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In the United States (US), how much or how little academia can contribute to US foreign policy or policy relevance in general is entirely contingent upon whether or not the perception by the academy and its various and sundry academics is in line with the goals and role of the United States in the world. In the aftermath of 9/11 the US government and particularly the Bush administration took up the “Clash of Civilizations” narrative (Huntington 1993), not because the broadly ignorant text best fit the world it sought to portray, but because the perception of the Bush administration fit with the narrative of inevitable civilizational conflict. This narrative was then used to push the Global War on Terror and various US invasions in Middle Eastern and South Asian countries. During the Obama administration, similarly, the notion of tech-friendly, democratic utopianism fit explicitly with the rationalist world view that Obama adopted (Goldberg 2016). To be policy-relevant is not necessarily a badge of honor, most often because whatever administration or foreign policy perspective currently holds sway will cherry-pick the particular section or subsection of the literature that best conforms to the prejudices and proclivities of the foreign policy. Thus, it may not make much sense to chase policy windows or shuffle down avenues of research most digestible to those in political power; rather, it may behoove those interested in lines of research considered to be outside the policy canon to simply pursue the work that most closely hews to their world view, and provide the best research and methodology possible. Chasing phantoms in the policy world of “relevance” may pay few dividends in the long term.

In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value… sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150). Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification “knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the illusive) scholarship itself. If “research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality, uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works. As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier. The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed. We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words, seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). What makes a discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). Therefore, if there could be an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be self-defeating, since “the meaning of an interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow. Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second, presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the change that they have caused in the discipline. Work is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible. Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR. Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a normative reinterpretation. Rather than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology, but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity. Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category. Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners, consciously or unconsciously, against a background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars. Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged, unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35, citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2). Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate “knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically. “Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment,” Halberstam contends that it is important to recognize, embrace, incorporate, and legitimize failure (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Lee Edelman suggests that pretenses of success and the “failure to succeed” that is their foil are actually both on the same side—“committed to futurism’s unquestioned good,” aspirational to success, and committed to a perceived normative value of success (Edelman, 2004). Edelman envisions another “side”—“the ‘side’ where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the ‘side’ outside of all political sides” (Edelman, 2004, loc. 97). We argue that it is in this ambivalent “side” that IR scholars should see, experience, and live IR as such. Halberstam’s account of this “side” (or “anti-side”) is “the queer art of failure.” Halberstam explains that “the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 187). If “winning has become a byword for greed, arrogance, profiting from others, and conformity” (Halberstam, 2012), losing can be the art of rejecting those things, and, with them, the normative value of the win itself. The queer art of failure wields negative affect and anti-futurity as a tool of political resistance (Ruberg, 2015, p. 114), suggesting that active rejection of not only the standards but also the idea of success constitutes the space of failure as habitable. In this view, “every experience of annoyance, anger, sadness, and hurt comes with its own value, its own message, and its own transformative potential” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 115). As Ruberg urges, there is space in the willingness to “see willful self-destruction not as pathological behavior from which queer subjects need rescuing but as an ecstatic rejection of mainstream power structures” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 115). Embracing disciplinary IR’s failures, then, has two potential advantages: recognition and resistance. Failure and Grand Theory in IR And they lived happily ever after. The end. No, really. If IR’s state-of-the-field debates are alternatively narrativized fairy tales, we have a replacement. We suggest that the fairy tales’ idealized end can be found not in success but in failure; not in agreement but in controversy; not in aggrandized claims but in careful thought; not in stability but in liminality.15 It is hitching our wagon to a failure of a discipline and acknowledging that failure that constitutes and creates the possibility of a happily ever after for IR theory. We see the answers to many of these questions bound up in a disciplinary IR that has racist, sexist, heterosexist, and cissexist intellectual orientations and remains silent about them and often the assumptions that prop them up. But even work which decenters or critiques these exclusions in IR, in our view, is positioned compared to or in opposition to the discipline’s existing structure. Rather than being disappointed that IR theories are exclusive, cannot be reduced to a single theory, cannot account for global politics as a whole, and cannot present grand narratives of their competitive advantages visa-vis other approaches, we suggest highlighting and inhabiting these failures. Questioning the terms of disciplinary success as lying in a tightly choreographed dance (peer review in elite journals) or a popularity contest (citation count), or even in the “science” of knowledge cumulation, we ask why empty signifiers continue to dictate value in a wide variety of channels in IR. But we do not think redefining success will “solve” this “problem,” no matter how well-intended or radical the redefinition is. Note that we are not denying the existence or importance of significant transgressive work within IR, work that rejects grand narrativizing, or other explicit or implicit attempts to embrace failure. We are under the impression that authors critiqued here might actually agree with our critiques, either placing themselves within them or taking exception to them. We are not looking to signal virtue or to exclude, simply to suggest an explicit alternative approach. Instead of looking for an alternative, emphasizing some of the “good” transgressions, finding another way to succeed, or recasting success, we look to deconstruct IR’s logics of success and failure, and, with them, its mimicry of reified standards and its fantasies of knowledge cumulation. We see rewards in embracing IR theory’s failure to live up to IR theorists’ expectations of it. With Halberstam, “perhaps most obviously, failure … disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between…winners and losers” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Declaring, and embracing, knowledge cumulation failure (and thus, IR’s intellectual failure) “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). The relevant norms in IR are the fetishization of science, the fetishization of progression and progress, and the establishment and reification of boundaries of what ideas matter to the field. In embracing failure and escaping those punishing norms that are as violent in their inclusion (e.g., Haritaworn et al., 2014) as they are in their exclusion, “queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fan

tasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 89). It “can be a potent form of critique,… a refusal of the norm, an indifference to assimilation, and a route to other ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2012). Here, the alternative to the hegemonic system of claims of knowledge cumulation is the queer, understood as both liminal and anti-heteronormative, as a foundation for theorizing more nuanced understandings of knowledge than success or failure at cumulation. If scholars find their affirmation in (hollow) confirmations of their claims to knowledge cumulation, a queer politics of failure suggests a different direction. As Halberstam recommends, “rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in… all of our own inevitable fantastic failures” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 187). Reveling in fantastic failures, in terms of a queer critique of the fantasy of progressive knowledge cumulation, has two elements: celebrating research as failure and confronting the future given that embrace. Queer theory suggests guidelines for embracing failure; “failing is something queers do well”—not (only) in the self-deprecating sense of laughing at (one’s own) flaws, but also in the more fruitful sense of exposing the ridiculousness of norms by failing to live up to them. In this sense, queer failure is “a map of the path not taken” (Weber, 2014a, 2014b). As such, “queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life,…but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction” (Halberstam, 2011, loc 3281). “Failing” to meet expectations and being fine repudiates the salvation narrative that accompanies the “right” rules and norms and lifts the often terrible consequences of falling outside “the norm” while removing the privileges of “belonging” to the category of success. The exposure and analysis of queer failure denaturalizes the coherence of knowledge-production performances to show the vapidity inside. We see the replacement of “all-encompassing global theories” with those “subjugated knowledges” which have been “buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemization” as a key first step but insufficient by itself (Halberstam, 2011). Turning IR’s “losers” into its “winners” would both serve social justice and unsettle the binary itself, but rejecting the categories writ large would both upset the politics of exclusion in those categories and discourage the win-seeking behavior that makes state-of-the-field debates. Celebrating failure instead “provides the opportunity to use [failure’s] negative effects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” where “the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3, 4). The “toxic positivity” in IR theorizing is the attachment to the utility of grand theory that cumulates knowledge which makes the inequalities in the discipline appear to be organized by some sense of objective quality, where “success happens to good people” and good research while failure happens to bad work or bad people (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Instead, we see those inequalities as structural and standards of success in IR as political. IR’s happily ever after, then, if it is to have one, must be in the failure, in the mess, and in rejecting both inherited interpretations of success and of the normative relationship between success and failure. It must be not only in not meeting expectations of any given state-of-the-discipline proselytizing but also in instead realizing that IR cannot and should not approximate those expectations. It is not a progressive discipline with a singular end or an exercise in progressive knowledge cumulation. It is instead necessarily undisciplined—it must put aside the straightjackets of research standards, the ego-stroking of aggrandized claims, and the authorial voice of the telling of the discipline’s past, present, and future—to embrace liminality and the necessity (and beauty) of failure. The irony of this argument is not lost on us. Halberstam, making the queer theory case for celebrating failure, has become a very successful academic by many of the traditional disciplinary standards, and The Queer Art of Failure is a successful academic text. Many of the critics and supporters cited here have built on academic success by their engagement with the argument. We are bringing the case to IR, publishing it in a academic journal, through the traditional mechanism of peer review, from the comfort of secure and permanent academic employment. We poke holes where those holes can be seen by those who would police the boundaries between winners and losers. This article does not “practice” as it “preaches,” to itself upend the “winners” and “losers” in disciplinary IR—it is couched in both necessary and unnecessary hypocrisy. But positionally at the very least, our celebration of failure is itself a failure—implicated in our interest in and disciplinary IR’s promotion of success. We are not arguing that failure can be made pure or that it should be—only that it cannot and should not be escaped, especially for the glorification of success as its perceived opposite. As we fail at failure to demonstrate the fantasy of success, we envision a happily ever after of failing, un-discipline, and diversity rather than a faux idealism of synthesis, aggrandizement, “science,” and disciplining.

In addition to terminological and methodological objections, feminists seek to recover women's and men's experiences that often drop out of levels analysis in mainstream IR. As feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe argues, the IR feminist insight that the "international is personal" has the radical implication that "governments depend upon certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs."22 Thus, many feminists focus on the domestic and personal aspects of IR and the problematization of the private/ public dichotomy. This focus is, in part, a response to the state-centrism of the predominant Waltzian system-level analysis in academic IR, and in part an ethical commitment of gender analysis to the marginalized and voiceless. Feminist empirical analysis has sought out experiences that are difficult to fully capture in the traditional levels models. 65

Following these commitments, IR feminists have argued persuasively that standard-level schemas at best fail to capture gender dynamics in world politics and at worst dangerously mislead in their obfuscation of significant power relations. Feminists have instead preferred to view IR, particularly war and violence, in terms of a continuum linking international relations to activities (such as sexual violence) and phenomena (such as militarism) not normally viewed in the same frame as interstate war.2 3 Encouraging curiosity about how international relations is dependent on constructions of domestic, private, and personal phenomena formerly thought irrelevant to international politics, feminist IR raises questions about both the analytic separation of explanations for war into distinct levels and the identification of security with state borders. Jacqui True cautions against an unthinking adaptation of the levels of analysis, warning that disciplinary moves can obscure important relationships. For example, True argues that an uncritical acceptance of levels schemas can locate danger in a place outside state borders, downplaying the role of many states in producing women's insecurity and ignoring the violence that routinely occurs in the private spheres (i.e., family and household) as emphasized by feminist theory.24 More recently, Laura Sjoberg, borrowing from political geography, has offered a provocative proposal to use scales rather than levels to study IR.2

In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value… sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150). Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification “knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the illusive) scholarship itself. If “research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality, uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works. As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier. The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed. We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words, seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). What makes a discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). Therefore, if there could be an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be self-defeating, since “the meaning of an interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow. Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second, presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the change that they have caused in the discipline. Work is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible. Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR. Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a normative reinterpretation. Rather than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology, but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity. Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category. Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners, consciously or unconsciously, against a background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars. Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged, unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35, citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2). Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate “knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically. “Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment,” Halberstam contends that it is important to recognize, embrace, incorporate, and legitimize failure (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Lee Edelman suggests that pretenses of success and the “failure to succeed” that is their foil are actually both on the same side—“committed to futurism’s unquestioned good,” aspirational to success, and committed to a perceived normative value of success (Edelman, 2004). Edelman envisions another “side”—“the ‘side’ where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the ‘side’ outside of all political sides” (Edelman, 2004, loc. 97). We argue that it is in this ambivalent “side” that IR scholars should see, experience, and live IR as such. Halberstam’s account of this “side” (or “anti-side”) is “the queer art of failure.” Halberstam explains that “the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 187). If “winning has become a byword for greed, arrogance, profiting from others, and conformity” (Halberstam, 2012), losing can be the art of rejecting those things, and, with them, the normative value of the win itself. The queer art of failure wields negative affect and anti-futurity as a tool of political resistance (Ruberg, 2015, p. 114), suggesting that active rejection of not only the standards but also the idea of success constitutes the space of failure as habitable. In this view, “every experience of annoyance, anger, sadness, and hurt comes with its own value, its own message, and its own transformative potential” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 115). As Ruberg urges, there is space in the willingness to “see willful self-destruction not as pathological behavior from which queer subjects need rescuing but as an ecstatic rejection of mainstream power structures” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 115). Embracing disciplinary IR’s failures, then, has two potential advantages: recognition and resistance. Failure and Grand Theory in IR And they lived happily ever after. The end. No, really. If IR’s state-of-the-field debates are alternatively narrativized fairy tales, we have a replacement. We suggest that the fairy tales’ idealized end can be found not in success but in failure; not in agreement but in controversy; not in aggrandized claims but in careful thought; not in stability but in liminality.15 It is hitching our wagon to a failure of a discipline and acknowledging that failure that constitutes and creates the possibility of a happily ever after for IR theory. We see the answers to many of these questions bound up in a disciplinary IR that has racist, sexist, heterosexist, and cissexist intellectual orientations and remains silent about them and often the assumptions that prop them up. But even work which decenters or critiques these exclusions in IR, in our view, is positioned compared to or in opposition to the discipline’s existing structure. Rather than being disappointed that IR theories are exclusive, cannot be reduced to a single theory, cannot account for global politics as a whole, and cannot present grand narratives of their competitive advantages visa-vis other approaches, we suggest highlighting and inhabiting these failures. Questioning the terms of disciplinary success as lying in a tightly choreographed dance (peer review in elite journals) or a popularity contest (citation count), or even in the “science” of knowledge cumulation, we ask why empty signifiers continue to dictate value in a wide variety of channels in IR. But we do not think redefining success will “solve” this “problem,” no matter how well-intended or radical the redefinition is. Note that we are not denying the existence or importance of significant transgressive work within IR, work that rejects grand narrativizing, or other explicit or implicit attempts to embrace failure. We are under the impression that authors critiqued here might actually agree with our critiques, either placing themselves within them or taking exception to them. We are not looking to signal virtue or to exclude, simply to suggest an explicit alternative approach. Instead of looking for an alternative, emphasizing some of the “good” transgressions, finding another way to succeed, or recasting success, we look to deconstruct IR’s logics of success and failure, and, with them, its mimicry of reified standards and its fantasies of knowledge cumulation. We see rewards in embracing IR theory’s failure to live up to IR theorists’ expectations of it. With Halberstam, “perhaps most obviously, failure … disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between…winners and losers” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Declaring, and embracing, knowledge cumulation failure (and thus, IR’s intellectual failure) “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). The relevant norms in IR are the fetishization of science, the fetishization of progression and progress, and the establishment and reification of boundaries of what ideas matter to the field. In embracing failure and escaping those punishing norms that are as violent in their inclusion (e.g., Haritaworn et al., 2014) as they are in their exclusion, “queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 89). It “can be a potent form of critique,… a refusal of the norm, an indifference to assimilation, and a route to other ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2012). Here, the alternative to the hegemonic system of claims of knowledge cumulation is the queer, understood as both liminal and anti-heteronormative, as a foundation for theorizing more nuanced understandings of knowledge than success or failure at cumulation. If scholars find their affirmation in (hollow) confirmations of their claims to knowledge cumulation, a queer politics of failure suggests a different direction. As Halberstam recommends, “rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in… all of our own inevitable fantastic failures” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 187). Reveling in fantastic failures, in terms of a queer critique of the fantasy of progressive knowledge cumulation, has two elements: celebrating research as failure and confronting the future given that embrace. Queer theory suggests guidelines for embracing failure; “failing is something queers do well”—not (only) in the self-deprecating sense of laughing at (one’s own) flaws, but also in the more fruitful sense of exposing the ridiculousness of norms by failing to live up to them. In this sense, queer failure is “a map of the path not taken” (Weber, 2014a, 2014b). As such, “queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life,…but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction” (Halberstam, 2011, loc 3281). “Failing” to meet expectations and being fine repudiates the salvation narrative that accompanies the “right” rules and norms and lifts the often terrible consequences of falling outside “the norm” while removing the privileges of “belonging” to the category of success. The exposure and analysis of queer failure denaturalizes the coherence of knowledge-production performances to show the vapidity inside. We see the replacement of “all-encompassing global theories” with those “subjugated knowledges” which have been “buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemization” as a key first step but insufficient by itself (Halberstam, 2011). Turning IR’s “losers” into its “winners” would both serve social justice and unsettle the binary itself, but rejecting the categories writ large would both upset the politics of exclusion in those categories and discourage the win-seeking behavior that makes state-of-the-field debates. Celebrating failure instead “provides the opportunity to use [failure’s] negative effects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” where “the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3, 4). The “toxic positivity” in IR theorizing is the attachment to the utility of grand theory that cumulates knowledge which makes the inequalities in the discipline appear to be organized by some sense of objective quality, where “success happens to good people” and good research while failure happens to bad work or bad people (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Instead, we see those inequalities as structural and standards of success in IR as political. IR’s happily ever after, then, if it is to have one, must be in the failure, in the mess, and in rejecting both inherited interpretations of success and of the normative relationship between success and failure. It must be not only in not meeting expectations of any given state-of-the-discipline proselytizing but also in instead realizing that IR cannot and should not approximate those expectations. It is not a progressive discipline with a singular end or an exercise in progressive knowledge cumulation. It is instead necessarily undisciplined—it must put aside the straightjackets of research standards, the ego-stroking of aggrandized claims, and the authorial voice of the telling of the discipline’s past, present, and future—to embrace liminality and the necessity (and beauty) of failure. The irony of this argument is not lost on us. Halberstam, making the queer theory case for celebrating failure, has become a very successful academic by many of the traditional disciplinary standards, and The Queer Art of Failure is a successful academic text. Many of the critics and supporters cited here have built on academic success by their engagement with the argument. We are bringing the case to IR, publishing it in a academic journal, through the traditional mechanism of peer review, from the comfort of secure and permanent academic employment. We poke holes where those holes can be seen by those who would police the boundaries between winners and losers. This article does not “practice” as it “preaches,” to itself upend the “winners” and “losers” in disciplinary IR—it is couched in both necessary and unnecessary hypocrisy. But positionally at the very least, our celebration of failure is itself a failure—implicated in our interest in and disciplinary IR’s promotion of success. We are not arguing that failure can be made pure or that it should be—only that it cannot and should not be escaped, especially for the glorification of success as its perceived opposite. As we fail at failure to demonstrate the fantasy of success, we envision a happily ever after of failing, un-discipline, and diversity rather than a faux idealism of synthesis, aggrandizement, “science,” and disciplining.

The work of Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser has stressed that populism does not threaten democracy per se—that populism is a natural reaction by voters against some of the undemocratic qualities of liberal institutions. In this view, decisions on too many issues have been shifted from legislatures to judiciaries or bureaucracies, removing them from democratic deliberation by elected officials, and creating a sense that “there is no alternative” for certain policies. Scholars like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue further that populists can perform an important role in re-politicizing politics, making clear that policies do indeed create winners and losers, and these decisions on who wins and who loses should be made by elected rather than unelected bodies. The economist Dani Rodrik would argue that, in particular, international economic agreements and the bureaucratization they entail too often undermine democratic deliberation by limiting the policy options of future governments.Richard Katz and Peter Mair would add that mainstream parties for too long worked to prevent real political competition, raising barriers to entry for new parties through campaign finance and media laws that benefitted incumbents. This “cartelization” of political competition has produced parties that are often indistinguishable on policy, and lent credence to populist claims that mainstream parties are unresponsive to public preferences. These arguments suggest that by mobilizing new constituencies, populists can make democracy more representative, improving democratic deliberation and accountability.Few of these scholars would describe populism as an unmitigated boon to democracy, however. Jan-Werner Müller argues that populism’s illiberal elements are in fact threats to democracy. Populists frequently disregard the rights of individuals who are not considered “the people”—usually ethnic or sectarian minorities—as well as the checks on government power they believe stifle the “will of the people.”[vii] In this line of argument, such tendencies are anti-democratic by their nature because they lead populists to undermine key qualities necessary for democracy: civil liberties for all citizens to freely organize and express their political preferences, and independent state institutions that can guarantee fair competition between the government and opposition.In a similar vein, Larry Diamond has argued that populism can, at a minimum, threaten liberal democracies—those that uphold the highest democratic standards for protecting civil liberties—when populists reject the notion of pluralism and embrace cultural exclusion. Diamond suggests that, for the first time since the worldwide “Third Wave” of democratization began in the mid-1970s, there is a risk that advanced liberal democracies could break down, and illiberal populists could be the actors behind these reversions to autocracy.In practice, populist parties in he 21st Century have had no more success than mainstream parties in improving democratic deliberation. Populist parties in power have increased democracy’s representativeness, but undermined accountability when their lack of interest or aptitude for governance has shifted policymaking to actors outside the party, and populists’ policy failures in office can create continuing crises of accountability. Populists in power have frequently strengthened the power of the executive over the legislature while polarizing the electorate into exclusionary groups and coopting or suppressing civil society. And populists’ weakening of key checks on executive authority has been a common precursor to autocratic reversion—including in the wealthiest democracies to ever break down.

The negative effects of left-wing populism on economics and businesses have already been widely examined. For that reason, this paper looks only at right-leaning, pro-business leaders who employ populist strategies to see whether they fare better.This paper shows that the populist style, regardless of ideology, has negative effects on economies and businesses. The populist strategy of building intense voter loyalty through polarization leads to the decline of social trust, which is strongly correlated with GDP and entrepreneurship levels. Social cohesion also declines, which can increase social unrest. Personalized, often centralized government decisionmaking yields unpredictable policies, increasing uncertainty and risk. It also increases corruption and cronyism, a finding that is particularly strong in countries where these problems were previously less significant. Corruption serves as a distorting tax on most businesses, while cronyism tilts entire business sectors. Finally, the sidelining or delegitimizing of oversight institutions and the press leads the rule of law to degrade.The populist governing style substantially inhibits economic growth. According to a comprehensive study of populist leaders from 1900 to 2020 by economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christopher Trenesch, leaders governing in the populist style create a drag on growth of about 1 percent per year after a short honeymoon period. Countries governed by populists also have more volatile economies and are more likely to face serious financial crises. Moreover, regardless of how they posed while campaigning, most leaders adopting populism enact policies from both the left and the right when they come to power. They tend to embrace tariffs and economic nationalism while also giving away substantial government funds to build support with little regard for inflation and debt.Historically, some businesses do well under populism. In 1933, during a secret meeting in Berlin, nearly two dozen German industrialists backed Adolf Hitler’s party. In keeping with modern findings on populist cronyism, the industrialists’ returns in the spring after Hitler took power were between 5 and 8 percent higher than other firms’ returns. Of course, Jewish businesses faced expropriation, forced sales to whomever would buy in a hurry, and far worse fates. Meanwhile, many other German firms faced decidedly mixed financial as well as moral outcomes as they navigated Hitler’s populist leadership.Populism doesn’t affect all business sectors equally, and because the whims of politicians alter, it is impossible for business leaders to ensure that their firms remain in the favored category. The case study of India shows how small businesses have been devastated by Modi’s policies; his policy of removing large banknotes from the market caused a short-term 47 percent drop in revenue and major job losses. In Brazil under former president Jair Bolsonaro, small businesses benefited from reduced regulations and licensing requirements, as did agribusinesses in the Amazon Rainforest, but financial firms and externally focused corporations have faced extreme volatility. In Hungary under Orbán, some corporate arenas have been protected, but the entire private sector has been politicized, while some other sectors have been nationalized or face state monopolization.In all of these cases, remaining small or close to the ruling party did not offer lasting protection from politicization, upsetting the fair market. One of the problems with populist governments is that even for businesses that try to ride the tide by becoming close with the government, it is impossible to predict the course of the waves that follow.

Inequality can be viewed from different perspectives, all of which are related. Most common metric is Income Inequality, which refers to the extent to which income is evenly distributed within a population. Related concepts are lifetime Inequality (inequality in incomes for an individual over his or her lifetime), Inequality of Wealth (distribution of wealth across households or individuals at a moment in time), and Inequality of Opportunity (impact on income of circumstances over which individuals have no control, such as family socioeconomic status, gender, or ethnic background). All of these inequality concepts are related and offer different yet complementary insights into the causes and consequences of inequality, hence providing better guidance to governments when designing specific policies aimed at addressing inequality.

Automation can lead to the creation of new jobs in several ways. One way is by increasing efficiency and reducing costs. By automating a manual process, businesses can reduce their overhead and labor costs, which can lead to increased profits. This increased revenue can then be reinvested into the business, allowing it to expand and create new jobs. Another way automation can lead to the creation of new jobs is by increasing productivity. By automating a process, businesses can produce more in less time, which can lead to an increase in demand for their product or service. This can create new jobs, as businesses will need more workers to meet the increased demand. Automation can lead to the creation of new jobs in several ways. One way is by increasing efficiency and reducing costs. By automating a manual process, businesses can reduce their overhead and labor costs, which can lead to increased profits. This increased revenue can then be reinvested into the business, allowing it to expand and create new jobs.  Another way automation can lead to the creation of new jobs is by increasing productivity. By automating a process, businesses can produce more in less time, which can lead to an increase in demand for their product or service. This can create new jobs, as businesses will need more workers to meet the increased demand. Automation can also lead to the transition of existing jobs. As businesses automate manual processes, they can hire fewer workers to do the same job. This can lead to a period of transition, as employees need to be trained in the new processes. This can create new opportunities for job seekers, as they can take on the roles that were vacated by employees who have been trained in the new processes. There are a number of ways automation is leading to the creation of new jobs. One way is by streamlining processes, which can free up employees to focus on more complex tasks. This can lead to the creation of new roles that didn’t exist before. For example, businesses may need to hire employees to manage the automated processes or to develop new software and technologies. Another way automation is leading to the creation of new jobs is by creating new markets and industries. Automation can open up new opportunities for businesses to create products and services that didn’t exist before. This can lead to the creation of new jobs for those who are trained in new technologies and processes. There are a few examples of automation leading to the creation of new jobs. For instance, robots and automated systems are being used in manufacturing to streamline processes and reduce labor costs. This has led to the creation of new roles, such as robotic technicians and software developers. Another example is the use of artificial intelligence in customer service. AI-powered chatbots can automate , such as answering customer questions and resolving issues. This has led to the creation of new roles, such as AI trainers and chatbot developers. 

The labor market impact of technology is often viewed through the lens of job creation or job destruction. Economists — with near ubiquity — treat technology as being either labor displacing or labor reinstating. If technology displaces workers, jobs are lost. If technology creates (or reinstates) work, jobs are created. Under this dichotomy, the key question is whether technology creates more jobs than it destroys. The World Economic Forum  that by 2025, technology will create at least 12 million more jobs than it destroys, a sign that in the long run, automation will be a net positive for society.

Technology’s job boosting ability is often touted by tech advocates. Take Waymo, the Google backed startup developing driverless taxis. In recent years, the company’s sensor-laden, white minivans have become a common sight in some American suburbs. However, mobility sans driver raises concerns about job losses. What will otherwise would-be cab (or more likely Uber and Lyft) drivers now do?

Automation often creates as many jobs as it destroys over time. Workers who can work with machines are more productive than those without them; this reduces both the costs and prices of goods and services, and makes consumers feel richer. As a result, consumers spend more, which leads to the creation of new jobs.

We estimate that the more conservative $25 carbon tax would boost U.S. employment by 1.4 million jobs each year between 2020 and 2030, which is nearly a 1 percent increase above the reference–case forecast of 160 million jobs in 2030. As the economy expands and the tax increases, job growth from the GND would accelerate, creating, on average, 3.4 million new jobs each year between 2040 and 2050—a nearly 2 percent increase above the 182 million jobs forecast for the U.S. in 2050. Overall, it is estimated that 72 million job years would be created over the three decades with a $25 carbon tax. (Note that if one job continues after one year for another 12 months, it represents two job years.) Today clean-energy technologies in the U.S. struggle to compete because fossil energy is so “inexpensive.” Low prices make it difficult for such alternatives to flourish. Our analysis shows that raising energy prices would empower the transition to efficiency, renewables and other low-carbon resources. Indeed, a carbon tax of either $25 or $60 would cut carbon emissions significantly, but the higher tax would produce quicker and deeper reductions. On the other hand, while both tax levels would grow jobs, the $25 tax would provide more employment growth than the $60 one. Thus, as with most policies, the optimum is a trade-off between competing priorities. By using the clean technologies that carbon taxes would promote, Americans would not have to travel less, freeze in the winter, take cold showers or cut the output of their manufacturing plants to reduce the U.S.’s carbon emissions. Our independent analysis, along with a growing body of research, suggests that a low-carbon economy is likely to be a stronger and more secure economy that also provides climate solutions.

The world is in the midst of multiple ongoing crises: the global pandemic, the climate crisis, and a persistent economic inequality crisis that condemns far, far, too many to poverty. As the vaccines begin to roll off the production line, an end to the pandemic is in sight. But the other issues, including continued scarcity amidst abundance, abundance that is helping to fuel the climate crisis, are going to take much longer to address. In these times of runaway inequality and an ever-warming planet, policy makers are increasingly looking for ideas to mitigate emissions and redistribute resources at the same time. One of the biggest ideas gaining traction is a global green new deal.[1] As countries seek to rebuild after this devastating crisis, green investments should unquestionably be front and centre. But complementary bold ideas, including a universal basic income, are catching on too. The hiccup, per usual, is the pesky, and often misguided question of “how do you pay for it?” But what if I told you there was a straightforward policy that could finance a universal basic income and substantially curtail carbon emissions? It is called a carbon price-and-dividend. The policy is simple really: set an economy-wide price on carbon across the globe and rebate the revenue back to the people on an equal per-capita basis. It is true, a carbon price, in the form of a tax or cap, means higher prices, at least in the near future as the transition away from fossil fuels takes hold. But these higher prices will be more than offset for the vast majority of the world's population through the carbon dividend. The math here is rather straightforward: the rich and those living in high-income countries are responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, and thus will pay the bulk of the tax (Gore, 2020). But the money is redistributed to everyone, equally. Thus, low-income people will end up with far more money in their pockets at the end of the day. Such a policy could reduce the Gini coefficient by 3-6% and drastically slash the number of people living in poverty (Davies et al., 2011). This green basic income would be highly progressive while providing people not only with the benefits of cash but cleaner air too. All the while the pricing would curtail emissions as the global community runs out of time to meet the goal established under the Paris Agreement to “limit global warming to well below 2, and preferably 1.5ºC,

First, let's take a look at earlier attempts to set out the nature of AI. The first definition is found in a proposal written by Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and John McCarthy in 1955: For the present purpose the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving. It was a proposal for a summer project - they couldn't know their definition would endure for decades. Yet here is Richard Bellman - who created the Bellman equation, one of the foundational concepts in reinforcement learning - defining AI in 1978: [AI is the computerisation of] activities that we associate with human thinking. We get something similar from Ray Kurzweil [1]. Kurzweil defined AI in 1990 as the: [The computerisation of] functions that require intelligence when performed by people. All three definitions are saying the same thing: AI is computerised human intelligence. This is unscientific. The scientific field of 'human intelligence' doesn't exist, because there is nothing uniquely human about intelligence. The field of cognitive neuroscience studies intelligence across the animal kingdom. Elephants scream and weep when one dies. They cover the body in branches and spend days quietly standing over it. They visit the graves of their friends many years after they died. In short, they mourn. If I created a robot that did everything an elephant can do, I would be doing artificial intelligence research. Let's accept that the early AI researchers were products of their times. Nobody would think like this now though, right? Then why did the  define AI like this in 2018? 'Technologies with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and language translation.' The UK government provided an even more wrong-headed definition of AI in 2019, this time from the : 'AI can be defined as the use of digital technology to create systems capable of performing tasks commonly thought to require intelligence.' What happens if people commonly think playing the game of checkers requires intelligence but then stop commonly thinking it? Would checkers-playing computers stop being AI and start being something else instead? The definition of scientific concepts, say atomic nuclei or microscopes,  don't normally depend on what people commonly think.

While the arguments in favor of a robot tax may be well-intentioned, robot taxes are a misguided idea that would have negative consequences for firms, their workers, and ultimately the economy. To begin with, the assertion that robots are taking jobs is not well founded. Recent research shows that firms that adopt robots experience more employment growth than those that do not. These firms also appear to be more productive, potentially benefiting consumers, although the gains experienced by the adopting firm may come at the expense of firms that do not adopt. Moreover, defining a “robot” turns out to be non-trivial; depending on this definition, a robot tax may affect some industries more than others, regardless of the impact on human labor. Ultimately, a robot tax would lead to slower adoption of robots, especially in industries such as manufacturing where it may be easier to define a “robot,” and this slower adoption will likely lead to less economic growth. Instead of robot taxes, policymakers who want to help workers displaced by automation should focus on other policies, such as addressing disparities in taxes on capital and labor and easing labor market frictions. Doing so would benefit workers, firms, and the economy more so than would a tax on robots. Firms adopting robots see more employment and better performance Over the past couple of years there have been several firm-level studies on the effects of robot adoption in industrial settings. These papers all find that firms that adopt robots see an increase in employment. For example, a recent paper by Dixon, Hong, and Wu (2021) uses data on robot imports to identify Canadian firms that adopt robots.1 They then compare employment, behavior, and performance between robot-adopting and non-adopting firms. They find that the robot-adopting firms experience a subsequent increase in employment and that the employment increase is predominantly from low-skill workers. As another example, Acemoglu, Lelarge, and Restrepo (2020) find that, among French manufacturing firms, those firms that adopted robots add jobs.2 A similar finding is in a paper by Koch, Manulov, and Smolka (2019), who use firm level data from Spain.3 These studies also find that the firms that adopt robots see an increase in performance (measured as an increase in firm-level total factor productivity or revenue). Interestingly, the studies find that the non-adopting firms in the same industry as the robot adopting firms see decreases in employment. This may be due to reallocation from slower-growing, more poorly-performing firms to faster-growing, better-performing firms. In some cases, the decreases in employment at the non-adopting firms more than outweigh the employment gains at the robot-adopting firms, causing a location- or industry-wide fall in employment (as shown for example in Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020)).4 There have also been papers on robot adoption in service settings. A paper studying the effects of robots on workers in Japanese nursing homes by Eggleston, Lee, and Iizuka (2021) finds that robots complement human labor and reduce labor turnover.5 The physically demanding nature of work in nursing homes can often lead to high turnover, so robots in these settings are intentionally designed to assist with the most physically demanding tasks such as lifting patients out of beds. The paper also highlights an interesting feature of the Japanese setting: that many Japanese prefectures provide subsidies for nursing homes that adopt robots. If indeed robots complement human labor, then subsidies make sense and may help spur adoption of robots in these settings.

In response to concerns about the effect of automation on workers’ jobs, some policymakers and technology industry leaders have called for a robot tax. They argue a robot tax is necessary to slow job losses from automation, raise revenue to support displaced workers, and prevent more economic inequality. However, these arguments are wrong and a robot tax would ultimately hurt workers. One argument is that a robot tax is necessary to protect workers from job losses. For example, Bill Gates has argued for a robot tax as a way to “slow down the speed” of job losses from automation. Likewise, former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed “a ‘robot tax’ on large companies that eliminate jobs through increased automation” and even suggested creating a federal agency that would require businesses “seeking to increase automation that would displace workers” to obtain a government permit. But the goal of government policy should be to accelerate, not slow down, robot-driven automation. More automation means greater productivity, and greater productivity benefits the U.S. economy through higher wages and lower prices. Another argument is that a robot tax is necessary to raise revenue to support displaced workers. For example, de Blasio wants companies to “pay five years of payroll taxes up front for each employee eliminated” and use these funds to invest in high-employment infrastructure jobs, such as green energy. Gates makes a similar argument, arguing that revenue from a robot tax should pay for jobs that require “human empathy and understanding,” like caring for older adults and children with special needs. Government should support workers impacted by technological disruption, including by reducing financial hardships for laid-off workers and providing more assistance to help those individuals find new jobs, but taxing robots to fund these initiatives would only slow U.S. productivity and wage growth. This idea has as much merit as imposing new taxes on clean energy businesses to pay for jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry. A third argument is that a robot tax is essential to prevent greater income inequality. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders has argued for a robot tax to ensure that “the people on top” are not the only beneficiaries of automation. These critics envision a dystopian world where the rich get richer, not by exploiting workers, but by eliminating them entirely. But workers are not disappearing. Indeed, this argument relies on the “lump of labor fallacy” which says there is a limited amount of work and therefore increases in productivity mean fewer jobs. But the evidence tells a different story: Even as labor productivity has increased in the post-World War II era, unemployment is at a record low. Moreover, productivity has doubled since 1984, while domestic profits as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) remain unchanged. Competitive markets mean that increases in productivity do not result in higher rates of profits. Those who want government policy to provide great wealth redistribution do not need to tax robots to achieve this goal. They would be better off taxing rich people more. Taxing robots would ultimately leave Americans worse off. Companies deploy robots to automate dirty, dull, or dangerous tasks and transition human workers to better and safer jobs. For example, Boston Dynamics’ Stretch robot can unload boxes from trucks at warehousing and storage facilities. Using a robot to unload trucks relieves human workers from handling heavy loads. And discouraging the use of robots could cause U.S. companies to offshore to countries that have embraced automation, thereby weakening domestic supply chains and increasing dependence on foreign countries, such as China. A robot tax is a misguided policy that would inhibit productivity growth that could otherwise make U.S. companies more competitive, create higher-paying jobs, and improve quality of life for all Americans.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has steadily become more powerful over the course of the last decades and in recent years it has entered our world in many different domains. In a companion article – the brief history of artificial intelligence – I document this development. This was achieved despite having relatively few resources. Until recently, investments in terms of capital and scientific efforts were small. In this article I highlight that this has very much changed in recent years. Corporate investment has increased and the scientific field has grown in size. Given how rapidly AI developed in the past, despite the limited resources, this should make us expect AI technology to continue to become more powerful in the coming decades. Investments into AI The first chart looks at corporate investment over time.1 Until recently, private sector investment was relatively low. But, especially from 2018 onwards, it has increased rapidly. Investments in 2021 were about 30-times larger than just eight years earlier. Research and the labor market The four following visualizations show that the trends for AI research efforts and the labor market are similar. Just a decade ago the field was much smaller than it is today. Since then the number of research publications on artificial intelligence has doubled, and AI conferences have become much larger events. This is what the first two charts show. The third chart documents the increasing importance of AI skills in the labor market. The last chart shows the specialty of computer science PhD students in the US. With an increasing number of students in the field, the number of researchers and research output is set to increase further in years to come. Additionally, AI itself is contributing to the development of AI: Researchers are beginning to find ways for AI itself to contribute to the development of AI.2 Conclusion The developments in the past happened despite the fact that funding and brainpower dedicated to AI were quite limited. As these charts have shown, this has changed. Across a range of metrics, the resources dedicated to AI development have increased substantially. The fact that the field advanced with relatively small resources, and now has much larger resources at its disposal – leading to rapid advances in the last few years – is one reason why I expect AI technology to continue to develop rapidly and to exert a larger and larger influence on our world.

VAT is a regressive tax, putting more burden to the poor than to the rich. Indeed, VAT applies the same rate to everyone regardless of their level of wealth – but the richer you are, the lower the proportion of your revenue goes to consumption. VAT cancels out one-third of the effects of fiscal redistribution.

Although increasing income inequality has been observed in many countries, the varying experiences across countries, with inequality even decreasing in a sizeable share of countries, suggests that public policy and institutions play and important role in determining such outcomes.2 In this respect, fiscal redistribution (i.e., the transfer of income from higher to lower income households via tax and transfer schemes) has a key role to play in addressing income inequality. For instance, evidence from studies of fiscal redistribution shows that over three-quarters of the difference in average disposable income inequality between advanced and Latin American countries (with the lowest and highest average disposable income inequality, respectively) is accounted for by differences in the extent of fiscal redistribution rather than by differences in market incomes (Bastagli, Coady and Gupta, 2015).

In asking questions about the politics of the process of desecuritisation, this article seeks to engage with what Stritzel calls the ‘second generation…contextual securitization scholars’ that seek to combine the formal aspects of the securitization model with a greater emphasis on examining the interrelationship between security politics and its context. With the aim to ‘construct a more comprehensive understanding of underlying processes’, by focusing on the ‘socio-linguistic and/or socio-political micro-dynamics of generating threats’ (Stritzel, 2012: 2, for other example of these types of studies see Balzacq, 2005, 2011; Guzzini, 2011; Salter, 2008; Stritzel, 2007, 2011; McDonald, 2008, 2011). In so doing, this article argues that it is vital to investigate not only the way in which (de)securitizations are enacted within a specific context at a particular time, but also to consider what happens to the different referent objects identified in the initial securitization once de-securitization processes are introduced. Secondly, it considers the case of Russia’s policy of normalization towards Chechnya since 2000, as an exemplary case-study to illustrate the politics at play in the nature and practice of de-securitizations, especially if and how this plays out across multiple referent objects. In the initial period of securitization, the Russian authorities securitized the threat emanating from Chechnya as posing an existential danger to three principle referent objects, namely Chechnya, the North Caucasus region and Russia. Once the Russian authorities moved towards a policy of normalization, however, three different strands of desecuritization discourses emerged related to these three securitized referent objects, following different trajectories from one another. Indeed, whilst the sum total of these discursive strands adds up to an overall de-securitization narrative, their exact nature and specifics were largely dependent on the referent object in question. This suggests that processes of de-securitization across multiple referent objects can 3 and do follow very different trajectories from each other, whilst continuing to retain a certain degree of inter-dependence and overlap. In practice, this can both support the parallel de-securitization processes vis-à-vis the other referent objects, and problematize the overall de-securitization strategy carried out by the main de-securitizing actor. In addition, and in view of the recent discussions about the widening and deepening of methods and methodology in critical security studies (see Aradau and Huysmans, 2014, Salter and Mutlu 2013, Shepherd 2013, Aradau, Huysmans, Neal and Voelkner 2015, Hansen 2006, Jackson 2011), the papers also calls for greater use of longitudinal and process-orientated analysis in (de)securitization to allow researchers to better capture the evolutionary dynamics within security policies. Indeed, as set out below, a contradiction remains within the current (de)securitization literature between the second generation suggestion that (de)securitizations may develop not only as a result of one-off speech acts, but also incrementally across longer periods of time (Åtland 2008, McDonald 2008, 2011), and the methodological practice of most empirical studies that tend to focus on narrow time periods that provide only a snap shot of how (de)securitizations processes emerge and develop. Yet, as will be demonstrated below, a longitudinal methodological lens is particularly apt in enabling analysts to trace the multifaceted processes of de-securitization. Methodologically, this article draws on the longitudinal approach combined with the single ‘case plus study’ method championed by Hansen in her study of the Western actors’ security discourses/practices during the Bosnian war (2006). However, whereas Hanson applied her ‘single case study’ method to investigate the way in which security policies were presented and enacted across time, in this case the aim is to outline the utility of longitudinal methods of analysis through the single-case study method by examining the evolution of a single case, from being securitized to de-securitized: the (de)securitization of Chechnya in Russian official discourse across an extended period of time, 2000- 2009. This is analyzed by a focus on the official discourses of the Russian federal authorities as the main (de)securitizing actor that drove both the securitization and the de-securitization of Chechnya, as the actor with both the authority and the facilitating capacity to put forward these particular discourses and processes (Koltsova 2006, Ortmann 2008, p.366). This article, firstly, charts the current debate on the nature of de-securitization processes, highlighting the current shortage of studies examining (de)securitization discourses across multiple referent objects. It then sets out its empirical case of Russia’s policy of normalization towards Chechnya. In so doing, it lays out a brief context of the Russian authorities’ initial securitization of Chechnya in 1999-2000. Using longitudinal process-tracing analysis, it then considers, chronologically, this case of desecuritisation according to two periods - Putin’s first (2000-4) and second (2004-8) terms in power. This temporal division broadly corresponds to Oelsner’s (2005) suggestion that de-securitizations often proceed in two-steps, namely peace stabilization and peace consolidation. The article concludes by outlining its key implications for (de)securitization studies.

Also according to the orthodoxy, the shift to the new terrorism, on the other hand, is thought to have emerged in the early 1990s (Jackson, 2011) and took root in mass consciousness with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. (Martin, 2010, 3).  The new terrorism is characterized by: “loose, cell-based networks with minimal lines of command and control,” “desired acquisition of high-intensity weapons and weapons of mass destruction” (Martin, 2010, 27),  “motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology and it is aimed at causing mass causality and maximum destruction” (Jackson, 2007, 179-180). However, these dichotomous definitions of the old and new types of terrorism are not without problems. The first major problem is that terrorism has been characterized by the same fundamental qualities throughout history. Some of the superficial characteristics, the means of implementation (e.g. the invention of the Internet or dynamite) or the discourse (communism vs. Islam) may have evolved, but the central components remain the same. The second major problem is that the characterization of new terrorism is, at best, rooted in a particular political ideology, biased and inaccurate. At worst, it is racist, promotes war mongering and has contributed to millions of deaths. As David Rapoport states: Many contemporary studies begin … by stating that although terrorism has always been a feature of social existence, it became ‘significant’ … when it ‘increased in frequency’ and took on ‘novel dimensions’ as an international or transnational activity, creating in the process a new ‘mode of conflict’ (1984, 658). Isabelle Duyvesteyn points out that this would indicate evidence for the emergence of a new type of terrorism, if it were not for the fact that the article was written in 1984 and described a situation from the 1960s (Duyvesteyn, 2004, 439). It seems that there have been many new phases of terrorism over the years. So many so that the definition of ‘new’ has been stretched significantly and applied relatively across decades. Nevertheless, the idea that this terrorism, that which the War on Terror (WoT) is directed against, is the most significant and unique form of terrorism that has taken hold in the popular and political discourse. Therefore, it is useful to address each of the so-called new characteristics in turn. The first characteristic is the idea that new terrorism is based on loosely organized cell-based networks as opposed to the traditional terrorist groups, which were highly localized and hierarchical in nature. An oft-cited example of a traditional terrorist group is the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who operated under a military structure and in a relatively (in contrast to the perceived transnational operations of al-Qaeda) localized capacity. However, some of the first modern terrorists were not highly organized groups but small fragmented groups of anarchists. These groups were heeding the call of revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and other contemporary anarchists to achieve anarchism, collectivism and atheism via violent means (Morgan, 2001, 33).  Despite the initial, self-described “amorphous” nature of these groups, they were a key force in the Russian Revolution (Maximoff, G.). Furthermore, leading anarchist philosophers of the Russian Revolution argued that terrorists “should organize themselves into small groups, or cells” (Martin, 2010, 217). These small groups cropped up all around Russia and Europe in subsequent years and formed an early form of a “loosely organized cell-based network” not unlike modern day al Qaeda. Duyvesteyn further notes that both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964, and Hezbollah, founded 1982, operate on a network structure with very little central control over groups (2004, 444). The second problematic idea of new terrorism is that contemporary terrorist groups aim to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This belief is simply not supported by empirical evidence.  One of the key problems with this theory is that WMDs are significantly more difficult to obtain and utilize than most people understand. Even if a terrorist group were to obtain a biological WMD, “Biologist Matthew Meselson calculates that it would take a ton of nerve gas or five tons of mustard gas to produce heavy causalities among unprotected people in an open area of one square kilometer” (Mueller, 2005, 488). And that’s only an example of the problem with the implementation of WMDs, assuming they are acquired, transported and desirable by a terrorist group in the first place. Additional problems, such as the fact that WMDs “are extremely difficult to deploy and control” (Mueller, 2005, 488) and that making a bomb “is an extraordinarily difficult task” (Mueller, 2005, 489), further diminish the risk. It is interesting to note that, while the potential dangers of WMDs are much lauded, the attacks of September 11th were low tech and had been technologically possible for more than 100 years. Mueller also states, “although nuclear weapons have been around for well over half a century, no state has ever given another state (much less a terrorist group) a nuclear weapon that the recipient could use independently” (2005, 490). All of this talk about the difficultly of acquiring and deploying WMDs (by non-state agents), is not to diminish the question of what terrorists have to gain by utilizing these weapons. It is important to question whether it would even further the aims of terrorists to use WMDs. The evidence suggests otherwise. In the “Politics of Fear” Jackson states, “Mass casualties are most often counterproductive to terrorist aims – they alienate their supporters and can provoke harsh reprisals from the authorities […]” in addition, “[…] they would undermine community support, distort the terrorist’s political message, and invite over-whelming retaliation” (2007, 196-197). Despite popular rhetoric to the contrary, terrorists are “rational political actors and are acutely aware of these dangers” (Jackson, 2007, 197). Government appointed studies on this issue have supported these views.