajectory towards a role as an enabling instrument of entry for free market capitalism. Accordingly, ‘reinforcing the methodological premises of the politics of development, development studies can be seen to function instrumentally in global politics, giving legitimacy to the territorially bounded consolidation of global capitalism’.⁸⁸ Analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals and of the GATT/WTO shows a remarkable carry-over of the modus operandi from the previous Cold War period into the era of neo-liberal global governance.⁸⁹

As an early modernizer, Apter well understood the relationship between ideology and what in effect became development studies as discussed by Weber and Murphy. Apter stated quite candidly that, ‘despite the fact that the ideologies of modernization quite often profess to be scientific … they are not because their objectives are not scientific’.⁹⁰ Yet no harm done; because, for Apter,

ideology in the modernizing nations is meaningful to the public less for its scientific content than for its symbolic expression … and as people withdraw from their primordial association and observe around them a different level of standards, they begin to adopt these as their own.⁹¹

Duncan Bell is clear that ‘modernization ideas shaped attitudes and policies to what used to be called the “Third World”, as well as politico-military strategy in Vietnam’.⁹² From Kant, who felt that the movement of historical progress was not about happiness but about human development,⁹³ and that the West had a responsibility therein, to Macaulay, who was certain that the best strategy was to ‘do our best to form a class [in India] who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’,⁹⁴ to Barnett’s New Rules Sets or Nye’s soft power, the idea has remained virtually unchanged. This is that the West needs to save non-western humanity from itself, if not by education then by armed intervention.

Conclusions

There are three main arguments to be summarized. The first is that, despite the general impression that DIR theory is too divorced from practical application and too removed from policy, I have shown not only that a substantial body of DIR is indirectly connected to policy-making, but that academia and state articulation of foreign policy are also directly connected through a revolving door of academics/strategists.

Second, although many of the racial foundations upon which early writing on international relations was based have disappeared, there continue to be major civilizational assumptions embedded in DIR. These assumptions are expressed with predictable recurrence in theories of democratic expansion, the defence of freedom against a proliferation of threats and, most especially, in theories of international development.

Third, the theory–policy nexus in DIR evidently has strong links to older debates on the management of world order. Many of the central claims articulated in the discipline, such as promoting democracy, good governance and security, were also the tenets of early imperial IR in the United Kingdom, and of a race-based IR in the United States. The difference is that while the old imperial IR was openly cast in terms of western civilizational supremacy, today the theorists, and by turns experts, advance their views within the protocols of global cosmopolitanism, much of it in the language of a common humanity sharing the same interests in peace, security and development.

The world has changed; and so have the disciplinary sensibilities, as well as the perspectives, of scholars. Yet, as Laura Sjoberg has noted, some things have not changed, at least in the area of security studies. Elites continue to dominate security discourses—so much so that Sjoberg claims that ‘the Beltway’ poses a security threat to Americans, and this because of the state-centrism of DIR, as well as its neo-positivist tendencies that eliminate all forms of historically grounded critical theory.⁹⁵ What is particularly important to note, however, is the near-dogmatic insistence that a handful of western states have figured out the path to a glorious future for all humanity, regardless of race, class, culture and history. In this regard, the old and new IRs are inextricably linked.

Footnotes

For a comprehensive introduction to these debates, see Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, eds, International Relations theories: discipline and diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).2

Duncan Bell, ‘Writing the world: disciplinary history and beyond’, International Affairs 85: 1, 2009, p. 12.3

For an excellent historical overview of the institutional development of security studies in the US, see Michael Desch, ‘Technique trumps relevance: the professionalization and the marginalization of security studies’, Perspectives on Politics 13: 2, 2015, pp. 377–93.4

James Goldgeier, a professor of IR who was a student of Alexander George, one of the first scholars to call for theory–policy convergence, is convinced that ‘younger scholars are more and more interested in conveying the relevance of their research to policy and public audiences, and they have multiple means of doing so’: James Goldgeier, ‘Theory–policy issues in IR’, correspondence with the author, 10 March 2021.5

Stephen Aris, ‘International vs. area? The disciplinary politics of knowledge-exchange between IR and area studies’, International Theory, publ. online Aug. 2020, p. 4, DOI: 10.1017/S1752971920000184. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 24 Oct. 2021.)6

Eriksson and Norman found that the concepts ‘clash of civilizations’ and ‘soft power’ ‘are plentiful not only in academic writings, but also in the media, in policy documents, and in political speeches’: Johan Eriksson and Ludvig Norman, ‘Political utilization of scholarly ideas: the “clash of civilizations” vs “soft power” in US foreign policy’, Review of International Studies 37: 1, 2011, p. 418.7

Bruce W. Jentleson, ‘The need for praxis: bringing policy relevance back in’, International Security 26: 4, 2002, p. 180.8

Sven Beckert, Empire of cotton: a global history (New York: Vintage, 2015).9

David Campbell, Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 76 (emphasis in original).10

Joseph Nye, ‘International relations: the relevance of theory to practice’, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds, The Oxford handbook of international relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3–4.11

Aaron G. Jakes, ‘A Yale program drew fire over donor meddling. Its real problem was promoting war’, Washington Post, Oct. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/10/11/yale-grand-strategy-beverly-gage-kissinger/.12

Duncan Bell, ‘What is liberalism?’, Political Theory 42: 6, 2014, p. 686.13

Bell, ‘Writing the world’, p. 11.14

Robert W. Cox, ‘Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10: 2, 1981, pp. 126–55. For an introduction to the theory–policy problems in IR and beyond, see Yannis Stivachtis, ‘The policy–theory relationship’, Journal of Political Sciences and Public Affairs 1: 1, 2013.15

Cox, ‘Social forces, states and world orders’. This article goes beyond the problem-solving vs critical theory route because Cox’s formulation does not consider race and racism as an integral dimension of world order. In my approach, world order is structurally tied to racial capitalism and war capitalism. For more on racism and world capitalism in the development of the modern world system, see Beckert, Empire of cotton.16

I adopt the definition of ideology in foreign policy provided by Michael H. Hunt, who saw it ‘as an interrelated set of convictions and assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that reality’: Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US foreign policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. xi.17

Accordingly, while constructivism has been accepted into the mainstream, it does not by itself have a political programme or ideological grounding. For an outstanding application of constructivist methods to US national security, see Ronald R. Krebs, Narrative and the making of US national security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).18

The distinction between Disciplinary IR and non-disciplinary IR is not fixed or straightforward. There are overlaps and intersections, and much of what is considered non-disciplinary actually lies within the academy. This is true for much of critical theory, including feminist theory, critical political economy, postcolonial/decolonial theory, climate change theory and global IR. References are made to critical theory in some instances, but the focus is on DIR here because it has the most direct connections to policy, policy-makers and the state.19

Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in international institutions: the ASEAN way and International Relations theory’, in G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno, eds, International Relations theory and the Asia–Pacific (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 11.20

Johnston, ‘Socialization in international institutions’, p. 115.21

Bell, ‘Writing the world’, p. 21.22

Isaac Kamola, Making the world global: US universities and the production of the global imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).23

For an excellent collection of essays on the fragile state as an imaginary, see Sonja Grimm, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Oliver Nay, eds, The political invention of fragile states: the power of ideas (New York: Routledge, 2015).24

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and utopia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 57.25

Mannheim, Ideology and utopia, p. 57.26

Louis Althusser, On ideology (London: Verso, 2020), pp. 44–50 (first published in 1970 in La Pensée).27

Althusser, On ideology, p. 17.28

Stephen Kinzer, The brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their secret world war (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2013), pp. 19–20.29

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, ‘Foreign policy and the American character’, Foreign Affairs 62: 1, 1983, p. 6.30

Jordan Tama, a scholar connected to the Bridging the Gap Project, observed that ‘a large number of policy makers have taken international relations or related courses as undergraduate or MA students. Through these courses, many policy makers have been exposed to some of the main analytical frameworks used by many IR scholars, such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism, as well as to more specific IR ideas, such as the democratic peace theory or economic interdependence’: Jordan Tama, ‘Notes on the theory–policy nexus’, correspondence with the author, 10 March 2021.31

Schlesinger, ‘Foreign policy and the American character’, p. 1.32

Schlesinger, ‘Foreign policy and the American character’, pp. 2–6.33

Note that critical theories of IR also have strong ideological leanings, often explicitly presented in the language of emancipation, anti-imperialism, decolonization, destruction of patriarchy and violent masculinity, and, not so long ago, socialism.34

Jeanne Morefield, ‘An education to Greece: The Roundtable, imperial theory and the uses of history’, History of Political Thought 28: 2, 2007, p. 329.35

Nye, ‘International relations’.36

Stephen Walt, ‘The relationship between policy and theory in International Relations’, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 8, 2005, p. 25.37

Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, ‘Realism, liberalism and the Iraq War’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 59: 4, 2017, pp. 8–9 (emphasis added).38

Bradley C. Parks and Alena Stern, ‘In-and-outers and moonlighters: an evaluation of the impact of policy-making exposure on IR scholarship’, International Studies Perspective 15: 1, 2014, pp. 73–93 at p. 75.39

Parks and Stern, ‘In-and-outers and moonlighters’, pp. 79–80.40

Parks and Stern, ‘In-and-outers and moonlighters’, p. 75.41

Parks and Stern, ‘In-and-outers and moonlighters’, p. 75.42

On the early development of British IR, see Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The making of global International Relations: origins and evolution of IR at its centenary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).43

Acharya and Buzan, The making of global International Relations, p. 19.44

Morefield, ‘An education to Greece’, p. 330.45

A. J. Grant, J. D. I. Hughes and A. Greenwood, An introduction to the study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1916), p. 41.46

Sabine Clarke, ‘The technocratic or imperial state? The Colonial Office and scientific research’, Twentieth Century British History 18: 4, 2007, pp. 453–80.47

Clarke, ‘The technocratic or imperial state?’, pp. 454–5.48

Clarke, ‘The technocratic or imperial state?’, p. 457.49

In an article in this journal, Nicolson affirmed that ‘to say that Germany is morally unfitted to possess colonies is to say something which is demonstrably untrue’: Harold Nicolson, ‘The colonial problem’, International Affairs 17: 1, 1938, p. 35. See also Alfred Timmern, ‘The decline of international standards’, International Affairs 17: 1, 1938, pp. 3–31.50

Norman Angell and H. B. Lees-Smith, ‘Popular education and international affairs’, International Affairs 11: 3, 1932, pp. 321–45.51

Norman Angell, ‘The new imperialism and the old nationalism’, International Affairs 10: 1, 1931, pp. 74–5.52

Angell, ‘The new imperialism and the old nationalism’, p. 79.53

Angell, ‘The new imperialism and the old nationalism’, p. 73.54

Angell, ‘The new imperialism and the old nationalism’, p. 78.55

For the thesis of the ‘colonial exception’, see Partha Chatterjee, The black hole of empire: history of a global practice of power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). For the quarantining of Native Americans, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous peoples’ history of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014).56

George H. Blakeslee, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Race Development 1: 1, July 1910, p. 1. Some have argued that World Affairs (starting with its precursor The Advocate of Peace) was the first American journal of foreign affairs. While there is a basis for the claim on technical grounds, it must be acknowledged that the publication was grounded in Christian missionary perspectives, not a broader scholarly tradition. Yet, consistent with my own argument, the very first issue of The Advocate for Peace evinced a ‘spiritual’ call for the world to be orientated to peace through education and other forms of socialization. That first issue made the following call: ‘For the production of … a change in public sentiment, we would set at work, and keep at work, all the mainsprings of moral influence—the pen and the tongue, the press and the pulpit, the church, the family, the Sabbath school, all seminaries of learning, all the great nurseries of knowledge and character in Christendom’: ‘Address to the friends of peace’, The Advocate of Peace 1: 1, 1837, p. 11, http://www.jstor.com/stable/27886872.57

Veneet Thakur, Alexander E. Davis and Peter Vale, ‘Imperial mission, “scientific” method: an alternative account of the origins of IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46: 1, 2017, p. 21. Inderjeet Parmar has shown how Chatham House in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York not only shared a common world-view but also advocated similar policies on liberal internationalism, despite the obvious contradictions at the time that belied anything liberal in the sense of universal rights or national sovereignty for all nations and all peoples. See Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Anglo-American elites in the interwar years: idealism and power in the intellectual roots of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations’, International Relations 16: 1, 2002, pp. 60–64.58

Robert Vitalis, White world order, black power politics: the birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. 12.59

George H. Blakeslee, ‘The Monroe Doctrine and the proposed constitution of the League of Nations’, Journal of Race Development 1: 1, 1910, p. 4.60

E. Root, ‘A requisite for the success of popular diplomacy’, Foreign Affairs 1: 1, 1922, p. 3.61

See http://thomaspmbarnett.com/bio/.62

Barnett has held a number of academic positions. He taught at the US Naval War College, and has been affiliated with the University of Tennessee and the University of Idaho.63

Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s new map (New York: Berkley, 2004), p. 6.64

The Functioning Core consists of ‘North America, Europe … Russia, Japan, China … India (in a pockmarked sense), Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and … Argentina, Brazil, and Chile’: Barnett, The Pentagon’s new map, p. 132. The rest of the world fit at various levels and degrees into the Non-Integrating Gap.65

Thomas P. M. Barnett, Blueprint for action (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005), p. xiii.66

Barnett, Blueprint for action, p. xvii.67

Barnett, The Pentagon’s new map, p. 56.68

Barnett, The Pentagon’s new map, p. 6.69

Barnett, The Pentagon’s new map, p. 57.70

Meera Sabaratnam, ‘Is IR theory white? Racialised subject-positioning in three canonical texts’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49: 1, 2020, p. 18.71

Sabaratnam, ‘Is IR theory white?’, pp. 18–19.72

Sabaratnam, ‘Is IR theory white?’, p. 20.73

Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr, Power and interdependence (New York: HarperCollins, 1977).74

Robert O. Keohane, After hegemony: cooperation and discord in the world political economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).75

Joseph S. Nye Jr, Bound to lead: the changing nature of American power (New York: Basic Books, 1991), preface to the paperback edition; Joseph S. Nye Jr, ‘The rise and fall of American hegemony from Wilson to Trump’, International Affairs 95: 1, 2019, pp. 63–80.76

Neo-liberal institutionalism agrees with some key assumptions of neo-realism. The state as the main actor and assumptions of rational self-interest are the most important. In some ways, neo-liberal institutionalism is a ‘backward’ move, given that earlier Keohane and Nye expended much intellectual capital arguing that other actors such as multinational corporations cannot be ignored.77

See David E. Apter, The politics of modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Though Apter focused on the political aspects of modernization, the book contributed to the cultural and economic understanding of the movement from traditionalism to modern institutions and practices.78

Miles Kahler, ‘Complex governance and the new interdependence approach (NIA)’, Review of International Political Economy 23: 5, 2016, p. 828.79

Miles Kahler, ‘Note on passive voice functionalism’, correspondence with the author, 10 Dec. 2020.80

G. John Ikenberry, ‘Soft power: the means to success in world politics’, Foreign Affairs 83: 2, 2004, p. 136 (emphasis added).81

Sarah Sewall, John A. Nagl et al., US Army/Marine Corp counterinsurgency field manual: with a foreword by General David H. Petraeus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).82

Roberto J. González, ‘Towards mercenary anthropology? The new US Army counter-insurgency manual FM 3-24 and the military–anthropology complex’, Anthropology Today 23: 3, 2007, p. 17.83

Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the politics of American empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).84

Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: the history and politics of imperial knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 5.85

Daouda Sembene and Ngueto Yambaye, Poverty, growth, and inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: did the walk match the talk under the PRSP approach?, IMF eLibrary, 12 June 2015. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2015/122/article-A001-en.xml.86

Heloise Weber, ‘Reconstituting the “Third World”? Poverty reduction and territoriality in the global politics of development’, Third World Quarterly 25: 1, 2004, p. 191.87

For an excellent collection of essays on constitutionalizing the world order, see Stephen Gill and Claire Cutler, eds, New constitutionalism and world order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).88

Weber, ‘Reconstituting the “Third World?”’, p. 194.89

Heloise Weber, ‘Politics of “leaving no one behind”: contesting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals’, Globalizations 14: 3, 2017, pp. 399–414.90

Apter, The politics of modernization, p. 318.91

Apter, The politics of modernization, pp. 318–19.92

Bell, ‘Writing the world’, p. 13.93

Thomas McCarthy, Race, empire, and the idea of human development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).94

T. B. Macaulay, ‘Minute by the Hon’ble T.B. Macaulay’, 2 Feb. 1835, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html.95

Laura Sjoberg, ‘Locating relevance in security studies’, Perspectives on Politics 3: 2, 2015, pp. 396–8.

Author notes

This article is part of the January 2022 special issue to mark the 100th anniversary of International Affairs: ‘Race and imperialism in International Relations: theory and practice’, guest-edited by Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall. I would like to thank the several external reviewers for their detailed, substantive and insightful critical feedback and many constructive suggestions. I would also like to thank Jasmine Gani and Jenna Marshall, Amitav Acharya, Jordan Tama, James Goldgeier and Carl Levan for the valuable comments they provided.© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.comThis article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model

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Randolph B. Persaud, Race and racism in International Relations – Talk presented to University of Kentucky. Hosted by the Department of Political Science

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American University (2012)
School of International Service
Human and Global Security – SIS619:001 – Classroom Watkins G12
Fall 2012 – Mondays 5:30-8:00

Prof. Randolph .B. Persaud
Phone – 202-885-1757; email – persaud@american.edu

Course Description: This course examines new developments in security studies, and new ways of thinking about security. While many of the issues we will engage have been around for a long time, their gravity has been more sharply felt since the end of the bi-polar world order and a deepening economic crisis within Western societies. We will do the following things in this course: (1) consider ways of thinking about security other than through the national security framework; (2) work towards an understanding of non-military threats (3) examine the intersection of globalization and new forms of security provision (such as private security); (4) analyze the relationships among identity, nationalism and the social construction of security (5) analyze the problems of legitimacy in humanitarian intervention, (6) analyze United nations Peacekeeping Efforts.
Learning Outcomes – Students will acquire significant knowledge about the some of the key debates and disputes in security studies. After the course, students will be able to demonstrate sound theoretical knowledge of the subject matter and should be able to apply this knowledge to policy assessment and policy formulation. Finally, students would be able to formulate interesting research questions (based on the theoretical and empirical material) for purposes of future research.
Course Texts
David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Susan Rice et al., (eds), Confronting Poverty: Weak States and U.S. National Security. Washington, D.C. Brookings Press, 2010.
Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Plume, 2012.

Highly Recommended
Alan Collins, Contemporary Security Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Paul D. Williams, (ed.) Security Studies: An Introduction: New York: Routledge, 2008..
S. Tadjbakhsh and A.M. Chenoy, Human Security: Concepts and Implications, London: Routledge, 2007
Roland Dannreuther, International Security: The Contemporary Agenda. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
John Gray, False Dawn, New York: The New Press, 1998.

Some Key Journals
Security Dialogue International Security Foreign Affairs
Arms Control Review of Int. Studies Millennium
International Interactions Int. Studies Review Jour. of Conflict Res.
International Organization Alternatives Latin Am. Pol. & Society
Third World Quarterly Foreign Policy World Politics
Pacific Review International Journal Development Dialogue
Jour. Modern African Studies, Human Development Report Security Studies
European Jour. of Int. Rel. Jour. of Strategic Studies NACLA
Journal of Peace Research Race and Class Soc. & Eco Studies

Assignments and Grading

Assignment Date Length Value
Short paper, October 1, 20%
Short paper, October 20, 20%
Term Paper, December 04, 20%
Exam, 20%
Participation, 20%

Academic Integrity Code
All students are governed by American University’s Academic Integrity Code. The Academic Integrity Code details specific violations of ethical conduct that relate to academic integrity. By registering, you have acknowledged your awareness of the Academic Integrity Code, and you are obliged to become familiar with your rights and responsibilities as defined by the code. All of your work (whether oral or written) in this class is governed by the provisions of the Academic Integrity Code. Academic violations include but are not limited to: plagiarism, inappropriate collaboration, dishonesty in examinations whether in class or take-home, dishonesty in papers, work done for one course and submitted to another, deliberate falsification of data, interference with other students’ work, and copyright violations. The adjudication process and possible penalties are listed in American University’s Academic Integrity Code booklet, which is also available on the American University website. Being a member of this academic community entitles each of us to a wide degree of freedom and the pursuit of scholarly interests; with that freedom, however, comes a responsibility to uphold the high ethical standards of scholarly conduct.

Aug. 27 – Discussion of syllabus, assignments, expectations, and grading.

Sept 10 – What is Security?
John Mearsheimer, The False Promise of International Institutions, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3, Winter 199495, pp. 5-49.

Recommended
Kenneth Waltz, “Structuralism after the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 1 Summer 2000, pp.5-41.
David A. Baldwin, “The Concept of Security,” Review of International Studies, 23, 5-26, 1997.
Charles A. Kupchan and Clifford A Kupchan, International Security, “The Promise of Collective Security,” Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer 1995, pp. 52-61.

Sep. 17 – Challenge and Change: Human Security Concepts
Keith Krause and M.C. Williams, “Broadening the Agenda of Security Studies: Politics and Methods,” Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 40, 1996, pp. 229-254.
Amitav Acharya, “Human Security: East Versus West,” International Journal, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2001, pp. 442-460.

Recommended
Matt McDonald, “Human Security and the Construction of Security,” Global Society, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002.
Sadako Ogata, “Empowering People for Human Security,” Presentation to 56th Annual DPI/NGO Conference.
Paul M. Evans, “Human Security and East Asia: In the Beginning,” Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 4, 2002, pp. 263-284.
Sep 24 – Human Security, Development, and Human Rights
Sorpong Peou, The UN, Peacekeeping, and Collective Human Security: From An For Peace to the Brahimi Report,” in Edward Newman and A. Schnabel, (eds.) Recovering from Civil Conflict: Reconciliation, Peace, and Development. London: Frank Kass, 2002, pp. 51-68. Caroline Thomas, Global Governance, development and human security: exploring the links,” Third World Quarterly, 22:2, 2001, 159-75.

Recommended
C. Sommaruga, “The global challenge of human security,” Foresight: The Jour. of Future Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy,” 6, 4, 2004.

Oct. 01 – Debating Security/Human Security
Roland Paris, “Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air,” International Security, 26:2, Fall 2001, 87-102.
N. Thomas and W.T. Tow, “”The Utility of Human Security: Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention,” Security Dialogue, 33:2, 2002, 177-92.
A.J. Bellamy and M. McDonald, “”The Utility of Human Security’: Which Humans? What Security? A Reply to Thomas and Tow,” Security Dialogue, 33:3, 2002, 373-377.
Recommended
Edward Newman, “Critical Human Security Studies,” Review of International Studies, (2010), 36, pp. 77-94

Oct. 08 – Poverty, Weak States, and Security I
Susan Rice, “The National Security Implications of Global Poverty,” Confronting Poverty, Ch. 1
Susan Rice, “Poverty and State Weakness,” Confronting Poverty, Ch. 2
C. Graff, “Poverty, Development and Violent Extremism,” Confronting Poverty, Ch. 3.

Recommended
A. Loomis, “Poverty, State Weakness and Civil War,” Confronting Poverty, Ch. 4

Oct. 15 – Poverty, Weak States and Security II
J. Busby, “Feeding Insecurity? Poverty, Weak States, and Climate Change,” in Confronting Poverty, Ch. 5
M. Estrin and C. Malm, “State Weakness and Infectious Diseases,” Confronting Poverty, Ch. 6
C. Pascual and C. Graff, “Conclusion and Policy Implications,” in Confronting Poverty, Ch. 7

Oct. 22 – Multilateralism and International Security I – The Role of the UN
Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Ch. 1-6.

Recommended
P.W. Singer, “Outsourcing War in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2005, 119-132.
Congress of the United States (110th Congress), Report on Blackwater, Oct. 1, 2007.

Oct 29 – Multilateralism and International Security II – Peacekeeping
Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War On war. Chs. 7-12.

Recommended
W. Andy Knight and Randolph B. Persaud, “Subsidarity, Regional Governance, and Caribbean Security,” Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 29-56.

Nov 05– Security and the Politics of Identity I
David Campbell, Writing Security. Introduction and Chs. 1-5.

Nov 12– Security and the Politics of Identity II
David Campbell, Writing Security. Ch. 6-8 and Epilogue.

Nov. 19- Humanitarian Intervention
Gregory Reichberg and Henrik Syse, “Humanitarian Intervention: A Case of Offensive Force,”Security Dialogue, Vol. 33, No. 3.
Mohammed Ayoob, “Third World Perspectives on Humanitarian Intervention and International Administration,” Global Governance, 10, 2004.

Recommended
John Orme, “The Utility of Force in a World of Scarcity,” International Security, 22:3, Winter 1997-98, 138-67.

Nov. 26 – Class Debate on Security and Exam review

Dec 03 – Exam – In Class.

Prof. Randolph B Persaud blog

International Relations – Brief Notes For Students

Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Ideology, socialization and hegemony in Disciplinary International Relations’ International Affairs, January 2022.

Abstract

Article Contents

Ideology, socialization and hegemony in Disciplinary International Relations

Abstract

Knowledge production and hegemonic socialization

Theory, policy and purpose

Empire, imperialism and the emergence of a discipline

Global white supremacy as International Relations

Socialization of Disciplinary IR after 1945

Conclusions

Footnotes

Author notes

Randolph B. Persaud, Race and racism in International Relations – Talk presented to University of Kentucky. Hosted by the Department of Political Science

Robbie Shilliam, Race and Racism in International Relations: Retrieving a Scholarly Inheritance

Randolph B. Persaud, Postcolonialism, Race, and International Relations in the Age of Racial Populism

Walter Rodney and the Struggle for Justice – With Dr. Randolph B. Persaud; Dr. Patricia Rodney; and Dr. Robbie Shilliam

Randolph B. Persaud and Jackson Yoder, HUMAN RIGHT – WHICH HUMAN;WHAT RIGHTS? BIOPOLITICS AND BARE LIFE IN MIGRATION AND COVID-19

City University Of London Series – The International System of Power. featuring Randolph Persaud (American University, Washington DC); Michael Cox (LSE) and Leonardo Ramos (PUC, Brazil)

Randolph Persaud. Human & Global Security, School of International Service, American University