Ole Jacob Sending

Constitution, Choice and Change: Problems with the `Logic of Appropriateness' and its Use in Constructivist Theory

The debate between a moderate version of constructivist theory and rationalist theory centres primarily on the rationality of individual action. The article consists of an in-depth analysis of the `logic of appropriateness (LoA) invoked in constructivist theory. The analysis reveals that the LoA is a structural explanation and understanding of individual action. As such, it is untenable as a theory of individual action. The implications of this structural bias are discussed in relation to three core claims of constructivist theory. Moderate constructivist theory claims, first, that norms are constitutive for actors identities. Second, it claims that agents and structures are mutually constitutive. Third, it claims that changes in ideational structures do occur and lead to changes in political practice. I conclude that the LoA is able to account for the first of these claims, but that by virtue of being able to account for this claim, it is, at the level of a theory of individual action, inconsistent with the second, and unable to effectively account for the third.

Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality

A key debate within International Relations (IR) centers on the character of globalization and what globalization means for the principle of state sovereignty and for the power and functioning of states. Among theorists, realists who argue in favour of the continued importance of states confront constructivists who contend that a number of political entities challenge states while the logic of globalization itself undermines their sovereignty. Drawing on the literatures on state formation and social theory, particularly the works of Weber and Foucault, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending question the terms of the realist-constructivist debate. Through a series of detailed case studies, they demonstrate that the growing importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) tends to increase the power of states, because states are able to draw on them indirectly in the effort to uphold social order. Neumann and Sending conclude that the power of states not only depends on the predominance of the states-based system in global politics, but ultimately rests on the individual states social power. Furthermore, the key to globalization is the neo-liberal rationality of government--a rationality that is creating a global polity where new hierarchies among states as well as between states and other actors have emerged.

`The International' as Governmentality

In traditional power analysis, `the international is a characteristic of the states system — an anarchic realm, qualitatively different from the domestic. To traditional norms analysis, the international is increasingly a realm of shared value allocation, akin to other political realms. Given this bifurcation in the literature, privileging power incurs the cost of not being able to study systemic change of the international, whereas privileging norms incurs the cost of not being able to study power. We argue that extant conceptualisations of the international hail from Weber via Morgenthau, for whom international politics was an ideal type applied to the realm between states. Building on Mike Williamss work, we perform a new reading of these two scholars. We find that Morgenthaus identification of the political as an ideal-typical sphere has room for social theoretical insights as found in constructivist theory. Indeed, by his own Weberian lights, Morgenthaus specific ideal type of international politics is in need of updating. We try to rise to the challenge by drawing on Michel Foucaults work in order to forge an understanding of the international as governmentality. The result is a conceptualisation of the international as a socially embedded realm of governmentality. It is a structure (defined by relations of power) that generates different and changing practices of political rule (defined as governmental rationality) and agencies (for example, polities).

The Future of Diplomacy: Changing Practices, Evolving Relationships

As we enter the 21st century, everybody seems to agree that diplomacy is changing and yet few people can specify exactly how or where it is heading. Since its very inception, International Journal has been a key forum for such discussions. A 1998 exchange between Paul Sharp and Andrew Cooper, for example, gave new scholarly prominence to the ways in which, and degrees to which, state-to-state diplomacy was being challenged by new actors.1 This has remained a core question in debates about the changing faces of diplomacy ever since. In this issue of IJ, we seek to contribute to the search for emerging patterns in diplomatic practices. Instead of focusing solely on new actors, however, we cast a wider net and locate both traditional and nontraditional diplomatic agents as part of an evolving configuration of social relations. Overall, the picture we draw shows an intriguing combination of the gentlemanly diplomacy inherited from a state-centric world with various heterodox forms of political intercourse made possible by globalization. In the changing diplomatic landscape, we argue, old and new practices coexist in a mutually constitutive relationship.As innovative relationships develop among an increasingly heterogeneous cast of diplomatic actors, the nature and function of diplomacy also evolves. Of course, todays diplomacy, just like yesterdays, remains primarily concerned with the ways in which states deal with the external world. But emerging practices also indicate efforts on the part of states to enrol various nonstate actors, just as nontraditional agents seek to act globally through the states diplomatic outreach. Observe, for instance, how foreign ministries have bankrolled historically nondiplomatic practices such as development and disaster relief, and how nontraditional agents use public resources toward their ends. As soon as one scratches a little, in fact, examples of new forms of diplomatic relations abound. Globalization and increased interdependencies have caused line ministries to interact directly with their counterparts in other countries, thereby challenging the position of foreign affairs ministries. In multilateral settings, the practice of diplomacy is being reshaped by recent changes in the global distribution of power, often in unexpected ways. Nongovernmental organizations have become more visible in world politics through delegation and indirect rule, thereby opening new state-society interfaces at the global level. All the while, military professionals have developed new practices for mediating and interacting with a broader set of actors. With the current trend toward the legalization of world politics, lawyers have become central diplomatic actors in their own right, providing authoritative interpretations of other actors room for maneuver. Religious actors are often powerful by virtue of the capacity to mobilize transnational constituencies. Economists, for their part, shape diplomatic practice through claims of expertise that go far beyond the technical details of economic governance.In this introduction, we specify two main areas in which diplomacy is changing as a result of these evolving social patterns. First, we look at the relationship between representation and governance: if anything, diplomatic work is traditionally about representing a polity vis-a-vis a recognized other. To the extent that such representation now increasingly includes partaking in governing, however, a whole array of questions about the relationship between diplomats and other actors emerges. Most prominently, are the governing and representing functions compatible in practice, or do they contain inherent tensions? Second, we focus on the territorial-nonterritorial character of the relation between the actors who perform diplomatic work and the constituencies on whose behalf they act and from which they claim authority. Bunding on these distinctions, contributors to this issue use their empirical findings to reflect not only on the evolution of diplomacy, but also on broader debates on the changes in world politics. …

There is no global public: the idea of the public and the legitimation of governance

Scholars of global governance have made much use of the public–private distinction in their exploration of the power of non-state actors and the constitution of authority beyond the state. But is this distinction analytically adequate? We subject the public–private distinction to analytical scrutiny and argue that it does not hold when analysing phenomena beyond the domestic setting. State actors are universal at the domestic level, but they are particularistic at the global level, being responsible primarily to its territorially defined constituency. The difference between public and private actors qua participants in global governance is thus overstated. We differentiate between public as a category of analysis and a category of practice. As a category of analysis, public denotes a particular configuration of accountability and capacity, which can, in principle, be found at the global level. As a category of practice, public is a claim to universality and responsibility that different types of actors use to legitimize what they do. We illustrate the added value of this conceptualization through a discussion of possibly emerging global public actors, and of how actors’ claim to ‘publicness’ in an incomplete public sphere serves to conceal their particularistic character, thereby undermining ‘publicness’ at the global level.

The “humanitarianization” of urban violence

This paper describes how international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) are adapting their operations to working in the urban environment. When levels of armed violence in urban areas are sufficient to trigger international humanitarian law, organizations such as the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) may argue that they have an important contribution to make by offering a set of skills and experience gleaned in conflict and non-governed settings. This paper reflects on this humanitarian turn to the city and uses it to problematize certain assumptions within the existing understanding of “urban violence” and the nature of humanitarianism itself. What does it mean to “humanitarianize” urban violence? What is the value-added that humanitarians might bring? And in what ways might such engagements be changing the nature of the problem itself? Drawing upon a wide range of literature that sets the local structures of violence in light of wider national and international processes, we analyze the “humanitarianization” of urban violence as a cross-scalar governmental assemblage that is likely to play an increasingly important role in cities in the global South in the future.

US military diplomacy in practice

Airmen understand Airmen, and thats where the partnership begins. General Mark A. Welsh, Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, speech to the Air Force Association Air Power Working Group, Washington DC, May 20, 2013. Quoted with his permission. In their Introduction to this volume, Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann argue that “if we want to account for changes in diplomatic practices by virtue of the proliferation of actors involved in diplomatic work, the question of how and why different actors do diplomacy must be central.” In this chapter, we discuss US defense diplomacy with the aim of providing answers, however partial, to this question. The significance of studying US military diplomacy should require little elaboration. The United States is currently the dominant military power in the world. Its power projection capabilities are unprecedented in human history. As Barry Posen argues, for the past few decades the US military has possessed “command of the global commons,” that is, it “gets vastly more military use out of the sea, space, and air than do others … it can credibly threaten to deny their use to others … and … others would lose a military confrontation for the commons if they attempted to deny them to the United States.” This condition rests on raw US military might, but “two important Cold War legacies contribute to U.S. command of the commons – bases and command structure.” Indeed, US primacy “is further secured by the world-wide U.S. base structure and the ability of U.S. diplomacy to … secure additional bases and overflight rights.” Bases and overflight rights, though, reflect simply one dimension of the extensive system of alliances and partnerships built by the United States. Indeed, a significant degree of contemporary global security governance operates within and through this US-centered network. Our analysis draws on a variety of sources, including interviews and the personal experiences of the authors. It builds on two basic wagers: first, “routine diplomacy is a matter of network construction and maintenance” and second, the content of those networks – the meanings actors attach to or impose on them – reflects and shapes the conduct of diplomacy. In this sense, an analysis of the meanings that US military and civilian officials attach to their diplomacy provides insight into the practice of US primacy.

Recognition and liquid authority

To analyze how authority emerges, become institutionalized, and may be transformed, we are best served with a concept of authority that highlights its dynamic features, and that captures the multiplicity of actors involved in producing and sustaining it. Extant accounts tend to operate with a view of ‘solid’ authority, but such a concept of authority is mainly descriptive, not explanatory. A turn to the liquid features of authority is not only better suited to account for global authority, but also for those pockets of ‘solid’ authority that we can find in the global or international sphere. I develop an account of authority that draws selectively from some of Bourdieu’s core concepts and highlight the inherently relational aspect of authority. Authority, I submit, is based on actors’ search for recognition. Such a perspective is better able to account for how authority emerges and may stabilize as ‘solid,’ and also be transformed over time. I draw on examples from the World Health Organization and the UN Security Council to illustrate the argument.

United by Difference: Diplomacy as a Thin Culture

The last two decades of research on globalization is replete with claims about the power of nonstate actors and the implied demise or transformation of diplomacy.1 Posing the question in these terms, however, begets a more fundamental question: what characterizes diplomacy as a social practice? Answering this question is important if we want to know how diplomacy may be changing as other actors become more active in representing and governing between and beyond states. This is a task thatis less straightforward than one might expect. We may, for example, draw up a list of tasks performed by diplomats and see whether others, too, are performing such tasks: if we can tick a given number of boxes - representation, communication, or negotiation, for example - that then constitutes diplomatic work. Or we can differentiate diplomats from other actors by adding prefixes, such as celebrity diplomacy or NGO diplomacy. But none of this tells us much about the meaning attributed to diplomacy by diplomats and nondiplomats alike. What are the rules of diplomacy and what types of skills are valued? Stripped to its basics, what is it that constitutes diplomacy?In seeking to answer these questions I draw on the analytical framework presented in the introduction - territorial versus nonterritorial representation and representation versus governance - and analyze diplomatic work by contrasting it with humanitarian work. I argue that what unites diplomats is simultaneously what separates them, namely the representation of different territorial units. For this reason, diplomacy is characterized by a thin culture in that it places a premium on communication and the management of friction in the absence of shared values. Humanitarian actors, by contrast, share a thick culture in that what constitutes humanitarian action is defined by a set of substantive values that underwrites their claim to the representation of groups in whose name they act.2Underlying this difference in the constitution of diplomatic and humanitarian work is a more general mechanism: the culture that characterizes diplomatic work and humanitarian work, respectively, flows from the character of the relation that is established and continually reproduced between the actor and the object that the actor either seeks to represent and/ or govern. Diplomats represent territorial units whose existence is given: there would not be diplomats as we know them if the system was suzerain, for example. Humanitarian and other nonstate actors, however, have to construct and continually reproduce the governance object (i.e., suffering individuals, the economy, the environment) that is the rationale for their existence. Humanitarianism is constituted by a set of substantive values whose existence is constitutive of humanitarianism as a social practice. Diplomacy, by contrast, is constituted by a set of procedural values that reflect the defining feature of the object that diplomats represent, namely sovereign, territorial units whose interests may differ.The more general point is that we gain more in terms of understanding diplomacy and its evolution over time by seeking to unearth some of its core features than by drawing up a list of typical diplomatic tasks such as representation, communication, and negotiation. Other actors perform these same tasks, but that does not mean that they engage in diplomacy, nor are such actors fruitfully labelled diplomats. Unearthing the logic of diplomacy in terms of the character of the relation between diplomats and what they represent, then, offers added value for the study of diplomacy and global governance more generally. I argue, for example, that the thinness of diplomatic culture is expressed in how diplomats are attentive to form in a way that other actors are not, and that this feature also helps account for its resilience.I focus on humanitarian actors as a contrast to diplomats for three main reasons. First, humanitarian action has expanded considerably over the last two decades, and diplomats and humanitarian actors engage one another on a range of issues that are high on the international agenda. …

Security, Development and UN Coordination

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has made it a key objective to reform the United Nations (UN) from a “culture of reaction to a culture of prevention” (Annan 1997). Annan’s reform-initiative is based upon the idea that there is an inherent relationship between development and security, and that investment in development efforts is the most effective way for the UN to fulfil its goal, as stated in the Charter, of “saving coming generations from the scourge of war” (Annan 2001). The question of the prospects for conflict prevention and on the more general relationship between development and security currently receives intense scholarly and political attention.1 Indeed, an international consensus has emerged on an inherent relationship between development and security, as has been mentioned in the final document of the 2005 World Summit in September 2005, which states that “we recognize that development, peace and security and human rights are interlinked and mutually reinforcing” (UN 2005).2