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By disproving Wilderson’s claim that the Black Body is in a perpetual state of ontological death because of the violence of the Middle Passage and showing that the Black Body is not socially dead, then the possibilities of legal reform and coalitional politics become possible and desirable. For Wilderson, coalitional politics are just attempts to feign the ontological capacity of Blacks to shape their own future. He refers to white people and colored immigrants specifically who try to engage in coalitional politics with the Black Body as “the junior and senior partners of civil society” who pretend as if the Black is coherent and human. (Wilderson, Red, White and Black, pg. 39). It is this kind of ontological absolutism that Wilderson adheres to that David Marriott criticizes when he writes, “Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole of being. It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism: for the claim that ‘Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a logic of non-recuperability.” (Mariott, Black Cultural Studies, pg. 37-66). Wilderson’s insistence of absolute negativity destroys the possibility for coalitional politics because it will always frame the Black Body as something that will always stand in an antagonistic position to the world. In engaging in this form of ontological absolutism, Wilderson effectively creates an ”us against the world” logic whereby its best to either succumb to the negativity surrounding the Black Body or destroy the world to free the Black Body. Furthermore, as Mariott points out, this dogmatic ontological absolutism essentializes the Black experience to its most negative point, a kind of negativity that reproduces a form of self-hatred that contributes to the destruction of positive coalitional politics. When one comes to believe that they themselves are ontologically dead, this encourages the logic of political apathy where one refuses to attempt to engage with agents of change because they curse their own identity and believe that there is nothing they can do about their situation because Blackness is an ontological condition. To put it in Lehman’s term, “why go vote if I’m socially dead?”. This form of disengagement from the political is problematic when racism is entrenched in our law, as Ian Haney Lopez points out in his book White By Law when he writes, “law is implicated in the construction of the contingent social systems of meaning that attach in our society to morphology and ancestry, the meaning system we commonly refer to as race. The legal system influences what we look like, the meanings ascribed to our looks, and the material reality that confirms the meanings of our appearances. Law constructs race.” (Lopez, White By Law, pg. 16). If the precedent set by court cases, as Lopez points out, were responsible for creating the precedents that shaped how we see race as a social construction, then the need to challenge racism through legal reform becomes more apparent. Wilderson’s ontological absolutism destroys the possibility to form the kind of coalitions that are necessary to engaging with the legal systems that use the law to shape our social perceptions of race. The kind of self-hatred that Wilderson perpetuates through his ontological construction of Blackness will only re-entrench racism because the Black Body will refuse to engage in the forms of legal reform necessary to change the law and they way it shapes how we view race as a social construction. If the law is what truly shapes the social construction of race and if the Black Body is truly capable of engaging with these institutions, then Wilderson’s Afro-pessimism must be firmly rejected to usher in a politics of hope that is necessary to mobilize coalitions against dominant power structures. The idea of embracing a politics of hope and solidarity is a concept that would seem absolutely foreign to Wilderson. Indeed, with the recent events surrounding the likes of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the credibility surrounding the Afro-pessimist school of thought is increasing. Yet it is precisely these events that necessitate a politics of hope and solidarity that Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name Bell Hooks, advocates for in her 1996 book Killing Rage: Ending Racism when she writes, “Black Americans are succumbing to and internalizing the racist assumption that there can be no meaningful bonds of intimacy between blacks and whites. It is fascinating to explore why it is that black people trapped in the worst situation of racial oppression—enslavement—had the foresight to see that it would be disempowering for them to lose sight of the capacity of white people to transform themselves and divest of white supremacy, even as many black folks today who in no way suffer such extreme racist oppression and exploitation are convinced that white people will not repudiate racism. Contemporary black folks, like their white counterparts, have passively accepted the internalization of white supremacist assumptions. Organized white supremacists have always taught that there can never be trust and intimacy between the superior white race and the inferior black race. When black people internalize these sentiments, no resistance to white supremacy is taking place, rather we become complicit in spreading racist notions. It does not matter that so many black people feel white people will never repudiate racism because of being daily assaulted by white denial and refusal of accountability. We must not allow the actions of white folks who blindly endorse racism to determine the direction of our resistance. Like our white allies in struggle we must consistently keep the faith, by always sharing the truth that white people can be anti-racist, that racism is not some immutable character flaw.” (Bell Hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, pg. 269-270). Bell Hooks avoids falling into the colonial trap of Wilderson by speaking for herself and her own experiences. By acknowledging that there are many anti-racist whites, she has created a space where Black folk who believe that they have a future can speak of their own experiences and contribute to meaningful dialogue about how Black folk should take steps forward in the context of legal reform. Unlike Wilderson who universalizes the Black experience, Bell Hooks acknowledges that internalizing racist assumptions of the Black Body, or in the context of Wilderson, their own ontological construction, will only give into White supremacy because the cycle of self-hatred creates a sense of powerlessness that prevents the Black Body from ever getting out in the first place. Furthermore, Wilderson’s ontological absolutism is a tactic of White supremacy, because, as pointed out by Bell Hooks, it creates a sense of distrust that plays into the divide and conquer mentality that is crucial to White supremacy’s grip on society. For Bell Hooks, when the Black community gives into its own pessimism, White supremacists win because there is no motivation for resistance. In the wake of recent events, embracing a politics of hope and solidarity is more important than ever as racism begins to become more apparent. Hope offers the crucial first step towards encouraging the first steps towards resistance, a step that Wilderson’s extreme negativity prevents from ever been taken. Instead of imagining the end of the world, we must imagine a world with a better future.

When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the maintenance of strong communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More generally, the Middle Passage epistemology (like other established Black linear progress or antiprogress narratives—e.g., Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, Afropessimism)10 also links all Black collectives across the Diaspora to the experience of racism and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be “Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically “Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to interpellate Ramses within this definition, we must produce Blackness as a fixed identity that transcends time and space; through this, Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?

It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then “empties out” all meaning in qualitative collapse. The attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither “Black” nor “African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should “expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some discourses attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks.

But perhaps my own defense of Indigenous decolonization movements for sovereignty begs a larger question about whether sovereignty in itself offers a radical politics that can encompass or mobilize a black radical tradition rooted in the project of abolition. And it is here that I agree with Sexton’s intervention to problematize the idea that antiracist agendas must emerge from the foundational priority of Indigenous sovereignty and restoration of land.54 But against the totalizing frame of Afro-pessimism, I want to stress instead the pitfalls of any antidialectical approach to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from the position of either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism. Settler colonial racial capitalism is not a thing but a social relation. As such, it is not produced out of the causal relationships that Sexton puts forward here: “Slavery, as it were, precedes and prepares the way for colonialism, its forebear or fundament or support. Colonialism, as it were, the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument.” 55 The nearly totalizing black existential frame is similarly based on a questionable construction of epistemic privilege:

[black existence] does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.56

In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon:

[Fanon’s] ‘audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside “race” […] is something that does not endear Fanon’s work to today’s practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the “strategic” award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures’. (pp. 157–8, my emphasis)

The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. As we have seen throughout our earlier reflections on power, Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word “potent” as in an omnipotent god. If we again look back farther, we will notice the Middle Kingdom Mdw Ntr word pHty, which refers to godlike strength. Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source. In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka activates the ka (sometimes, as we have seen, translated as soul, spirit, womb, or “magic”), which makes reality.20 All this amounts to a straightforward thesis on power as the ability with the means to make things happen. There is an alchemical quality of power. The human world, premised on symbolic communication, brings many forms of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford relationships that build institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud, we should recall, rightly described as “a prosthetic god.” It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods—protection from the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such power clearly can be abused. It is where those enabling capacities (empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural cum political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. The institutions in Abya Yala and in Northern countries, such as the United States and Canada, very rarely attempt to establish positive relations to blacks, and Blacks the subtext of Afropessimism and this entire meditation. The discussion points to a demand for political commitment. Politics is manifested under different names throughout the history of our species, but the one occasioning the word “politics” is, as we have seen, from the Greek pólis, which refers to ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted inside the city-state, where order necessitated the reso-lution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation of which could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of relations into those appropriate for “outsiders.” Returning to the Fanonian observation of selves and others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups amount to impeding or blocking the option and activities of politics. Yet, as a problem occurring within the polity, the problem short of war becomes a political one. Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question becomes this. If the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political—where antiblack institutions of power have, as their project, the impeding of Black power, which in effect requires barring Black access to political institutions—then antiblack societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the human negotiation of the expansion of human capabilities or, more to the point, appearance, speech, and freedom. Antipolitics is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also those in which racial moralizing dominates; moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of addressing institutions the transfor-mation of which would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political problem, it demands a political solution. It is not accidental that blacks continue to be the continued exemplars of unrealized freedom and against whom violence is waged against appearance and speech. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Y. Davis, Michelle Alexander, Angela J. Davis, Noël Cazenave have shown the expansion of privatization and incarceration is squarely placed in a structure of states and civil societies premised on the limitations of freedom (Blacks)—ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the United States, in the name of freedom.21That power is a facilitating or enabling phenomenon, a functional element of the human world, a viable response must be the establishment of relations that reach beyond the singularity of the body. I bring this up because pro-ponents of Afropessimism might object to this analysis because of its appeal to a human world. If that world is abrogated, the site of struggle becomes that which is patently not human. It is not accidental that popular race dis-course refers today to “black bodies” instead of “black people,” for instance. As the human world is discursive, social, and relational, this abandonment amounts to an appeal to the nonrelational, the incommunicability of radi-calized singularity, and appeals to the body and its very limited reach, if not isolation. At that point, it is perhaps the psychologist, psychiatrist, or psycho-analyst who would be helpful, as turning radically inward offers the promise of despair, narcissistic delusions of divine power, and, as Fanon also observed, madness.22 Even if that slippery slope were rejected, the performative con-tradiction of attempting to communicate such singularity or absence thereof requires, at least for consistency, the appropriate course of action: silence. The remaining question for Afropessimism, especially those who are primarily academics, becomes this: Why write? It is a question for which, in both existential and political terms, I do not see how an answer could be given from an Afropessimistic perspective without the unfortunate revelation of cynicism. The marketability of Afropessimists in predominantly white institutions—perhaps as an exotic phenomenon that affirms white standpoints as ontological sites of legitimacy—is no doubt in the immediate and paradoxical satisfaction in dissatisfaction it offers. Indeed, if Afropessimists were correct, their only solace would be in black institutions, but that, too, would pose a problem since the argument is that such institutions lack agency because, as black, they are absent. This is not to say that critical black and Black thinkers should not do their work in predomi-nantly white spaces. It is simply that the argument of the impossibility of their doing so makes their location in such places patently contradictory. We are at this point on familiar terrain. As with ancient logical paradoxes denying the viability of time and motion, the best option, after a moment of immobilized reflection, is, eventually, to move on, even where the pause is itself significant as an encomium of thought.

Torpey is certainly not the only intellectual expressing these worries. According to historian Pieter Lagrou, “our contemporary societies, for lack of future projects, shrink into a ‘passeist’ culture.”12 In European public discourse, he argues, the focus on crimes of the distant past has become so strong that it tends to marginalize claims of victims of contemporary crimes and human rights violations. Therefore, Lagrou argues, “a commemorative discourse of victimhood is very much the opposite of a constructive and dynamic engagement with the present, but rather a paralyzing regression of democratic debate.”13 Lagrou's argument closely resembles many others that turn against retrospective politics and “victim culture” such as Ian Buruma's warning about the peril of minorities defining themselves exclusively as historical victims and engaging in an “Olympics of suffering”14 and Charles Maier's claims about a “surfeit of memory.”15

These warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing or even banning politics directed at contemporary injustices or striving for a more just future should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of an exclusively present- or future-oriented politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. Contemporary injustice often manifests itself in the form of structural repetition or continuity of injustices with a long history. Moreover, totalitarian versions of progressivist politics have frequently abused the idea of a struggle for a more just future in order to justify past and present suffering. It could even be argued that the rise of dominant restrospective politics has been initiated partly on the basis of disillusionment with the exculpatory mechanisms of progressivist ideology.16 Some indeed claim that much of present-day retrospective politics and the “setting straight” of historical injustices would be unnecessary had totalitarian progressivist politics focused less exclusively on the bright future and shown more sensitivity to the contemporary suffering of its day. This claim certainly makes sense if one thinks of extreme examples such as Stalin's five-year plans and Mao's Great Leap Forward. Yet, as Matthias Frisch rightly argues, the risk of the justification of past and present suffering lurks around the corner wherever progressive logics of history or promises of bright and just futures are not counterbalanced by reflective forms of remembrance.17

As Tomé and Açıkalın (2019) point out, in order to fill the gap between IR theory and real-world problems, “an increasing number of scholars have come to embrace a spirit of intellectual openness, recognizing both the need for greater flexibility in the theoretical formulations and the possibility of complementarity by other theories and approaches” (p. 12). This section discusses the added value of scenario analysis as a complementary approach to traditional IR methods. The most obvious advantage of scenario analysis as a methodology, grounded in the reservoir of foresight studies, lies by definition in its ability to tackle future events. As mentioned before, there are no specified instruments within traditional IR methods which would allow scholars to go beyond past and present. The only exception is forecasting, one of the formal methods in IR, which is, however, distinctly different from foresight.9 The underlying logic of forecasting is to provide predictions about the future by drawing on mathematical models and big data-sets based on known patterns. Thus, it is not particularly suitable to accommodate discontinuities. Foresight, as described above, aims at going beyond existing patterns by developing alternative futures based on an innovative combination of multiple driving forces. Its goal is to capture a set of possible futures and learn from them by examining the causal relations between driving forces and their different evolutions. By applying scenario approaches, scholars can thus account for evolving dynamics and discuss such timely issues as the consequences of Brexit for both British and EU-security, economics and politics (Brakman, Garretsen, & Kohl, 2018; Martill & Sus, 2018; Musolff, 2017; Verschueren, 2017; Ziv et al., 2018). Yet, scenario analysis offers more than the possibility to talk about the future. We see a fourfold merit of adding scenario analysis to the range of methods applied by IR scholars. Confronting enduring assumptions As we presented in the previous section, the main feature of explorative scenarios, which are the subject of this paper, is to stimulate creative thinking by challenging the deeply held assumptions of their authors. In other words, this method is helpful for overcoming enduring cognitive biases—mental errors such as linearity, presentism, and group think caused by the subconscious and simplified information processing of humans (Heuer, 1999, pp. 111– 112). Humans have the tendencies to focus on the present at the expense of the future and to think about the future in linear terms by extrapolating past trends into the future. As Gaddis (1992) points out, “we tend to bias our historical and our theoretical analyses too much toward continuity (…) we rarely find a way to introduce discontinuities into theory, or to attempt to determine what causes them to happen” (p. 52). Even if Gaddis does not explicitly mention scenarios, he refers to the concepts underlying scenario approaches (Han, 2011, p. 51). Scenario analysis attends to “deeper, otherwise left implicit, assumptions about continuous and linear patterns of development” (Wilkinson et al., 2013, p. 707). The process of scenario development invites the participants to reveal and question convictions which have so far remained unchallenged, and to question the linearity of world developments. The ability of reexamining one’s own assumptions and going beyond linear patterns of development is essential for IR scholarship. To illustrate it with two examples: IR scholars and historians did not think that the Soviet Union could collapse and were startled by its fall, the peaceful resolution of CONTEMPORARY SECURITY POLICY 445 the Cold War and the transformation of the bipolar system (Davis, 2005; Gaddis, 1992). In a similar vein, United States scholars were for decades so convinced of China’s economic, political, and cultural limitations that they neglected the possibility of its sudden ascent and were taken by surprise when it happened (Hundley, Kenzer, & Peterson, 2015). Interestingly, since the rise of China became evident, the United States debate on its future has been marked by a similar linearity of thought, leading to single-outcome predictions of China’s long-term future (Kerbel, 2004). In both cases, the discipline proved incapable of anticipating events of such importance, because scholars took for granted the status quo instead of confronting their bias towards linearity and detect manifestations of upcoming change. As a result, two major geopolitical surprises—the end of the Cold War and the rise of China have at first been neglected, forcing academia to catch up. Against this backdrop, foresight helps IR scholars to exit the tunnel vision on world affairs and discover potentially valuable nonlinear lines of development. These can be both innovative in terms of scholarship, and policy-relevant by offering a reflection on unexpected discontinuities. Thus, it can facilitate the intellectual capability to think the unthinkable (Porter, 2016, p. 259). Bringing forward new research questions Scenario analysis starts with confronting one’s enduring assumptions and developing multiple causal possibilities, through which scholars can potentially discover topics that have not been examined before. One of the greatest challenges for any scholar is to identify innovative venues for research that might bring the discipline forward and advance publicity for one’s work. In Lakatosian terms, such an ability is often considered an evidence of a progressive research program.10 Since the prime feature of scenario analysis is to detect rapid and significant shifts in trajectories, or the forces behind them, this method succors when defining new pressing topics for academia. In particular, as mentioned in the previous section, scenario analysis enables the detection of both weak signals and wild cards. By drawing attention to these hitherto overlooked but potentially pressing issues, scenario analysis can identify research agendas for further investigation (Barma et al., 2016). Therefore, scenario analysis seems to be the right tool to advance innovative research since it helps scholars drive their research into new areas, away from moribund topics that have been followed for many decades. By “identifying questions of likely future significance” (Barma et al., 2016, p. 6), scenario analysis can contribute to combatting the proliferation of researchers in fields occupying the political status quo, such as Soviet or Japan studies in the United States in the 1980s. At the same time, innovative research topics confront the uncertainties that are crucial for policymakers to be monitored closely. 446 M. SUS AND M. HADEED Dealing with the complexity and interdisciplinarity of real-world issues Another added value of the scenario analysis for IR scholarship lies in its ability to provide comprehensive causal reasoning and thus to tackle complex issues. As mentioned in the introduction, the world’s complexity combined with abrupt shifts poses a challenge for IR scholarship. The possibility to accommodate multiple driving forces, to take into account different values they might take and finally to combine them with each other and see how they affect the dependent variable, makes the scenario approach quite unique. Traditional IR methods work with a limited number of independent variables, formulate and test hypotheses usually based on the relation between a single causal variable and the dependent variable. Investigating complex causal trajectories is therefore not possible. Against this background, we agree with Barma et al. (2016) and his colleagues who argue that scenarios are highly apt for dealing with complexity and uncertainty and providing academia with a tool for “actionable clarity in understanding contemporary global issues” (p. 1). Moreover, the scenario approach helps to tackle the challenges of interdisciplinarity that is tied to complexity. By drawing on the active participation of people from different disciplines, backgrounds, and with different expertise in the scenario development process, it brings interdisciplinarity to the table by default. The key advantage of the approach is that this interdisciplinary conversation takes place prior to and during the research phase, rather than after it. This distinguishes the scenario approach from other methods that bring interdisciplinary perspectives together but do not facilitate a discussion between them, rather letting them passively co-exist. By exploring the dynamics between seemingly unrelated vectors of change (key drivers), scenario analysis can be useful for shedding light on developments that would have been overlooked by narrower research designs. In security studies, for example, scenario analysis can connect the dots between hard, soft, traditional and non-traditional understandings of security and capture the interplay of economic-societal environmental and technological changes. Imposing interdisciplinarity also helps to counter the “hyper-fragmentation of knowledge” that “makes it difficult for even scholars in different disciplines to understand each other, much less policy-makers and general public” (Desch, 2015, p. 381). Complex real-world issues that were tackled using scenario analysis include the Israel-Palestine conflict (Stein et al., 1998), Turkey’s geopolitical environment (Çelik & Blum, 2007), the prospects of the United States– China conflict (Friedberg, 2005) and the consequences of Brexit for EU foreign and security policy (Martill & Sus, 2018). An examination of these topics without the application of interdisciplinary approaches would not be possible precisely due to their multifaceted character. CONTEMPORARY SECURITY POLICY 447 Stepping out of the ivory tower Finally, scenario analysis also enables IR scholars to establish a channel of communication with policy-makers other than conducting interviews for their own research or providing ad-hoc consultations. A participatory scenario process forges “deep and shared understanding between its participants” (Ramírez & Wilkinson, 2016, p. 21). In scenario workshops, academics and policy-makers work together, confront their world visions and assumptions and arrive at an agreement upon which they develop narratives for alternative futures. Hence, scenario analysis can be perceived as a tool towards more exchange between academia and policy-making that can contribute to a better understanding between the two worlds. For policymakers, it provides the opportunity to consider long-term trends (an occasion not often found in the day-to-day nature of politics). For academics, it provides insight into which trends are most concerning for policy-makers, allowing them to check and ultimately enhance the relevance of their research agendas. We acknowledge the difficulty to engage policy-makers in foresight exercises caused by their time-constrains and possible lack of interest. Yet, in our experience, this problem mostly refers to high-level policy-makers. Mid-level and former officials and policy-makers have more time and willingness to participate in foresight exercises and contribute equally valuable perspectives. The participatory character of foresight exercises facilitates the exchange of views from different stakeholders on an equal level. In our case, as the evaluation has shown, it has proven to be stimulating for each of the engaged groups. Moreover, the policy dialogue benefits from scenarios’ accessibility to a broader audience. Scenario publications tend to be shorter and easier to read than the average academic publication and as Nye (2008) rightly notes “a premium on time is a major difference between the two cultures” of academia and policy-making. Since scenario publications are more suitable to the time- and attention-constraints of many policy-makers, they improve the accessibility of research findings for the policy world (Cairney & Kwiatkowski, 2017). An illustrative example is offered by a foresight exercise conducted by the Aspen Institute Berlin in 2017. A group of academics, think tank experts and policy-makers developed scenarios on the future of the liberal world order that served as raw material for a newspaper from the future titled “The Aspen Insight” and dated October 21, 2025. Not only did the presentation of the newspaper catch the attention of many Berlin-based policy-makers but the “The Aspen Insight” was also attached as a supplement to the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel, and reached more than 300,000 readers.11 We acknowledge that the four aspects of the added value of scenario analysis for IR scholarship are interrelated and that their boundaries are not clear448 M. SUS AND M. HADEED cut. Yet, we believe, they highlight distinct benefits of this approach for academics that want to tackle the challenges of today’s world via their research.

Avoiding Cognitive Biases In a methods book on scenarios, James Ogilvy discussed the inability of extremely bright people to see ahead due to cognitive biases, that is, what people found “unthinkable,” though those futures eventually came into being. In the context of discussing the future of US and USSR nuclear arsenals during a 1980s scenario exercise, Ogilvy wrote in hindsight that “two decades later we now take for granted what was then unthinkable to some very good thinkers” (Ogilvy 2002:191). This comment is very similar to an insight by Philip Tetlock that political scientists tend to view surprises as overdetermined in hindsight, but as inconceivable ahead of time (Weber 1996:281). Scenarios, whether formally written or developed for purposes of conversation, offer a powerful way for researchers to compensate for cognitive biases endemic to any kind of human research. Scenarios do this by forcing researchers to confront their most basic assumptions about how the world operates and by teasing out the logical implications of extreme values on the independent variables of interest. As Peter Schwartz put it, “[Scenario building is] all part of a process of self-reflection: understanding yourself and your biases, identifying what matters to you, and perceiving where to put your attention. It takes persistent work and honesty to penetrate our internal mental defenses. To ensure the success of our efforts, we need a clear understanding of the relationship between our own concerns and the wider world around us. To achieve that, it helps to have a constant stream of rich, diverse, and thought-provoking information” (Schwartz 1996:59). One of the most common forms of bias that scenarios help to compensate for is an anchoring bias; that is, the tendency to interpret new information in ways that conform with our preexisting beliefs (Jervis 1976:143–202). One might also think about this as a “linear projection” bias; scholars who have a view of how the world is operating in the present (theoretically informed or not) may well project this view into the future. In addition to forcing scholars to explicitly confront these beliefs, the scenario process offers a way to think about sorting new information. A completed scenario project allows a researcher to think about multiple futures (with differing plot lines for how the world arrived there) at once. Thus, new information is not automatically compared against a single linear projection into the future, but rather weighted relative to alternative futures. New information might be consistent with all hypothesized futures, in which case the new information may not lead to a new understanding. An example is the current debate regarding whether China is rising or declining relative to the United States. This literature, despite access to the same data, offers remarkably different projections regarding the future strength of each state and what this portends for the international system (Pape 2005; Layne 2009; Beckley 2011/2012; Subramanian 2011). In many cases, however, new information is likely to favor one trend line over another, thus changing how a researcher assigns probabilities to various futures. Pedagogy Scenarios offer many of the same benefits as simulations, recently a hot topic in the pedagological literature, to teaching in political science (Newkirk and Hamilton 1979; Smith and Boyer 1996; Newmann and Twigg 2000; Simpson and Kaussler 2009; Sasley 2010). Indeed, scenarios are often a key part of simulation learning. For instance, in a decision-making simulation in which students are assigned the roles of heads of state, the students are often offered a scenario vignette to respond to with policy choices. The emphasis of scenarios and simulations in pedagogy, however, is different. The literature on simulations tends to focus on experiential learning, but recent scholarship has cast some doubt on whether or not this kind of learning improves students’ knowledge of core course concepts (Raymond 2010). Scenarios offer a way to make classroom exercises more explicitly oriented toward the incorporation of theories. For instance, rather than asking students to take on the roles of the President, National Security Advisor, etc., the students may be presented with a vignette and asked to analyze the strategic implications of the scenario for the United States. Both coauthors of this article have used scenarios in classroom exercises. Tom Mahnken has taught the use of scenarios for stategic planning at the Naval War College. Tim Junio used scenario exercises at the University of Pennsylvania. Students in the class “International Security,” having been assigned Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence and other core readings on strategy, were asked to evaluate a scenario in which the United States had committed itself to military action, but was subsequently held hostage by a foreign power. In Junio’s scenario, a future US President was led to believe that due to an intelligence breakthrough, North Korean nuclear weapon targets were rendered vulnerable to a US first strike with conventional weapons. The United States and close allies saw this as an opportunity for regime change and pre-positioned US forces in the region. The US President then issued an ultimatum to the North Korean regime to vacate the country within 48 hours, akin to the US threat to Saddam Hussein in 2003, or face a forceful regime change at the hands of the US-led coalition. To the surprise of US leaders, North Korea’s Supreme Leader went on television to announce that an unspecified number of nuclear warheads had been smuggled into the United States as a contingency against such a situation. The Supreme Leader then declared that any act of aggression against the North Korean people would be met with retaliation against the US homeland. Students in the class were asked to first discuss the strategic situation for the United States. What mistakes had been made to get the United States into that scenario? What issues were at stake? Then, the students were asked to apply strategic concepts to discuss how the United States might seek to extricate itself from the situation. The North Korea’s blackmail scenario is an example of an extremely low-probability event that almost certainly would not justify much further analysis by the intelligence and defense policy communities, but is extremely useful for pedagogy. This kind of scenario increases student interest in the material and forces them to engage with the theories and concepts of the course. Rather than focus on policy decisions alone, as simulations are likely to do, students are forced to bring deductive logic to bear to assess the boundaries of the scenario.

In order to take us from neurophysiology to questions of international relations, let us next consider the question of meaning. Meaning is a topic that cognitive theorists have discussed at great length and their conclusions are quite different from those that constructivists have reached. Consider, for example, how imagination works. To imagine something is to conjure something up in our minds that is not physically present to our senses. We do this all the time of course, yet imagination is a remarkable process that operates with the help of what cognitive theorists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner refer to as ‘conceptual blends’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 39–67, 1996; cf. Blair 2009: 92–103). In a conceptual blend, the meanings constructed in two or more input-spaces are projected onto an additional, third space, where new meanings arise that were not originally present in the inputs. The blended space exist in a subjunctive mode, as it were; it points to the existence of a possible world that is organised according to the combined logics of other, real or possible worlds. Conceptual blends are ‘as if’ simulations that we run in our minds, and the ability to run various scenarios ‘in the blend’ means that we can avoid going through time-consuming, or dangerous, processes of trial and error (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 217). It is easy to see why animals that know how to engage in such simulations have been favoured by evolution. Take ‘the case of the missing chair’ (Fauconnier and Turner 1998: 146–49; cf. Cook 2006: 85–86). Curiously, but also self-evidently, there can be no nothing in the world since there is at least one of everything. For that reason, all absences are conceived of in a subjunctive mood. This is the case, for example, with missing chairs: the missing chair is a thing in the blend that, viewed from the outside, is a nonthing. It can be pointed to and takes up physical space. It inherits its physical characteristics of being a gap from the ‘actual’ input, in which there is not a chair in the corresponding position. (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 241) This is precisely the reason why many cultures, including the classical Greek and Roman, operated with number systems that did not include a zero. The zero was eventually invented in India as one input space — the world of numbers — came to be blended with another input space — the subjunctive world of absences. Strictly speaking, the number zero exists only in this blended conceptual space. This is also, let us suggest, how we imagine ourselves. There is clearly no point in looking for ourselves ‘inside ourselves’ since this only begs the questions of what we are looking for and where we are to look (Zahavi 2008: 99–146). Neither will we find ourselves inside our brains — the ‘seat of the soul’ is not, as Descartes once believed, located in the pineal gland. Instead, we exist only in the conceptual blends in which various input spaces come to be combined. We are imaginary, a useful assumption conceived of in a subjunctive mode, and as such we are no different from everything else that human beings make up. If this is worrying to us, we should remember that we are both as real and as imaginary as the number zero, or as a missing chair.10 Which images we apply to ourselves depends ultimately on how our bodies interact with the world. As cognitive theorists explain, meaning is a far broader and much richer notion than constructivists acknowledge. The world is made meaningful not as a result of explicit interpretations but through our direct bodily experiences of it; meaning is something felt, something perceived, the qualia through which we experience life (Johnson 2008: 25). ‘An embodied view of meaning’, Mark Johnson argues, looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments. It sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate things, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation. (ibid.: 11) The world is, consequently, just as meaningful, albeit in a different fashion, to animals — be it dogs or gastropods — who engage in no explicit interpretations of their own, and it is meaningful to new-borns too who have no words with which to describe it. The point is not that a body is required for cognition to take place — everyone agrees with that — but rather that the way our bodies interact with their environments gives rise to the meanings we come up with (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 37; Thompson 2010: 54–57). To perceive and to conceive are closely related activities. Starting from these basic embodied experiences, we gradually go on to construct conceptual systems of increasing complexity and scope. A key mechanism here is metaphor, and as cognitive theorists explain, all basic metaphors are based on bodily experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 19–21; Johnson 2008: 135–54). It is because of our body’s knowledge of what it means to pile things on top of one another that ‘more’ is taken to be ‘up’, or because we pour liquids into containers that our ‘hearts’ can be ‘filled with joy’ (Johnson 2008: 195). Everything else that we interpret is grounded in embodied metaphors. Consider, for example, the metaphors so heavily relied on by scholars of international relations.(Marks 2001: 358–64; cf. Ringmar 2006: 66–71). We understand the notion of ‘balances of power’ since we have an embodied knowledge of what balancing means and various metaphorical ways of conceiving of power, and we understand the notion of a ‘security dilemma’ since we have an embodied knowledge of both dilemmas and security. Meaning, conceived in this experiential, embodied fashion, implies a very different ontology than that invoked by constructivists. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call it ‘embodied realism’. ‘Our concepts’, they explain, cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-free reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 44) Constructivists show up too late, as it were, when meaning has already happened. Meaning is not, as cultural constructivists would have it, contained in a shared, intersubjective system which is inherited from previous generations and into which each new generation is socialised. Neither is meaning, as structural constructivists argue, a function of the way the world is represented in language or in a language analogue. Instead, the reality of the world is confirmed through our direct bodily interaction with it (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 17–18). But the real is, at the same time, not intrinsically ‘hard’ and not even ‘material’, and it does not, as cultural constructivists claim, constitute a world of ‘brute physical facts’. The real is the real as we experience it, but since experiences vary between species, other animals experience reality quite differently (cf. Gibson 1986: 128; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 25, 104–06). This is not to deny that people also make sense together, in explicit and fully verbalised ways, and it is not to deny that power plays an important role in the constitution of social life (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 102–04). A unified account of the human must incorporate both the physiological and the social. An analysis of metaphor illustrates this combination of processes. Clearly, many metaphors are specific to a particular culture. In Thailand, ‘she walks like an elephant’ is an expression of highest praise, and in Scotland ‘my love’ can be compared to ‘a red, red, rose’. However, neither metaphor makes much sense in societies not familiar with elephants or roses. Embodied realism acknowledges these facts, but insists that embodied meaning is the more fundamental process and that all conceptual structures, no matter how elaborate and culturally specific, start from the body’s interaction with the world. After all, the most basic metaphors do not vary over time or from one society to the next (Brown 1991). Meanings are universal to the extent that human bodies, in their fundamental physiological constitution, all are alike and to the extent that we interact with the world in the same fashion.

In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.

Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent ‘re-discovery of the material’ associated with various self-styled ‘new materialists’ is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.

Imagine a vigorous, diverse field of International Relations in which different—and mutually exclusive— ontologies, epistemologies, and methods are all constantly narrating and re-narrating events in different ways and by different means. Now situate that field in a vigorous, diverse political culture in which one finds different—and mutually exclusive—ways of identifying and conceptualizing problems relevant to it, while also contesting its own limits and nature. The structural conditions of the two fields themselves are not what would achieve pluralism in this scenario, but they do provide the possibility for a pluralist mind-set to obtain. In the case of IR, such a diverse field would not be one in which “anything goes”—in which any claim was as good as any other, or was to be judged only in terms of the political “work” it was understood to perform. Each research program—each combination of a stipulated ontology, epistemology, and methodology, with their generative intellectual, affective, and normative commitments —would still entail close scrutiny from others. Each, moreover, would be bound to the rules that it stipulates for itself. Interpretive claims of truth and hypothetical deductive ones would still be bound to their own particular methodological rules and logical warrants, even if—as Jackson and Nexon have noted—the specific knowledge claims they produce are incommensurable with one another, and hence also irrefutable in one another’s terms.99 Each, moreover, would continue to reflect the value commitments and fears—the experiences of epistemic rupture—around which their promulgators had initially constellated. If the field practiced IR in such a diverse and contested fashion, our hunch is that such a practice would do much to combat the notion of reification-asforgetting advanced earlier. If, that is, theorists writing in these distinctive veins talked to, understood the claims made by, and argued with one another from positions of roughly equal disciplinary prestige, then coming to terms with radically dissimilar ways of theorizing the political would become a matter of course. The effect of this would be to force individual scholars to think systematically about their own assumptions, concepts, and commitments: the logical warrants and a prioris that are always on the verge of passing into reified forgetting. A path would be opened for Nye’s peasants and strongmen, and for Haiti’s revolutionaries, to appear on the same terms as up-and-coming American elites and revered European philosophers. The skepticism each scholar naturally brings to the sensibilities and projects of others would be constantly turned back on their own as well. Here, then, is the wager: that the continuous assault of multiple theoretical narratives would force theorists from every quarter just slightly off balance—still able to draw conclusions from data and to advocate for what follows from them, but without forgetting their limited ontological and epistemological warrants. Research design would include that experiential aim in its deployment of different intellectual lenses. The researcher would think, partly, in the same terms as might the curator of an artistic exhibition: seeking out and deploying pictures of a complex event in ways that would buffet both the theorist and the reader of theory with a variety of unsettling and mutually incommensurable accounts. If such an approach to pluralism seems facile, that is because on some level it is—self-consciously so. The very possibility of mutually incommensurable accounts changes the epistemic status of social-scientific authority. One is no longer promising settled truth, but only provisional claims, whose partiality—again, in both senses—is constantly being underscored even as their analytical findings and policy upshots are never entirely abandoned. Not truth, but something rather less grand: what the comedian Stephen Colbert once called truthiness, or what Adorno—to return to a theme developed in the introduction—called “clowning”: The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of this thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning . . . . Philosophy is the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that serious.100 For philosophy, substitute social science: the attempt to systematize politics through conceptualization, explanation, and interpretation. Such efforts, as Ned Lebow and Toni Erskine—and before them, David Ricci—have noted, are inherently tragic.101 Static concepts cannot contain the vitality and contingency of politics; and yet, they are all we have. While the term clowning connotes a lack of seriousness, it is not merely goofing off. Clowning, as Adorno intends this term, does for social science what the likes of Colbert, Jon Stewart, and a host of others have done for television news: to affirm the ideals of a discursive form—the “serious business” of social science or public-interest journalism—even as it underscores how those ideals can never quite be lived up to.102 Through the juxtaposition of many perspectives, the scholar underscores the limits of her own sensibilities; scholarly authority derives from one’s ability not to capture the truth, but to mark the space between the best accounts of a complex world one can obtain, and the actual complexity and indeterminacy of things. Thus might epistemological skepticism be sustained. One could hope that such clowning would produce a change of affect or sensibility. That change can be described as proceeding in three phases. First, a sense of dislocation is hoped for, stemming from the realization that any account of a given event both discloses a sense of that event, and betrays a larger reality that lies beyond it. We might begin to wonder how that selective disclosure works, what normative or ideological worldviews it suborns or suppresses. Second, from this sense of dislocation a sense of finitude or humility might follow: that while such narratives are inadequate, they are all any of us—thinkers, policymakers, human beings—have by which to make sense of the world. Third, from this sense of finitude, a sense of compassion and fellow feeling might emerge for those bound up in conflict, and for all of us when we consider our common vulnerabilities and worldly possibilities. This, we submit, would be a pluralism worthy of the name: a helpmate to political judgment, rather than an ill-starred attempt to replace it.103

As noted, the six arguments for pluralism reviewed in the first part of section one are not simply to be dismissed. Narrow readings of scientific knowledge do, as Jackson and Nexon argue, exclude the world’s full diversity from theoretical characterization and impoverish scholarly debate. Analytical eclecticists and bridging-the-gap pluralists, for their part, are not wrong in observing that paradigm and methods-driven work can lead to insularity and scholasticism. Meanwhile, the deeply technical nature of late-industrial modernity does necessitate an uneasily negotiated balance among phronesis, techne, and episteme—which, in turn, sometimes necessitates the kind of vigorous argument to which Socratic-belief pluralists hold. Finally, reflexivists are correct to underscore the ways in which power dynamics work inside the academy no less than outside of it. Yet these arguments on behalf of pluralism are disparate pieces of a larger story. They can be woven together, we suggest, by taking the line that pluralism necessarily entails skepticism in epistemological terms. From this perspective, what has been missing thus far has been proper attention to what pluralism works against: the idea that truths about politics can somehow transcend politics, and that the “right” theory or conceptual schema can lead us to them. Rather than a response to institutional or structural narrowness—to be solved by greater plurality—the call to pluralism responds to a tendency to forget that social-scientific concepts extrapolate from a world they can never fully capture, and then to conflate the former with the latter. This tendency to forget—known as reification—inheres in the very nature of thinking itself. As such, it demands explicit attention and remediation. On this account, pluralism matters because—when properly understood—it combats this reifying tendency: it “rearranges our thinking.” The scientific desire to make sense of things must be balanced against an acceptance of the fact that we live in a world that overflows neat conceptual definitions and categorical divisions; in which “everything is related to everything else.” 66 Yet, at the same time, we must still act in and on that world. In order to answer the practical question what do we do, we must compare situations facing us with others that are similar but not identical. We must be willing to toy with ideas, identify patterns, change perspectives, reason by analogy, and think from case to case, even as we recall the inherently provisional nature of such work. The remaining challenge is threefold. First, we must lay out the broader political and historical context that gave rise to the systematic study of world politics. The tools and ideals of IR—the idea of using theoretical knowledge to produce leverage over events in world politics—did not emerge from nowhere. They were born from a belief that the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century were indicative of a general condition of crisis in late modern politics, one that had become universal in scale and open-ended in time. Scientific intervention in world politics was born not out of idle Humean curiosity, but out of fear: a response to “the crater,” as Karl Mannheim put it, “which is yawning beneath our western society.” 67 Second, we must show that the wish to use theory to transcend or control politics nevertheless cannot succeed; that it actually perpetuates the crisis it was meant to resolve. This second point has less to do with what individual scholars intend, and more to do with delineating what thinking does: the way theories work in the mind, the peculiar combination of reified knowing and forgetting they suborn. Third, we must show how pluralism—understood as entailing epistemological skepticism—can be mobilized to combat such knowing and forgetting. Each of these points will be taken in turn.

We hold to the notion that pluralism necessarily entails epistemological skepticism: the position that no single knowledge system can ever possess the whole truth, at least as this applies to political matters. As Nick Rengger points out, pluralism in this sense is not the same thing as plurality: the fact that International Relations theorists already do deploy a range of approaches, theories, “-isms,” and methods in the pursuit of their work.18 This latter position is less a statement of value than a grudging acknowledgement of certain stubborn disciplinary realities: the failure of neopositivist “falsificationism” to create a uniform, normal social science of IR (or of political science) on the one hand, and IR’s rapid growth and persistent variegation on the other.19 Pluralism, by contrast, embraces diversity as inherently valuable for students of international politics, given that social-scientific concepts and categories can never do more than make provisional claims about a world that resists comprehensive organization through any single mode or scheme of explanation, interpretation, or analysis.20 Following Jeffrey Isaac, it holds that scholarship from a variety of different perspectives and sensibilities must have “not simply a place” in the academic study of politics, “but a valued place.” 21 So understood, a clear fissure seems to run through what might otherwise appear to be widespread agreement on the value of pluralism, creating at times strange intellectual bedfellows. Despite differences over methods and methodology, analytical eclecticists like Katzenstein and Sil, bridging-the-gap pluralists like Bruce Jentleson, and some proponents of phron¯esis, share a view of knowledge as ultimately singular and attainable. On the other side of the equation, those arguing for a wider understanding of science and knowledge like Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon, and reflexivists concerned with scholarship’s influence on politics like Inanna Hamati-Ataya share with scholars such as John Mearsheimer a concern with fostering pluralism and not just plurality—despite disagreement over many other issues of theory, method, and interpretation. Beyond highlighting the lack of consistency in what appears a unified call for greater pluralism in IR, our contribution is to demonstrate that, when understood as a necessary implication of epistemological skepticism, claims to pluralism take on a more critically reflexive role than present debates have recognized. As such, pluralism no longer promises to resolve the inherent contingency of politics or to transcend the limits of theory. Rather, its use is rather fundamentally pedagogical: it “teaches us to beware the tyranny of certainty.” 22 Pluralism thus becomes a habit of mind, which one cultivates to resist the ever-present danger of reification: conflating the concepts used to describe or classify things with the things themselves.“Philosophy . . . lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” noted Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno.23 Adorno’s point, which applies to social and political theory no less than to “pure” philosophical speculation, was threefold. First, that the continued search for truth beyond thought contained an ineluctable limitation, insofar as such truth could only be arrived at through thought—and thought always takes place within the world it means to understand or explain. Second, that the nature of thinking makes that limitation difficult to keep fully present to mind. Mere awareness of it does not suffice: scholars need to “arrange their thoughts and actions” so as to continually underscore it.24 Third, that failing to do so renders theory vulnerable to the worst kinds of tendentious appropriation, notwithstanding the intention of the theorist.

This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly achievement.

For Levine, the key challenge in international relations (IR) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked reification”: the widespread and dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the most difficult issues, from genocides to war. Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny can thus have far-reaching consequences. Following Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine takes a post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated.

There is, wrote H. L. Mencken, “always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”1 Mencken’s aphorism applies in spades to the subject of this account. To imagine that there exists a simple antidote to the “military metaphysic” to which the people and government of the United States have fallen prey is to misconstrue the problem. As the foregoing chapters make plain, the origins of America’s present-day infatuation with military power are anything but simple. American militarism is not the invention of a cabal nursing fantasies of global empire and manipulating an unsuspecting people frightened by the events of 9/11. Further, it is counterproductive to think in these terms— to assign culpability to a particular president or administration and to imagine that throwing the bums out will put things right. Yet neither does the present-day status of the United States as sole superpower reveal an essential truth, whether positive or negative, about the American project. Enthusiasts (mostly on the right) who interpret America’s possession of unrivaled and unprecedented armed might as proof that the United States enjoys the mandate of heaven are deluded. But so too are those (mostly on the left) who see in the far-flung doings of today’s U.S. military establishment substantiation of Major General Smedley Butler’s old chestnut that “war is just a racket” and the American soldier “a gangster for capitalism” sent abroad to do the bidding of Big Business or Big Oil.2 Neither the will of God nor the venality of Wall Street suffices to explain how the United States managed to become stuck in World War IV. Rather, the new American militarism is a little like pollution—the perhaps unintended, but foreseeable by-product of prior choices and decisions made without taking fully into account the full range of costs likely to be incurred. In making the industrial revolution, the captains of American enterprise did not consciously set out to foul the environment, but as they harnessed the waters, crisscrossed the nation with rails, and built their mills and refineries, negative consequences ensued. Lakes and rivers became choked with refuse, the soil contaminated, and the air in American cities filthy. By the time that the industrial age approached its zenith in the middle of the twentieth century, most Americans had come to take this for granted; a degraded environment seemed the price you had to pay in exchange for material abundance and by extension for freedom and opportunity. Americans might not like pollution, but there seemed to be no choice except to put up with it. To appreciate that this was, in fact, not the case, Americans needed a different consciousness. This is where the environmental movement, beginning more or less in the 1960s, made its essential contribution. Environmentalists enabled Americans to see the natural world and their relationship to that world in a different light. They argued that the obvious deterioration in the environment was unacceptable and not at all inevitable. Alternatives did exist. Different policies and practices could stanch and even reverse the damage. Purists in that movement insisted upon the primacy of environmental needs, everywhere and in all cases. Theirs was (and is) a principled position deserving to be heard. To act on their recommendations, however, would likely mean shutting down the economy, an impractical and politically infeasible course of action. Pragmatists advanced a different argument. They suggested that it was possible to negotiate a compromise between economic needs and environmental imperatives. This compromise might oblige Americans to curtail certain bad habits, but it did not require changing the fundamentals of how they lived their lives. Americans could keep their cars and continue their love affair with consumption; but at the same time they could also have cleaner air and cleaner water. Implementing this compromise has produced an outcome that environmental radicals (and on the other side, believers in laissez-faire capitalism) today find unsatisfactory. In practice, it turns out, once begun negotiations never end. Bargaining is continuous, contentious, and deeply politicized. Participants in the process seldom come away with everything they want. Settling for half a loaf when you covet the whole is inevitably frustrating. But the results are self-evident. Environmental conditions in the United States today are palpably better than they were a half century ago. Pollution has not been vanquished, but it has become more manageable. Furthermore, the nation has achieved those improvements without imposing on citizens undue burdens and without preventing its entrepreneurs from innovating, creating, and turning a profit. Restoring a semblance of balance and good sense to the way that Americans think about military power will require a similarly pragmatic approach. Undoing all of the negative effects that result from having been seduced by war may lie beyond reach, but Americans can at least make them more manageable and thereby salvage their democracy. In explaining the origins of the new American militarism, this account has not sought to assign or to impute blame. None of the protagonists in this story sat down after Vietnam and consciously plotted to propagate perverse attitudes toward military power any more than Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller plotted to despoil the nineteenth-century American landscape. The clamor after Vietnam to rebuild the American arsenal and to restore American self-confidence, the celebration of soldierly values, the search for ways to make force more usable: all of these came about because groups of Americans thought that they glimpsed in the realm of military affairs the solution to vexing problems. The soldiers who sought to rehabilitate their profession, the intellectuals who feared that America might share the fate of Weimar, the strategists wrestling with the implications of nuclear weapons, the conservative Christians appalled by the apparent collapse of traditional morality: none of these acted out of motives that were inherently dishonorable. To the extent that we may find fault with the results of their efforts, that fault is more appropriately attributable to human fallibility than to malicious intent. And yet in the end it is not motive that matters but outcome. Several decades after Vietnam, in the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword. Told that despite all of their past martial exertions, treasure expended, and lives sacrificed, the world they inhabit is today more dangerous than ever and that they must redouble those exertions, they dutifully assent. Much as dumping raw sewage into American lakes and streams was once deemed unremarkable, so today “global power projection”—a phrase whose sharp edges we have worn down through casual use, but which implies military activism without apparent limit—has become standard practice, a normal condition, one to which no plausible alternatives seem to exist. All of this Americans have come to take for granted: it’s who we are and what we do. Such a definition of normalcy cries out for a close and critical reexamination. Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy. Yet a meaningful reexamination will require first a change of consciousness, seeing war and America’s relationship to war in a fundamentally different way. Of course, dissenting views already exist. A rich tradition of American pacifism abhors the resort to violence as always and in every case wrong. Advocates of disarmament argue that by their very existence weapons are an incitement to violence. In the former camp, there can never be a justification for war. In the latter camp, the shortest road to peace begins with the beating of swords into ploughshares. These are principled views that deserve a hearing, more so today than ever. By discomfiting the majority, advocates of such views serve the common good. But to make full-fledged pacifism or comprehensive disarmament the basis for policy in an intrinsically disordered world would be to open the United States to grave danger.

Studies on cultural transmission have opened diplomatic history to new subjects and new interpretations, and constructively complicated its assumptions about what constitutes foreign relations. Some culturalists believe, however, that studies of fashion, tourism, and musical theater fail to address real power relations between nations. Fashion and tourism and musicals, they say, may reveal something about one people’s attitudes toward another; but to understand why nations behave as they do, it is essential to bring the state back into the analysis. How, for example, do such cultural analysands as race, gender, and language help us parse hard power, including the mechanics of empire and the conduct of war? Can the Geertzian approach explain not just the context but the content, and even the cause/effect, of US foreign relations?

To be sure, many of the previously cited books do concern power; and the distinction between “cultural transmission” and “culture as power” may be artificial. Let us consider several specific ways in which historians have tried directly to connect attitudes, images, values, and prejudices to the practice of foreign policy, and the exercise of state power. Begin with race. For some years, scholars have noted that white racism has influenced US policy toward non-white others. For Michael Hunt, racism is one of three main elements of American ideology (1987). Reginald Horsman (1981) and Richard Slotkin (1985) have shown that white acceptance of racist social science during the nineteenth century enabled brutal treatment of Native Americans, Mexicans, and Filipinos, among others. John Dower’s War Without Mercy (1986), a harrowing account of the Pacifi c War, demonstrates that white Americans and Japanese killed and maimed each other remorselessly because of their mutual racism. During the Cold War, US policy toward Africa was guided in part by the assumption that black Africans were unready for, and perhaps incapable of, self-government. In South Africa (Borstelmann 1993), Zimbabwe (Horne 2001), and all across the African continent (Noer 1985), white Americans sheltered too long and lovingly racist white minority governments that frustrated black aspirations to democracy.

Scholars love to debate the definition of their discipline. This is hardly surprising, as there is always a great deal riding on where one draws the line between what is in or out. In this book, ‘international relations’ is defined simply as the international level of world politics. By ‘international level’ I mean the interactions largely (but not exclusively) of sovereign states; by ‘world politics’ I mean ‘who gets what, when and how across the world’, to stretch Harold Lasswell’s classical definition of ‘politics’. The reason for accentuating the international level of world politics is twofold. First, as already mentioned, the international is a level with enormous ‘causal weight’. Second, to engage with ‘who gets what, when and how across the world’ without a coherent focus such as ‘the international level’ is to invite bewilderment in the face of information overload. This problem is evident in many of the doorstep-sized textbooks about ‘world’ or ‘global’ politics: what in the world is not a matter of ‘world politics’? The formulation proposed offers a distinct focus (‘the international’), while being empirically open (‘the world’). I owe this way of thinking largely to C.A.W. Manning, an early doyen of IR, who described academic international relations as having ‘a focus but not a periphery’. By focusing on the international, critics will say that I have succumbed to a ‘state-centric’ view of the world. This is the idea that states are the fundamental reality of world politics. Such a view is sometimes also described as being ‘statist’, meaning endorsing the idea that the state is and should be the highest level of both political decision-making and loyalty. My position is more complicated: I want to recognize the empirical significance of states and their relations without being statist politically or ethically. This is like an atheist arguing about ‘religion’. An atheist cannot for long discuss religion without talking about God, but this does not make the atheist ‘God-centric’; it only means that the atheist is aware of the significance of God when talking about religion. The book will argue that the international level of world politics is state-dominated in an empirical sense (some states are the most powerful ‘actors’ in the world) without succumbing to state-centrism in a normative sense (believing that the contemporary states-system represents the best of all possible worlds). Later chapters will underline that states are not the only actors at the international level: some multinational corporations have more clout than some states. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to play down the continuing significance of especially the most powerful states in determining ‘who gets what’ across the world, or the continuing ‘causal weight’ of state interactions in shaping the ‘when and how’ of things happening. Recognizing these empirical realities is perfectly consistent with accepting that one of the aims of studying IR is to challenge what is done, and why, and consider whether different worlds are possible and desirable. Matters of continuity and change are always present in international relations. According to the ‘realist’ tradition (explained later), the international level or system has had, again in Waltz’s term, a distinct ‘texture’ (a persisting set of characteristics) over the centuries. This continuity allows us to have a time-transcending understanding of the situations, dilemmas and crises faced by leaders and peoples in other places in other eras. Critics of this view - those dazzled by what’s new - tend to argue that talk of ‘texture’ exaggerates continuity. This is mistaken. There can be no doubt that we live in a new era when it comes to technology and its potential, for example, but have relations between political units fundamentally changed? We cannot, and should not, assume that everything will always be the same, but it would be foolish to underestimate the stubborn continuities of state interactions.

Thanks to Steve Walt for inviting me to contribute to his blog while he is away on vacation. I have been a regular reader of Steve’s blog since it launched, and for my first post, I wanted to pick up on a motif that I have seen running through Steve’s posts: Will realists ever again support the use of military force by the United States?

Followers of this blog will by now have little doubt about how Walt felt about the Iraq War or how he views the prospects for U.S. success in Afghanistan. In fact, throughout the history of his blog, I can only recall one case in which Walt advocated the use of U.S. military force (and I think the realist credentials in that case are rather dubious).

We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target.

What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics. It’s as if people like to wave their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act. Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene.

Most social scientists would like to believe that their profession contributes to solving pressing global problems. Indeed, the United States and many other modern societies subsidize university-based research and teaching on the assumption that scholars will develop useful knowledge about today’s world, communicate that knowledge to their students and to the broader public, and, where appropriate, offer rigorous, well-informed advice to interested policymakers. There is today no shortage of global problems that social scientists should study in depth: ethnic and religious conflict within and between states, the challenge of economic development, terrorism, the management of a fragile world economy, climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, the origins and impact of great power rivalries, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, just to mention a few. In this complex and contentious world, one might think that academic expertise about global affairs would be a highly valued commodity. Scholars would strive to produce useful knowledge, students would flock to courses that helped them understand the world in which they will live and work, and policymakers and the broader public would be eager to hear what academic experts had to say. One might also expect scholars of international relations to play a prominent role in public debates about foreign policy, along with government officials, business interests, representatives of special interest groups, and other concerned citizens. Social scientists are far from omniscient, but the rigor of the scientific process and the core values of academia should give university-based scholars an especially valuable role within the broader public discourse on world affairs. At its best, academic scholarship privileges creativity, validity, accuracy, and rigor and places little explicit value on political expediency. The norms and procedures of the academic profession make it less likely that scholarly work will be tailored to fit pre-conceived political agendas. When this does occur, the self-correcting nature of academic research makes it more likely that politically motivated biases or other sources of error will be exposed. Although we know that scholarly communities do not always live up to this ideal picture, the existence of these basic norms gives the academic world some important advantages over think tanks, media pundits, and other knowledge-producing institutions. Yet the precise role that academic scholars of international affairs should play is not easy to specify. Indeed, there appear to be two conflicting ways of thinking about this matter. On the one hand, there is a widespread sense that academic research on global affairs is of declining practical value, either as a guide to policymakers or as part of broader public discourse about world affairs. Former policymakers complain that academic writing is “either irrelevant or inaccessible to policy-makers. . . locked within the circle of esoteric scholarly discussion.” This tendency helps explain Alexander George’s recollection that policymakers’ eyes “would glaze as soon as I used the word theory.”[1] As Lawrence Mead noted in 2010: “Today’s political scientists often address very narrow questions and they are often preoccupied with method and past literature. Scholars are focusing more on themselves, less on the real world. . . . Research questions are getting smaller and data-gathering is contracting. Inquiry is becoming obscurantist and ingrown.”[2] Within the field of international affairs, this trend has led to repeated calls to “bridge the gap” between the ivory tower and the policy community.[3] Consistent with that aim, a number of prominent scholars have recently organized workshops or research projects seeking to challenge this “cult of irrelevance” and deprogram its adherents, although it is not clear whether these efforts will succeed in reversing the current drift.[4] This reflects a similar concern: how can the academic world contribute to a healthy public conversation about our collective fate, one that leads to more effective or just solutions to contemporary problems and helps humankind avoid major policy disasters? On the other hand, closer engagement with the policy world and more explicit efforts at public outreach are not without their own pitfalls. Scholars who enter government service or participate in policy debates may believe that they are “speaking truth to power,” but they run the risk of being corrupted or co-opted in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the same individuals and institutions that they initially hoped to sway. Powerful interests are all-too-willing to use the prestige associated with academic scholars to advance particular policy goals, and scholars are hardly immune to temptations that may cloud their judgment or compromise their objectivity. Furthermore, scholars who embrace the role of a “public intellectual” may be tempted to sensationalize their findings to attract a larger audience or find themselves opining on topics on which they have no particular expertise. Instead of improving the quality of public discourse, such behavior may actually degrade it. The remainder of this essay explores these themes in greater detail. I begin by discussing the unique contributions that academic scholars could make to public discourse on world affairs—at least in theory—highlighting their capacity to serve as an authoritative source of knowledge about the world and as an independent voice in debates about contemporary issues (→). I then consider why there is a growing gap between university-based scholars and both the policy world and the public sphere, and suggest that this trend is due largely to the professionalization of academic disciplines and the concomitant rise of a quasi-academic community of think tanks with explicit political agendas (→). Next, I identify some of the pitfalls that scholars face when they become more active participants in the public sphere (→). I conclude by proposing several reforms that could help the social sciences make a more vital contribution to public understanding and policy formation in the broad domain of global affairs (→). Why Is Academic Scholarship Valuable? Academics can make at least three distinct contributions to public discourse on global affairs. First, although the digital revolution has made a wealth of information from around the world accessible on a near real-time basis, most of us still lack both extensive direct data on events in far-flung areas and the background knowledge necessary to understand what new developments mean. If our town’s school district is troubled or the local economy is suffering, we can observe that for ourselves and make reasonably well-informed judgments about what might be done about it. But if the issue is the war in Afghanistan, an uprising in Yemen, a naval confrontation in the South China Sea or the prospects that some battered economy will be bailed out successfully, most of us will lack the factual knowledge or conceptual understanding to know what is really going on. Even when basic information is readily available, it may be hard for most of us to put it in the appropriate context or make sense of what it means. When citizens and leaders seek to grasp the dizzying complexity of modern world politics, therefore, they must inevitably rely upon the knowledge and insights of specialists in military affairs, global trade and finance, diplomatic/international historians, area experts, and many others. And that means relying at least in part on academic scholars who have devoted their careers to mastering various aspects of world affairs and whose professional stature has been established through the usual procedures of academic evaluation (e.g., peer review, confidential assessments by senior scholars, the give-and-take of scholarly debate, etc.). Second, and more importantly, an independent academic community is an essential counterweight to official efforts to shape public understanding of key foreign policy issues. Governments enjoy enormous information asymmetries in many areas of political life, but these advantages are especially pronounced when dealing with international affairs.[5]Much of what we know about the outside world is ultimately derived from government sources (especially when dealing with national security affairs), and public officials often go to considerable lengths to shape how that information is reported to the public. Not only do governments collect vast amounts of information about the outside world, but they routinely use secrecy laws to control public access to this information. Government officials can shape public beliefs by leaking information strategically, or by co-opting sympathetic journalists whose professional success depends in part on maintaining access to key officials.[6]Given these information asymmetries and their obvious interest in retaining public support for their preferred policies, it is hardly surprising that both democratic and non-democratic leaders use their privileged access to information to build support for specific policies, at times by telling outright lies to their own citizens.[7] This situation creates few problems when the policies being sold make good strategic sense, but the results can be disastrous when they don’t. In such cases, alternative voices are needed to challenge conventional wisdoms and official rationales, and to suggest different solutions to the problem(s) at hand. Because scholars are protected by tenure and cherish the principle of academic freedom, and because they are not directly dependent on government support for their livelihoods, they are uniquely positioned to challenge prevailing narratives and policy rationales and to bring their knowledge and training to bear on vital policy issues. If we believe that unfettered debate helps expose errors and correct missteps, thereby fostering more effective public policies, then a sophisticated, diverse and engaged scholarly community is essential to a healthy polity. Third, the scholarly world also offers a potentially valuable model of constructive political disagreement. Political discourse in many countries (and especially the United States) has become increasingly personal and ad hominem, with little attention paid to facts and logic; a trend reinforced by an increasingly competitive and loosely regulated media environment. Within academia, by contrast, even intense disputes are supposed to be conducted in accordance with established canons of logic and evidence. Ad hominem attacks and other forms of character assassination have no place in scholarly discourse and are more likely to discredit those who employ them than those who are attacked. By bringing the norms of academic discourse into the public sphere, academic scholars could help restore some of the civility that has been lost in recent years. For all of these reasons, it is highly desirable for university-based scholars to play a significant role in public discourse about key real-world issues and to engage directly with policymakers where appropriate. As I have argued elsewhere, academic research can provide policymakers with relevant factual knowledge, provide typologies and frameworks that help policymakers and citizens make sense of emerging trends, and create and test theories that leaders can use to choose among different policy instruments. Academic theories can also be useful when they help policymakers anticipate events, when they identify recurring tendencies or obstacles to success, and when they facilitate the formulation of policy alternatives and the identification of benchmarks that can guide policy evaluation. Because academic scholars are free from daily responsibility for managing public affairs, they are in an ideal position to develop new concepts and theories to help us understand a complex and changing world.[8] The picture sketched here is obviously something of an ideal type, and I am not suggesting that that the academic world consistently lives up to these expectations. As noted above, university-based scholars of international affairs—and especially the disciplines of political science and history—have increasingly focused on narrow and arcane topics and are contributing less and less to policy formation or public discourse.[9] And when academics do address topics of obvious policy relevance or public interest, the results are often presented in impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose and disseminated in venues that neither policymakers nor the public are likely to read. Even when scholars have something useful to say, in short, their tendency to “speaking in tongues” diminishes their impact on the public sphere.