Tag Archives: IR Theory

IR Theory, Podcast

Episode 29: The Iranian Nuclear ‘Crisis,’ with Hal Tagma and Paul Lenze

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Welcome to another episode of Fully Automated!

With the inauguration of Joe Biden just around the corner, many are pondering what new approaches his team might bring to US foreign policy. Despite President Trump’s penchant for bombast and bellicose rhetoric, it can’t be gainsaid that his reign has been more or less dovish in comparison to those of his more recent predecessors. One huge exception to this rule, of course, has been Iran.

Early 2020 US forces assassinated the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Then, in November 2020, we saw the assassination of military scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — a hit apparently green lit by Trump himself. In response to this latest provocation, the Iranian parliament introduced a law that will require Biden to renew the Iranian nuclear deal, or JCPOA, effectively within a month of taking office. The law also requires Iran to produce at least 120 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium annually. What does it all mean? On the one hand, as former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter has been arguing, Iran’s response has been remarkably calm. The amount of higher enriched fuel to be produced is still very low, arguably not for military purposes, and is “in conformity” with the limits proscribed under the JCPOA. Nevertheless, as Ryan Grimm reports, even on the way out the door, the Trump Administration has been plotting military strikes against Iran.

To discuss the current situation, and the release of their new co-authored book, Understanding and Explaining the Iranian Nuclear ‘Crisis’: Theoretical Approaches (Lexington: 2020), our guests for this episode are Drs. Hal Tagma and Paul Lenze Jr. Tagma is Assistant Professor at the Department Politics and International Affairs, at Northern Arizona University, where he teaches Middle Eastern politics, the political economy of international conflict, and critical approaches to international relations theory. Lenze Jr is Senior Lecturer in Politics, also at Northern Arizona University. He teaches International Relations and Comparative Politics with a focus on Civil-Military Relations, Middle East politics, and US National Security. Lenze can be reached on Twitter @DrPaulELenzeJr

This is a rich book, which I think will appeal both to IR theorists, and those looking to gain a sense of the debates around US-Iran relations. On the one hand, it contains a rich meta-commentary on contemporary IR, and the theoretical possibilities it contains for dialogue between its various theoretical paradigms. Second, its a very detailed and reasoned analysis of the state of US Iran relations, and the idea that there is a ‘crisis’ (and what it even means to speak of crisis).

Before we get started, the authors make strong claims in the book in favor of what they term eclectic pluralism, and they are critical of the idea that there is only one truth, or one story to be told, about International relations. That might seem to imply they see all truths in IR as somehow equal or equivalent. Nevertheless, as you’ll hear, the book is doesn’t hesitate to land some punches. In the chapter on Marxism and World Systems Theory, for example, they write that, from the perceptive of Marxism:

Modern academic Realism is a superstructural tool that legitimizes and naturalizes the exploitative and violent polito-economic order of global capitalism. Modern academic Realism is not outside of history nor is it ‘timeless wisdom.’ Instead, Realism is caught up in constructing the violent, capitalist World-System that it is hopelessly trying to make sense of.

Thanks for listening. We don’t ask for any financial support, in bringing you this show. But if you like what you hear, please leave a kind review on your podcast app. If you have any feedback, you can DM us @occupyirtheory on Twitter and Instagram. Thanks!

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Academic Commentary, IR Theory, Podcast, Strategy

Episode 23: Coronavirus, Catastrophe & Agamben, with Garnet Kindervater

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This episode is about the biggest story of the decade so far, COVID-19, or the coronavirus. But its also an episode with someone I’ve been wanting to have on the show for a long time, Garnet Kindervater.

Before we get started, just a few observations about the politics of the coronavirus itself. I don’t know if its fair to say viruses have a politics, but their human victims certainly do. And, as some of you may have been following, we’ve seen a big debate break out this week over a piece on the virus by Giorgio Agamben. Garnet and I don’t talk about Agamben in this interview. At the time of recording, we were only just becoming aware of this debate. But I want to talk a little bit about it before we get started, as I think its relevant to the interview you’re about to hear. Continue reading Episode 23: Coronavirus, Catastrophe & Agamben, with Garnet Kindervater →

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IPE

Episode 18: Science, Technology & Art in International Relations, with Anna Leander

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Hey everyone, and welcome to a very special episode of Fully Automated. Why so special? Well, because this is our first ever joint episode! We’ve teamed up with the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (or STAIR) section of ISA, for the first of what we hope will be a series of collaborations on the politics and economics of science and technology (and art!) in global affairs.

Joining me as a co-host on this episode is Stéphanie Perazzone, who graduated recently with a PhD in International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID). Stéphanie is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), the University of Antwerp. She is working on a Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research project entitled “Localizing International Security Sector Reform; A Micro-Sociology of Policing in Urban Congo.” She is also the Communications Officer for STAIR.

Our guest for this episode is Anna Leander, the winner of the 2018 STAIR ‘Transversal Acts’ Distinguished Scholar Award. Anna is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, with part-time positions also at the Copenhagen Business School. She is known primarily for her contributions to the development of practice theoretical approaches to International Relations and for her work on the politics of commercializing military/security matters. According to her bio, she is “focused on the material politics of commercial security technologies with special emphasis on their aesthetic and affective dimensions.”

In the interview, Stéphanie and I invite Anna to reflect on a number of the topics she has taken on, in the course of her career. One question of interest is the influence of Pierre Bourdieu on her thinking, especially concerning the role of symbolic power in reproducing systems of political violence, and the political value of reflexivity as a precursor of resistance. We also ask her about her work on the increasingly overlapping relationship between the commercial and the technological, and her thoughts on methodology in relation to studying this and other recent trends and developments in the security world.

Listeners interested in following up on Anna’s work might want to check out some of the following articles, which all get discussed to some extent in the interview:

  • The Paradoxical Impunity of Private Military Companies: Authority and the Limits to Legal Accountability. Security Dialogue, 41(5), 467–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010610382108
  • Ethnographic Contributions to Method Development: “Strong Objectivity” in Security Studies, International Studies Perspectives, Volume 17, Issue 4, November 2016, Pages 462–475, https://doi.org/10.1093/isp/ekv021
  • The politics of whitelisting: Regulatory work and topologies in commercial security. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(1), 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815616971

Thanks for listening. As ever, if you have any feedback, you are welcome to connect with us on Twitter @occupyirtheory. And the STAIR section can be reached @STAIRISA

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European Union

Episode 15: Brexit Revisited, with Lucian Ashworth

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This episode is the second in our Brexit series, and we are joined by Lucian Ashworth, Professor of International Relations at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and author of the influential text ‘A History of International Thought’ (Routledge, 2014).

Back before Christmas, in Episode 14, we heard Lee Jones offer what was perhaps not exactly a ‘Lexit’ (or ‘left exit’) position on Brexit, but nevertheless a progressive position very much in favor of a full Brexit. At the core of Jones’s arguments was, I think, the view that the EU is an essentially anti-democratic and unreformable project. The only way to address the problem, he claimed, was to restore British sovereignty. In this sense, Jones was critical not only of the deal Theresa May proposed, last December, but also the position of the Labour Party, with its now infamous six tests — that is, essentially, the idea that whatever deal the UK should pursue, it should be one that results in the “exact same benefits” as as those currently enjoyed by the UK, as a member of the Single Market, but with special additional provisions, including “fair management of migration.”

Since we spoke to Jones, there have been a number of important developments, but little by way of clarity as to how the drama will end. On January 15, in the greatest parliamentary defeat of any PM in British history, the British Parliament rejected Theresa May’s deal. Since then, following the terms of the so-called Brady amendment, passed on January 29, she returned to Brussels in order to try to negotiate “alternative arrangements.” She plans now to present her new deal to Parliament on March 12, just two weeks before the deadline March 29. This is very close to the wire, but May hopes to be able to get the EU to budge on the backstop — something she must do, if she is to persuade Tory Eurosceptics to support her plan.

In this episode, you will hear Ashworth engage with a number of Jones’s key points, including the ‘WTO rules’ issue, the importance of not overstating the power of the Far Right in Europe, and the history of reactionary politics, on the British left. But Ashworth’s core arguments stem from his concerns about the future of the Irish border, and the unacknowledged costs of a return to the fantasy of ‘the sovereign people’ — especially in an era where complex global flows of capital have made it harder and harder for the Left to leverage the state, as it pursues its mission of defending labour and democracy, from the interests of the global financial elite.

Importantly, this episode with Lucian Ashworth was recorded on February 16. Due to technical issues, it wasn’t ready for broadcast until today, February 28. This delay does not significantly effect the value of the interview, since our discussion focused mainly on the historical context of Brexit, and abstract questions about globalization, and its complex consequences for our traditional models of politics and economic life.

That said, it is worth mentioning that on Tuesday, February 26, Theresa May announced that, should her deal fail to pass the house, she is going to allow a vote on an extension of Article 50. The pressure is on, however, as we have also begun to see rebellion breaking out, and the creation in Parliament of a new ‘Independent Group,’ composed of rebels from both Labour and the Conservatives. Corbyn, for his part, announced his support for a second referendum — putting before the people a choice between whether to remain in the EU, or to pursue Labour’s alternative vision of a Brexit deal, which includes a permanent customs union.

If you have any questions or comments about the show, you are welcome to reach out to us via Twitter: @occupyirtheory — equally, feel welcome to leave us a positive rating on iTunes, or your favorite podcast software.

Thanks for listening!

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IPE, IR Theory, Podcast

Episode 12: Marxism in IR, with Maïa Pal

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Our guest for Episode 12 of Fully Automated is Maïa Pal, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. Among other things, Maïa is a scholar of early modern European history, focusing on the colonial origins of the modern state. She is an editor for Historical Materialism. And she is currently working on a book project, entitled Jurisdictional Accumulation: an Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (forthcoming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). You can find her on Twitter @maia_pal

This episode represents the third installment in our occasional series, on Marxism in International Relations. Previous guests in this series include Bryant Sculos (Episode 9), on the the topic of Marxist pedagogy, and Kevin Funk and Sebastian Sclofsky (Episode 10), about the sorry state of Marxism in IR, and in Political Science more generally. In this episode, however, Maia helps us begin to think about what it might mean to apply Marxism, in IR.

I invited Maïa on the show after I read her recent piece, Introducing Marxism in International Relations, in e-IR. In this piece, she argues that the contribution of Marxism in IR is to reveal what other, less critical approaches may contrive to hide. That is, how many concepts we normally take for granted in IR, like the international itself, can distract us from analyzing the social relations that comprise them, and the history of the material conditions that shape those relations, in turn.

As we discuss, some of even the most critical scholars in IR eschew Marxism because they fear it constitutes a kind of dogmatism. In the interview, however, you’ll hear Maia refer to a letter that Karl Marx wrote, to Arnold Ruge, in which he states:

“But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.”

So, in this spirit, Pal outlines for us what we might perhaps want to call a relentless Marxism — one unafraid to examine itself, and its own suppositions about the world.

As Maia says in the interview, the function of Marxism in IR is to challenge and destabilize many of the concepts it cherishes, and which might appear otherwise stable to the scholar: not just the division between the national and the international, but that of the political and the economic. Marxism, Maia suggests, shatters the “linear progressive narrative of the history of international relations,” as a discipline, and opens us up to the possibility of a much more messy and brutal history; a history of empire, and imperial conquest!

We covered A LOT of ground in this interview, and the result is a slightly longer episode than usual. But I hope you’ll stick with us to the end. Later in the show, you’re going to hear us talk about some of the implications of Maia’s work for the left today: whether or in what respects can we say the state in globalization still has political capacity, and how might the left conceive of this capacity as it grapples with the question of anti-capitalist strategy; and how debates about xenophobia among the working class and so-called ‘deplorables’ can overlook not only the nuances of working-class electoral preferences, but can distract us from thinking about the ‘normal’ racism of the state as it works to categorize migrant populations as undeserving of access to wealthy zones and spaces, within globalization.

Towards the end, we’ll also chat about what its like to be an editor with a left-academic journal like Historical Materialism, and get a little bit into the rationale behind the journal’s latest issue, on identity politics. Finally, we get into Maia’s current book project, and why she believes that Marxists need to pay more attention to the significance of ‘jurisdictional accumulation’, both in the pre-history of capitalist globalization, and as a specific condition shaping the play of global capitalist dynamics today.

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