Joel Quirk

The construction of an edifice: the story of a First Great Debate

Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism/utopianism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading characterisation of the history of academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by exploring how the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that scholars produced the myth of a First Debate by detaching the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from the unique historical milieu in which it was conceived, and employing this dichotomy for a new set of rhetorical purposes. We use these findings to suggest refinements for the historiographical methods employed to understand past international thought, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in international relations.

Governing the world at a distance: the practice of global benchmarking

Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations and corporate actors, as well as states and international organisations (IOs). Benchmarks serve to both ‘neutralise’ and ‘universalise’ a range of overlapping normative values and agendas, including freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, ‘modern’ statehood, and ‘free’ markets. The proliferation of global benchmarks in these key areas amounts to a comprehensive normative vision regarding what various types of transnational actors should look like, what they should value, and how they should behave. While individual benchmarks routinely differ in terms of scope and application, they all share a common foundation, with normative values and agendas being translated into numerical representations through simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. We argue that the power of benchmarks chiefly stems from their capacity to create the appearance of authoritative expertise on the basis of forms of quantification and numerical representation. This politics of numbers paves the way for the exercise of various forms of indirect power, or ‘governance at a distance’, for the purposes of either status quo legitimation or political reform.

Trafficked into Slavery

This article takes up the evolving relationship between antislavery and human trafficking. In recent times, there has been renewed interest in issues such as people smuggling, forced labor, and, in particular, sexual servitude. These serious problems are regularly represented as a species of slavery, with trafficking being portrayed as a form of slave trading, but there has been relatively little discussion of how this connection is established, or how contemporary problems relate to the broader history of organized antislavery. Building upon the concept of an “Anti-Slavery Project,” the article embraces a macrohistorical perspective, which seeks to integrate contemporary discussion of trafficking within a larger historical complex. This starts with the nexus between antislavery, “white” slavery, and human trafficking and ultimately extends to the difficult relationship between trafficking, transit, and larger political agendas.

The politics of numbers: the normative agendas of global benchmarking

Global benchmarks have grown exponentially over the last two decades, having been both applied to and developed by states, international organisations, corporations, and non-governmental organisations. As a consequence, global benchmarking is now firmly established as a distinct mode of transnational governance. Benchmarking chiefly involves the development of comparative metrics of performance, which typically take the form of highly stylised comparisons which are generated by translating complex phenomena into numerical values via simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. This process of translation takes what might otherwise be highly contentious normative agendas and converts them into formats that gain credibility through rhetorical claims to neutral and technocratic assessment. This politics of numbers has far-reaching ramifications for transnational governance, including the dimensions and effects of indirect power, expertise and agenda-setting, coordination, regulation and certification, and norm contestation and activism. This Special Issue draws upon an emerging literature to explore how and why benchmarks both align with and expand upon established models of International Relations theory and scholarship. It does so by critically examining the role of global benchmarks in key areas such as state ‘failure’, global supply chains, disaster management, economic governance, corporate social responsibility, and human development.

Past Masters and Modern Inventions: Intellectual History as Critical Theory

In this article, we explore the relationship between past and present international relations (IR) scholarship, paying particular attention to the way in which various representations, interpretations and classifications of past works can collectively influence how modern scholars ask and answer questions. This serves two main purposes. On the one hand, we seek to contribute to a growing literature interrogating misleading and simplistic depictions of past authors and eras. On the other, we explore how the history of ideas can be utilized as a critical resource, which offers a compelling platform from which to refine and re-evaluate prevailing notions of the purposes of intellectual inquiry.

Ending Slavery in all its Forms: Legal Abolition and Effective Emancipation in Historical Perspective

The legal abolition of slavery is often presented as a narrative endpoint, leaving an impression that subsequent events marked a fundamental departure from the earlier status quo. This paper challenges this complacent viewpoint, developing an analytical distinction between legal abolition and effective emancipation, with the former being defined in terms of a circumscribed change in official status, and the latter encompassing an evolving series of aspirations and expectations. To advance this line of argument, I interrogate three different post-abolition settings; the British Caribbean, Colonial Nigeria, and the Indian Subcontinent. By giving pride of place to the actions and outlooks of individuals who have been formally released from servile relationships, and charting their subsequent achievements – or lack thereof – these case studies serve to cast new light upon evolving efforts to combat contemporary forms of slavery.

Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa

Human mobility has long played a foundational role in producing state territories, resources, and hierarchies. When people move within and across national boundaries, they create both challenges and opportunities. In Mobility Makes States, chapters written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists explore different patterns of mobility in sub-Saharan Africa and how African states have sought to harness these movements toward their own ends. While border control and intercontinental migration policies remain important topics of study, Mobility Makes States demonstrates that immigration control is best understood alongside parallel efforts by states in Africa to promote both long-distance and everyday movements. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets. They examine short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting and urban expansion, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of gatekeepers and officers of the state who push and pull migrant populations in different directions. Through the experiences and trajectories of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this empirically rich volume sheds new light on larger global patterns and state making processes. Contributors: Eric Allina, Oliver Bakewell, Pamila Gupta, Nauja Kleist, Loren B. Landau, Joel Quirk, Benedetta Rossi, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Simon Turner, Darshan Vigneswaran.

Repairing Historical Wrongs

This paper introduces a special issue of Social & Legal Studies devoted to the topic of ‘Repairing Historical Wrongs’. In recent decades, both scholars and activists have given increasing consideration to various legal and ethical obligations which can arise as a consequence of serious acts of injustice committed by previous generations and/or political regimes. Many of these efforts to repair historical wrongs pose a challenge to established models of legal responsibility and corrective justice. To help make sense of the core issues at stake, we have divided the paper into four sections, starting with an analysis of the limitations of existing avenues for legal redress, and the types of arguments that have emerged in response to these limitations. From here, we go on to consider the ethics and mechanics of institutional and individual inheritance, paying particular attention to a widespread tendency to treat assets and accomplishments as collective goods, while reducing wrongdoing to individual acts. This is followed by a snapshot of potential remedies, in which we identity three key modes of reparation: financial restitution, apologies and holistic approaches. Finally, we consider the political dynamics surrounding the representation of specific cases as ‘historical wrongs’, and the potential consequences associated with this approach to the past.

Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives (review)

The last decade has been marked by tremendous growth in the study of both historical and contemporary slavery. This edited collection makes a number of significant contributions to this expanding literature, bringing together scholars from different backgrounds and regional specializations. This is reflected in eleven chapters which cover an eclectic array of topics, from the historical dynamics surrounding slavery in Goa, the Banda Islands, and the British West Indies, to the way slavery has been represented in various narratives and discourses. In her introduction to the project, Maria Suzette Fernandes Dias suggests that the overarching purpose of the collection is to reconsider slavery as a historically ubiquitous institution, which “has generated and continues to engender legacies, be they historical, oral or visual, which need to be compared and discussed to facilitate dialogue between cultures and civilizations and to mitigate the wounds of the past which continue to scar our present.”1 This expansive agenda has much to recommend it, but many of the chapters that follow lack a sense of common purpose.2 The collection is divided into two main sections. The first section, “Connecting Histories,” begins with a valuable contribution from Patrick Manning, who offers an innovative survey of key trends within the historical literature on slavery from the 1930s onwards. The main focus of the chapter is the evolving relationship between intellectual inquiry and parallel developments within the world at large. Of particular importance here is the use of slavery as a metaphor, as “the subjugation of people into abject submission before their owners” has consistently served as a “compelling metaphor for all the social problems of inequality and oppression.”3 In this line of argument, the slavery metaphor has not only been invoked to underscore political objections to various practices and institutions, but has also proved to be an essential catalyst for the academic analysis of connections between contemporary practices and historical slave systems. For Manning, this nexus has been chiefly expressed through two key themes: culture and labor. Subsequent chapters in this section examine a number of settings that do not figure prominently in most histories of slavery. This begins with two chapters exploring different aspects of human bondage in Australia. One contribution comes from Peter Read, who catalogues many examples of the exploitation of Australian Aborigines by pastoralists and