Theory Talks

Theory Talk #7: Joseph Nye

2008-05-15T18:31:00.011+02:00

Joseph Nye on Teaching America to be more British

Theory Talks proudly presents a Talk with Joseph S. Nye Jr., the scholar behind the popular concept of ‘soft power’, by which he adds a dimension to the classic realist notion of ‘hard’, or military, power. Being one of the top-ten most influential IR-scholars in the world, Nye continues to criticize American unilateralism as simply not the right way to survive: in an increasingly interdependent world, even ‘success in the War on Terrorism depends on Washington’s capacity to persuade others without force’, and, as Nye constantly argues, that capacity is in dangerous decline. In this Talk, Joseph Nye subsequently argues why the future of international politics lies in cooperation, and why the US can learn from 19^th century Britain.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR?

One of our biggest challenges is understanding the way the information revolution is affecting power, and the way the world is changing from simple inter-state politics to global and world politics. This was caught by the rationalist/constructivist debate at the end of the Cold War, and the reaction against simple materialist definitions of power that underlay what structural realists such as Waltz considered “theory of international politics.” This does not mean that the nation-state or realist theory is obsolete, but it does mean that the stage of world politics is becoming more crowded with extra actors, the distinction between domestic and international is not so neat, and the politics of transnational relations and complex interdependence need an understanding of liberal and constructivist approaches as well as classical realism.

What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I have challenged what philosophers call the “concrete fallacy” in the definition of power by introducing the concept of soft power. If power is the capacity to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, you can do it with material sticks and carrots (coercion and payment), but also by affecting the preferences of others and attracting them to want what you want. I call this ‘soft power’. Classical realists like Machiavelli and Morgenthau understood this dimension, but in its search for parsimony, structural realism settled on a truncated and impoverished materialist view of power. In my work with Robert O. Keohane, I explored different models of power and interdependence including the mixed coalitions typical of the ideal type we labeled ‘complex interdependence’. I have applied this approach to current policy issues as well as theory.

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

I came into IR though a side door, so to speak. I was interested in how economic rationality and political ideology interacted in the structuring of markets in newly independent Africa. I did my dissertation in Africa on “Pan Africanism and East African Integration.” (Today it might be called constructivist analysis.) I came into IR through regional integration theory, and that led to broader work on transnational actor and interdependence. A spell in the State Department dealing with nuclear proliferation led to a book on called Nuclear Ethics (1986), which also discussed arms control and the future of American power. It may seem a winding path, but the guiding thread was my curiosity.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

I argue in my text Understanding International Conflicts (1997), that students should have a good grounding in realism, liberalism, and constructivist approaches. Then find some puzzles or interesting anomalies and see how the theoretical approaches can be combined with empirical investigation to illuminate the problem. Keep going back and forth between theory and history, and beware of the tendency to elegance that leads many in the field to say more and more about less and less.

In what kind of international world do we live?

We live in a hybrid world. Part of our positive and normative world is Westphalian and based on sovereignty, and part is post-Westaphalian in which transnational actors and the norms of international humanitarian law transgress sovereignty. Both are likely to persist for decades, so good positive and normative analysis will have to be able to account for both.

Keeping in account this configuration, how do you see the near future?

In interstate relations, we are seeing a gradual movement of power that is often summarized as the “rise of Asia.” Some see this as American decline, but as I argued in Bound to Lead (1990) and The Paradox of American Power (2003), I think this is mistaken: I have argued that power resources depend upon context, and that there are three quite different contexts in world politics, something like a three dimensional chess game.

On the top board of military relations among states, the world is still unipolar and I do not see China, Europe or others surpassing the US in the near future.
On the middle board of economic relations among states, the world is already multi-polar.
On the bottom board of transnational relations that cross borders outside the control of governments – pandemics, climate change, transnational terrorism – power is chaotically distributed.

These issues can only be dealt with by cooperation among governments, and which is why the US, even as an undisputed military hegemony, cannot go at it alone.

Who should respond to the increasing scarcity of natural resources, states or the international society?

As the most powerful country, the United States should define its national interest broadly to include the provision of global public goods (as I spell out in The Paradox of American Power) much as Britain did in the 19^th century.

In the 21^st century, no one state can handle these issues alone, and it will be important to develop a broad range of more effective international institutions. This raises a number of interesting and difficult issues about participation, accountability and democratic theory within international institutions.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is also the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations and former Dean of the Kennedy School. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. In 2004, he published Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics; Understanding International Conflict (5th edition); and The Power Game: A Washington Novel.

Related links

About Nye

Joseph Nye’s faculty profile at Harvard
A 1998 interview with Joseph Nye by Harry Kreisler, Conversations With History (1998)

Nye’s work

Read Nye’s monthly comments on (international) politics and leadership here (available in English, Spanish, French and other languages)
Read Nye’s article Farewell to Arms Control (Foreign Affairs, 1986) here
Read Nye’s influential Foreign Policy article Soft Power (1990) here (pdf)
Read Nye’s article Think Again: Soft Power (Yale Global, 2006), in which he reviews his 1990-concept of ‘Soft Power’, here
Read a review of Nye’s 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power here
Read Nye’s observations on the implications of soft power for the contenders in the US presidential race here

Theory Talk #6: Klaus Dodds

2008-05-13T21:36:00.008+02:00

Klaus Dodds on James Bond, the Final Argument for a Geopolitical Approach to International Relations, and a Russian flag on the bottom of the ocean

Klaus Dodds is part of a new generation of critical ‘geopoliticians’ and focuses his work on, amongst others, the representation of space in visual media like internet, movies and pictures. He is also engaged in research about the geopolitics of the South Pole. In this comprehensive Talk, Dodds introduces us to, amongst others, the International Relations of James Bond, the South Pole and talks about the importance of the military in Latin American IR.

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?

I discern more than one principal issue in International Relations, and for me, the challenge of global governance is most certainly one of them. First of all, I have to be clear on what I mean exactly by ‘governance’: contrary to, for example, what Timothy Sinclair asserts in Theory Talk #5, I don’t see a distinction between ‘international institutions’ driven by state interests on one hand and global governance induced by private actors working very well, because the concept of governance is, if you like, too slippery for such a distinction: international institutions exist together with a whole range of other international structures and agents, and I think it to be very difficult to label some as serving exclusively state purposes and others exclusively private purposes.

For me, the main point about governance is that in our terribly unequal world, we should push for a significant deepening of institutions. Furthermore, any form of a more profound global governance should be based on rules, on law embedded in institutions. The ‘global’ side of ‘global governance’ is something social: it comes into being through the practices and discourses of human beings – as you can clearly see, for example, with the conception of the world in terms of the ‘War on Terror’, which denominates certain aspects of the world as dangerous based on a specific set of ideas on how the world works. Institutions should constitute the limits of these practices so as to not exploit our world or, as is generally the case, some specific part of it.

Another big issue is the role of space in international relations. Things do not just take place; everything takes place somewhere. In the formulation of theories on how international politics work, scholars often try to abstract from that spatiality, to conceive of ‘places’ as random and little relevant factors – like all politics could take place anywhere.

One aspect of this spatiality which is so important to me, is the visual one: how does the global get represented in visual culture, like movies or on internet? And how do principally large countries use these images to construct a story about what they are doing? In a very direct sense, you can see what I mean if you look at, for example, the web sites of environmental movements, which as a rule incorporate an image of the earth in its totality. This clearly conveys the feeling that ‘we are all living in this one earth’; since we share it, we also have to take care of it together. Another way of using the image of the world as a whole, is the cover of the book ‘Empire’ by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), which also displays the earth as a whole, but now conveying the strong message that it serves as the playground for empires. If one looks at the US and its strategy for their ‘global war on terror’, the authors might just have been right.

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

I interpret that question as asking about how I came to be so interested in the relationship between geopolitics and visual culture. Basically, I’ve studied a lot of IR that I found very dull. To be frank, I kept asking myself: ‘why are there just three big debates in IR?’ The mainstream IR is too insular for me, it excludes a lot of interesting and important issues. I am very fond of interdisciplinarity; using different approaches to answer questions and to understand what’s going on. I also try to bring International Relations back to popular culture; not only by linking notions of power to images, but also by making it accessible to a broader public. The implications of geopolitics affect everyone, and through such powerful media as television and images. Take the symbolic power something as common as saluting the flag has. So why let IR reside in an ivory tower?

But if that question refers to what motivated my to do geopolitics, I would name two big reasons: first of all, the fundamental notion that there is a very intimate relationship between power and knowledge; and second of all, the fact that most IR scholars have actually forgotten about the world. International Relations need a map to the world. Scholars that for me are related to these issues, are for example Edward Said, whose notion of ‘imaginative geographies’ I find particularly useful, and Noam Chomsky, whom I respect most of all for being a publicly engaged scholar.

In terms of real-world events that profoundly influenced me, I was particularly stricken by the fact that during the Cold War, al main discourses and with that public attention was basically fixed on the tension between the United States and Russia and their nuclear arsenals, while the whole Cold War had a much more profound impact in the South.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

Apart from, of course, a PhD, I would advice students to read as widely as possible. One should not be constrained by specific debates or issues, and most certainly avoid to consciously dedicate a whole career to one debate; not even the big debates (between, for example, rationalists and constructivists; Marxism, liberalism or realism; or between structure and agency) are worth it. That’s the reason why I publish in such different journals: it enables me to be involved in a lot of interesting issues and not to lose myself in one of them, so to speak.

As you’ve mentioned before, you constantly establish the connection between geopolitics and visual media. Can you give us an example?

I’ve just published an article titled ‘Have you seen any good movies lately?’ Geopolitics, International Relations and Film. There, I try to show, amongst others, that at times of crisis, Hollywood has often been more than willing and able to produce and market films designed to ‘raise’ national morale and spirit. Just after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush’s advisor Karl Rove met with Hollywood big shots to consider how the motion picture industry might contribute to the War on Terror. And in the following years, movies sympathetic to American military engagement have appeared while movies potentially critical about such issues, such as Buffalo Soldiers (2003), have been delayed and generally rejected by American audiences. Popular movies like Independence Day communicate and promote very specific views on how a nation should work and what the role of the United States is in regard to ‘external threats’. I’m trying to convey a sense about the role of such geopolitical notions essentially in elite cultures.

But geopolitics is not limited to film in culture: in geographical education, very specific notions of spatiality are being transmitted to pupils, in order to educate nations that think alike – and approvingly – of the politics their states are engaged in. Here, the example of the way the Malvinas are treated throughout all sections of society in Great Britain and Argentina, who have been in conflict over those islands for decades.

You take an interest in the difference between Latin American, European and American geopolitics. What’s the main difference between Latin American and, for example, the European strand of geopolitical thought, and what are the implications of this difference?

I was first of all surprised about the importance of military writers in the Latin American academia: they represent an authentic authority when it comes to geopolitics and everybody discussing it, is subsequently inclined to a realist conception of space: national security is seen as the main objective when discussing geography. That has much to do with the second big difference between Latin America and Europe in terms of their interpretation of geopolitics: in Latin America, borders matter. They are constantly being disputed, and the continent has a long history of conflicts over such issues as the exact denomination of borders (think about the conflict between Argentina and Chile over the Straight of Beard in the 90s) and the legitimate control over resources and territories. In Europe, this kind of issues has generally been settled a long time ago, which is why we engage in a different kind of geopolitical analysis.

You’ve published a lot on the Antarctic, like for example your 2002 book Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. What’s your interest in the Antarctic?

Apart from the fact that I’ve been there four times, I take an interest in the notion of ‘global commons’, or parts of the world that (should) belong to all of us. The Antarctic has been indicated as one of such places, but there are still a number of rival claims over who gets to govern or control the Antarctic. The conflict between Britain and Argentine over the Maldives fits into this broader interest I have for the region, and highlights – again – the importance of ‘place’ in International Relations.

To go from one side of the globe to another: we’ve recently heard that by 2015, the North Pole will be ice-free during the summer, a process that is irreversible. What are the implications hereof for the geopolitical imaginations of the poles?

I think this is very much related to something I wrote about recently: in 2007, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the bottom of the Arctic Basin, thus claiming a big stretch of that area. Many of its Arctic neighbors, and especially Canada, felt threatened, especially because there are vast amounts of oil estimated in the Arctic Basin. You would’ve expected the North Pole to become demilitarized after the Cold War, but now we’re witnessing the opposed: it is increasingly being seen as one of the ‘last regions to contest and divide’. If the North Pole is coming to be considered more and more as ‘just another stretch of ocean’, then the disputes over the legitimate exploitation of the resources in this region will increase – with all the consequences that implies: ecological problems, less space for the indigenous population, and so forth. Again, apart from these tacit practices, it all depends on how discourses of dominant actors about the North Pole will change and how those changes will be accepted by the public opinion. And again, we see what benefits global governance could reap.

We zoom in on a different part of the world: Africa. What would a ‘geopolitician’ say about our conceptions of the continent?

If you want to understand Sub-Sahara Africa, you have to start by taking into account the postcolonial geography of the (sub)continent. It sits very uneasy in the world, because of the sheer awkwardness of the application and occidental exigency of basically colonially determined conditions of statehood; that architecture not only doesn’t work, but Africans are furthermore condemned for failing to adapt to our imaginations of how the world should be divided. The continent has to deal with an awful lot, and the way we treat it doesn’t help in making things work.

You’ve published about James Bond. Can you explain us what his movies represent?

I use a lot of movies to make things clear to my students. James Bond movies are amongst my personal favorites, because they represent the inherent dynamics of geopolitical discourses and representations: if you compare the last James Bond, Casino Royale, to older ones such as From Russia with Love, you’ll see the very distinctness of which regions, persons and situations pose threats. I especially like Casino Royale for being the first Bond-movie to come out after 9-11: it represents a very gentle tackle of the whole ‘War on Terror’-issue: it treats it as global issue that ‘naturally’ requires a global response, but not as explicitly as could have been possible: it does not, for example, relate to religious fundamentalism. Also, this movie interesting enough uses Montenegro as the location for an illegal poker contest – which says a lot about the conception we have of Southeastern Europe.

Last question – geopolitics is not exactly (international) politics nor is it completely geography. Yet the first already incorporates notions of space and territory, as the latter incorporates notions of power. For the possible skeptics: what’s the ‘final argument’ for geopolitics as an approach?

First of all, events in International Relations always occur in places, a fact that makes an important difference. Those places, furthermore, are not reducible to States and their boundaries: a lot of events are localized (and significant) either at a more local level or at a more global level. Secondly, the (critical) geopolitics I’m engaged in, enable to ask who is able to represent the world and what that implies: when President Bush gives a speech, the whole world tunes in, something we don’t do for a president of what we consider to be ‘some’ Sub-Saharan country. And thirdly, the study of International Relations first and foremost has implications for global power relations, between people who are generally bound to specific and limited places. Critical Geopolitics enables us to study these relationships of power and place.

Klaus Dodds is professor of Geopolitics at the Department of Geography of the Royal Holloway University of London, director of the Politics & Environment Research Group (PERG), and published a number of books on geopolitics, amongst which Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Geopolitics in a Changing World (1999).

Related links

· Klaus Dodds Faculty Profile

· Read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s 2000 book Empire here for free (pdf)

Theory Talk #5: Timothy Sinclair

2008-05-10T19:38:00.007+02:00

Timothy J. Sinclair on social forces, transnational corporations and global governance

Timothy Sinclair is well-known for his research on the politics of global finance and the power of private actors, especially the American bond rating agencies, in his The New Masters of Capital (2005), and for his book on and with Robert R. Cox, the influential critical theorist who introduced Gramsci to IR. Since their joint publication Approaches to World Order (1996), it is difficult to think about Sinclair’s work and not link it to notions of social forces, states and their relations to hegemony or world orders. In this Talk, Sinclair amongst others explains how not only states but also institutions form the stage for struggles between social forces and how global governance has a nature very different from that of international institutions.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR?

The major problem in IR is that it is a perspective on the world developed during the Cold War for the purposes of American policy, as Stanley Hoffmann suggested in the 1970s. Integrating capitalism and “the international” is therefore the challenge. The post-9/11 hysteria about terrorism retards this intellectual and practical project.

What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

We need to develop the analytical and political agenda of IR, moving away from the prevailing mainstream fixation with sovereignty and anarchy. To my mind, neither of these categories should be at the centre of our thinking.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR (and by that, I mean in your ideas on how the world works)?

Like most critical people, I read Marx. But I didn’t stop with the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. I also read the three volumes of Capital. Very few critical scholars seem to have read Capital, even self-professed Neo-Gramscians. Then, oddly perhaps, I worked as a policy adviser in the New Zealand Treasury, involved in rationalizing public sector expenditure and privatization. Subsequently, I encountered a more open, tractable Marxism at York University in Toronto, working with Stephen Gill and Robert Cox. This allowed me to make sense of the critical and liberal analysis I had been exposed to before leaving New Zealand in 1989. Since coming to England I have been strongly influenced by Ruggie, Katzenstein and John Searle.

What (skills, mindset, etc.) would a student need to become an IR-theorist like yourself?

Given my biography I think a rigorous immersion in classical theory has huge benefits. In my case this was Marx, but others would do just as well. I would also reinforce practical experience as theory is, after all, just a tool. This helps people see things in perspective – a rare quality in IR theory where extremes seem to rule. Last, I would say that international experience is essential. Inevitably, I have some difficulty understanding how IR scholars can do all their work in one country.

Your research focus has always circled around ways to check the market. Is the capitalist market something negative, and do international organizations serve actors (overcoming transaction costs, uncertainty or collective action problems) or do they offer civil society a means to govern them?

The market is an enormously powerful and often incoherent social system. My position is similar to that of the late Susan Strange. What we must deal with is the inherent tendency of capitalism, specifically global finance, to produce volatility, as revealed yet again by the subprime crisis. There is a good history of international cooperation in the monetary field, but I fear that the pace of change is so fast, that like domestic regulators, international actors have problems keeping up. We look to civil society for counter-hegemonic movement, but crisis will have to prove more damaging and persistent to produce mobilization.

How would you judge popular talk about globalization, which typically comprises the pervasive spread of capitalism as the only way of doing things, information technology as a means by which we can construct new social relations and more intense contact between people all over the world that will result in homogeneity?

This seems to be a dream for some and a nightmare for others. I see ‘location’ as key to the most globalized form of capitalism, finance, as Saskia Sassen shows. Proximity is necessary and adds value. So I don’t see this homogenized place-less world as a practical proposition any time soon.

Why is the literature on transnational corporations moribund?

The dominant theories of the 1960s and 70s, dependency theory and the elite or radical Weberian approach to political economy were largely descriptive and polemic, and so they burnt themselves out in the 1980s. Far better accounts of institutions have emerged from sociology and organizational theory since, in part by the authors that I’ve mentioned before as sources of inspiration and from scholars such as Harrison White and Oliver Williamson. Time is now ripe to apply these to Transnational Corporations.

In Europe and the States, there’s been a proliferation of attention for international labor standards, human rights and the like, which focuses mainly on the rest of the world. This can be seen as something positive (‘we finally make a stand against global injustices’) or as something negative (‘social standards as a way to curb competing companies from the developing world’). What’s your view on this instrumentalization of normativity?

In my view, this instrumentalization provides many opportunities for intervening in the affairs of subordinate countries, reinforcing their more marginal place in the world order.

You’ve asserted that ‘collective understandings can become powerful forces in world politics’. That assertion can be interpreted as a ‘Coxian’ assertion in its effects, and a constructivist one in its process. Are institutions always for someone and for some purpose? And can you give a concrete example of such a powerful collective understanding?

This takes us back to the state debate of the late 1960s and 1970s, about which Robert Cox and I have written extensively in Approaches to World Order. There, we explained that both states and world orders can be seen as the result of the struggle between social forces. The ideas, norms and values expressed in states, we argued, serve the interest of specific groups. I subsequently see institutions not as instruments, but as places in which conflict and accommodation take place between and within social forces.

An example often cited of a powerful collective understanding would be monetarism. Or, if you like, ‘collective disposition against inflation.’ This helped to delegitimize union wage demands in the 1980s, which again serves the purpose of a certain group, and certainly does not serve another.

In 2009, you’ll publish a book on global governance, in which you link governance to the infrastructure of private authority. Can you explain the main argument of this study?

It turns out that ‘global governance’ is a much more limited conception of cooperation than international organization. Global governance, I show, is in great measure the organization of the international by private actors. Unlike international institutions, which represent states and political actors, and are thus subject to criticism and politicization, private institutions find favor because they enable many otherwise political issues to be dealt with as technical matters to which normative issues do not apply easily.

Related links

Who influenced Timothy Sinclair

Read An Annotated Bibliography of Susan Strange’s Academic Publications 1949-1999 (C. May, 2002) here (pdf)
Read Robert Cox’s influential article Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory (1981) here (Sage, subscription or free trial required)
Read Saskia Sassen’s (counterintuitive?) thoughts on the importance of the local in a globalized world in her article The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier (2001 lecture) here, and read her 2006 article Cities at the Intersection of New Histories here (pdf)

Sinclair’s work

Read selections from The New Masters of Capital (2005) and journal articles at Sinclair's faculty profile at University of Warwick here

Read Timothy J. Sinclair’s lecture Capitalism in the Information Age: Continuity or Change? (2001, lecture held at the United Nations University Global Seminar) here (pdf)
Read the first chapter Beyond international relations theory: Robert W. Cox and approaches to world order from Approaches to World Order (1996, Robert W. Cox & Timothy J. Sinclair) here (pdf)

Theory Talk #4: John Agnew

2008-04-30T11:05:00.006+02:00

John Agnew on geopolitics and the borders of power in IR

John A. Agnew is best known for his re-invention of geopolitics from a critical perspective. Challenging classical notions of geopolitics, he has written widely on the views of international actors on place, borders and territory and the relationship of those concepts to political power. In this Talk, Agnew explains what’s going on in Italy, how borders crumble and the contingency of the nation-state. He subsequently also questions the state-centric approach of Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3).

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR?

Whether to continue to regard the stereotypical “state” (that exists in minds more than in reality) as equivalent to a “person.”

What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I think that this is totally wrong headed. But it is strongly endorsed by a wide range of IR types from realists to some constructivists.

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

I actually question the meaningfulness of “IR” itself. In other words, I reject the state-centric calculus upon which the field itself relies. I prefer to speak about world politics and the various agents, discourses, and forces involved in its constitution, including a variety of state-forms with various degrees of agency.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

I am not the best person to ask this. I suppose a belief in states as the key if not the only actors in world politics but with service to US foreign policy as an important corollary.

Your work seems to emphasize the social construction of discourses (about the legitimate control over) space. Have you ever considered a marriage with social constructivism, and why (not)?

It all depends on what you mean by “social constructivism.” I certainly would not endorse the state-centric version associated with Wendt et al. But there are other versions emphasizing social action more broadly that would be eminently compatible. See, for example, the argument made in the book Mastering Space I wrote in 1995 with Corbridge and in my 2001 paper, Disputing the Nature of the International.

Geopolitics is very much alive – influential American authors such as Huntington, Fukuyama and Barnett offer concrete agenda’s based on their classification of the world, all based on modern state-centrism. You’ve touched on the contingency of this state centrism. What are the perspectives for postmodern or non-state-centrist approaches in IR? Do they increase with what is labeled ‘globalization’?

Globalization is certainly part of the alternative but it is not all. The argument is not that realism was OK until we had globalization and then everything changed. Rather, the emphasis is on the significance of hierarchy in world politics: who gets to write the script and how it then plays out in different places. If states and empires have also become less central to this, then they were never all there was to it in the first place.

You’ve convincingly showed the anomalies of and conflicts resulting from the current conception of spatiality, borders and discourses about power over territory. Can you indicate any tendencies towards change in this discourse?

I think that there has been a recent attempt at reinstating borders and trying to revive territorial constraints on movement so as to revivify national identities. But this all goes against the trend of breaking down borders because of the powers of transnational capitalism and demographic imbalances that mandate increased global mobility. At the same time there are many emerging global problems that suggest responses to which the state-form of political organization as we have known it is manifestly incapable of responding.

Much of the contemporary discourses about territory, borders and sovereignty do not seem to apply in Sub-Sahara Africa. But an alternative does not seem easily available. Isn’t the current ontology of the world politics in terms of nation-statehood simply the only option since there is no salient alternative available? In other words, how could we ameliorate the conception of borders?

Borders as inherited from European colonialism have never made much sense in Africa. Essentially tribal/ethnic divisions have come to dominate African “nation”-state politics in the absence of much in the way of national identities. Rent-seeking by dominant elites to favor their co-ethnics is the major dynamic of African politics with a dose of mobilization against the continued presence of the colonial past, seen to great effect with Mugabe in Zimbabwe. But you are correct, what is the alternative to a maladapted so-called nation-sate? That is the tragedy of the African state. Basil Davidson said all this much better in The Black Man’s Burden many years ago.

What’s going on in Italy? How can you explain that Berlusconi yet again comes to power?

I have a book on this co-authored with Michael Shin: Berlusconi’s Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics (2008). Contrary to the conventional wisdom about media power, we argue that it is due to : (1) his ability to put together a more robust nationwide alliance with other parties on the right than the left has been capable of (at least until now); (2) his appeal to a myriad of often competing interests in different parts of Italy that see him as their defender against a more transparent state championed by the left; and (3) his capacity to appear as an “everyman” who has succeeded in life despite the best efforts of a Byzantine judiciary and over-active state to restrict him. This last factor is especially attractive to the huge number of people in Italy who are self-employed rather than salaried. Italy has far more of them as a percentage of the labor force than any other major industrialized country.

John Agnew is professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles and currently President of the Association of American Geographers. Amongst his most known books are Place and Politics (1987) and Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (2003). In 2004, he won the Guggenheim Award for his work.