Mary Kaldor Part 1

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? And what is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

Everything is changing so dramatically that I think the central challenge is whether International Relations is a subject at all, to tell you the truth. We are witnessing a shift from international relations to global politics. By that, I mean that instead of settling things in the traditional way, based on the inside-outside convention which is so typical of international relations as a discipline, where the inside is politics and the outside is strategy and diplomacy, more and more of what counted as the outside is becoming politics and more and more involves not just states, but also non-state actors, civil society groups and so on. On the other hand, what happens inside our borders is increasingly treated by foreign ministries and the army. We’re in a moment of tremendous flux where lots of critical ideas that ten years ago were seen as very challenging are now widely accepted.

Whether it’s critical security approaches, whether it’s the importance of multilateralism… all of these things seem more broadly accepted than they used to be, say, ten years ago: there’s more and more acceptance that we’re moving towards a world of global politics, and yet, oddly enough, because this is the way this discipline is taught – especially in the United States – many people in the field remain within realist assumptions and realist ways of doing things. So while in a way it is not a debate, it is still a challenge to start working with what are now accepted new concepts. For instance, to give you an example from my own experience: I find that a lot of people, while they are willing to accept that contemporary conflicts have changed and that the main conflicts that they are concerned with are what I call new wars, they are not willing to accept that this requires a new approach. I have been reading a lot of American literature and they regard new wars as something to approach from within the traditional counter-insurgency literature on national liberation. They still think there is a world of traditional geopolitics and I think perhaps that is the biggest debate, or the biggest idea to be challenged.

The other big challenge, I suppose, is to think discursively – and thereby I mean that the biggest debate is or should be about constructivism, really. There’s an important debate between people who have different interpretative understandings of social science and those who have an explanatory understanding, and I think that that’s in a way the biggest debate going on at the moment. The main idea that social constructivist approaches have added is that how you frame things shapes how you find solutions in social sciences. So much in those sciences is about identifying human motivations and that is impossible to establish objectively. What you can do is try to find interpretations that enable you to act and to reflect upon your practice, to see how helpful your interpretation actually was.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

A lot of it is very personal. I’d have to go right back to my childhood: my background is that I am half Hungarian and that my uncle was a dissident in Hungary in prison during the 1950s. At the same time, however, my mother was an active member of the Labor Party and a peace activist, and somehow I had to find a way of reconciling these two sides of my family. So I think that from a very early age I was against nuclear weapons and had an active interest in the peace tradition. At the same time, I had this very uneasy feeling that people who are involved in peace activism weren’t really concerned about issues like human rights and the problem of communism in Eastern Europe. So somehow I wanted to bring those two things together.

Then, I was myself very involved in peace activism, and when I left university, I got a job at SIPRI (the external pageSwedish International Peace Research Institutecall_made) and there my job was (because of my undergraduate diploma in economics) to construct the Arms Trade Statistics – and funnily enough, as I look back on my career, that’s one of the things I’m most proud of, because it is still being used today. And through that, I got very interested in the defense industry, arms trade, military technology, which lasted for about ten years. In the 1980s the peace movement surged in Europe, in which I then got really involved. I was really inspired by two people in that context: one is the historian external pageEP Thompsoncall_made who talked a lot about ‘history from below’, and another was Mient Jan Faber, a Dutch peace activist who had worked a lot on aspects of Eastern Europe that I was interested in.

As a result of that, some of us started the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (external pagehCacall_made) the idea of which was to help civil society in difficult places and to work together across the East-West divide. I got tremendously involved in Yugoslavia and Bosnia, because branches of the hCa were started, and being there led to all my work on new wars.

So in the end the most important ingredients for the dish that I became would have been family experience; some very important people such as Edward Thompson; and the experience of being a peace and human rights activist.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?

I do think, as you see from my own experience, that activism is very important. And then it’s also important what kind of activism. Quite contrary to the general academic view which hold that if you’re too political you’ll become less objective, I think activism forces you to be very objective because you have to get your arguments right and you can’t twist them as it suits you. You can always be publicly challenged. But related to activism is the ability to be reflexive and to reflect on what you do and what you do wrong, in short, to think about your own behavior and ideas very critically. Imagine yourself in somebody else’s shoes. That’s tightly linked to what I denoted as the constructivist challenge to IR: how do people make decisions? Where does change actually come from? Where does agency reside?

There’s an old fashioned view that change comes from above, that leaders make decisions, change policies, and that view holds that leaders simply decided that the Cold War was over. I think change actually sort of bubbles up through discursive practice, through dialogue, discourses, the way people talk about things. Leaders cannot uphold a Cold War or War on Terror if nobody believes their discourse – such ideas have to be upheld by societies at large. Look, for instance, at how everybody has changed their views on climate change. That hasn’t come because some politician decides so; it is rather the politicians that have been dragged into this.

And for a student it is very important not to get caught up in appealing narratives that are projected on global politics afterwards, but to try and scrutinize what’s going on as closely as possible. Seeing actors in practice forces you to put yourself in their place, and this, in turn, creates a deep understanding of political and social reality.

You have been writing about the changes the social relations of warfare have gone through since the end of the Cold War, starting out with your famous book New and Old Wars. Things have been turbulent since and, for instance, private security actors are rife. Has the Old War forever faded?

Well I certainly think that ‘old war’ has faded, but I’m not sure if it has forever faded – let me qualify that. Many people see the shift from traditional, standing army warfare to different kind of warfare occurring at the end of the Cold War, but if one observes closely, it is actually after the Second World War that old wars have become very, very rare. And I think there are clear reasons for that. One reason is something we experienced in the Second World War, which is that military technology has simply become too destructive to be used in symmetrical ways. Nuclear war is, I think, a metaphor for the destructiveness of war in general.

Another reason, which I think is something we’re often not aware of, is that globalization (which is I think greater human consciousness) has profoundly constrained the possibility of atrocities and war. This has to do with the whole social construction and perception issue of politics I referred to. Just to give you an example: when Israel attacked Gaza most people were completely horrified. I remember one of my friends rung me up and said: ‘don’t they think Palestinians are humans?’ And I said: ‘no, of course not, this is war.’ You don’t think the other side is human in a war. But my friend said: ‘but surely we thought the Germans were humans in the Second World War…’ To which I replied: ‘no, we didn’t; we killed about one or two hundred thousand in a single night in Hamburg and Dresden!’ So what we did in the Second World War was actually far worse than what the Israelis did in Gaza. But nowadays the context is changed by this hugely changed consciousness (an effect or essential element of globalization) – it’s simply unacceptable to do something like killing 200,000 people overnight nowadays. Now, of course, given that this contemporary condition has to do with human consciousness, implies that the situation can change again, depending largely on how we frame things – just like it was possible for Hitler to re-invent slavery after it had been abolished. I hope, of course, that such conflicts and practices are a thing of the past, and I hope particularly with new technologies that we will always have this sensitivity. But nevertheless you can never rule out the possibility.

This leads me to ask you a meta-question: are you basically optimistic or pessimistic about human nature and/or the nature of social interactions on a large scale (like, for instance, the level of global politics)? Is politics the fight to curb negative tendencies in human nature or are we empowering the good that people inherently do?

Well, do you know the famous phrase of Antonio Gramsci, who called for ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’? I think that’s a very good description of how one ought to feel. One ought to be very clear about the negative sides of human relationships, and the huge difficulties of changing human relationships. But I also think one ought to be positive about what human beings will do given the right conditions and trying to create the conditions in which human beings can solve problems though debate and reason rather than through violence and struggle. That seems to me the key thing. So in one sense I am optimistic: if you create the conditions through which people can have free debate then they will come up with reasonable solutions. But creating those conditions is extremely difficult. (Continue with part two)