The document provides an overview of David Campbell's work on security studies and foreign policy. It discusses how the US has historically defined security threats as representing disorder that challenges the state's identity and organization. These threats are often portrayed as foreign or morally depraved. The document also examines how the definition of threats has evolved over time through policy documents to target new enemies like communism, drugs, and immigration.
The issue of world order is central to an understanding of international politics. The shape of world order affects both the level of stability within the global system and the balance within it between conflict and cooperation. However, since the end of the Cold War, the nature of world order has been the subject of significant debate and disagreement. Early proclamations of the establishment of a 'new world order', characterized by peace and international cooperation, were soon replaced by talk of unipolar world order, with the USA taking centre stage as the world's sole superpower. This 'unipolar moment' may nevertheless have been brief. Not only did the USA's involvement in difficult and protracted counter-insurgency wars following September 11 strengthen the impression of US decline, but emerging powers, notably China, started to exert greater influence on the world stage. The notion that unipolarity is giving way to multipolarity has, moreover, been supported by evidence of the increasing importance of international organizations, a trend that is sometimes interpreted as emerging 'global governance'. Of particular importance in this respect have been the major institutions of global economic governance – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization – and the centrepiece of the global governance system, the United Nations. Although some argue that the trend in favour of global governance reflects the fact that, in an interdependent world, states must act together to address the challenges that confront them, others dismiss global governance as a myth and raise serious questions about the effectiveness of international organizations.
The issue of world order is central to an understanding of international politics. The shape of world order affects both the level of stability within the global system and the balance within it between conflict and cooperation. However, since the end of the Cold War, the nature of world order has been the subject of significant debate and disagreement. Early proclamations of the establishment of a 'new world order', characterized by peace and international cooperation, were soon replaced by talk of unipolar world order, with the USA taking centre stage as the world's sole superpower. This 'unipolar moment' may nevertheless have been brief. Not only did the USA's involvement in difficult and protracted counter-insurgency wars following September 11 strengthen the impression of US decline, but emerging powers, notably China, started to exert greater influence on the world stage. The notion that unipolarity is giving way to multipolarity has, moreover, been supported by evidence of the increasing importance of international organizations, a trend that is sometimes interpreted as emerging 'global governance'. Of particular importance in this respect have been the major institutions of global economic governance – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization – and the centrepiece of the global governance system, the United Nations. Although some argue that the trend in favour of global governance reflects the fact that, in an interdependent world, states must act together to address the challenges that confront them, others dismiss global governance as a myth and raise serious questions about the effectiveness of international organizations.
African perspectives on Africa-Europe relations
Geneva Centre for Security Policy, European Training Course in Security Policy
Dr. Damien Helly
Policy Officer, ECDPM
19 March 2014
The English school of International Relations ibrahimkoncak
This presentation is about the English School of International Relations Theory, presented in class as lecture to the BA students of International Relations.
International relations represent the study of foreign affairs and global issues among states including the roles of the states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non- governmental organizations (NGOs), and multinational corporations (MNCs). It is both an academic and public policy field, and can be either positive or normative as it seeks both to analyze as well as formulate the foreign policy of particular states. It is often considered as the branch of political science.
Apart from political science, IR draws upon such diverse fields as economics, history, law, philosophy, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology and cultural studies. It involves diverse range of issues including but not limited to: globalization, state sovereignty, ecological sustainability, nuclear proliferation, nationalism, economic development, global finance, terrorism, organized crime, human security, foreign interventionism and human rights.
With the coming of the new millenuim, the entire world has entered the globalized age, which is characterized by the US global power leading the world after the fall of the ex- USSR. The emergence of globaization rose several questions about the role of the US: Is it acting in favor preserving the world cultures, or trying to model the world according to the US Western and liberal values? This; in fact, has paved the way to rise of such theories, expliaing that the US has enetered a new phase of conflict which is basically cutural in order to survive and promote its cultural values.
This presentation is made by Samin VossoughiRad. American University for Humanities- Tbilisi campus
The security Dilemma is the them of the presentation and it has been explained exactly why states goes to war
African perspectives on Africa-Europe relations
Geneva Centre for Security Policy, European Training Course in Security Policy
Dr. Damien Helly
Policy Officer, ECDPM
19 March 2014
The English school of International Relations ibrahimkoncak
This presentation is about the English School of International Relations Theory, presented in class as lecture to the BA students of International Relations.
International relations represent the study of foreign affairs and global issues among states including the roles of the states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non- governmental organizations (NGOs), and multinational corporations (MNCs). It is both an academic and public policy field, and can be either positive or normative as it seeks both to analyze as well as formulate the foreign policy of particular states. It is often considered as the branch of political science.
Apart from political science, IR draws upon such diverse fields as economics, history, law, philosophy, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology and cultural studies. It involves diverse range of issues including but not limited to: globalization, state sovereignty, ecological sustainability, nuclear proliferation, nationalism, economic development, global finance, terrorism, organized crime, human security, foreign interventionism and human rights.
With the coming of the new millenuim, the entire world has entered the globalized age, which is characterized by the US global power leading the world after the fall of the ex- USSR. The emergence of globaization rose several questions about the role of the US: Is it acting in favor preserving the world cultures, or trying to model the world according to the US Western and liberal values? This; in fact, has paved the way to rise of such theories, expliaing that the US has enetered a new phase of conflict which is basically cutural in order to survive and promote its cultural values.
This presentation is made by Samin VossoughiRad. American University for Humanities- Tbilisi campus
The security Dilemma is the them of the presentation and it has been explained exactly why states goes to war
A brief survey of the European/American Enlightenment, from the Locke/Hobbes debate through Rousseau, and some of the greatest hits in between (Voltaire, deism, Diderot, Encyclopedia, etc.)
The role of culture in decision/action models - Pt.12Larry Paul
This presentation looks at the role cultural traditions play in decision-making in soccer. It combines the work of E. Hall, B. Sutton-Smith and J. Boyd. Without these traditions decision-making cannot happen beyond the most basic levels and patterns.
The Sociological Imagination Chapter One The Promise C..docxjoshua2345678
The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within
their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often
quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by
the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up
scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain
spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats
which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of
continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and
the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a
worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person
is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new
heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a
store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both.
Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups
and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between
the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually
know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of
history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential
to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural
transformations that usually lie behind them.
Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a
pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes
as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly
becoming 'merely history.' The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is
transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful.
Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Re.
The Sociological Imagination Chapter One The Promise C..docxarnoldmeredith47041
The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within
their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often
quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by
the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up
scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain
spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats
which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of
continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and
the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a
worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person
is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new
heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a
store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both.
Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups
and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between
the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually
know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of
history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential
to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural
transformations that usually lie behind them.
Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a
pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes
as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly
becoming 'merely history.' The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is
transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful.
Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Re.
2. Overview
• Throughout its history the United States has faced a vast spectrum of
“security threats.”
– International communism, illegal drugs, indigenous
peoples, minorities, alternative ideologies
• Actors united in that they represent anarchy, disorder, uncleanliness, and
depravity that threatens survival of state identity and organization.
– Dependence on separation between “us” and “them.”
– Assignment of alien nature/foreign origin of threat.
– Emphasis on morality.
– Use of disease and contagion metaphors.
• Constant need to mobilize against ever-changing mosaic of
threats, (re)writing security needs through foreign and domestic policy.
– Evolution of classified NSC documents that reframed the Soviet Union from
limited to existential threat.
– Bizarre questions on INS documents.
3. Historical Foundations
• Relative decline of Christendom in late Middle Ages represented a crisis in
political identification and organization.
– Neither divine teleology (foundation of the declining Medieval system) nor reason
and rationality (foundation of the rising modern system) were sufficient to
maintain identity in the state.
– Need for “external guarantees” to replace the broken link between God and man.
• Use of danger in identity formation
– Emphasis on unfinished and endangered nature of the world established state as a
perpetually threatened guarantor of security.
– Gave populations an “us versus them” framework that defined them as citizens.
– As church promised salvation from an unredeemed death, state promised security
from a hostile world.
– Need for constant vigilance against internal and external threats.
• Central need to identify sources of otherness such as “dirt matter out of
place, irrationality, abnormality, waste, sickness, perversity, incapacity, disorder, ma
dness, unfreedom” in need of
“rationalization, normalization, moralization, correction, punishment, discipline, dis
posal, etc.”
4. Writing Security in the United States
• The American Jerusalem
– “Irish pretext,” which demonstrates Protestant treatment of any margin of difference as
otherness.
– Puritan notion that America was the fulfillment of prophecy and divine intent.
– Identification of Europe as corrupt and decadent.
– “Othering” of Native Americans and African slaves.
• The Communist Threat
– Communism’s challenge to private property rights makes it a challenge to American
distinction between “civilized” and “barbarian.”
• Precedes Soviet military capacity or international status.
• Echoes “myth of the frontier” that 1) establishes a space where civilization and
barbarity are in constant struggle and 2) claims Indians (or communists) had no
capacity for an individuated self.
– Metaphors of disease and contagion
– Constant need for policing (e.g. loyalty oaths, background checks,McCarthyism).
• Post-Cold War manifestations
– War on drugs, terrorism, illegal immigration, Obama-care.
5. Final Points
• Securitization is not a conspiracy or a power system maintained by
knowing elite, it is embedded in the pressures of the modern world and
functions invisibly.
• Writing Security doesn’t claim that all American security risks are
unreal, but rather that America is the “imagined community par
excellence” and as such is dependent on a discourse of danger to an
unmatched extent.
• The book calls on America to rethink its orientation to the world so it is
“not predicated on the desire to contain, master, and normalize
threatening contingencies through violence.”
7. Neorealism’s orrery of errors
• Statism
– Gives the state unquestioned metaphysical significance
• Utilitarianism
– Rational actors inhabiting a world of scarcity
– Power defined solely by ability to command resources
– No concept of social power behind or constitutive of states
– International order is derivative of state interactions (yet state cannot be defined)
• Positivism
– Metahistorical faith in scientific-technical progress that positivism itself cannot question
– Incapable of questioning historical constitution of actors; can only advise on efficiency of
means
– Theory disguised as method.
• Structuralism
– Atomism’s superficiality combined with structuralism’s closure condemns to surface
level of appearances.
– Metaphor of the self devouring snake (p 256)
8. The Ghosts of the Old Revolution
• Revisiting classical realism is appropriate response to neorealism, the
“grotesque mediocrity playing a hero’s part.”
– Neorealism is rooted in praxis and an understanding of the political scheme
– Hermeneutic (interpretive) framework
– More authentic interpretation of the balance of power
• Particularity of the universal – universal claims cannot rectify contrary points
• Universal of the particular – particularistic actions bear universal claims
• Classical realism balances these orientations, reflects reality that statesmen are in
an artful and strategic struggle to be empowered. Success is measured by their
ability to strike a “balance” among all aspects of power. Balance =national interest
– Power measured by propagation of its vantage point
• Yet, classical realism fails
– Immersed in tradition it studies, silent where the tradition is silent, unable to grasp what
threatens theory’s foundations, fails to learn from other theories
– May needs a dialectical competence model
9. “Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of
Difference: Critical Social Theory and International
Relations.” Jim George and David Campbell.
10. Critical Social Theory
• Critical social theory has emerged to challenge traditional understandings
– Wittgenstein – compromised link between language and objective reality.
– Winch – “practical wisdom” as complex, rule bound, culture specific set of practices that
identify what is normal and rational
– Kuhn – paradigm theory
– Habermas’s Critical theory – totalitarian potentialities of instrumental reason
– Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan – the rejected “Other”
• Postructuralism’s challenge to the tradition posits:
– Will to reason as will to power. Expects no distinction between truth and power
– Lack of objectivity in scientific inquiry
– Favoring of technical knowledge limits what we can understand of the world
– Realism blinds itself to change generated by dialectic of theory and practice
– Need exists to find voices that have been excluded from official discourse
– Need for the question “How have my questions been produced?”
– Potential exists to emancipate ourselves from the confines of traditional structures
• The Cartesian anxiety that we must have an ultimate foundation for our
knowledge or we are plunged into the void must be exorcised!
12. Significance of territory in the contemporary world
• Transnational microeconomic links becoming increasingly important.
– Orthodox IR theory denies the importance of this phenomenon
• Believe that because corporations, etc, aren’t substitutable for state they can’t cause
fundamental changes
• Realism and institutionalism are based in 18th century enlightenment constructions
• Territoriality is a modern way of fixing power, not a timeless one
– Systems of rule have existed without being embedded in territory
– Rise of the state was not a simple, direct political transformation
– Non-state structures, like the medieval trade markets, shaped destiny of feudal system
without being a replacement for them.
– Alternatives existed (e.g. city-states)
– Rise of state depended on social epistemology
• Use of grammatical “I” form
• Use of perspective in art
• State did not evolve, it was invented by modern Europeans
– Frequency of spaces where territoriality is” unbundled” (waterways, common markets)
– Reliance on territoriality is an impoverished way to treat our globalized, postmodern world.
13. “Why is There No International Theory?”
Martin Wight
14. Why is there no international theory?
• International theory, or speculation about the relations between
states, “doesn’t exist.”
– Pre-twentieth century literature on the topic is scattered, non-systemic, and mostly
inaccessible.
– Also repellent, intractable in form, and marked by intellectual and moral poverty.
• Dominance of state system has made IR into a subcategory
– Few true members of international society
– Resistance to notion of world state, favoring state system as necessary and natural
– Hard to discern international theory within major movements (e.g. Reformation, Communism)
• Most important reason- IR’s low susceptibility to progressive
interpretation
– International politics is realm of recurrence and repetition, necessary actions adapting to
crises
– Progressivist international theories have argument from desperation embedded in them
• “It is surely not a good argument for a theory of international politics that we shall be
driven to despair if we do not accept it.”
• Defeat is unthinkable because defeat would render history meaningless.
– Inverse relationship between international politics and international law.
• “It is surely not a good argument for a theory of international politics that we shall
be driven to despair if we do not accept it.”
• International theory is the theory of survival.
15. “Security Must Be Defended – Or, the Survival
of Security.” Nisha Shah
16. History versus genealogy in security studies
• Buzan and Hansen’s The Evolution of International Security Studies
explores development of ISS via relationship of knowledge & practice.
– Goal of equal representation across various approaches
• Equal representation problematized by evolution metaphor
– Foucault – Historical discourse modifies history
– Rorty, White, Nietzsche – metaphors create similarities, become canonical
– Evolution metaphor authors use orders ISS as field
• External (evolutionary) events whose significance is self-evident shape inquiry
• Preexisting meanings and implications conceal objects of inquiry from criticism.
– Example is 9-11. Event clearly happened but all its meaning is worked out in
advance and foisted on ISS. No interplay between scholar and event or
possibility of escaping predetermined categories.
– Contrary to author’s intentions, this approach favors (neo)realist interpretation of
security.
• Realism becomes the theory that organizes ISS, structures and organizes its
contents.
• Shah’s solution is genealogical counter-history.
– Genealogy preserves “radical incommensurability” between approaches.
17. “The (S)pace of International Relations:
Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed.” James
Der Derian
18. Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed
• Problematic of simulation, surveillance, and speed offer challenges to the
international system that is resistant to traditional modes of thought
• Simulation
– With hyperrealism, the model of reality (e.g. computer models and simulations)
becomes more real than the world it models.
– Simulations have the power to displace the “reality” they claim to represent.
• Simulation trained Navy personnel on U.S.S Vincennes shoot down an Iranian
airliner in 1988.
• Tom Clancy’s simulation novels rescuing the realist principle.
• Surveillance
– SIGINT has created a global panopticon
• System is beyond the reach of public and scholarly view.
• Continues both war and peace by technical means.
• Creates a cybernetic system marked by the symptoms of advanced paranoia.
• Speed
– Capacity of advanced weapons and surveillance systems has caused war to shift from
“space” into “time”
– Spectacle of war has been replaced by the war of spectacle.
20. Becoming an “avatar of the other”
• Der Derian claims Avatar is the “best anti-war movie of all time.”
– Repudiates the utility of war
– Reproduces how culture projects fears, flaws, and desires onto another, until only
violence can resolve escalating states of mimetic estrangement.
– Shows how war does irreparable harm to all sides of a conflict.
– Allows hope to triumph over violence when the hero is willing to become the avatar of
the other.
• Anti-war message in Avatar (and The Hurt Locker) is problematized by the
aesthetic glorification of war.
• Human Terrain, a documentary exploring COIN training that der Darien
was associated with, explored similar themes as Avatar, but the project
was transformed by the war death of a scholar who was also tied to the
project. The film changed:
– Triangulation between der Derian and other scholars (us), defense experts (them) and
the indigenous subjects (the other) shifted. Boundaries were blurred.
– Filmmakers lost distance they once maintained, became “avatars of the other” through
the loss of their friend.