Anti-whaling pirates

Whales and whaling seem to have worked their way into our project in a variety of subtle ways this summer, beginning back in May with our theory and methodology reading, when we read Charlotte Epstein's The Power of Words in International Relations: The Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse. This book is not only an excellent example of how to conduct a discourse analysis in International Relations, but also examines what James Rosenau would call a "genuine puzzle": how the anti-whaling discourse became dominant and created normative changes that then made certain national and international policies possible.

We ran into whales again in Mystic Seaport (after we had finished our time in the archives) where we watched a video on whaling practices explained through passages from Moby Dick (a significant work in the construction of the anti-whaling discourse for the way in which its representation of whales creates a distance between actual whales out in the ocean and the whale in the story -- a narrative reappropriated by anti-whaling activists) and handled a bronze whaling gun:
However, perhaps the most interesting pirate-whaling link we've come across has been the appropriation of pirate imagery and identity by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the organization featured in Animal Planet's popular show Whale Wars (a connection we found out about from this Foreign Policy photo essay). Apparently some members of this society have taken it upon themselves to harass Japanese whaling vessels which they believe to be whaling for commercial rather than research purposes (though they would clearly object to the latter as well). This show is of note, first of all, for the extent to which it vividly illustrates Epstein's thesis about the "real-world" power of the anti-whaling discourse and the construction of (disputed) political space for non-governmental environmental actors. It's hard to see the same show being made with another environmental discourse (I can't see the Environmental Liberation Front's burning down of a Colorado ski lodge to save lynx habitat mobilizing quite the same level of enthusiasm), and even more challenging to envision a non-environmental non-state illegal group garnering such wide-spread popularity.

But, an even more interesting twist (at least from the standpoint of our research), involves the deliberate appropriation of the pirate identity by the Sea Shepherds. Faced with accusations of piracy by Japanese whalers, Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson asserted his pride in being a "pirate of compassion" in an op-ed published in the Guardian. The op-ed is worth reading in full, but several points jump out.

First, Watson deploys the "pirate as (national) hero" commonplace that enjoyed great popularity in the early 18th century with English descriptions of Captain Morgan and again in the early to mid 19th century in American representations of John Paul Jones and, later, Jean Lafitte. Indeed, these are the pirate heroes that Watson cites:

At least proper piracy has a long list of renowned and admirable practitioners: John Paul Jones, who founded the navies of both the US and Russia; Jean LaFitte, who stood with General Andrew Jackson in defence of New Orleans; and Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, knighted by Elizabeth I. I stand in honourable company as a modern-day pirate, though I've not shot anyone, burned any ships, looted any cargos or kidnapped anyone.

Watson's grasp on history is tenuous (he denies the British Navy had anything to do with the suppression of 18th century Caribbean piracy, attributing it instead to Henry Morgan), but his strategic deployment of the same pirate-legitimating commonplaces used centuries ago is quite interesting to observe.

Second, having made note of the pirate imagery used by the Sea Shepherd and Whale Wars, I was intrigued to read about both the deliberately defiant way in which it was deployed and also the popular appeal it lent to the Sea Shepherd's controversial cause:

My ship, the Steve Irwin, does fly a modern version of the Jolie Rouge, the original name of the banner that evolved into the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger. We decided years ago that if people were going to call us pirates, we would adopt our own version, and designed the crossed Neptune trident and shepherd's staff with the skull.

As soon as we hoisted that black flag, kids from around the world began to write to us in support. Our Jolly Roger hats and shirts have become our most popular merchandise. Why? Because there is a romance associated with piracy that is separate from the reality. Some pirates were noble heroes and some were dastardly villains. It's all a matter of perspective. If you love whales, we be heroes; but if you eat whales then we be pirates.

Finally, the introductory paragraphs of Watson's op-ed suggest he is aware of just how persuasive the popular imagery and language of pirates can be in summoning up enthusiasm:

Shiver me timbers, boys and girls, we is awash in a sea of pirates down here in the Southern Ocean and it's time for a parley to do a little 'splaining on the subject. This ocean now rivals the 17th century Caribbean for reported acts of piracy. The only thing lacking is the Sea Shepherd member Orlando Bloom.

Japanese whalers are accusing the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace crew members of being pirates. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace are accusing the whalers of being pirates. The whalers and Greenpeace are accusing Sea Shepherd of being pirates. The Japanese government is throwing the word piracy about as freely as the governor of Jamaica once did.

No one has sunk any ships, looted any cargos, kidnapped any damsels (just a couple of blokes) or forced anyone to walk the plank yet - but listening to the rhetoric, the public could be forgiven from thinking these activities are ravaging the Southern main.

That the deployment of pirate rhetoric is being used to legitimate (some) illegal non-state actions in the 21st century is a striking illustration of the extent to which the pirate discourse has shifted throughout history. That the deployment of the same word -- and some of the same commonplaces -- would, at the exact same time, be used to delegitimate other illegal non-state practices (most notably Somali piracy) indicates that, like Epstein, we too have an IR maritime puzzle to explain.

(Photo from: http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/uploads/sea_shepherd_in_hobart_dec_06.jpg)

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.