The Neglected Cause: Religion and the Peloponnesian War

By Stefan Dolgert

 

Introduction

After more than two thousand years, the spectacle of the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians[1] still holds our imagination.  Why this is so, or whether it is entirely healthy, contemporary scholars wrestle with the question of why this first war between “superpowers” occurred, and whether it could have been avoided by the policy makers of that time, had they simply learned the correct lessons from their past.  It presents us with equal parts mystery and tragedy, and provides fertile ground for the ruminations of the historical consciousness.  In addition it is the first historical event that presents itself, via its reporter Thucydides, as an open book for the scientific imagination.  In searching out the causes of the war, and the laws of human nature that are revealed therein, the war promises us the chance to learn the real grounds of life, so that we may make ourselves as secure as possible from the shocks and catastrophes that fate might otherwise hold in store for us.

The Peloponnesian War is taken to be the paradigmatic example of war in the ancient world, but it is also looked to for lessons in the modern world.  In particular, the resemblance between Athens and the United States has led many commentators to look to the Athenian experience to guide contemporary American policy.  Two commercial republics, well-known for democratic practices at home and imperial pretensions abroad, Athens and the United States seemed to face a parallel set of dangers in their respective paths through the international arena.  While this similarity was more pronounced during the Cold War, when the USSR appeared in the guise of Sparta, many today still look to ancient Athens, and to the lessons of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War in particular, for guidance in matters of international policy.

Recent scholarship in International Relations has focused on the characteristics of Thucydides as a political thinker, rather than on the war itself.  Realists and Constructivists have debated whether Thucydides is the father of political realism, as Realists from Waltz to Gilpin generally maintain, but have largely ignored assessing the underlying causes of the war, which are usually taken for granted (see Keohane, 1986, Garst, 1989, Clark, 1993, Bagby, 1994, and Forde, 1995, among others).  Robert Keohane, for example, asserts that Thucydides was the first to set out the basic maxims of political realism:  “(1) states (or city-states) are the key units of action; (2) they seek power, either as an end in itself or as a means to other ends; and (3) they behave in ways that are, by and large, rational, and therefore comprehensible to outsiders in rational terms” (Keohane 1986, 8).  But the causes of the war itself modern International Relations has left to the province of the historians and classicists (see Kagan, 1970 and Ste. Croix, 1972 for a summary of the vast literature on this topic).  It is this gulf which I hope to bridge.

Masculinities, Power, & The Epidemic: Messages Of Social Research

By Raewyn Connell

University of Sydney

 

An international symposium linking lessons from HIV, sexuality and reproductive health with other areas for rethinking AIDS, gender and development; 15-18^th October, 2007, Dakar

 

Studying Masculinities

I have been involved in research on masculinities for a quarter of a century, and I am still impressed by how much we have to learn. What we don’t know becomes very intimidating in the context of the HIV epidemic. So let me start on an upbeat, by discussing some things we do know about masculinities, and how we know them.

I started research on these problems while working with two groups of colleagues, one researching social inequality in Australian high schools, the other researching theories of gender. Both groups had learnt from feminist and gay liberation insights into power and oppression, so both groups began asking questions about gendered power relations among boys and men (Connell et al. 1982, Carrigan et al. 1985). This research, together with a following life-history study of masculinities in change, became part of a new wave of research which I call the “ethnographic moment” in masculinity research.

This was certainly not the beginning of serious thought about the question. The making of masculinity in a context of modernisation and divided cultural identity in Mexico was already a theme in Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude back in 1950. Powerful insights about masculinities and colonialism in India can be found in Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy, which drew on European psychoanalytic research going back a hundred years. A considerable literature of US social-psychological research using abstracted measures of masculinity/femininity and the “male role” has also existed for decades.

Nevertheless the wave of research in the 1980s was something of a breakthrough, because it combined the conceptual power of the new gender analysis with sensitive empirical research techniques. Life history interviews, sample surveys, ethnography, institutional research, discourse analysis, and studies of written and visual documents combined, quite rapidly, to build up new pictures of men, boys, and social constructions of masculinity. Soon syntheses of this new knowledge became possible (Edley and Wetherell 1995, Connell 1995). As research circulates from more regions of the world, more comprehensive syntheses are appearing, such as the recent Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Kimmel, Hearn & Connell 2005).

The results of this research are relevant to many social issues, including those around HIV/AIDS. We have to be thoughtful, nevertheless, in “applying” the findings. The link between social research and social action is not like the link between physics and engineering. Social research illuminates situations – it does not mechanically determine a universal best practice.

Robert Keohane: Political Theorist

By Andrew Moravcsik

 

From Helen Milner and Andrew Moravcsik, eds. Power, Interdependence and Non-State Actors in World Politics: Research Frontiers, (Chapter 13)  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2009).

 

This volume closes with a backward look. The fifteen years from 1970 to 1985 witnessed the emergence of the new subdiscipline of international relations now widely known as “international political economy” (IPE). No one contributed more to this process than Robert Keohane.[1] Working in part with Joseph Nye, he laid the theoretical foundation for IPE in three books—Transnational Relations and World Politics, Power and Interdependence, and After Hegemony—and many related essays.[2] Among his numerous contributions to international relations, these are the most essential.

This chapter has two aims. The first is to describe the basic contribution of those works to general international relations theory. They introduced three fundamental causal premises about international politics, which have served as core elements of the discipline of international political economy ever since. These premises highlight the important impact on state behavior of, respectively, shifts in state preferences induced by globalization, shifts in interstate power induced by asymmetries in interdependence, and shifts in the distribution of information induced by international institutions. Taken together, these three factors offer a coherent explanation of patterns of international cooperation in world politics

The second aim of the chapter is to place these theoretical innovations in historical perspective. Keohane’s background and intellectual style, combined with a distinct set of historical circumstances both in the outside world and in academia, explain the emergence of these particular theoretical contributions at this juncture in the history of international relations. Critical is the fact that Keohane’s temperament and training have always been closer to those of a political philosopher than a political scientist. Drawing on additional biographical material, the chapter traces how Keohane deployed the skills of a “political theorist” at a moment when international economic issues were becoming more important in American and global politics, and realist international relations theory was facing theoretical challenge. This circumstance created a unique moment for major intellectual breakthroughs—a historical “window of opportunity” that has now closed.

 

Keohane’s Fundamental Theoretical Contributions

Robert Keohane’s scholarship between 1970 and 1985 opened a new substantive area for inquiry. The work focused on new issues (international political economy, not international security), new actors (transnational actors, not states), new forms of interaction (transnational and transgovernmental relations, rather than interstate relations), new outcomes (international cooperation rather than international conflict), and new structures (international institutions, not pure anarchy). It advanced provocative hypotheses, most notably the claim that institutionalized cooperation persisted after the decline of postwar American hegemony. These aspects have been much discussed—and are treated in detail elsewhere in this volume.[3] Keohane’s most important contributions lie, however, at the level of basic international relations theory.

The English School and Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled

By Iver B. Neumann.

 

Paper presented to the Fourth ECPR IR Standing Group Conference, Canterbury, 14-16 September 2001. Comments welcome to ibn@nupi.no.

 

There are, perhaps, three major reasons for the renewed interest in the English School after the Cold War. First, this event made for such an obvious challenge to the structure of  world politics that even the structuralists of our discipline were, at least initially, willing to consider that something was changing. Acknowledged change pushes the scholar in the direction of privileging process over structure. Inasmuch as the English School is one of IR research programmes which are most attuned to historical contingency and change, an upsurge in attention was to be expected. Secondly, a particularly noteworthy aspect of that change which had been afoot since decolonialisation, but which had been marinalised by the centrality of bipolarity in the states system, was the enhanced importance of multiculturalism to world politics. The end of the Cold War brought on a ‘return of culture’ to IR in various quarters of the discipline. As seen from the English School, those returning came late to the ball. The question of how the rise of what was generally referred to as the ‘third world’ would impact on world politics at large had been a core interest of the English School since its inception (e.g. Bull 1984a). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that a renewed interest in the one should be condusive to a renewed interest in the other. Whereas the first reason for the renewed interest is lodged in developments at large and the second reason concerns a factor which makes itself felt in a number of different places in world politics, a third reason is to do with the link between the development of the states system and the development of IR as a discipline. Inasmuch as it was predicated on the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War removed the causal factor behind the institutionalisation of a ‘Western’ military alliance. This meant that one reason for papering over the fissure between what had become the two principal parties to that alliance – United States and the EU – was gone. Whereas a way was found, at least initially, to shore up ‘Western’ unity in such an area as defence, in most other areas the fissure between the United States and Europe grew wider as Europeans reasserted themselves. Read in the light of this development, it is hardly coincidental that the upsurge of interest in the English School also happens to be an upsurge in interest in the only fully fledged non-American research programme that the ‘American’ discipline of IR (Hoffmann 197x) has ever known.[1]

For reasons similar to the ones listed above, the renewed interest in the English School has also coincided with a renewed interest in the specific practices which together constitute world politics. Instead of assuming a set of functions and a state structure and then deducing a set of truth claim from these assumptions, a growing number of scholars have begun to scrutinise how world politics are actually performed. As pointed out by the English School, if one views world politics as an historically emerging and social phenomenon, then diplomacy plays a key role in it. The renewed interests in the English School and in social practices like diplomacy should, therefore, be mutually reinforcing. To the extent that Tim Dunne (1998: 181) is right in maintaining that ‘few academics who identify with the English School today are interested in the processes of diplomacy’, this is definitely a situation which should be remedied.[2] Part of the groundwork for such a revival must be to scrutinise and critique what the English School has had to say about diplomacy. That is the job to be undertaken in this paper. Part one introduces English School thought on diplomacy as it evolved through an original series of book. Part two looks at the work of  the next generation(s). Part three draws attention to the limits of the present English School  conceptualisation by arguing that it is not sufficiently tied in with an overall discussion of social change. The conclusion reached is that the English School has indeed made an impressive contribution, but one which we can only followed up by wedding it to more wide-reaching projects of social theory.