Dissent! Dissent on the pirate blog!

As the Great Howard-Jackson Academia Debate of 2009 shows (see here and here and here and here and even here), a good knock-down, drag-out battle of hearts and minds makes for fascinating reading, so I've decided to drag some more controversy aboard the pirate blog by taking another PhD'ed scholar to task. This project and I thrive on dissent, discussion, and debate, so lest a reader be inclined to think that the whole wide world endorses our non-traditional research inclinations, I thought I would post a critique of the methods of discourse analysis from Janice E. Thomson's Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-building and extraterritorial violence in early modern Europe. Thomson's book deals with the fundamentally constructivist problem of how the system of state sovereignty that realist theorists treat as an exogenous assumption was, well, constructed:

If all of these boundaries are contested and contingent, the question is, How are they produced and reproduced such that they appear permanent, fixed, and natural? Why do we think we know what sovereignty is? Put differently, how are Ruggie's 'hegemonic form of state/society relations' or Ashley's 'hegemonic exemplar' of 'a normalized sovereignty' constructed? (18)

Thomson recognizes that sovereignty is variable, social, and contingent (12-13) but rather than treating discourse as a constitutive site of sovereignty, she discounts it entirely as such:

Textual (intertextual, contextual) interpretation, discourse analysis, and other deconstruction methods are not the necessary or only alternative. It is not clear that these methods will generate a 'productive' research program in the Keohanian sense ... Moreover, by adopting such unconventional methods, critical theory allows or forces mainstream scholars to dismiss postmodernism based on its research designs, methods, and data. It hardly helps matters that much of postmodernist discourse is opaque (thus, largely meaningless) to ordinary international relations scholars ... Beyond this, the postmodernist focus on discourse poses the danger of diverting attention from the reality of state power to the discourse about it. States are now massive, physical, bureacratic, and coercive institutions that have been developing for some six centuries. While postmodernists are surely right to claim that discourse is the deployment of power, it is implausible to argue that the exercise of power in this form is of central importance to, much less decisive in, world politics. Discourse may contribute to the construction of the state but I am not convinced that the state might be fundamentally altered if the discourse on the state changed or that it would vanish if we stopped talking about it. (161)

These are pretty damning charges that strike at the heart of our research project, especially given the overlap between the construction of sovereignty and the construction of pirates, that Thomson herself observes and analyzes (hence the book's title). My response* to this footnoted assault on my summer's work, then, is four-fold:

1. Thomson questions whether discursive analyses can generate a productive research program, citing Robert Keohane's critique of reflectivism in "International Institutions: Two Approaches." However, Thomson herself, writing in 1994, dismisses this critique on empirical grounds in an earlier footnote, noting that "this charge is unfair to the extent that these scholars have spawned the deconstructionist project in international relations" (160). Fifteen years later, the empirical argument against claims of "no research agenda" is even stronger. IR scholars such as Jutta Weldes, Charlotte Epstein, Neta Crawford, and Janice Bially Mattern have written post-structuralist analyses that explicitly focus on discourse and rhetoric using a coherent and rigorous --if unapologetically non-positivist -- methodology. The theory and methodology informing such works present an implicit research model, and in Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War, Lene Hansen offers an explicit description of how to conduct quality discourse analysis research. Works like Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea's Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn represent contemporary attempts to develop a set of serious guidelines around which to orient such textually focused research methods.

As for Thomson's charge that such "unconventional" methods force mainstream scholars to dismiss such research, again, that is a norm that is changing, and articles such as the extended exchange in International Studies Quarterly between Robert Keohane (!) and J. Ann Tickner (see here and here and here and here) indicate that conventional scholars are indeed seriously engaging with non-mainstream methods, even as they critique them.

Next, it is unclear to what extent Thomson herself follows a clearly defined "productive" research program. Her rejection or realist and liberal assumptions about sovereignty puts her squarely outside the realm of mainstream IR theory, and her use of an interpretive institutionalist "protoparadigm" (14) seems open to much the same critique that she levels at postmodernism.

2. Thomson states that postmodernist discourse tends to be incomprehensible to IR scholars. First of all, the arguments above about how unconventional methodologies are theories are becoming increasingly conventional applies here. Second, I would suggest, that this is a relatively silly, red herringish, reason to dismiss such methods. I'm sorry they are difficult to understand, but a methodology that dismisses parsimonious covering laws is bound to be a bit complicated. I'm sorely tempted to say that this criticism has nothing to do with the merits of postmodernist methods, but I'm afraid it would be obnoxiously hypocritical to exempt postmodernist discourse from a critique of postmodernism. A better response is that every discipline has its vocabulary and Thomson's book -- particularly her theory and method chapter -- would be quite difficult to the policy-makers whom she briefly addresses in the final chapter (151-152) if they had no knowledge of academic IR theory. The best response would be to not prejudge the question; we have no intention of gratuitously using esoteric academic jargon -- from any discipline -- in our paper and to the extent that we do, we intend to clearly and concisely define our terms (or at the very least, present an argument for why we don't).

3. Thomson's argument that focusing on discourse about power takes attention away from "the reality of it" is powerfully discounted by every one of the rhetorically-focused constructivist authors whose theory and methods we draw upon in our research. Such authors argue that discourse and policy are mutually constitutive: that there is no brightline between discourse and reality. In "Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric," for example, Ronald Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson outline a particular mechanism (that of rhetorical coercion) by which state power can be discursively deployed. Further blurring the putative line between rhetoric and reality, Jutta Weldes explains how official discourse shapes the national interest and creates the conditions of possibility under which force can and cannot be deployed:

Drawing on and constrained by the array of cultural and linguistic resources already available within the security imaginary, state officials create representations that serve, first, to populate the world with a variety of objects, including both the self (that is, the state in question and its authorized officials) and others ... Second, such representations posit well-defined relations among these diverse objects. These relations often appear in the form of quasi-causal arguments such as ... the domino theory ... Finally, in providing a vision of the world of international relations— in populating that world with objects and in supplying quasicausal, or warranting, arguments— these representations have already defined the national interest.

Weldes argues that examining state discourse helps understand why claims about national interest and threats to state power are believed and thus legitimate state action, using the discursive construction of the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba as a "crisis" as a case study. In a similar tradition, Janice Bially Mattern makes the case in Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force that language power is every bit as "real" as military strength and that representational force (what she calls a "threat of potential violence to the victim's subjectivity") can coerce "real" state action just as effectively as the traditional mechanisms of power politics. Specifically, she argues that the mechanisms of language power and rhetorical links between concepts like "betrayal" and "Dulles" made it impossible for the US to intend to use force against British cooperation with the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

Arguments like these demonstrate that discourse is indeed deeply relevant and even decisive in the exercise of world politics. To bring the discussion back to pirates, the fact that the United States can call the Somali hijackers "pirates" makes possible and rules out specific military and non-military reactions to what can be constructed as a threat. It's not as simple as labeling anyone the Navy SEALS want to snipe as a "pirate" -- prior understandings of the word determine whom we can label as a pirate -- but the deployment of the term itself does legitimate "real world" responses.

4. Thomson's final point here is that nothing would change if we altered our discourse on the state and the state would not vanish if we stopped talking about it. In response to the first half of the statement, the above argument applies fairly well. Again, because our use of discourse analysis rests on intersubjective understandings of various rhetorical commonplaces, we are not making the argument that a change in discourse can cause a change in state (or non-state) identities. The causal relationships we are analyzing are not one-directional independent-variable/dependent-variable type mechanisms. Rather, they deal with conditions of possibility and contingent configurations: because we understand a "pirate" to be someone who hijacks ships in international waters (to use a crude definition) based on a series of historical experiences, we can then deploy the term "piracy" to what we understand some Somalis to be doing in the Gulf of Aden. Then, because the term "piracy" carries with it a history of sanctioned state responses, we can respond "appropriately."

Thomson is correct; a deliberate and unilateral (or, I would argue, exclusively academic) change in state discourse -- in and of itself and devoid of the social context that gives it meaning -- would not inevitably change our understanding of the state. But, a change in the discourse about states that resonates with the public or that makes use of rhetorical coercion or deploys representational force -- such a shift in discourse could well change our understanding of states. States, to misquote Wendt, are what states make of them, but states cannot be made infinitely many things.

Thomson's claim that the state would not vanish if we stopped talking about it is a similar sort of perversion of (our flavor of) constructivist thought. It's a silly argument, because in today's political and international context we could not just decide to stop talking about the state. That's why all this constructivist talk of context and intersubjectivity matters; the state-based international system may be a social construction, but, as Thomson notes, we function as though it were real. Discourse does not independent produce or cause the state any more than the state independently produces or causes discourse. Discourse and the state exist only in relation to each other.

Epilogue: Finally, Thomson is correct that the knee-jerk reaction to the label of "postmodernism" by a certain, often generationally-defined, segment of academia (my father, for example) tends to be outright dismissal. Indeed, by labeling all textual and discursive analyses as postmodern, Thomson herself manages to confound theory and method and throw baby and bathwater out the window. Discourse analysis, of course, is a methodological tool that can be used to serve different theories and what Catherine and I are doing is actually constructivist rather than postmodernist in intention, to the extent that our concern lies much more with explicating contingent conditions of possibility and turning points than with revealing hidden structures of violence. But that would have been the easy response to all this and sometimes my own buried identity as a policy debater with eightminutestofillwithrapidfirespeechandnodroppedargumentsontheflow is revealed (I had to work very hard not to type TURN! before the third paragraph of subpoint 1) ...

*Maybe a footnoted methodological criticism doesn't really deserve an extended line-by-line rebuttal. On the other hand, maybe it really, really does. I adhere to the latter position. Additionally, I expect this will come in handy for our lit review.