'Real'? As if! Critical reflections on state personhood

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 363-377

  Schiff, Jacob ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42949128601     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508008061     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Alexander Wendt, 'The State as Person in International Theory', Review of International Studies, 30 (2004), p. 289.
2. Arnold Wolfers, 'The Actors in International Polities', in Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962).
3. See, among others, Richard Ashley, 'Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17:2 (1988), pp. 227-62;
4. Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
5. J. Camilleri, A. Jarvis and A. Paolini (eds.), The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995);
6. R. B. J. Walker and S. H. Mendcovitz (eds.), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 1990);
7. and R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8. Robert Gilpin, 'The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism', in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 318.
9. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Forum Introduction: Is the State a Person? Why Should We Care?', in Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), p. 255.
10. Wendt, 'State as Person', p. 289, n. 1.
11. Ibid., p. 291.
12. Colin Wight, 'State Agency: Social Action without Human Activity?', in Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), p. 270.
13. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Hegel's House, or "People are States too" ', in Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), p. 281.
14. Iver Neumann, 'Beware of Organicism: the Narrative Self of the State', in Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), pp. 265, 267.
15. Wight makes the suggestion about instrumentalisra (in 'State Agency'), and Wendt later refers to it ('State as Person', p. 290). In that reference, however, Wendt positions his own, scientific realist position against instrumentalism in order to claim that the state has 'ontological standing in its own right'.
16. Thus I agree with the spirit of Peter Lomas' response to Wendt in which he indicates that there is something ethically suspect at work in the argument for state personhood, even if I think this critique needs to be much more radical. Wendt's reply quite explicitly does not address these issues, which lie takes to be in some sense secondary. Peter Lomas, 'Anthropomorphism, Personification and Ethics', in Review of International Studies, 31:2 (2005), pp. 349-56;
17. Alexander Wendt, 'How Not to Argue Against State Personhood: A reply to Lomas', Review of international Studies, 31:2 (2005). pp. 357-60.
18. Wendt, 'State as Person', p. 289.
19. Ibid., p. 289.
20. Alexander Wendt, Social 'Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 215-24.
21. Wendt, 'State as Person', p. 291.
22. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, 'Relations Before States: Substance, Process, and the Study of World Polities', European Journal of International Relations, 99, pp. 291-332.
23. Jackson, 'Hegel's House', p. 286.
24. Ibid., p. 282.
25. Ibid., p. 283.
26. Ibid., p. 282, second and third emphases added.
27. Ibid., p. 284.
28. Jackson and Nexon, 'Relations Before States', and Burke C. Thomason, Making Sense of Reification: Alfred Schulz and Conslructivist Theory (London: Macmillan, 1982).
29. Wight, 'State Agency', p. 272.
30. Neumann, 'Beware of Organicism', p. 259.
31. Ibid., p. 265.
32. Ibid., p. 265.
33. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 52.
34. This implicit distinction between materiality and discourse will, of course, not satisfy everyone, but the scope of this article forbids a lengthier engagement. For other useful engagements with that distinction see (inter alia) D. Campbell, 'Recent Changes in Social Theory: Questions for International Relations', in R. Higgott (ed.), New Directions in International Relations? Australian Perspectives (Canberra: Australian National University, 1988), pp. 11-64;
35. W. E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd edn. (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993);
36. J. Der Denan and M. J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations (New York: Lexington Books, 1989);
37. J. Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 1999);
38. M. J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: the Politics of Discursive Practices (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).
39. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 31.
40. Foucault, Archaeology, p. 32.
41. Ibid., p. 32.
42. Ibid., p. 40.
43. Ibid., p. 41.
44. Ibid., p. 42.
45. This illustration is generally inspired by many of the contributions in Biersteker and Weber, 1996. See also Weber, 1998 and Campbell, 1998. They do not, however, attend as systematically to Foucault's account of discursive formation as I do here. While I find this account to be theoretically fruitful in this instance, readers should certainly bear in mind that the accuracy of Foucault's own histories of various institutions - psychiatric and penal-have recently been called into question. See Andrew Scull, 'Michel Foucault, "History of Madness" ", in Times Literary Supplement 23 March 2007. However, damaging this review of Foucault's historical methods is - and I think it is quite damaging - this is not the same as a critique of his theory of discursive formation.
46. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New-York: Vintage Books, 1995):
47. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
48. Foucault, Archaeology, p. 50.
49. Ibid., p. 74.
50. Ibid., p. 33.
51. Jackson, 'Hegel's House', p. 283.
52. Jackson, 'Forum Introduction', p. 258.
53. Wendt, 'State as Person", p. 293.
54. Ibid., p. 289.
55. Ibid., p. 290.
56. Ibid., p. 293.
57. Ibid., p. 293.
58. Ibid., p. 293.
59. Jackson, 'Forum Introduction', p. 258.
60. Wendt, 'State as Person', p. 316. Given my argument in this article, it is extremely interesting to note that Wendt himself appears to collapse the hard real/as-if distinction that he earlier appeared to insist upon. This, however, does not necessarily nullify my critique; Wendt's invocation of performativity here seems to me to bespeak an uncomfortable tension in his own thought, one between an understanding of the 'real' as referring to some underlying reality, and one that refers to the realities constituted by discourse. Although tensions can certainly be productive, in my opinion there are good reasons - which I have spelled out above - to resolve this particular tension in favour of the latter conception of the real, but that is not my concern at the moment.
61. Wendt, 'State as Person', p. 316.
62. For other engagements with problematic anthropocentrisms in contemporary world politics, see, for example, Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003);
63. Jacques Derrida, For Wliat Tomorrow: A Dialogue (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004);
64. and Jenny Edkins, 'Humanitarianism, Humanity, Human', Journal of Human Rights, 2:2 (2003), pp. 253-8.
65. Lomas, 'Anthropomorphism'.
66. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
67. Meyda Yeǧenoǧlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
68. Cynthia Weber, 'Masquerading and the US "Intervasion" of Haiti', in Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram and Véronique Pin-Fat (eds.), Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder, CO and London: Lynn Rienner, 1999), pp. 39-56.
69. James Moy, 'Fear and Desire in Anglo-American Fantasies of Asia Sexuality', in Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder, CO and London: Lynn Rienner, 1999), pp. 57-70.
70. Karen Litfin, 'Towards an Integral Perspective on World Politics: Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecology', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32:1 (2003), pp. 29-56.
71. For a recent treatment of green political theory, see Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 4th edn. (New York: Routledge Press, 2007).
72. See, for example, John Dryzek, 'Green Reason: Communicative Ethics for the Biosphere', in Lori Gruen and Dale Jamieson (eds.), Reflecting on Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
73. John Dryzek, 'Political and Ecological Communication', in Environmental Politics, 4:4 (1995), pp. 13-30;
74. John Dryzek, The Politics of The Earth: Environmental Discourses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
75. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
76. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modem Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 5.
77. For this insight, I am indebted to the recent, unpublished (2007) BA thesis of Dorothée Royal-Hedinger at the University of Chicago, entitled 'Bringing Rationality To Ecology: Dryzek Encounters the Nonhuman'. What I call the problematic ethics of encounter are analysed by Michael J. Shapiro in, 'The Ethics of Encounter: Unreading, Unmapping the Imperium', in Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World. Politics, eds. David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 57-91.
78. Bennett, Enchantment, p. 89.