Genealogy as a research tool in International Relations

Review of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 1295-1312

  Vucetic, Srdjan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79960247020     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210510000938     Document Type: Article

References (165)

1. A useful, but dated literature review can be found in Jennifer Milliken, 'The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods', European Journal of International Relations, 5:2 (1999), pp. 246-8.
2. For a notable exception, see, Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (Amronk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), pp. 30-5.
3. In my sample of sixty two recent 'research methods' course syllabi written by IR instructors for their graduate students only two devoted any portion of the course to genealogy as a research method. Sampling was not scientific: I accessed and collected them in order in which they were listed by an online search engine.
4. All contained the English word 'methods' and were authored by self-identified IR scholars in the period between 2000 and 2007. My review of the programmes of the last four annual conventions (2003-2007) of American Political Science Association, International Studies Association, British International Studies Association and European Consortium on Political Research found no panels dedicated to genealogy.
5. IR scholars were much more likely to discuss genealogy at more specialised and multidisciplinary conventions, such as those organised by groups such as the History of Political and Social Concepts Groups or the History of the Present.
6. The appellation comes from Vincent Descombes, cited in Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 98.
7. On the many Foucaults (including the dominant Foucaults in the US-centric disciplines), see, François Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2003)
8. Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006)
9. And Paul Veyne, 'The Final Foucault and His Ethics', trans Catherine Porter and Arnold I. Davidson, Critical Inquiry, 20:1 (1993), pp. 1-9.
10. As practiced in IR, critical realism believes that unobservable phenomena are in principle subject to reliable knowledge. For ontological discussions relevant to my argument, see, especially, Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
11. Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
12. Jonathan Joseph, 'Foucault and Reality', Capital & Class, 82:2 (2004), pp. 141-63
13. And Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical realism and the (Re) construction of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2002).
14. To appreciate the variable status of reality, materiality as well as causation in the readings of Foucault, compare and contrast the following passages: Linda Alcoff, 'Foucault's Philosophy of Science: Structures of Truth/Structures of Power', in Gary Gutting (ed.), Continental Philosophy of Science (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005), pp. 215-6
15. Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jennifer Webb (eds), Understanding Foucault (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 57-8
16. Thomas Diez, 'Speaking "Europe": The Politics of Integration Discourse', in Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jørgensen, Antje Wiener (eds), The SocialConstruction of Europe (London: SAGE, 2001), pp. 89-90
17. Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 60-6
18. Thomas Flynn, 'The Philosopher-Historian as Cartographer: Mapping History with Michel Foucault', Research in Phenomenology, 29:1 (1999), pp. 37-8
19. Gary Gutting, Foucault, pp. 40-1
20. C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 25-30, p. 109, fn. 98
21. And Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1999), pp. 39-46.
22. As Martin Saar observed, Foucault developed and used genealogy only in his middle period. Saar, 'Genealogy and Subjectivity', European Journal of Philosophy, 10:2 (2002), p. 232.
23. See, above all, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sherdian (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I and II. trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). Among Foucauldian perspectives used in IR, governmentality is currently more popular than genealogy. For the reasons of space, I cannot discuss these other tools or how geneology relates to other Foucauldian concepts (for example, biopolitics, historical a prioris, state racism, etc.).
24. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, p. 57.
25. For the reasons of space, I cannot consider the status of these definitions in the philosophy of science. Anecdotally, they appear to resonate at the usual disciplinary/disciplined sites such as the Institute for Qualitative Research Methods or the European Consortium for Political Research Summer School in Methods and Techniques.
26. For claims of unity/difference between qualitative and interpretative methods in the social sciences, see the contributions in Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2006).
27. See, respectively, Larry Shiner, 'Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power- Knowledge', History and Theory, 21:3 (1982), p. 397
28. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), chap. 5
29. And Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1993, chap. 8.
30. Citations in Claire O'Farrell, Michel Foucault (London: Sage, 2005), p. 52
31. And Shiner, 'Reading Foucault', p. 396. Some of his students also added, with various degrees of approval, the following descriptions: 'non-general method', 'ad hoc method', 'un-method', 'non-method', 'anti-method'.
32. See, inter alia, Paul Brass, 'Foucault Steals Political Science', Annual Review of Political Science, 3 (2000), pp. 305-30 (Pubitemid 33281305)
33. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, with an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1983
34. Shiner, 'Reading Foucault', Megill, Prophets, and Michael S. Roth, 'Foucault's "History of the Present"', History and Theory, 20:1 (1981), pp. 32-46.
35. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 184.
36. But these lessons are subject to wide interpretations. On the status of the 'why resist?' question and Foucault
37. see, inter alia, Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994), chap. 5
38. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault trans. and edited by Seán Hand (London: Athlone, 1988)
39. Sara Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 2004), chaps 4-5
40. Timothy O'Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2006)
41. Paras, Foucault 2.0
42. Saar, 'Genealogy and Subjectivity', pp. 234-7
43. Veyne, 'The Final Foucault', and David Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005).
44. Linda Alcoff, 'Foucault as Epistemologist', The Philosophical Forum, 25:2 (1993), pp. 95-124.
45. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Dunne Books/St Martin Press, 1999).
46. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 234.
47. For the standard interpretative squabbles over Focault's alleged positivism, compare, inter alia, Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 105
48. Catherine Elgin, 'Epistemology's End', in Linda Martin Alcoff (ed.), Epistemology: The Big Questions (London: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 26-40
49. Gary Gutting 'Foucault and the History of Madness', in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 64-9
50. Rekha Mirchandani, 'Postmodernism and Sociology: from the Epistemological to the Empirical', Sociological Theory, 23 (2005), pp. 91-2, 109-10
51. Saar, 'Genealogy and Subjectivity', p. 233
52. And Bernard Williams, Truth & Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 64-5.
53. See, for example, the discussion of Foucault's 'Questions of Method', in Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, pp. 3-4, 151
54. O'Farrell, Michel Foucault, pp. 52, 139
55. And Gutting, 'Foucault', pp. 64-9.
56. There are multiple citations, with slightly varying translations. Gutting, Foucault pp. 112-3.
57. Less famous is Foucault's description of his books as 'surgeon's knives, Molotov cocktails or, galleries in a mine [. . .] to be carbonized after use.'
58. Quoted in Steven V. Hicks, 'Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond', in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds), Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 102. Referencing Foucault 'properly' is becoming an exercise in scholasticism and will not be pursued in this article.
59. On the evolution of this concept, see Jacob Torfing, 'Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments and Challenges', in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (eds), Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 5-9, 24.
60. Foucault never fully developed a theory of politics, but thanks to his insights, we can now better understand why the Haitian revolution, the successful black slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, was unthinkable in Europe in its time or why systematic studies of UFOs do not exist.
61. See, respectively, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
62. And Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, 'Sovereignty and the UFO', Political Theory, 36:4 (2008), pp. 607-33.
63. What constitutes a non-discursive context is a much-debated question among Foucault's acolytes. For critical realists, reality is socially constructed in the sense that people construct their interpretations of the non-discursive real.
64. See, especially, Joseph, 'Foucault and Reality', and Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts, 'Introduction', in John Michael Roberts and Jonathan Joseph (eds), Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1-19.
65. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 135-228.
66. In general, far more intellectually defensible is the rejection of casing when the latter is put forward as the statistical method writ small, a qualitative method without qualitative methodology, so to speak.
67. See the discussion in Jacob Torfing, 'Discourse Theory' and Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, chap. 6
68. Also see Jens Bartleson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 8, 76
69. And Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006), chap. 6.
70. Saar, 'Genealogy and Subjectivity', pp. 238-40.
71. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, effective history is not the same as Wirkungsgeschichte, as in Gadamer's (and so perhaps Heidegger's) hermeneutics, but from Nietzsche's (and so perhaps Rousseau's) wirkliche Historie (real or true history)
72. Here, Machiavelli's verita effettuale (effective truth) is a possible predecessor as well. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, p. 114).
73. Also misleading are claims of identity between genealogy and Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and others and/or Cambridge contextualism of Quentin Skinner and others; neither one of these is identical with the 'history of concepts' that Foucault read under Georges Canguilhem.
74. Gutting, Foucault, pp. 8-10.
75. Cf. Mark Bevir, 'Begriffsgeschichte', History and Theory, 39:2 (2000), pp. 273-84.
76. On historical knowledge before and after Foucault in the discipline of history, see, inter alia, Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)
77. Fernández-Armesto, Truth; and Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004).
78. This pre-theory of power - its 'apparatus', 'dispositif' - is what makes genealogy an 'upgrade' to archaeology, Foucault's earlier tool for historical-interpretative analysis. There is a debate to what extent Foucauldians should regard these two as different.
79. Compare Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 32-4
80. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 104
81. Gutting, Foucault, pp. 45-6
82. David Couzens Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 6-7
83. O'Farrell, Micheal Foucault, p. 129
84. Paras, Foucault 2.0, pp. 68-9.
85. See the discussions in Richard Bernstein, 'Foucault: Critique as a Philosophic Ethos', in Michael Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 222-5
86. Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, p. 4
87. Flynn, 'The Philosopher-Historian', p. 42
88. And Roth, 'Foucault's "History of the Present"', p. 43.
89. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27.
90. Ibid., pp. 30-1.
91. Cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault, p. 118
92. Gutting, Foucault, p. 10
93. and Roth, 'Foucault's "History of the Present"', pp. 37-40.
94. Foucault still concluded that ancient Greeks were less libertarian in their sexual practices than late moderns. Foucault, Archealogy, Vol. II, p. 39. Foucault's analyses were also effective because they shifted the study of the human body in history, but, once again, that is another story.
95. See, Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 81-3.
96. Cf. Saar, 'Genealogy and Subjectivity', and Hans Sluga, 'Foucault's Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche', in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 210-39.
97. In the liberal Kantian tradition, contingency can be understood as subject-centred agency - the capacity of a human actor to make judgments and decisions despite structural conditions (whereby agency is proportional to contingency).
98. On Kant's conceptions of causation, see Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
99. For major controversies and issues, see Philip Tetlock and Richard Ned Lebow, 'Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws: Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning', American Political Science Review, 95:4 (2001), pp. 829-43. (Pubitemid 33571344)
100. Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, p. 6.
101. In principle, rationalist approaches focus on choices as opposed to teleological outcomes, too. Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
102. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, pp. 117-8.
103. See Colin Hay, 'Constructivist Institutionalism', in R. A. W. Rhodes, Sarah Binder and Bert Rockman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 56-75.
104. Phillip Woods, 'Building on Weber to Understand Governance: Exploring the Links Between Identity, Democracy and "Inner Distance"', Sociology, 37:1 (2003), pp. 143-63. (Pubitemid 36263496)
105. See, especially, Jan Selby, 'Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR', International Relations, 21:3 (2007), pp. 324-45.
106. Richard M. Price and Christian Reus-Smit, 'Dangerous Liaisons? Critical International Theory and Constructivism', European Journal of International Relations, 4:2 (1998), p. 268.
107. See, inter alia, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Making Sense of International Relations Theory (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), pp. 172-5, 329-30
108. And Milliken, 'The Study of Discourse', pp. 246-8).
109. Bartelson famously declared that his methodology must not be taken 'too seriously', but then he still went on at some length to discuss the rationale for selecting his episodes and generating his archive.
110. Bartleson, Genealogy, p 78 vs. pp. 7-11, 78-87.
111. David Campbell, Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 14, 91, cf. p. 275, n. 5.
112. Paradigmatic cases are unique for being chosen on intuition, as they are meant to set the selection standard, rather then being selected on a standard Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, p. 80.
113. Richard Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 1.
114. Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 73-8.
115. Hansen commits an entire chapter, and then some, on methodological trade-offs in genealogical scholarship. Hansen, Security as Practice, pp. 52-92, 217-20.
116. On coherence in genealogy, see Gutting, Foucault, pp. 66-7.
117. Foucault, Archaeology, pp. 10-14.
118. Cf. Kendall and Wickham, Michel Foucault, p. 5
119. Torfing, 'Discourse Theory', p. 19
120. Jens Henrik Haahr and William Walters, 'Introduction', in Haahr and Walters (eds), Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 17.
121. See, especially, Gary Gutting's interpretation of genealogy as a 'historical causal explanation that is material, multiple, and corporeal'. Gutting, Foucault, p. 47.
122. While Foucault's conceptualisation of causation varied, he always clearly rejected monocausality (that is, direct correspondence between discourse and action) and idealism (that is, 'collective unconscious') and there is an inconsistency in his claims that there is 'nothing outside discourse'.
123. Price, The Chemical Weapons, p. 4.
124. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, p. 3.
125. IR has long been overloaded with reflections on large and old philosophical debates on human experience, and the understanding-explanation debate goes back at least to Wilhelm Dilthey.
126. For a widely-read statement, see Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press Paperbacks, 2004).
127. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 77-89.
128. Steve Smith, 'Wendt's World', Review of International Studies, 26:1 (2000), pp. 151-63.
129. By attempting to walk his via media, Wendt was also attacked by positivists who contend that constitution is already part of explanation, either as description or as a task of specifying antecedent conditions (permissive/deep causes) that permit a later outcome to occur (proximate/shallow causes).
130. Jorge Rivas, 'Realism is Not a Via Media between Positivism and Interpretivism: Assessing Wendt's Version of Scientific Realism', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th Annual Convention, San Francisco (2008). On file with the author.
131. See, inter alia, Karin Fierke, 'Critical Methodology and Constructivism', in Karin Fierke, Diplomatic Interventions: Conflict and Change in a Globalizing World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 12
132. Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 217-8
133. Hansen, Security, pp. 1, 10-1, 25-8.
134. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, p. 41.
135. Also see, Edward Keene, 'Reconstructing the English School's Conceptual Vocabulary: An Ideal-Typical approach', Paper presented at the Annual ISA Convention, Chicago (2007). On file with the author. For philosophical discussions of the 'reasons as causes' debate
136. see, especially, Stephen Asma, 'Darwin's Causal Pluralism', Biology and Philosophy, 11:1 (1996), pp. 1-20
137. Nancy Cartwright, 'Causation: One Word, Many Things', Philosophy of Science, 71:5 (2004), pp. 805-51
138. Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991)
139. Paul Roth, 'Beyond Understanding: The Career of the Concept of Understanding in the Human Sciences', in Turner and Roth (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Blackwell Philosophy Guides, 2002), pp. 311-33
140. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979)
141. Stephen P. Turner and Paul A. Roh, 'Ghosts and the Machine: Issues of Agency, Rationality, and Scientific Methodology in Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science', in Turner and Roth (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Blackwell Philosophy Guides, 2002), pp. 1-18.
142. From an epistemological standpoint, a claim that all meaning is unstable is indefensible: even the most anti-epistemological analysis must value some intellectually evaluative criteria - spelling and grammar in the exposition, consistency of the narrative and evidence.
143. Hansen, Security as Practice, p. 19, fn. 1.
144. Laura Shepherd, 'A User's Guide: Analyzing Security as Discourse', International Studies Review, 8 (2006), pp. 656-7.
145. Again, see Bartleson, Genealogy, p. 78. William Walters called his genealogy 'unapologetically superficial'.
146. Walters, Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 10.
147. Hansen, Security as Practice, pp. 10, 25.
148. Rupert Read and Kenneth A. Richman (eds), The New Hume Debate (London: Routledge, 2007).
149. The terms come from Milja Kurki, 'Causes of a Divided Discipline: Rethinking the Concept of Cause in International Relations Theory', Review of International Studies, 32:2 (2006), pp. 211-2.
150. Here, anything that produces a certain reality is causation. For earlier calls to 'broaden and deepen' the conceptualisation of causation in IR, see Price and Reus-Smit, 'Dangerous Liaisons?', pp. 278-9, 282
151. Patomäki, After International Relations, pp. 76-82
152. Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 55-6, 84-7, 165-8
153. Why a World State is Inevitable: Teleology and the Logic of Anarchy', European Journal of International Relations, 9:4 (2003), pp. 494-5.
154. Hansen, Security as Practice, p. 31.
155. X, Y, and Z are not to be confused a type of constitutive analysis that focuses on the inter-subjective context 'C'.
156. See, especially, John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York, Free Press, 1995).
157. SHere, an analysis of the relationship between discourse 'X' and outcome 'Y' leads to a conclusion that that X renders Y in C. For instance, a same-sex couple from Whitehorse was constituted as married (Y) by a decision of the Supreme Court (X) in Yukon Territory (C).
158. H. Stuart Hughes, 'The Historian and the Social Scientist', The American Historical Review, 66:1 (October 1960), p. 28.
159. Elster, Explaining Social Behavior, p. 36
160. Cf. Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, eds., Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
161. Compare Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, pp. 43-5
162. And Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 81-5, 153-4.
163. Selby, 'Engaging Foucault', pp. 339, 341.
164. Ibid., p. 340.
165. To the extent that IR, like Marxism, is ultimately interested in evaluating realities most conducive to emancipation (meaning the human subject's pursuit of goals in ways that do not stop other subjects from doing the same), then Foucauldian research tools must also be ready to engage questions such as 'what is right, just or fair?', 'what is to be done?' or 'what could work?'