Statecraft and the State
Reading this post reminded me that I had thoughts, a year or so ago, about the disconnect between how the academic literature breaks down the state and the way that policymakers consistently seem to fail to understand that other states have domestic politics. In particularly, I was frustrated by the belief, apparently endemic to the US pundit and strategic class, that authoritarian states don’t operate under domestic constraints, and consequently can do whatever they want. It’s not quite right to say that academy has figured out how to successfully integrate domestic politics into theories of foreign policy behavior, but we’ve certainly worked on the question. The policy community, however, seems almost utterly uninterested in this literature, to the extent that “well, Ahmadinejad/Putin/Chirac/Chavez/Milosevic/Calderon/Netanyahu/Kim could comply with our demands, but his domestic coalition would almost certainly fracture, and it’s tough to expect leaders to do things that will lead to their downfall” becomes a repetitive refrain.
Then it occurred to me that hey, I teach in a policy program, and I can teach pretty much anything I want for my elective, so better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Accordingly, last spring I taught Statecraft and the State, a course geared towards breaking down the idea of the unitary nation-state, of understanding the state as one actor within society, of appreciating the role of domestic politics in foreign policy, and finally applying these insights to Iraq and Afghanistan. I ran the course as a seminar, with a student leading discussion each week.
We started off with what I took to be the basics, including Weber’s Politics as a Vocation and Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States. The former lays out a basic definition for the state, while the latter gives a good account of how the state moved from being one coercive actor among many to becoming the central purveyor of societal violence. I included the Geary as a useful corrective about the myths behind nationalism, as well as the development of modern nationalism; I considered going with Benedict Anderson, but thought that he was a touch too academic for the course. In retrospect, I probably should have just gone with the Anderson.
The heart of the course was the combination of Joel Migdal and James Scott. Migdal places the state as an actor within society, one purveyor of “narratives” within many. The state can’t simply do what it wants; it competes with other actors in order to provide services and communal understanding. In order to reinforce the idea that the state and the State are different things, we then moved on to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. The students loved Scott, but I think that it ended up being just a little bit too powerful for the course. The students did a good job with Scott, but from that point forward interpreted everything within the context of his argument about high modernism. The Migdal, on the other hand, didn’t catch on nearly as well, and the Migdal is pretty important to tempering our understanding of Scott. This is to say that discussion became a little bit too state-focused, and not enough society focused.
We then moved to some works that straddled the academic policy divide. On the academic side, we read Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire and Robert Putnam’s the Logic of Two Level Games. The latter was my concession to the 50% or so of our program that deals with economics and trade policy, although the concept works with any negotiation. On the policy side, we read the Beginners Guide to Nation-Building, which was really a guide to state building. This was written as a template for US foreign policy agencies to approach state-building in places like Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s an interesting, readable document that crystallizes many of the lessons learned over the last fifteen years. It also suggests just how terrible the US approach to state-building has really been.
The Iraq and Afghanistan sections both went pretty well. I had not previously read Charles Tripp, and found his History of Iraq an absolute gem, especially for this course. He takes what amounts to a state and society approach, discussing in depth the relation between the Iraqi state and the various vested interests in Iraqi society. We also read Ali Allawi’s The Occupation of Iraq, which is a crushing narrative of the various failures of the US occupation that also focuses on state and society. For Afghanistan the Robert Crews edited volume had some quite good articles on the rise of the Taliban and its statecraft, including a nice discussion of the reasoning behind the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan; the author argued that Al Qaeda pushed for the demolition in order to drive a wedge between the Taliban and the international community.
Altogether I think that the course worked, although if I teach it again I’ll make some changes. I would have liked to devote some attention to Iran, not because I suspect that my students will soon be nation-building there, but rather because it’s the focus of international coercive efforts and because its internal politics are of great consequence for those efforts. Unfortunately, I probably won’t teach the class for a few more years. I’d be interested in hearing alternative approaches to the same subject, however. I’m also curious whether anyone else has ever developed a class entirely in response to a pet peeve.
I’m also curious whether anyone else has ever developed a class entirely in response to a pet peeve.
I taught a course on the history of U.S. conservatism, but I’m not sure that’s exactly a pet peeve ;-)
I just misread the title of the post as “Starcraft and the State.” Still a nice post, but damn.
Hehe. Me too. Now if only you could find a way to use Starcraft as a teaching tool. Hmmm.
As a grad student in IR at top department, I’ve been wanting to teach an undergrad seminar entitled “Stop Drinking the Kool-Aid: Theories of IR Where Our Faculty Are Not Key Players” – it would cover defensive realism, neo-classical realism, Constructivism, and the English School…because it really is amazing how some of the undergrads finish a class with certain faculty members and then think the world has been scientifically proven to work in exactly the way the prof’s book theorizes…
Guess I might have to throw some philosophy of science into the course as well…
This is both very funny, and rather sad.
When I was first hired at my school, I was seen as an advocate for a particular theoretical perspective. I soon inferred that my colleagues assumed that I would be pushing that perspective on my undergrads and grads, rather than simply exposing them to different kinds of arguments and working them through salient assumptions, benefits, and problems.
I found this puzzling, until I figured out what some of my colleagues do in their own classes.
Yes, Scott can be overwhelming. You wouldn’t think a discussion of Prussian forestry would be so compelling, but there it is.
I have a particular love and weak spot for Snyder, especially his discussion of blowback — which I think is sort of the political science equivalent of sexual selection. That is, it’s a feedback mechanism that can lead to astonishing grotesqueries (beetle horns and peacocks’ tails) in a relatively short period of time. I did my masters’ thesis on blowback in the internal politics of Imperial Japan; I ended up liking Snyder a lot, but wishing he’d gone further.
Doug M.
A different field, but I teach a history of science and religion class mostly because I was annoyed about the way people dealt with creationism.
I strongly recommend Richard H Grove’s Green Imperialism, and for a course that Farley would like to teach, it teaches a history of the beginings of technocratic governance from the perspective of environmental, forestry, water management concerns.
I always include a section on why psychological egoism is bollocks in my ethics class. I think that must be close to 50% pet peeve.
I never really taught a ‘class’ but I did give tutorials under the Oxford system for the standard IR course. I started each student off with a standard spiel about what I referred to as the IR ‘guild’ and its often ridiculous attachment to theory, the lesson being ‘this may be a grossly simplified and often distorted way of talking about social reality, but its what you need to write about in the exam if you want to do well.’ The non-falsifiability of neo-Realism was a topic raised by a lot of my students, to which the response was invariably ‘it sure is, and that should tell you something about its value as a theory, but lets get back to the exam shall we?’
If you’re interested Rob (and I’m sure you’re not) I’m currently finishing up my doctoral thesis on the bilateral relationships between Russia and the major post-Soviet states. My main argument is that traditional IR perspectives are quite insufficient for explaining the policy outcomes we’ve seen during the Putin era. I attempt to explain them using a framework I call ‘post-Imperialism’ – basically arguing that the normative, social, economic and cultural links fostered by Empire have had a much greater effect in influencing relationship development than the literature appreciates.
Whenever I go over to Britain I am impressed by the caricatured way in which people talk about “neo-realism,” and how proponents of what are (by the same standards) completely “non-falsifiable theories” seem to think this is a devastating attack. Then I realize that the problem is a kind of self-perpetuation of distortions, enabled by a tutorial and PhD system that fosters (at all but a handful of schools) intellectual silos rather than broad knowledge of the field.
That being said, your dissertation sounds pretty interesting. I assume you’ve read Alexander Motyl’s Imperial Ends, Alex Cooley’s Logics of Hierarchy, and other work that touches on cognate issues?
And, despite the utter obnoxiousness of the first paragraph, your supposition is almost certainly correct and it is one that most Russia hands just kind of assume to be true. But it does deserve theorization within the context of the (1) new wave of work on empire and (2) various postcolonial theories.
Ouch – didn’t mean to be obnoxious, and sorry if I did. I should have been more clear. I try to teach the students that the various schools of IR thought are very useful lenses for the analysis of various problems, and that different lenses are useful at different times and you shouldn’t get too attached to any particular one (which often happens at Oxford.) In any case, I have the greatest respect for IR theory and theorists, just not the dogmatism that a lot of people attach to it.
I certainly have read Motyl, though not Cooley (I’ll be sure to grab a copy before I leave this town.) Motyl’s hub and spoke model forms a big part of my basic framework.
Anon gets it right, I was referring to my own obnoxiousness.
Probably repeating homework you’ve done, but other uses of Motyl-esque hub-and-spoke system analysis of empires include Ikenberry, Nexon, and O’Reilly. You’ll find Cooley’s work interesting as it becomes clear that the rimless hub-and-spoke model is very similar to the Williamson M-form organization.
And what anon says about Popperian falsification below is dead on.
Meh – I thought your fetishizing of falsifiability was more obnoxious than his diagnosis of problems with PhD systems. P.o.S. has gone a long way past Popper, and while falsifiability is one important issue in social science, non-falsifiability is not an immediate disqualification. I think Elster’s mechanisms approach is one of the best introductions of ways to get past that particular stumbling block: if someone’s father is an alcoholic, that could be used as an important part of the explanation for why the child grows up to be an alcoholic or a teetotaler. While at first this sounds like a replay of the Marxist theories Popper was challenging by insisting on falsifiability, Elster makes us think more critically about varying responses to identical stimulants/catalysts.
Also, I tend to find formal modelers to be less falsifiable than most neo-Realists – often their models are normative models that are never actually shown to be relevant to particular cases.