CSS Blog Network
While the merits of intervention on humanitarian grounds can be debated, the capacity of states to wage war is not limited to those occasions where it can be justified, on that basis or any. According to some observers, the first decade of the 21st century witnessed a reassertion — in places like Georgia and Lebanon — of this more old-fashioned form of intervention. This syllabus on military intervention more broadly will help keep you abreast of these less sanguine developments.
In his 2009 book Aesthetics and World Politics, Roland Blieker made some controversial observations. Traditional forms of IR theory, he argued, exhibit “a masculine [aesthetic] preoccupation with big and heroic events: wars, revolutions, diplomatic summits and other state actions.” This, he claimed, was “supplemented with the scientific heritage of the Enlightenment…[with] the desire to systematize, to search for rational foundations and certainty in a world of turmoil and constant flux.” As one form of representation among many, then, IR theory by definition has aesthetic commitments, but — preoccupied with the ‘scientific’ imperative of representing as ‘mimetically’ (and absently) as possible – it has usually been blind to them.
What then, we should ask, are these hidden aesthetic commitments? And what have been the consequences of hiding them? One way of getting at this is by considering the dominant spatial representations of the world—i.e., the world maps — with which traditional IR theory corresponds. A world map is a way of conceptualizing the human condition as a whole. Maps of the world may be especially relevant to the study of international relations because (as Chris Brown has written) the study of international relations seeks “to build theory on the broadest canvas available” – an orientation that is perhaps its distinctive feature.
Today’s world maps are romantic; they suggest that what matters are the big and heroic: mountains, oceans, deserts, cities and national borders. And, in faithful positivist fashion, they seek to represent as ‘mimetically’ as possible, specifying magnitudes for mountains and cities and proportionally representing their relative positions. Some of the nicer globes even try to make the mountains the right height. A cursory survey of surviving medieval mappa mundi makes for instructive comparison. Some such maps already focus on the big and heroic, but a key difference is the treatment of space: not exactly absolute and homogeneous when ships, Krakens and the like are the size of Great Britain; and imaginary, undiscovered, or theological places exist alongside real, known, sublunary ones. The influence of the pictures of the world furnished by our globes and global positioning satellites on the pictures of the world furnished by IR theory is perhaps too obvious — yet remains poorly understood.
This week the ISN takes on the following topics:
And in case you missed any of last week’s special coverage, catch up here on: advances in cyber-range capabilities; early signs of a Sino-Indian rapprochement; the special plight of girl soldiers; and Bolivia’s economic woes.
Google will expand its operations in Indonesia and plans to open a local office by 2012, government officials announced, after encouraging talks between the Indonesian vice president and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. The reasons for the investment are obvious: Indonesia is the largest and fastest growing online market in Southeast Asia, and its ‘bright and promising’ digital start-up scene is ready to take off.
In a blog I wrote for OSINTblog.org the other week I discussed the intelligence community’s preoccupation with Islamist political extremism. This preoccupation, I argued, is a manifestation of an obsession with global Jihad in academic discourse and open source intelligence (OSINT) gathering. I argued that, in the former case, this hampers academic progress and, in the latter, undermines security.
When intelligentsia and intelligence services speak of “terrorism,” it often carries the connotation of Islamist political extremism. However, as a couple of scholars with NUPI, an ISN partner, concluded in a report: although figures of speech contribute to the cognitive dimension of meaning by helping us to recognize the equivalence to which we are committed, cognitive shortcuts or ‘heuristics’, raise problems and do little to increase our understanding of terrorism as a phenomenon. In fact, cognitive shortcuts are counterproductive of why we study terrorism, namely, to enhance security.