What explains why some armed organizations engage in high levels of rape during civil war, while others engage in little? Why is gang rape such a high fraction of rape by organizations that do engage in widespread rape during civil war? What accounts for the participation in the rape of girls and women by female combatants in those organizations?
Dara Kay Cohen addresses these questions in her book.
H-Diplo Commentary by Philip Zelikow on “‘Documentary Evidence’ and Llewellyn Thompson’s Berlin/Cuba Assessment of Soviet Motives in the October 1962 Missile Crisis.”
In a favorable review of The Kremlinologist, the fine recent biography of the great American diplomat and Soviet expert Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson that was written by his daughters, David Foglesong added this curious cavil. “The Thompsons argue that the Cuban missile crisis stemmed from [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev’s seeing ‘an irresistible opportunity to use missiles to solve all his problems’—including Chinese criticism, Soviet military complaints, and East German instability, as well as Cuban vulnerability—even though they acknowledge that there is very little documentary evidence to support that thesis.”[1]
Article Review 107 on Tobias Theiler. “The Microfoundations of Diversionary Conflict.”
The theory of diversionary war posits that domestic turmoil creates incentives for leaders to distract their publics by initiating conflict abroad. The canonical example of such behavior is the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982 between Argentina and England, a conflict initiated by Argentina’s military junta while in the grip of an economic crisis, and which ultimately resulted in the junta’s demise when England defeated Argentina. The foundations of diversionary war theory rest on the conflict-cohesion hypothesis in sociology, which states that conflict with an outside group can promote cohesiveness within a group and increase support for the group’s leader. Aware of this phenomenon, insecure leaders can stir up these feelings by initiating conflict in order to preserve their reign. As the sixteenth-century political philosopher Jean Bodin put it, “[T]he best way of preserving a state and guaranteeing it against sedition, rebellion, and civil war is to keep the subjects in amity with one another, and to this end, to find an enemy against whom they can make common cause.”[1]
H-Diplo Roundtable XX-14 on When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War
More time has transpired between the fall of the Berlin Wall and today than the entire duration of that iconic Cold War barrier. Meanwhile, George H.W. Bush, the main subject of Jeffrey Engel’s When the World Seemed New, became the longest-living U.S. president, while there are undergraduates this semester who were born during the presidency of his son, George W. Bush. In short, this book can make a lot of readers feel old.
It should also makes us feel hopeful. “Tomorrow our children will go to school and study history and how plants grow,” President Bush said in his 1992 State of the Union address. “And they won’t have, as my children did, air raid drills in which they crawl under their desks and cover their heads in case of nuclear war.”[2] Scholars can forever debate the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War, yet one ought not lose sight of the fact that good and incredible things happened.
Roundtable 10-19 on American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security
It has become accepted wisdom in Washington, D.C., and among many international relations scholars, that East Asia is a region rife with geopolitical rivalry, and that the United States and China are destined for protracted great-power competition and perhaps conflict. In his newest book, David Kang offers a sharply contrarian viewpoint. He argues that East Asia is far more peaceful and stable than it seems, that China’s rise is not particularly threatening to most East Asian states, and that the United States will only find itself in an intense competition with China if it makes unwise policy choices that turn that danger into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The United States should, therefore, refrain from the temptation to double-down on its East Asian security commitments and efforts to check China’s rise; it should adopt a more restrained posture that minimizes rather than embraces great-power competition.
Roundtable 10-18 on Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
I suspect that most readers of this Roundtable, like our review Nils Gilman, will be “only dimly aware of Hans Speier.” I also suspect that, like Gilman and his fellow reviewers, readers will be interested to learn more about him. As Daniel Bessner explains in his intellectual biography, Speier is one of the lesser-known European intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany, having never taught in the major university or written much of note. Our reviewers agree with Bessner that he is nevertheless very interesting for his intellectual trajectory, the choices he made, and his role in the emerging national security state.
Article Review 106 on “The Other Hidden Hand: Soviet and Cuban Intelligence in Allende’s Chile.”
Kristian Gustafson and Christopher Andrew rightly state that the presence of U.S. intelligence during the Salvador Allende government is well known and well documented, whereas the role of Cuban and Soviet intelligence in Chile is understudied. Their article is a welcome publication for two reasons: an analytical one for presenting a study of Soviet and Cuban intelligence, and a methodological one for combining primary sources, especially Soviet archival records and written memoirs by key persons, and documentation about Cuba’s involvement and interviews of Cuban intelligence officers.
Article Review 105 on “The International Relations of Police Power in Settler Colonialism: The ‘‘civilizing’’ mission of Canada’s Mounties.”
The role of police institutions in transnational governance and economic development has become a site of intensive scholarly and policy debates, especially since the revitalization of counterinsurgency doctrine in the early twenty-first century as the crux of U.S.-led coalition actions in the so-called War on Terror. Some argue that public police ought to remain occupied solely with matters of ‘domestic’ law and order, sounding alarms about ‘mission creep’ and the inappropriate involvement of ‘civil’ institutions in ‘military’ interventions across ‘international’ boundaries, or the vice versa.[1] But research that exhibits a critical historiography of policing as an already global practice, and that explicitly recognizes and foregrounds the rise of police institutions in the context of imperial expansionism, colonial administration, and the rise of (neo)liberal political economic ideologies, belies any assumed bright lines between domestic-international and civil-military spheres of police influence and praxis.[2]
Roundtable 10-17 on The Cold War They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter
Within security studies, scholars have increasingly called for work that bridges the gap between academics and policymakers and that moves beyond milquetoast nods to ‘policy relevance’ at the end of journal articles, and instead ask that theorists engage directly with their policy counterparts. In this context, Ron Robin’s biography of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter provides a powerful account of how two scholars’ works on intelligence, uncertainty, and nuclear strategy influenced United States defense strategy, both during the Cold War and, through the lives of the Wohlstetters’s students, into the present day.
Review Essay 45 on Richard Ned Lebow, ed. Max Weber and International Relations.
Neo: Is that your point, Councillor?
Councillor Hamann: No. No point. Old men like me don’t bother with making points. There’s no point.
—Matrix Reloaded
At first, Max Weber and International Relations may be mistaken for a very 90s book. That would be unfortunate. Most of its contributors entered the field during the immediate post-Cold War ‘reflectivist’ uprising and like many of the revisionist engagements with the canon in the 1990s, this volume presents a rather unorthodox reading of its protagonist. And yet, in many respects, it goes well beyond that. In the 1990s, there was, for instance, something like a cottage-industry among doctoral students with ‘critical’ dispositions but no clear research questions: pick a ‘real classic’ casually referenced by an ‘IR classic’ and show how ‘IR classics’ got ‘real classics’ wrong. This rather elementary exercise was peppered with fancy jargon, but none of the sophisticated ‘-ologies’ could conceal the fact that decades later a significant part of that IR generation was as perplexed by the events ‘on the ground’ as were the mainstream theorists they once criticised.
H-Diplo | ISSF Review Essay 45
Richard Ned Lebow, ed. Max Weber and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781108416382 (hardback, $99.99).
Reviewed by Alexander Astrov, Central European University
Published 9 November 2018 | issforum.org
Edited by Diane Labrosse and Seth Offebach
Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Shortlink: http://tiny.cc/ISSF-RE45
Permalink: https://issforum.org/essays/45-Weber
PDF URL: https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/RE45.pdf
Neo: Is that your point, Councillor?
Councillor Hamann: No. No point. Old men like me don’t bother with making points. There’s no point.
—Matrix Reloaded
At first, Max Weber and International Relations may be mistaken for a very 90s book. That would be unfortunate. Most of its contributors entered the field during the immediate post-Cold War ‘reflectivist’ uprising and like many of the revisionist engagements with the canon in the 1990s, this volume presents a rather unorthodox reading of its protagonist. And yet, in many respects, it goes well beyond that. In the 1990s, there was, for instance, something like a cottage-industry among doctoral students with ‘critical’ dispositions but no clear research questions: pick a ‘real classic’ casually referenced by an ‘IR classic’ and show how ‘IR classics’ got ‘real classics’ wrong. This rather elementary exercise was peppered with fancy jargon, but none of the sophisticated ‘-ologies’ could conceal the fact that decades later a significant part of that IR generation was as perplexed by the events ‘on the ground’ as were the mainstream theorists they once criticised.
As a result, calls for abandoning excessive meta-theorizing and re-engaging with the ‘world’ are heard today from different quarters. In a way, Weber is a perfect candidate for studying how to do just that. After all, his theoretical sophistication notwithstanding, he cannot be accused of neglecting the worldly problems of his time and place. But then again, if re-engagement with the world is the issue, why address it by examining yet another ‘classic’ rather than the world itself? In other words, who needs another book on Weber?
One way of answering this question is by jumping to this particular book’s concluding chapter. There Ned Lebow and David Bohmer Lebow relay Hans Morgenthau’s conversation with Karl Deutsch in which the latter warned the former that it was “almost inevitable that his theory becomes ‘hard boiled’ in the hands of strategists… who know no history” (194).[1] If anything, Lebow’s volume places Weber in context, while taking measure of this context’s historical depth. More importantly, however, the history that thus provides a much needed background for theoretical discussions is not merely a history of Weber’s thinking. In some important sense, it is the history of the world. Or one particular facet of it, the one we routinely call (western) ‘modernity.’
Needless to say, one cannot expect any comprehensive discussion of modernity in a relatively small book focusing on selected aspects of Weber’s oeuvre. But this is where the book’s real strength comes through: it is exceptionally well thought through, focused and structured as a whole, and yet this structure is never allowed to turn into the infamous ‘iron cage,’ forcing each contributor to make the same point over and over again. In fact, there is no fixed point to be made, or discovered in Weber’s writings on this interpretation of those. Rather, there is a certain trajectory to be (re)traced, the one Weber himself lays out rather uneasily.
This trajectory invariably begins with Weber’s conceptualization of modernity as a polysemic experience, subdivided into various distinct realms, each governed in its peculiar way. Then comes Weber’s failure to sustain these clear-cut distinctions, together with his analytical rigour that does not allow him to take easy shortcuts and his ethical and political convictions that make capitulation impossible. Lebow chooses to define the resulting situation as “tensions” and identifies four of these: epistemological, sociological, political and tragic. (1-8, 172-95)[2] These four nodal points, in turn, provide the book with its structure.
This underlying structure is never advertised explicitly, but once it becomes clear, the choice of contributors appears only ‘natural.’ One would expect Patrick Thaddeus Jackson to focus on the ‘epistemological’ tension,[3] Stefano Guzzini – on the ‘sociological’ one,[4] with John Hobson adding historical and postcolonial dimension to it,[5] Jens Steffek – on ‘political,’[6] and Lebow himself – on ‘tragic.’ Yet, it is not that straightforward. The boundaries between ‘tensions’ are challenged and traversed, rather than established. Thus, Jackson’s discussion of Weberian ‘ideal types’ brings in sociology of knowledge and politics. Guzzini locates Weberian ‘international relations’ at the impossible and yet necessary intersection of two realms that are supposed to be categorially distinct: constitutive political ontology and explanatory theory of action. This particular transgression, in turn, becomes clearer following Lebow’s reconstruction of Weber’s intellectual context and Hobson’s dissection of his Eurocentrism.
It is fascinating enough to follow these reconstructions and dissections in detail, but perhaps even more interesting is their cumulative effect, which is best appreciated when looking at the volume as a whole: an appreciation of the fact that the ongoing drawing of meaningful distinctions – something every student of theory is supposed to learn, and not least from Weber – is bound to result in the recognition one’s own limitations. This is what Morgenthau defined as “tragic” in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics.[7] To understand politics, we need to grasp man in his complexity that goes well beyond his rationality. But to understand politics, we have no choice but to rely on reason.
Morgenthau’s refusal to see this ineliminable limitation as a mere ‘contradiction’ to be resolved one way or another is what sets him apart, according to Lebow and Bohmer Lebow, from other immediate students of Weber, both on the right (Carl Schmitt) or on the left (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer). But this is also where one could start raising questions about the limitations of Lebow’s own framework. For Morgenthau, ‘tragic’ is almost a characteristic of ‘political.’ For Lebow, the two are distinct, and yet related in a way that is somehow more significant than in the case of other ‘tensions.’ (173-7)[8] Why exactly remains unclear, mostly because, throughout the volume, both ‘tragedy’ and ‘tensions’ are used as metaphors rather than fully-fledged concepts. As such they still do an important and interesting job, but the reader is left with a feeling that both could be pushed further. For instance, in the direction of Michael Dillon’s early discussion of ‘tragedy’ by now significantly extended into the realm of biopolitics;[9] or that of Derridean ‘undecideables’ once explored by Jenny Edkins in relation to the ‘political.’[10] To be sure, this particular trajectory may be too postmodern for a volume dedicated to the exemplary modernist; and yet, by following it we may arrive at a better understanding of what exactly connects an exegesis of Weber to the world of today. Is it not the case, after all, that the frustrating breakdown of analytical distinctions so evidently on display throughout the volume matches the way in which the world itself is turning into a ‘zone of indistinction’?
Alexander Astrov is Associate Professor in the International Relations Department of Central European University.
©2018 The Authors | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License
Notes
[1] David Bohmer Lebow and Richard Ned Lebow, “Weber’s Tragic Legacy,” in Max Weber and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 194.
[2] Richard Ned Lebow, “Introduction,” in Max Weber and International Relations: 1-9; Bohmer Lebow and Lebow, “Weber’s Tragic Legacy”: 172-199.
[3] Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “The Production of Facts: Ideal-Typification and the Preservation of Politics,” in Max Weber and International Relations: 79-96.
[4] Stefano Guzzini, “Max Weber’s Power,” in Max Weber and International Relations: 97-118.
[5] John Hobson, “Decolonizing Weber: The Eurocentrism of Weber’s IR and Historical Sociology” in Max Weber and International Relations: 143-171.
[6] Jens Steffek, “International Organizations and Bureaucratic Modernity,” in Max Weber and International Relations: 119-142.
[7] Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946)
[8] Bohmer Lebow and Lebow, ’Weber’s Tragic Legacy’: 173-177.
[9] Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996)
[10] Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back in (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999)
