The Pragmatarian Style: Environmental change, global health, and Gro Harlem Brundtland’s Nordic Internationalism

Book chapter, forthcoming in Scandinavian Humanitarianism in the 21st Century: Do-Gooders at the End of Aid, Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée & Kristian Bjørkdahl (Eds).

Through an exploration of the international career of Norway’s former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, this chapter examines the emergence of a style of internationalism that we might call “pragmatarianism”. As a political style, pragmatarianism can be compared to the political styles of Hofstadter’s (1964) account of the paranoid style in US domestic politics. What prompted the paranoid style, for Hofstadter, was a sense of dispossession: be it earlier incarnations in the 19th century, which saw illuminism, masonry, and Catholicism as threats to an imagined prelapsarian image of American life; or the mid-20th century form that most interested Hofstadter, which was animated by what US conservatives in those years perceived as the national treachery committed by immigrants, cosmopolitans, communists, and the intellectuals who for many conservatives combined those various traits. In developing his argument Hofstadter borrowed loosely from clinical psychology. My aim here is to borrow loosely from his political insights in turn, and to suggest that paranoia need not be the only psychological or social basis of a given ‘style’ in politics. Indeed, the pragmatarian style, as I outline it here, belongs more properly on the political (social democratic) left. But in place of treason as the favored enemy motif one finds instead the moral vacillation and ignorance of mankind at large: waiting to be fixed by the technocrats and the doyens of market signaling.

How to Have Theory in a Pandemic

Book chapter, forthcoming, co-authored with Tim Brown, Stephen Taylor, Kerry Holden and Sydney Calkin

In the months since the arrival of COVID-19 the question has been posed, in the words of Paula Treichler, of whether it is possible to have theory in a pandemic. What can scholars schooled in the deconstructive arts say at this point? With this question in mind, this chapter considers Treichler’s chronicling of HIV/AIDS, as well as Priscilla Wald’s account of the so-called outbreak narrative, and explores how their rendering of parallel pandemics might help us in our reading of COVID-19. Drawing on these authors especially, we encourage geographers, writing in the interdisciplinary space that we inhabit, to raise critical questions about the uneven geographies of the pandemic. COVID-19, perhaps more than any recent outbreak of infectious disease, has been framed by discourses that make much of common responsibilities and in particular of national collectives. Such a collective response has helped to save lives, particularly in countries that acted swiftly and decisively: “go hard, go early” in the words of New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. Yet at the same time it is necessary to consider the narrative framing of this pandemic alongside the material realities and situated politics that shaped peoples lives before, during, and no doubt, after, its arrival. For as the burden of this disease is mapped and disaggregations of which communities, classes and social groups have been most affected become available, it is equally clear that we are not all “in this together”.

The Legitimation Crisis of the Liberal International Order

Book chapter, forthcoming in Juliano Fiori et al, Amidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the end of Liberal Order

The international order constructed after World War II set out to promote and protect “liberal” values. Free enterprise was to be underpinned by strong property rights, the sovereign integrity of national states was to be upheld by international law, and rules-based international institutions were devised to govern these political and economic relations. Yet as numerous critics have pointed out, the liberal order that resulted always turned more on the “order” part than on its ostensible “liberalism”. And when push came to shove, as often it did during the Cold War, it was international authority – and US hegemony, at the centre of this system, in particular – that mattered more than any counterpart commitments to human rights. Arguably, therefore, the liberal international order has never been either as liberal or as openly internationalist as its proponents like to claim – even during the post-Cold War years of the so-called “democratic peace” when a “real new world order” of transnational cooperation fluttered briefly in liberal international thought. But rather than critique liberal internationalism for what it is not, or for what it has failed to be, I want in this chapter to take the normative aspirations of liberal internationalism at face value. In particular I want to enquire into the roots of liberalism’s “vision” for the world in the post-1945 era. Doing so opens up a rather different vista onto the present crisis of the liberal international order: one focused less on what has risen to “challenge” it in recent years (to wit a now lengthy literature on the rise of illiberal democracies and the decline of multilateralism) and more on the contradictions and tensions that emerged within liberalism as it engaged with a changing world around it.

Global Public Investment: a preliminary sketch

Revue d’économie du développement (2020) 27 (2): 169-201

Over the past decade a growing body of work has begun to engage with the task of rethinking development finance for the 21st century. In a field dominated by innovative finance and sector-specific proposals, this paper sets out to consider the case for a more structured system of international fiscal allocations: Global Public Investment. The core characteristics of Global Public Investment are its potential to enhance the supply of public goods, services and infrastructure globally, through raising each year a nominal, fixed portion of national income as GPI funds and re-allocating those marked funds on a per-capita or other needs-indexed basis. In such a scheme all countries would pay in according to ability and receive according to need and all would have a fair share in negotiating contributions and priority-setting alike. The paper begins by overviewing four historical dynamics presently bringing the seven-decades old system of ODA to an end and examines whether GPI represents a feasible means of addressing the problem of “the end of aid” (Severino and Ray, 2009). It then considers what such a system of structured international public finance would focus on before turning to examine some of the critiques and challenges that any form of statutory international public finance must address. The second half of the paper outlines how a system of GPI might possibly work in practice before turning, finally, to consider the cen- trality of social cohesion to this vision. The potential role of GPI in enhancing social cohesion is considered in relation to increased cooperation, democratic engagement, and social productivity. 

Inequality and Democracy

Review of Social Economy (2020) 78 (2): 185-202

In this response I reflect on the contributions of the recently published report of the International Panel on Social Progress. I focus in particular on the Report's treatment of the relationship between inequality and democracy: the proper subject of chapter 14 in Part II of the report, but also a central concern throughout the entire Report. I begin by setting the Report's arguments more fully in the historical context of the past few decades, and specifically the post-70s era. I then interrogate in more detail the relationship between liberalism and democracy, before examining each of three key themes raised by the report: the domestic challenges posed by economic inequality to political pluralism; the relationship between the state and globalisation; and the extent to which current institutional arrangements of liberal democratic systems articulate and safeguard the basic values and moral principles of democracy. I conclude by looking forward.

Whose World, Which Inequality?

Public Lecture, Aarhus University, September 2019

Inequality is the defining issue of our time. Yet in part because it has become so central to contemporary politics, exactly what inequality “is” often gets assumed rather than asked. The end result sometimes generates more heat than light. This is a serious problem in an era when the most pressing challenges before us, be it climate change or international migration, can only be solved to the extent we also reckon effectively with the inequality in which they are set. In this lecture, rather than ask how political thought can illuminate inequality, I shall therefore take the opposite approach, and explore some of the ways in which inequality illuminates the history of political thought. To do this I will examine how global inequality has been understood in different times and different places, and end with the question: whose inequality gets to count?

Reimagining Peace through Social Justice in mid-late 20th Century Europe.

Book Chapter (under revision)

The history of peace offers a window onto the mid-twentieth century European world in transformation. A product of its time, postwar European peace research linked developmentalist concerns with de-colonisation and economic underdevelopment at the global scale to more locally-attuned sensitivities towards patriarchy in the domestic realm and relations between the classes publicly. Historically located both after the great postwar pursuit of peace through economic growth and internationalisation (whose crowning achievement was the EEC) and before the ‘upwelling’ of the Euromissile peace movements of the 1980s, one particular strand of peace research soon became a philosophy and an ethic of social justice all of its own. This was what came to be known as “positive peace”. Gandhian in its insistence that peace must be brought about by peaceful action alone, Anglo-American in its commitments to social scientific method as the appropriate means, positive peace nonetheless took route in the Nordic reaches of Europe, as a means of hitching social democratic commitments to more radical and utopian calls for social justice at all political scales. Positive visions for peace provided, during these years of international encroachment and domestic upheaval across the continent, a distinctive vision of social justice centred upon society in its fullest imagining, as well as a means of trying to achieve it. 

Reflections on Canguilhem

Public Remarks at the launch of “Canguilhem” by Stuart Elden in Cambridge

This is an essential book about a hugely important thinker. Reading it one is immediately reminded of the sheer scope of Canguilhem’s work and its three cardinal axes – the relationships between biology and philosophy, between history and epistemology, and between ideology and science. Canguilhem invariably thought in dualities such as this: it’s just one of the things to come out of Stuart’s book so strongly. I was also reminded of what a brilliant aphorist Canguilhem is: “‘It is as if each society had “the mortality which suited it”,” as he writes at one point.* Or elsewhere: “Epistemology is a rigorous description of the process by which truth is elaborated, not a list of final results.” In my comments today I’ll speak loosely to these three relationships in his work, and I’ll do so by bringing into our conversation something of the biographical and spatial aspects that I think make Canguilhem of wider significance in today’s world.

*About Halbwachs (1966: 103), cited in Fassin, Another Politics of Life is Possible.

Humanitarianism as Liberal Diagnostic

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (3): 418-431

What is humanitarian reason? Images of catastrophe and the suffering of distant others form an important part of the contemporary western imagination. Such images trace the geography of an uneven world at the same time as they assert the moral and political horizons of liberal forms of care towards it. Drawing upon Foucault's notion of political rationality, I revisit the emergence of this distinctively liberal moral geography to show how a modern form of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2011) developed in concert with the rise of capitalism and the liberal state. In particular, I explore the processes that, during the course of the long 19th century, invoked both a market‐driven moral economy and a state‐driven political morality within humanitarian endeavour. The final part of the paper then applies these reflections on humanitarianism's past to its much‐debated present. I move away from what is sometimes a rather binary focus on humanitarianism as a problem of Western intervention in other spaces to draw attention instead to its strategic function as a ‘liberal diagnostic’: a recursive moral practice that helps constitute a liberal politics as much as it projects that politics onto other people and places. I sketch out the implications of this by examining some of the ways that contemporary humanitarianism fulfils this role with respect to issues of global order and capital accumulation.

An Incorporating Geopolitics

Geopolitics 18 (1): 198-224

With Europe’s borders seeing greater refugee flows than in many decades the question of how borders are managed has become of th utmost importance. nowhere is this more true than at the Southern ‘maritime’ border between the EU and North Africa. To examine this border regime, I undertook research on the history of the European Border Agency, Frontex. The work of such agencies is often understood as part of a wider rubric of security or even economic imperative. Rejecting both approaches I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, I posit the idea that such an incorporating geopolitics is today replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – the trade-off between free trade and tightened security – with a more fundamental contradiction: because the more that the work of bordering gets out of control, the more it undermines the societies that borders purport to protect.

Sovereignty, law and pharmaceutical provisioning

Counter Vitalities Workshop (Yale) Under Revision.

In this paper I examine how aspects of patent law and innovation are given shape in the world, not just in relation to wider political economies but in relation to the politics of law and their attendant moral economies. Moral economies are not found but made. We need to complicate our anthropologies with more of the historical longue durée to properly recognize this, I think, and I want to suggest one way of doing that in his paper. The paper centres upon a landmark Supreme Court ruling that took place in India from 2009-12, a ruling which was itself the culmination of a series of longer-running struggles. I want to read this ruling, in essence an act of (re)writing an emergent part of the global regulatory architecture that shapes the wider global health landscape, as part of a wider counter-movement (in Polanyi’s terms) against the hegemony (in Gramsci’s terms) of Global Pharma. By working through some of the issues at stake in this case, I want to unearth a series of questions about the law while also broadening out and complicating of our sense of the different political scales within which these legal struggles are embedded. I start by introducing the case itself before moving intomy own encounters with it and then out into some of these wider histories and geographies that revolve around it. 

Our Humanitarian Present

Society & Space 31 (4): 753-760

Humanitarianism has become such a central feature of international politics over recent decades we are in danger of taking it for granted. It is timely, then, that over the past year what will surely number among this field’’s defining monographs have also been produced. Empire of Humanity, by the American political scientist Michael Barnett, offers what historian Bertrand Taithe describes as ““the political history against which every other account of humanitarianism will have to be measured””. In Humanitarian Reason the French medical anthropologist Didier Fassin offers, by contrast, a Foucault-inspired account of the form of power/knowledge which lies concealed within humanitarianism’’s will to care. And in The Least Of All Possible Evils, the Israeli architect and social scientist Eyal Weizman turns the houses of both reason and morality against themselves to explore the violence that is too regularly, and too knowingly, unleashed in the name of saving lives.

Security or Development?

Security Dialogue 42 (1): 97-104

What is a nexus? And why does this one - the security-development nexus - matter? In this response to an essay by Maria Stern and Joakim Öjendal (2010) I develop an alternative ‘mapping’ of the development–security nexus in order to explore one or two alternative avenues their productive approach might be taken in. Their piece reveals (and develop) what Chandler (2007) has elsewhere argued: that the nexus is in effect a hollow signifier capable of carrying any number of meanings, and that this capacity is maintained through its (paradoxically) attaining the veneer of a stable and uncontested notion. Such dissection is an undoubtedly important task, from which follows what Foucault would call both critical and effective possibilities (Dean, 1994). Such a mapping as Stern and Öjendal offer is a more critical approach than earlier, more user-focused attempts to ‘map the landscape of the development and security agenda in order that it might be navigated better’ (Waddell, 2006: 531). But, in its focus on primarily the discursive realm, it still says relatively little about the underlying cartographies of power that inform such mappings and that help determine what effects those readings have. Moreover, it treats the act of conceptual ‘mapping’ as one primar- ily of uncovering the presence of different points of view occurring within the same epistemic space of the ‘nexus’ so as to reveal their inconsistencies, and it is my contention that a critical map- ping can go further than this. Indeed, it may well need to. As it stands, Stern and Öjendal’s approach to mapping the nexus may actually (and unintentionally) reinforce the way that the nexus serves the interests of power.

On Žižek on WikiLeaks

Antipode 44 (1): 1-4

How does truth speak to power? In a recent (2011) account of WikiLeaks, written in the London Review of Books, Slavoj Zizek argues that predominant portrayals of WikiLeaks – from left and right respectively –have presented it either too straightforwardly as an act against secretive governments and organizations in support of the freedom of information, or too pejoratively as a terrorist attack on stable international relations. Both views are wrong, he says. The latter is wrong because it falls back on Leo Strauss’s elitist view of democracy: that those in power should rule, aware of the actual state of things while feeding the people fables to maintain their ignorance and accord. The former is also flawed, because the real struggle is within WikiLeaks itself: between “the radical act of publishing secret state documents and the way this act has been reinscribed into the hegemonic ideologico-political field by, among others, WikiLeaks itself”. The problem here isn’t so much a question of corporate collusion, he says (referring to the five papers granted exclusive deals to publish the documents) but because it means that Wikileaks must also play the role of manager of secrets – “a ‘good’ secret group attacking a ‘bad’ one”; it presents a framing of power at the top being held accountable by those who ‘take the power back’ at the bottom. If we settle for such a framing of Wikileaks, then the one thing that goes unchallenged, Zizek says, is power (or the dominant form of power) itself. 

Writing the Land

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (3): 365-369

Peter Hulme’s ‘Writing on the land’ offers a critical literary account of the imagination of Cuba’s geography. Hulme’s particular focus is to account for how the geography of the nation – its landscapes, its territory and its people – has been represented and reworked in a variety of forms through metaphors relating to place. At the heart of this is recognition of the fact that, as Louis Pérez Jr puts it, metaphors ‘have consequences’: political as much as epistemic (Pérez 2008, 14; see also Kaplan 2003; Livingstone and Harrison 1981). Since, in recognising this, Hulme directs his attention to also understanding their tenor and resonance in different contexts, I will focus my reply upon two lines of thought that his paper suggests to me might be fruitful to develop. My comments relate first to what we might think of as the geopolitics of metaphor and second to the relationship between spatial metaphors and historical amnesia.

The Territorial Trap

Geopolitics 15 (4): 752-756

In this introductory essay to a special issue re-examining John Agnew’s concept of the “territorial trap” I summarise and review recent work by geographers and others on the history of territory and sovereignty. The idea of the territorial trap was first written about by Agnew in an article in the journal Review of International Political Economy in 1994. As stated there, Agnew developed the idea in order to draw attention to three assumptions common to a good deal of international relations and international political economy writing: first, that national spaces are fixed and secure territorial units of sovereign space; second, that domestic and foreign spaces are distinct and separable spheres; and, third, that the territo- rialised sovereign state is the appropriate container for society. Agnew did not then, nor in subsequent reiterations, suggest that territory, or the parceli- sation of land into territorial units, was unimportant. Rather, he argued that the way in which societies coalesce into national units of considerable ter- ritorial fixity was not inevitable and it should not form the only normative basis for our understanding of the relations between and within national states.

Life, Luck and the Human Condition

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (3): 554-574

This was the essay, co-written with the brilliant Gerry Kearns, that introduced the notion of vital geography. As we wrote there: life has been problematized anew by recent social change and scientific innovation. There are important and little studied geographical dimensions to any such understanding of “the politics of life itself,” however. A geographical perspective involves, first, highlighting the spatial aspects of both states and capital, two rather neglected dimensions of vital politics. Elaborating the geographical constitution of vital politics entails further describing the related powers of knowledges and practices. Reflecting on the geographical dimensions of longevity and health leads directly to a recognition of the ethical implications of the geographical luck of birth and residence. Taking up this ethical challenge requires specifying at least six components of geographical justice: culpability, fairness, care, state failure, human rights, and solidarity with environmental and social justice.

Ghosts of Guantanamo

London Group of Historical Geographers (under revision)

There is a sense in which the two principal forms of state power – sovereign power and governmentality – run alongside one another while nevertheless tending to remain distinct.  My hypothesis in this paper is that there are times when the boundary between these two forms of power blurs somewhat. In a classic formulation of sovereign power, Michel Foucault states that “the objective of the exercise of power is to reinforce, strengthen, and protect the principality, but with this last understood to mean not the objective ensemble of its subjects and the territory but, rather, the prince’s relation with what he owns, with the territory he has inherited or acquired, and with his subjects” (Foucault, Governmentality, in his course on Security, Territory and Population, p. 205). Under this formulation, the exercise of state power required a constant work of clarification, definition and determination of the sovereign’s relation to its subjects. Such a power takes its ultimate form in the ability for the sovereign to execute violence: both domestically by means of legitimate violence over one’s subjects; and abroad, by means of the ability to wage war. Governmentality stood apart from this. Foucault refers to it as: “The tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led toward the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline and so on) of this type of power resulting on the one hand in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges”(Governmentality, in his course on Security, Territory and Population, p. 220). In this paper I want to examine whether the case of Rasul v Bush represents a shift in the way that state power is exercised with respect to territory: one in which by combining certain aspects of sovereign power and governmentality, the exercise of power comes to be seen less as a work of clarification, definition and determination and more a work of effacement, diffusion and disassociation.

Exceptional Sovereignty

Antipode 39 (4): 627-648

Does Guantanamo Bay really lie beyond the scope of international law? Or the many other sites that comprise that modern incarceral archipelago: the global rendition programme? The answer seems clear today but was far less apparent when I wrote this essay on Guantanamo and the (re)colonial present: and it was what I set to uncover. The US government has presented Guantánamo Bay to the world through the lens of “exceptional sovereignty”, I wrote then. This argument holds that international law does not apply at Guantanamo because while America has “complete authority” over the base “ultimate sovereignty” rests with Cuba. Many accounts rightly critical of the abuses of power taking place at Guantanamo similarly understand it as something wholly abnormal—a literal “non‐place”. But in falling back on this argument both the American position and many of its critics have tended to “black box” what is taking place within the camp. In this paper I suggest that we ditch any sort of critique that says Guantanamo is somehow outside of the law and instead replace this line of argument with a critical history of the deployment of a particular sort of Executive power there. From this perspective, Guantanamo is better understood as a rather more normal part of the current imperial moment and connected up in various ways to American imaginations and materialisations of power. As a way of exploring some of these connections in greater detail, I examine the construction of Guantanamo as a particular sort of social space by drawing upon the accounts of those who have been there: former guards, detainees and their defence lawyers.