Peter W Singer Part 1

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

I believe the biggest challenge is how we continue to hold on to old theories, old frameworks, that actually do not apply to our current reality. That is, we have a field that continually keeps its head in the sand, while the sands underneath it are shifting. And my work has been, in many ways, dedicated to trying to challenge some of those aspects. Take, for example, the concept that the state is the only player in international relations. When I was in graduate school, that was something which was very much forced upon us. People would argue back against this state only approach with examples from human rights or environmental issues, and the response always made was: ‘oh, well, but those are just soft issues – when it comes to security, of course, the state is the only player’. That’s what Corporate Warriors was about: it argued that even in this realm of security (considered the core of state-hood), the state is not the only player. Even more, states were becoming dependent on private military firms (PMCs); even the most powerful states, to carry out their military tasks. And this has several policy implications for warfare, just as the question of who states are having to face up against with their armies: which is the state that the US is fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan?

We keep holding on to those categories frantically, because they supply us with frameworks we deem necessary for understanding what’s going on: in policy terms, without the notion of states, we simply wouldn’t know what to do, how to intervene in the world out there. But when we enter situations and we only look at them the way we want them to be, instead of the way they really are, that’s when we make some of our worst mistakes – and Iraq would be a great example of that.

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

All of us are shaped by our own experiences, so for me it’s a lot about how I grew up (you know, as a kid I played lots with toy soldiers and with Star Wars action figures!). I come from a family that has a good deal of military background, that may have shaped my understanding. When I was in grad school a lot of fundamental transition was taking place in the world (the Cold War had just ended) and I had some fantastic professors when I was there, amongst which the great late Samuel Huntington, who was a particular inspiration. You might agree or disagree with him, but he was a titan of the field because he co-determined the framework in the debate of how we would explore IR. And that’s true whether you talk about civil-military relations or if you’re looking at issues of culture and war.

For this new book on robotics and war, it again comes out of my personal experience of growing up loving these topics, but it also comes out of a sense of frustration. As I talk about in the book, I would go to a series of conferences, which were bringing together really some of the major personalities and players in the security studies field as well as from the Pentagon; they would talk about what’s new and revolutionary in war, and yet, here we were, using robots – and no-one was even mentioning it! Let alone that anyone was wrestling with the impact of it, the trends this was following, or the ethical and legal issues that would arise from it, how it would impact war initiation, how war is fought and ended… No one was willing to talk about the employment of drones in war, because as one person put it: ‘it’s mere science-fiction’.

Well, guess what: it’s not mere science fiction: in the US army, we currently have more than 7.000 drones in the air and more than 12.000 unmanned ground systems. In our operations, we use them every single day. And, to give you an idea of where we are, these are just your Model T Ford, the Wright Brother’s Flyer – compared to what’s coming. So it was in a sense a little bit of a frustration with our field that I was wrestling with. And that set me out on a journey. The same fascination linked to frustration has formed the driving force behind each and every investigation I did.

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

Don’t take scorn or ‘no’ for an answer. My experience, in terms of my own work, is an interesting example hereof. As my dissertation topic, I wanted to look at private military companies, and I was told by a very distinguished professor that I would do well to instead quit graduate school and go work in Hollywood, for thinking about fictional topics such as private companies in war. And yet, my dissertation lead to my book Corporate Warriors, and we have more private contractors in Iraq now than US soldiers. All the controversies that have come out of Iraq, such as the torturing in Abu-Ghraib involving ‘interpreters’ from private security companies and the 2004 shootings in Fallujah involving Blackwater personnel, all center around private military contractors.

The first time I presented the topic of my second book, on child soldiers, a Harvard professor told me I was ‘making it up’: she didn’t believe the issue of child soldiers mattered, let alone existed. And that’s of course an absurdity, since there are presently more than 300.000 child soldiers active. Plus, the issues that come out of studying child soldiers cover everything from legal and ethical questions to the challenges that soldiers face in the battlefield, like being fired on by young children. The very first US combat casualty in Afghanistan, a Green Beret, was killed by a 14-year-old sniper.

The same goes for a book on robotics and war: it is considered a major career risk to research and write a serious book on what many people insist is science-fiction. I also doubled down the risk factor in this book by writing it in a way I wanted to write it. It is a very pop-culture book, lots of anecdotes, lots of stories in it, but it also refers to Hobbes. It has IR theory but also discusses everything from Star Wars to Gilmore Girls. Hopefully, it makes people laugh out loud at some point in the reading of it. But, importantly, it has taken robotics out of science fiction and into policy.

So the lesson would be: believe in yourself. If you think you have come across an interesting and important topic and you get scrutinized by the old guard, don’t take “no” for an answer. A subject isn’t interesting because an authority thinks it is so.

I especially think that the old idea of a sort of apprenticeship model is one that really doesn’t drive the best work. But yet, that is how a lot of research is being done in our field: we take what some professor has done, and some advisee tweaks it just a slight bit. That’s not how we get good research is done, and that’s not how good theory is built.

You have gained fame for your book Corporate Warriors on the corporate security sector or private military companies (PMCs) as you call them. Since, publications on the subject have proliferated. But data is hard to come by – because governments are reluctant to disclose information and because the companies involved invoke contractual privacy. How did you manage to get by your data?

Research, research, research. Gather each and every book or article that relates even vaguely to the topic. I picked things from history, political science, economics… One of the challenges of IR is that people only read IR. Well, guess what: the world doesn’t work in these stove-pipes. Each issue in the field, including PMCs, has aspects of it that concern, and are treated by, other epistemic communities such as law, history, economics, etc. Each one of those opens up new research pathways.

At the same time, of course, we live in a world were not everything is in books. The comedian Stephen Colbert jokes: ‘I don’t trust books, there’s no heart’. So you interview, and not just in your own field and not just fellow academics, but everyone that matters to that topic of concern. And if it’s a topic that’s alive, there’s likely to be some news connected to your topic. The idea here is that you can build a 365-degree picture of what we’re looking at concerning your topic.

In the case of PMCs, I felt I was like a scientist, wanting to understand everything about this strange animal: how does it behave, how is it structured, but also the context in which it grew and interacts with other species of actors out there.

The same is the case for Children of War: it’s not just about reading the history or reading the latest issue of Security Studies, but jumping into the field and getting to know everything you can. Considering my last book, I talked to newspaper editors from Lebanon, to Human Rights Watch, to four-star generals and 19-year-old drone pilots, but also to insurgents from Iraq, to find out: what do they think about it? (Continue with part 2)