This blog provides the discussion highlights for Sunday IR Cafe #12. Conducted on 17th April 2022, the discussion covered Haider Nizamani’s chapter Our Region Their Theories: A Case for Critical Security Studies in South Asia.
CORE ARGUMENTS:
- In this article, Haider Nizamani makes a case for a separate yet not exceptional theoretical paradigm of security studies for the Third World nations. Though the neorealist framework has held a prominent position in the South Asian security scholarship, it has not been able to explain the rivalry between India and Pakistan succinctly. To situate the issues of the Third World in their historical context, Nizamani proposes critical, Foucauldian theory as a more plausible alternative.
- Neorealism as a theory of international security reflects the Western notions of the state, state-making, and security. Yet it claims universal explanatory power, applicable to all nations and societies, regardless of the cultural and historical differences. In reality, though, neorealism developed in the backdrop of the US domination of world politics and reinforced the U.S. national interest.
- The dominant theory of neorealism seeks to provide simplified explanations of international relations, conflict, rivalry, and peace based largely on the experiences of the First World alone. The Third World and its specificity do not amount to much within the neorealist framework. For instance, neorealism considers the state to be a coherent and stable entity acting as a unified actor in international politics. But in the case of the Third World, the state rarely enjoys coherence, legitimacy, and stability that the West takes for granted, and most of the conflicts are intra-state conflicts.
- Hence, the neorealist assumption of functional similarity among states can be questioned for its insufficiency in capturing the security dynamics of the Third World. Further, even the approaches that move beyond neorealism and try to focus on state-specificity are fraught with problems. For instance, Barry Buzan’s classification of states as weak and strong is simplistic, circular, and ahistorical, amounting to orientalism. Likewise, Mohammed Ayoob’s attempt to diversify the analysis by emphasizing the qualitatively different state-building processes in Third World resorts to historical determinism.
- Weak states are the ones where the end purpose of the governance is contested; civil society is not fully visible; there exists more than one nation or hierarchies among those nationalities. In weak states, power is not equally distributed among groups, and people identify themselves more with primordial identities than national ones. The state cannot hold power without excessive force and intimidation, implying a lack of legitimacy. The strong states, in contrast, are the modern industrial societies of the West.
- Holsti furthers this division by categorising states on the basis of two foundations of legitimacy: i) historic-civic and ii) natural. While most of the western states evolved in line with these two categories, the Third World states are cast as ‘fictional’ states in Holsti’s typology. These ‘fictional states’ had artificial origins and emerged out of the European colonisation process.
- Nizami argues that the logic of security orientalism guides the formulation of weak/strong states. The categories and characteristics counted in these typologies ignore the historical specificity and diversity of the state-building process in the Third World. Thus, this approach also falls short in addressing the process of state-making in the Third World. Ayoob reduces all the problems of the Third World to that of colonial legacy, absolving the corrupt elite of the responsibility for state failures.
- Nizamani concludes by making a case for doing away with the state-society dichotomy and instead proposes a more dynamic construction of social reality. To construct a more heterogeneous reality, scholarship has to be focused on historical context and realities while not remaining fixated on those ideas.
DISCUSSION:
- The Western theories reflect the experiences, history and socialization of their states while ignoring the international relations of the Rest. For instance, realism uses the assumption of the state as a unitary actor to explain international politics. But the states in the non-western world are different. Intra-state conflict and not just inter-state conflict is of special significance in understanding the security considerations in South Asia. For instance, the Taliban can be seen as a meaningful security actor in Afghanistan despite being a domestic insurgency problem for a long time. Any framework of analysis which privileges the state and takes it as a given can’t offer a suitable explanation in cases like this. The quest for a distinct security problematique in this article presents an alternative, more meaningful way of looking at such security dynamics by contesting the core assumptions of the Western security studies discipline.
- The charge of ahistoricity against the neorealist conception of the state as a unitary actor is a valid one. However, such charges need not invalidate the neorealist categorisation and conception. This is so because the ‘weak’ states themselves are invested in pursuing the path proposed by the ‘ideal-type’ strong states. There exists a desirability to emulate the strong states among the masses and the elites in the Third World. The recognition of this desirability already exists in scholarship that may not fall under security studies. Ram Guha, for example, has characterized India as a 40:60 democracy, implying certain desirable criteria which is being used to evaluate India’s performance. The criteria for judging the strongness of states may reflect the state of advanced industrial democracies and include factors like treatment of minorities, pluralism, levels of economic development, tolerance for alternative views, electoral democracy, etc. It may also include respect for the rule of law, the absence of discrimination against certain sections of society, and procedural democracy.
- From a neorealist point of view, Kenneth Waltz’s insights can be invoked to contest the author’s criticism of neorealism. Waltz’s neorealism assumes the state to be a unitary actor. Other actors like domestic interest groups or multinational corporations and regime types (democracy, one-party state, oligarchy, etc.) are ignored by neorealists in the interest of parsimony. Since Waltz sees theories as an abstraction of reality, he is fine with ignoring certain elements of reality while privileging others. Any robust criticism of the theory should ideally deal with and show flaws in its internal logic and coherence instead of just pointing out elements which are excluded in theory. Theories are also not meant to explain everything. Neorealism’s inability to explain the Third World security issues is not exactly a robust criticism because the theory is meant to deal with the great power politics. Further, given the positivist foundations of many streams of realism, though Waltz himself was not positivist, the issue of epistemological incompatibility with theories using interpretivist lens like Foucauldian analysis becomes evident. Such epistemic incompatibility precludes or at least makes it difficult to discuss the merits and demerits of realism from the lens of another theory. That said, the process of theory building need not follow what Waltz has prescribed. The template that Waltz follows is useful but cannot be the sole criterion for constructing useful theories.
- South Asian realities can be better explained by considering independent variables at the unit level, involving domestic actors, ideologies, etc. Here neoclassical realism could be more useful than neorealism in understanding the South Asian security dynamics. It would have been useful for the author to consider neoclassical approaches while looking for alternative resources for an alternative security problematique for South Asia.
- Further, recently a trend can be seen in the emergence of scholarship that focuses on alternative explanations of international politics based on indigenous concepts and theories rooted in the South Asian context. These studies add new concepts and vocabulary for understanding international politics. A few major contributions in this vein include:
- Advaita as a Global International Relations theory – Deepshikha Shahi.
- Provincialising International Relations through a reading of Dharma – Giorgio Shani and Navnita Chadha Behera.
- International Relations Theory and South Asia – E Sridharan et al.
- India’s Strategic Practice: A Case Study for Mughal Grand Strategy 1556-1605 – Jayashree Vivekanandan.