Stephen Walt on the Israel Lobby, the ‘Security’ in Security Studies and Other IR Issues
13 Nov 2012
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge or principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge or in this debate?
I think that the biggest challenge to the field has three parts. The first part is that it has been a while since there has been a really big new theoretical break-through, the kind of idea that engages everyone in the field. My sense of the field is that for the last 10 or 15 years we have been in something of an intellectual cul-de-sac. Secondly, much of contemporary IR theory is simply not very relevant – it doesn’t actually tell our students much about the real world we’re grappling with; it doesn’t give much guidance to policy makers or even concerned citizens who are trying to understand the contemporary world. Encouraging theorists to engage with real-world issues is something our field ought to do. And the third challenge I see is that of trying to integrate all of the different strands of theory that we already have. We have theories at the systemic level, theories that look at the characteristics of units, and so forth, but we have never been very good at putting those together in any kind of systematic way. Currently, we have lots of competing predictions stemming from those competing theories but we’re still not very good at sorting out which of these might fit together or how you could try and use all of these different bodies of theories in some kind of synthetic way.
As far as the main debate: I think that the most fundamental debate is still the one between those who have an optimistic view of human progress—based largely on the spread of liberal principles--and those who don’t. The former group believes that the international system is gradually evolving in a peaceful direction, that major warfare is becoming increasingly unlikely, and that the spread of democracy, economic interdependence, international institutions, and the integration of information systems are gradually creating a world community in which large-scale warfare is not going to be a serious problem. The second group consists of those who in fact think that international relations basically hasn’t changed much over time. For the latter, international politics is still mostly about competition between territorial units – in the modern world, states – and even if war is unlikely, preparations for war will continue and the familiar set of security concerns will remain central to IR. I’m in the latter group, obviously.
At present, I’m especially concerned by the second challenge I mentioned, the connection between IR theory and the real world. I try to engage issues that are actually happening out there—albeit in a scholarly way—and I wish more academics did too. International relations theory should not become a purely academic enterprise where scholars just write for a handful of other academics. If all we do is read each other’s work without actually trying to speak to larger audiences, we are abdicating a very important social role. What’s the point of having tenure if one never uses that freedom to engage in big, real-world debates? And I think our field has very much slipped into this rarified sort of scholarly autism.
In terms of the main debate, I clearly think the competitive nature of the system is not going to go away. People continually hope that war is becoming obsolete and that security competition will be eliminated by either liberal political forms or economic interdependence, but I just don’t see something like that happening in my lifetime.
In terms of real-world challenges IR theory has to grapple with, I’ll just mention one. Today we are beginning to explore the implications of a globally integrated information system, —of which the Internet is the most obvious manifestation—a world where ideas and information can traverse the globe in real-time and at very low cost. The degree of interconnectivity that now exists between different societies and the capacity to learn about them in real time is potentially very significant, but we still have to figure out what the political implications are. For example, it may become more difficult to demonize other countries or present biased information about them as a wide array of information sources become available. Again, the problem is that we don’t quite know what it means. So that is example of a real-world phenomenon that requires theoretical analysis.
A second real-world issue for us to be thinking about is the balance between the power of the state and the power of the individual. Small groups of people have the potential to do more damage than at any time in history. All you have to do is think about terrorist organizations equipped with biological weapons or nuclear weapons; they could do extraordinary levels of damage, far more than any non-state actor could ever have done in the past. For some, it suggests that states are growing weaker. But at the same time, the capacity of state organizations to monitor what (individual) human beings are up to has also grown, and citizens in many countries seem to be willing to tolerate higher levels of surveillance than they would have accepted in the past. One of the major issues of politics more generally is how this sort of competition between state power and individual autonomy--which includes individuals interested in doing bad things--plays out over the next century. And this matters for not just the western world, but also in lots of other places.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I think four main influences shaped my outlook on IR. First, going back to my childhood, my father was a physicist and also something of a military history buff. Growing up, I got interested in military history and general features of international politics at a relatively young age, and we used to argue a lot about foreign policy when I was in high school. I read a lot of books on war and collected airplane and warship models and things like that.
Secondly, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford I studied with external pageAlexander George (1920-2006), and his interest in using theory to speak to policy issues clearly resonated with me. Also, his attempts to use history in a more systematic and structured way – the work he did on “structured, focused comparison as a type of qualitative methods – was very appealing. This was because I liked history, but I wanted to be able to integrate theory and history in a more rigorous way.
Needless to say, Kenneth Waltz (external pageTheory Talk #40) had an enormous influence on me. He was my dissertation chairman, as well as something of a role model to many of my fellow graduate students. It wasn’t just the ideas he had on international politics—though they were obviously very influential—but also the example he set. Waltz always asked big and fundamental questions – and he was more concerned with quality than quantity. One of the striking things about Waltz was that he didn’t publish an enormous amount relative to his enormous reputation. He obviously had a very productive career and remains active today, but he didn’t publish a huge number of books and articles. There are lots of less influential scholars who have much longer CVs. Instead, he tended to publish work that was always really, really good, and on central topics. One of the things I learned from that is that quality control really matters: it is better to write a smaller number of really important pieces than a huge number of not very interesting works. Waltz was also inspiring because he wasn’t afraid to challenge fads or the conventional wisdom, and because he tried to state things clearly and simply, and I’ve tried to emulate those traits in my own work.
The final influence has been my colleagues and peers, going back to my graduate days at Berkeley. I was fortunate enough to go to graduate school with a terrific set of students and I subsequently met others during my years as a pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard. And I often tell graduate students that they’ll learn as much from each other as they’re going to learn from their professors, and that their fellow-graduate students are going to be their intellectual partners for a long time, so it's important to forge lots of intellectual connections. I was lucky to have come along at a moment when some remarkably smart and dedicated peers were around and a lot of my own success is due to having smart people to learn from early on.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I can think of three things here. One is that you do need a lot of knowledge of the real world and of the relevant history. It is hard to be very good at understanding the contemporary world politics if you don’t know a lot of the substance of it. The value of any theory ultimately rests on its ability to explain what is actually occurring (or has occurred), and knowing a lot about substance helps us create theories that actually do fit the facts.
I might add that this means knowing a lot about global history. When people like me were trained in North America, courses in diplomatic history tended to be European history, or maybe transatlantic history. But unless you became a regional specialist, you simply didn’t learn very much about the history of other parts of the world. Today, however, one needs to try and learn as much about what happened in South Asia or Latin America or East Asia or Africa as well, because history is both the primary data base for testing theories and because how we understand the past shapes a lot of behavior today. So the first point is this basic bedrock knowledge of the real world.
Second is a capacity for simplification. Theory is all about figuring out what the essence of a particular phenomenon is; it’s about abstraction, eliminating the superfluous elements and really getting at the essence of what is happening. And that involves imagination--the ability to conceive of things in simple terms rather than in complex terms and to strip away what is peripheral and grasp the essence of a social phenomenon. There is also the capacity to analogize, to take an idea from one realm and see that it applies in a totally different domain, while recognizing ways in which the analogy may not hold. So the second step consists in taking all that knowledge of the real world and stripping away the stuff that doesn’t matter to really see what is going on. Some people are very good at this and others aren’t. I think you can try and hone that capacity through graduate training, but often it is simply a mental quality that some people have and others don’t.
And thirdly, everyone needs to get at least a certain basic training in methods of causal inference and research design. I don’t necessarily mean the full arsenal of quantitative and qualitative methods, but the basic principles research design, and learning how to draw conclusions correctly from a pattern of evidence and the capacity to test ideas rigorously is fundamental. If you don’t have that, you’ll make elementary mistakes and get the wrong answer.
In 1991, you published an article called The Renaissance of Security Studies (read external pagehere, PDF), arguing against the widening of the concept of security into non-national realms such as human security, environmental security, etc. ‘Wideners’ have since gained momentum, not in the least because of events such as 9/11. How do you think about the definition of security now?
There is no question that the concept of security has broadened from what it might have been in the 1950s or 1960s, when it did tend to be very state-centered. What I was arguing against in 1991 was making the term ‘security’ so inclusive that it included virtually anything that might affect human welfare. So people, for instance, wanted the field of security studies to include the study of global health, or the study of poverty, or of migration. And I felt first of all that this “redefinition” was being used to try and take over the field in ways that I didn’t think were going to be helpful.
In particular, I felt the attempts to redefine were being made in order to marginalize the study of traditional forms of security affairs. Ultimately, I think the actual name of a field is kind of a secondary issue: it doesn’t really matter what we call these things. If you want to call more traditional security studies ‘strategic studies’ and call the study of human security ‘security studies’, I don’t have a big problem with that. What I was objecting to was the attempt to use nomenclature as a way of legitimizing a particular view of the field, so that traditional topics could be excluded and a whole set of unrelated topics could occupy it instead. In particular, people wanted to define “security studies” broadly so that academic positions and programs that had traditionally focused on conflict and war could be taken over by people studying the environment, public health, gender politics, or whatever, even when it had no particular connection to organized violence. I should emphasize that I think topic like global health or migration or human rights or transnational crime are all important subjects that deserve serious attention, and I certainly wasn’t suggesting that they shouldn’t be studied; I just thought that should be done openly, and not through a sort-of stealthy redefinition of an existing sub-field. And I wanted to retain a relatively focused conception of the subfield, so that it would retain some intellectual coherence and so that it wouldn’t suffer the same fate that military history had suffered in many academic history departments.
Of course, when I was writing that article in the early 1990s, there were a lot of people who believed that with the Cold War over, peace was going to break out everywhere and we were not going to need to study these things anymore. Indeed, a number of prominent scholars said some remarkably silly things about the obsolescence of security studies, in effect suggesting that people who were experts on war and security competition could be put out to pasture and replaced a new group of scholars who will study these other questions. Unfortunately, that initial post-Cold War optimism wasn’t borne out. We see now that competition between states has continued and that war is still a major challenge, even though it may take somewhat different forms. I don’t think there is a particularly heated debate any longer: we have discovered that there is room for a lot of different people studying a lot of different aspects of human competition in the field. Continue reading