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5o Encontro Nacional da ABRI Redefinindo a Diplomacia num mundo em transformação Belo Horizonte (MG), 29-31 Julho 2015. Área Temática: Teoria de Relações Internacionais CRITIQUE, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE TRADITION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY Natália Maria Félix de Souza IRI/PUC-Rio e PUC-SP Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission Abstract The paper will start an investigation on the role of critique in the history of international relations theory. It will do so by developing two arguments. First, the paper will address, along Foucauldian lines, what critique as a generalized practice distinct from philosophy might entail. Through this movement, the paper will argue that sustaining a “critical attitude” means not only understanding the epistemological aspect of critique, i.e. accepting the separation between noumena and phenomena, or the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to us; a critical attitude also involves a question of the production of subjectivity involved in the reflexive moment inaugurated by Kant, one which brings into question a problem of ethics and aesthetics. Far from trying to decipher this colossus that is Kant’s work, I believe Foucault may offer us a much more readable and interesting avenue for thinking through this aspect of critique, and inquiring the discipline of IR in its ability to account for it. Having delineated what this critical attitude means, the paper will briefly turn to the trajectory of international relations theory in order to understand whether its authors have been able to sustain a critical attitude in both its epistemological and subjectivity aspects. Specifically, the paper will engage the works of early IR theorists such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr in order to investigate how a certain critical attitude that was present in their political and academic positions was lost or diluted specially during the 1960s and 1970s, having an impact on the whole tradition of international relations theory. Keywords international relations theory; critique; subjectivity 2 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission Critique, Subjectivity, and the tradition of international relations theory Natália Maria Félix de Souza1 International relations theory today: between critique and crisis Recently, international relations theory has begun another concerted round of inquiries into its status as an academic enterprise, a body of knowledge with its ontological, epistemological and methodological commitments. This has been especially evident in two recent issues of important “critical” journals in the area – the European Journal of International Relations2 (EJIR) and Millennium: Journal of International Studies3 – which bring forth to the academic community a series of questions and discussions concerning the current practice of international relations theory4. The 2013 EJIR issue, enquiring about “the end of international relations theory?”, features contributions ranging from a multiplicity of conceptual positions – including well- known authors such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, David Lake, Christian Reus- Smit, Chris Brown, Stefano Guzzini, Christine Sylvester, Michael C. Williams, Arlene Tickner, amongst others. A range of other scholars further debated their articles during a Symposium promoted by the international relations blog “Duck of Minerva”5, broadening the debate among the academic community. At the center of EJIR’s provocations were questions concerning a possible state of “stagnation, crisis and end”6 of theory and theorizing in international relations, questions which seemed to be triggered by the end of the “paradigm wars” which characterized the so-called “great debates” in the discipline, a moment of accepted “pluralism”, in which “theory testing”, rather than “theory development” seems to be the case across the multiple traditions, or “isms” that characterize the discipline (Dunne et al., 2013). In their contribution to the issue, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Nexon (2013) argue that the field is living through a “post-paradigmatic era”, in which “the health of international relations theory” must be assessed from a different perspective: one should no longer look for the methodological wagers that characterized previous decades – which have declined – but should instead understand international relations theory in terms of “scientific ontologies”. According to the authors, the different theories in international relations consist 1 PhD Candidate at IRI/PUC-Rio. Assistant Professor at PUC-SP. E-mail: [email protected] 2 Available at: < http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/19/3.toc> 3 Available at: < http://mil.sagepub.com/content/current> 4 Both of these special issues are compilations of papers and discussions that previously took place during important Conferences – the 2011 ISA Conference in Montreal, in the case of EJIR; and the 2014 Millennium Conference on method, methodology and innovation in IR. 5 All of the contributions are available at: <http://duckofminerva.com/2013/09/the-end-of-ir-theory- symposium.html> 6 See the response of Felix Berenskoetter to the special issue in the Duck of Minerva Symposium. Available at: <http://duckofminerva.dreamhosters.com/2013/09/19951.html> 3 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission of “(social-) scientific claims about the ontology of world politics, including its actors, proper units of analysis, and how such elements fit together”. Seen from this standpoint, one can have “a cautiously optimistic diagnosis of the health of international theory.” (Jackson, Nexon, 2013, p. 544-5). Partaking of such an optimistic account, David Lake (2013) believes the end of the “paradigm wars” and “great debates” represents an exclusively positive development for the discipline, since it allows the different camps – positivism and post-positivism – to stop with disciplinary and academicist wagers between themselves and engage with a much more productive mid-level theorizing, which promises to bring forth progress in both of their research programs. Mearsheimer and Walt (2013), on their turn, present a grim account of such a state of theorizing in the field. The authors strongly lament the abandonment of grand theorizing in the name of middle-range theorizing and hypothesis-testing, for they strip theory from its policy relevance. Brown (2013) concurs with this negative assessment concerning the current state of international relations theory, pointing out however, that progress is much more evident in the standard cannons of the discipline – liberalism and realism – than among “critical/‘late modern’” scholarship. According to him, critical theory has been unable to produce “action-guiding and world-revealing insights”, whereas problem-solving theory, despite being progressive, has been of no value for those at the margins of society. Brown calls, then, for the development of “critical problem solving” theories, that can engage reality – as realists and liberals do – but considering the problems of the dispossessed. After a period of enthusiastic celebration of the opening up of the field of international relations to accommodate multiple instances of critical theory7, these insights show that we have begun to question the implications of our pluralism for the future of international relations theory. Among other things, this development indicates a sense that “critique” has reached some sort of limit – precisely when “critical accounts” seem to proliferate across the discipline – which makes it necessary to inquire about its future in terms of its past. The 2015 issue of Millennium picks up on some of the same questions that emerged around the EJIR issue, more specifically “issues related to what constitutes science and how IR scholars relate to these debates” (Lacatus et al., 2015, p. 769). The Millennium contributions aim, more specifically, at deepening investigations concerning “method, methodology and innovation” in the discipline, reflecting on a question posed by Cynthia Weber to the editors of the journal: “where do we go from here?”. This concern with methods and methodology comes from a shared assumption that individuals’ choice of how to treat data and proceed with research always carries deeper philosophical presuppositions. In this 7 See: Ashley, Walker (1990) 4 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission sense, “the belief that all research of international politics ought to be self-reflexive” (Lacatus et al., 2015, p. 778) propels the Millennium editors to try to shed light on the profound links between methods-methodology-epistemology-ontology. Not everything that comes out of these different (yet somehow related) questions that are being posed by international relations theorists today is of a kind. Yet a number of them remind us of some enduring problems with which international relations theory has struggled since its very articulation as a discipline. When the EJIR issue poses anew the question of “crisis” or “end” of international relations theory and Millennium brings back, once again, the problem of science; or when Jackson and Nexon want to assess the “health of international relations theory”; or even when Brown and Williams, in different ways, speak of some limit of contemporary critical approaches to think politically about the future; they all seem to be rehearsing some familiar themes which have animated international relations theory – one in particular that I would like to take up, which is the question of crisis and the future