Aggregating transdisciplinary media for an increasingly interconnected world.
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Max Bergmann (The Wonk Room): "Helping Pakistan Is In US National Interest" →
From the article:
“While working with Pakistan is vital to broader US counter-terrorism aims, the Pakistani public has an immensely negative view of the United States. Providing disaster assistance won’t automatically make everyone love us, but it will have an impact. Being on the ground providing aid and assistance in desperate situations following natural disasters, is something that is not soon forgotten. After an initially slow start following the Tsunami disaster in 2004, the US military and US aid agencies mobilized. The military essentially created a sea base, involving a flotilla of ships, of the coast off Indonesia. The US had 15,000 troops in the region and went about urgently ferrying needed supplies to the destroyed coastal regions that were unreachable by land due to the destruction of infrastructure. Following this effort, a Pew Survey found that 80 percent of the citizens of the world’s largest Muslim-majority country had a more favorable opinion of the United States after our response”.
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Taking a critical stance towards international relations.
Theory Talks held an excellent interview with Dr. Michael Shapiro, political science professor from the University of Hawaii. Shapiro offers a provocative critique of the international relations discipline and urges it to “wake up from its pre-Kantian slumber”. A major problem with IR, for Shapiro, is that it’s predicated upon “an anemic, empiricist philosophy of social science which treat mere appearances.” Below is his explanation:
The biggest challenge for contemporary IR is to wake up from its pre-Kantian slumber. Most of the discipline remains uncritical because it is predicated on an anemic, empiricist philosophy of social science which treats mere appearances. The Kantian/post Kantian innovation is to focus on the conditions of possibility for something to appear. More concretely, the dominant forms of realism and rationalism in the discipline tend to naturalize the geopolitical world of states and to allow an unreflective discourse on sovereignty to dominate the problematics that mainstream inquiry entertains. From critical perspectives, the discipline or IR is an object of analysis rather than a set of norms for creating and analyzing global phenomena. IR and empiricist social science in general is tied to appearances. If we follow the trajectory of post-Kantian critical thinking, our concerns become involved with the alternative ways in which the world is politically partitioned and note the economies of what is able to appear versus what is concealed. The experiences of slavery, forced migration, violent usurpation of indigenous territories, global trading in bodies and body parts all produce perspectives and voices that challenge security-minded and war-strategy focused versions of “international relations.” One critical question, then, is why the dominant sovereignty-predicated focus remains; the others involve recognizing and analyzing global exchanges that operate outside of or below the level of inter-state relations. My strategy? Forget IR.
Shapiro draws on literary theory, cultural studies, sociology and more, to better understand the world around us. In particular, this interview focuses on his examination of art and other visuals as texts for critical analysis.
This is a fascinating interview with Dr. Shapiro, and his incorporation of critical humanities adds a clarity and richness to his political research. More social scientists should take note as we may often grow too comfortable with traditional (perhaps even stale) approaches to political science.
