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Young Americans support abstract and unworkable socialism Appeared in the Daily Caller, March 3, 2023 Young Americans support abstract and unworkable socialism It’s undeniable that in western countries including the United States, young people are expressing a preference for profound economic and social change including socialism. But of course, young Americans never lived in a world with widespread socialism and the misery it created. In fact, their version of “socialism” has never existed and is unworkable. According to a 2017 poll, a majority of American millennials preferred to live in a “socialist, communist, or fascist nation than in a capitalist one.” The Feb. 2019 cover of The Economist heralded “The Rise of Millennial Socialism” and featured poll results from Gallup showing 51 per cent of people aged 18-29 approved of socialism. And most recently, our new poll indicated that 45 per cent of Americans aged 18-24 agree that socialism is the ideal economic system for the U.S. Critically, however, most polls do not define socialism. Historically, socialism has meant that the state owns or controls the means of production—that is, raw materials, plants, equipment, technology and even the labor needed to turn inputs into goods and services. For those old enough to remember, the economic outcome of such socialism was so bad that the system collapsed under the weight of its own failures and largely ceased to exist after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Today, however, only 32 per cent of Americans in our poll define socialism as government taking control of companies and industries such that the state—not individuals and entrepreneurs—control the economy. Rather, when Americans today express support for socialism, what they really mean is more expansive government. Specifically, 58 per cent of Americans define socialism as the government providing more services and 47 per cent define it as the government guaranteeing a minimum income for all citizens. Among younger Americans (ages 18-34), those percentages increase to 66 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively.

Perhaps the most important question for communism, given its emphasis on communal functioning, is whether people’s ability to get along with and cooperate with one another can be changed. At least one present-day writer, Steven Pinker, argues that it can be changed and that in fact it has been. In The better angels of our nature: A history of violence and humanity, he presents a mass of evidence indicating that, contrary to what most people believe, people are becoming less violent in a variety of different ways. Over time they have become less likely to kill one another in wars, less likely to murder, and more likely to concede rights to women, minorities, homosexuals, and even animals. 38 38 Pinker, Better angels . 44 Was Communism Doomed? How might this have come about? Pinker’s basic argument is that people have become nicer. He is uncomfortable with the possibility that people have become better at empathising with each other, that is, feeling the emotions of others as if they were one’s own. 39 More likely, he considers, is that people have become better at self-control, and he points to evidence, ranging from gradual falls in the interest rate charged on money—greater self-control should result in a greater tendency to forgo present pleasures for future ones and so lead to lower interest rates—to improved nutrition, that indicates that people in the developed world at least have developed better self-control. 40 Another possibility is that the adoption of rational–legal morality by much of the Western world has improved people’s ability to foresee that acting in a particular way is likely to produce a painful and unpleasant reaction from others. Put slightly diff erently, we remain self-interested, but our self-interest has become better informed. 41 Finally, drawing on Flynn’s work, he suggests that there has been an increase in people’s ability to reason and that this in turn has produced both an increase in liberal attitudes on many issues and a greater ability to take different perspectives. 42

Yet, the neoliberal revolution has been widespread and highly successful. And the motives of neoliberal reforms are much purer than one would imagine after reading left-wing criticisms of free-market reforms. First, to understand what neoliberalism it, we need to start with the term “liberal.” The best way to make sense of liberalism, in all its permutations, is to assume that liberals are people with constantly evolving policy views but relatively stable utilitarian values. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, idealistic utilitarian reformers, aka “classical liberals,” believed that free-market capitalism was the best way to improve human welfare. Views shifted over the course of the 19th century, as capitalism was increasingly associated, whether accurately or not, with overly-powerful corporations and increasing inequality. After the Great Depression, many liberals saw laissez-faire not just as unfair, but also as dysfunctional. In the United States, self-described “liberals” moved toward somewhat more socialist policy views. Modern liberalism (or social democracy outside the United States) reached its peak between the 1930s and 1970s. The policy mix included a great deal of statism (barriers to trade, price controls, high marginal tax rates (MTRs) and government ownership of industry), as well as greatly increased government spending, especially in government transfer programs. Then, beginning in the late 1970s, there was a sudden and dramatic shift away from one aspect of socialism—statist policies were discarded and free markets came back into vogue. However, there was no significant reduction in government spending: In most countries, the government’s share of GDP has been fairly stable in recent decades. The neoliberal revolution combines the free markets of classical liberalism with the income transfers of modern liberalism. Although this somewhat oversimplifies a complex reality, it broadly describes the policy changes that have transformed the world economy since 1975. Markets in almost every country are much freer than in 1980; the government owns a smaller share of industry; and the top MTRs on personal and corporate income are sharply lower. The United States, starting from a less-socialist position, has been affected less than some other countries. But even in the United States there have been neoliberal reforms in four major areas: deregulation of prices and market access, sharply lower MTRs on high-income people, freer trade, and welfare reform. Many other countries saw even greater neoliberal policy reforms, as once-numerous state-owned enterprises were mostly privatized. There is an unfortunate tendency to associate the term “neoliberal” with right-wing political views. In fact, the quite liberal social democracies of northern Europe have been among the most aggressive neoliberal reformers. Indeed, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Denmark is the freest economy in the world in the average of the eight categories unrelated to size of government. The Nordic countries have begun to privatize many activities that government still performs in the United States. These include passenger rail, airports, air-traffic control, highways, postal services, fire departments, water systems, and public schools, among many others. These countries do have much larger and more comprehensive income-transfer programs than the United States has, but are not otherwise particularly socialist. So why is the left so skeptical of the neoliberal revolution? And why does the right tend to overlook it, except for the obvious cases, such as the collapse of communism? Many on the left are skeptical about how much freer markets have actually achieved. Part of this skepticism reflects the slowdown in worldwide growth since 1973. Because almost all countries instituted at least some reforms, and yet growth slowed in most countries, there is a tendency to assume that the reforms failed. Others point to well-publicized fiascos in electricity and banking deregulation and assume that these represent the broader reality. On the right, many American economists focus on the failure of Reaganomics to reduce the size of government, as well as on increased regulation in areas such as health, safety, and the environment, while the so-called “economic regulations” were trimmed back.

Capitalism is intrinsically futuristic. The ideas that underpin market economies – growth, accumulation, investment – express an unspoken assumption, that tomorrow will be different, and probably better, than today. The question that murmurs through markets is not “What is good?” or “What is fair”, but: “What’s new?” This future orientation is one of the most striking hallmarks of modernity. Pre-capitalist societies looked to the past – to founding myths, old religions and ancestral lines. Capitalist societies look to the future – to new inventions, broader horizons and greater abundance. “Oh, the places you’ll go!” is an ur-text of market capitalism. Change is of course a mixed blessing. Opportunity and uncertainty go together. Critics of capitalism sometimes point out that it creates an uncertain future. Economic growth requires change and disruption – Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”, which can impose some immediate social costs. This is true in the details – nobody knows where market dynamics will lead us. Nobody predicted Facebook and Twitter. But it’s false for the overall picture. If the economy grows, as a result of market capitalism, we can predict with confidence that the future will be better than the present. Capitalism has kept this promise quite well over the broad span of history. Compared with earlier periods in history, the material conditions of life have improved dramatically since the birth of capitalism. For the 500 years up to around 1700, economic output per person was flat. In other words, the median person in 1700 was no better off, economically speaking, than the median person in 1200. Work by the team at, led by Max Roser, makes the point visually – and dramatically.

Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars like , , and began voicing concerns about a new era of great power competition with China. But well into the first decade of the 21st century, many saw such fears as relics of a bygone era of international politics – no longer relevant in the age of global interdependence. Today, it is the optimists who are the . Many in the U.S. foreign policy community who once enthusiastically supported engagement and cooperation with China now tend to advocate much more cautious positions, if not outright anti-engagement. In fact, the United States and China should have anticipated intense security competition in East Asia from the beginning of the post-Cold War period. The two sides will find it increasingly difficult to avoid such competition over the coming decades. The fundamental reason does not have to do with the nature of either country’s politics or society, but rather with the basic structure of the situation in which the two great powers are dealing with each other. The central problem is that, no matter what it does, China probably cannot commit to not exploiting its growing power at the expense of the United States and its allies. Beijing doesn’t have to do much to create justifiable fears among its interlocutors. Even if China had no intention of aggressing against its neighbors, they obviously can’t trust that it will stay that way 10, 20, or 50 years down the road. Therefore, out of essentially defensive motivations, the United States and its allies will continue to pursue measures to correct the growing imbalance of regional power driven by China’s rise – beefing up their military capabilities, adjusting their defense postures to array more forces in China’s vicinity, pursuing more cutting-edge military technologies while trying to deny them to Beijing, and forming new arrangements for security cooperation directed against China. But from China’s perspective, such efforts will invariably look quite threatening. They will appear as efforts by a hostile military coalition to “gang up” on China. China is right to think in this way, even if its interlocutors are acting with defensive motivations. Beijing’s leaders should understand that there is ultimately little China can do to fundamentally alleviate its neighbors’ concerns and that they will be searching hard for ways to bolster their security at its expense. This, in turn, means that the “rising power” itself must continuously worry that its rivals might eventually find the means to inflict a devastating reversal of fortunes upon China. Thus, out of its own legitimate fears China will adopt riskier measures to shore up its own security, which will tend to “confirm” the fears harbored by the United States and its allies and drive them to adopt even stronger containment measures. The generated under conditions of shifting power tend to make both sides adopt increasingly hardline policies toward each other. All of this is to say that intense security competition between the United States and China will probably be unavoidable over the coming decades. There is bound to be considerable tension and hostility, and even crises that carry a serious risk of escalating to militarized conflict. Some may call this a “.” It most certainly is. But simply recognizing a self-fulfilling prophecy at work does not mean that one can escape it in any fundamental sense. Unfortunately, the United States and China will increasingly find themselves at loggerheads with each other, even if policymakers on both sides realize the self-fulfilling dimensions of their mutual hostility.

A fifth problem wih retrenchment is that it lacks domestic support. The American people may favor greater burden sharing, but there is no evidence that they are onboard with a withdrawal from Europe and Asia. As a survey conducted in 2019 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found, seven out of ten Americans believe that maintaining military superiority makes the United States safer, and almost three-quarters think that alliances contribute to U.S. security. A 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation poll found that over 60 percent of Americans want to maintain or increase defense spending. As it became apparent that China and Russia would benefit from this shift toward retrenchment, and as the United States’ democratic allies objected to its withdrawal, the domestic political backlash would grow. One result could be a prolonged foreign policy debate that would cause the United States to oscillate between retrenchment and reengagement, creating uncertainty about its commitments and thus raising the risk of miscalculation by Washington, its allies, or its rivals.

Beyond Neoliberalism In sum, competition has long been an animating concern of anthropological theory, albeit often a tacit dynamic that is not theorized explicitly. Recently, critical attention has focused on neoliberal social and economic policies that deploy competition as a mode of governance. In the process, however, conversations about competition have too often become conversations about neoliberalism, subsuming the former into the latter such that theory about neoliberalism encompasses theory about competition. Yet competition as a human experience and a way of relating is not exclusive to neoliberal contexts. Nor was competition as a mode of governance an innovation of neoliberal ideologues and economists. Rather, competition is also tied to the political/economic ideologies of Leninist and Stalinist Russia (Siegelbaum 1982; Viñas 2022), communist and neo-socialist China (Rao, this issue), and post-independence socialist India (Alter, this issue). To theorize competition itself, analysts must address its implication in political projects aligned with neoliberal ideals and those that differ dramatically. Instances of competition as a mode of governance (neoliberal or otherwise) share the assumption that competition produces predictable and predetermined social changes. Neoliberal ideologues expect that market competition leads to progressive technological and social change, and the just (if not even) distribution of wealth. Likewise, Siegelbaum (1982) shows that ‘shock work’ competitions (in which workers competed to be most productive) were envisaged to generate a sense of collective unity and transformations in dispositions toward work in twentieth-century Russia, albeit within a communist framing of ideal subjectivity. Buitron, Alter, McCarthy, Rao, and Long (all this issue) also show how competition is encouraged with the hope of precipitating anticipated changes. Social scientists have often shown that the assumptions held by neoliberal ideologues and economists about competition's outcomes are incorrect. Rather than fueling progressive social change, competition as a technique of neoliberal governance produces inequality, legitimizes violence, and shapes subjectivities in very predictable ways. The critique is thus that neoliberal economists are wrong, both about what competition's outcomes are and that its actual outcomes are generally deleterious. Both anthropological critique and invocations of competition as governance assume that competition leads to changes that can be defined in advance. Despite this, an emerging literature shows that highly individualized, calculating, and reflexive subjectivities are not an inevitable consequence of neoliberal governance. Rather, relational moralities and subjectivities also appear to be central to life in highly neoliberalized contexts (Colloredo-Mansfeld 2002; Cristian Rangel and Adam 2014; Trnka and Trundle 2017). Building on this work, we question the assumption that competition has predictable outcomes, and that those predictable outcomes (whatever they might be) define competition. To do so, we invite readers to think with us about the relationship between rules, participation, arbitration, and competition's outcomes. Here, we find inspiration in the anthropology of games. Rules, Restrictions, Stability, and Change The instances and dynamics of competition considered in this issue all entail rules, conventions, and shared parameters. These may be tacit or explicit, but they always involve a shared sense of what one is competing for, how one competes, and the ways that performance is likely to be evaluated. This is equally true of competition as a quality of a relationship and as a formalized framework for interaction, although rules and conventions may be more explicitly articulated in the latter than the former. Two contrasting approaches to games help illuminate the relationship between competition, rules, and social reproduction. Drawing on Johan Huizinga's (1949) understanding of games as distinct from ordinary life, David Graeber (2015: 109) suggests that bureaucracies—like games—create ordered spaces in which the relationship between action, meaning, consequence, and reward is clearly delineated. This is not to deny that there are rules and conventions outside bureaucracies or games; rather, tacit rules and conventions exist in all social interactions. Yet such tacit rules induce anxiety because their implicit nature means that there is always the possibility of getting them wrong.6 Graeber contrasts the rule-bound space of games with play, the “free expression of creative energies” unbounded by rules (ibid.: 192). Play, he suggests, creates rules (and thus games and order) but is, by definition, not constrained by the rules it creates. When one plays, one has the capacity to reimagine action, meaning, and the world in new and creative ways. At the same time, creative expressions (or actions that do not heed behavioral conventions) might just as easily be violent rather than affirmative or pleasurable. The unpredictability of play-as-freedom makes it unnerving. Games (and bureaucracy) thus offer a ‘utopia of rules’ (Graeber 2015)—a safe haven from the indeterminacy of free creativity. For Graeber, rules generate a sense that the world is ordered even if it is not. We might argue that people find convention-bound competitive spaces appealing because they claim to authoritatively determine relative value within given parameters—that is, to generate order. Neoliberal imaginaries of competition as the ‘invisible hand’ of the market make precisely this claim—that competition will authoritatively reveal relative value in a given moment. Read this way, it is the claim that competition can and will determine value that makes it appealing, even if this promise of predictability is rarely fulfilled. What competition does from this perspective is to act as ideology, in the Marxist sense, maintaining social structure in the face of evident contradictions. Graeber's approach, like Huizinga's (1949: 10–12), assumes that the rules of a game or competition are clearly delineated, understood in the same way, and equally applied by and to those involved. This generates a reassuring sense of order. Yet as this collection shows, the rules and conventions of competitive spaces are neither stably imagined nor applied. Rather, they are always under-determinate because the complexity of social life always exceeds abstract structural prescriptions. Thomas Malaby suggests an alternative way to imagine the relationship between competition, rules, and meaning. Inspired by practice theory (Ortner 1999), Malaby (2007: 104) considers games as constructs grounded in action and thus as “dynamic and recursive, largely reproducing their form through time,” but necessarily “always in the process of becoming” (ibid.: 103) as they are re-enacted, rather than deeming them beyond the ordinary (cf. Bateson 1972; Caillois 1962). As they are remade, reinterpreted, and reproduced, games are subject to the possibility of emergent change. However, indeterminacy (beyond the self-evident contingencies of practice) is central to games. Like Graeber, Malaby suggests that bureaucratic rules are designed to make life predictable, even if they often fail to do so. By contrast, games are contrived to deliberately produce a degree of indeterminacy, which can then be evaluated by players, audiences, and arbiters (Malaby 2007; 2009: 213–215). Such indeterminacy might be semiotic—dependent on the changing interpretation of outcomes; performative—contingent on the capacity of actors to perform under the rules of a game; social—contingent on whether others evaluate actions in the same way as ego; or stochastic—dependent on factors beyond the control of actors, like the weather (Malaby 2007: 107). Whereas Graeber suggests that rules create stability, Malaby stresses the contingency that they generate as they are put into practice. For him, games “are about contriving and calibrating multiple contingencies to produce a mix of predictable and unpredictable outcomes (which are then interpreted)” (ibid.: 105–106)—producing a degree of disorder. That these dynamics of predictability and contingency mirror the uncertainty of life makes games compelling (Malaby 2003, 2007). Games do not provide refuge from life's unpredictability but embrace it. Crucially, Malaby draws the diverse opinions of audiences and arbiters into his account of games’ contingencies. Such an approach creates space to theorize competition's outcomes as constituted through the shifting evaluations of actors positioned differently within a given instance of competition. Similarly, his account lends itself to thinking about the dialectic between predictability and indeterminacy in competitive encounters and practices, which we argue is central to what competition does. Although clearly at odds, both Graeber's and Malaby's accounts shape our approach to competition. Affordance and Mediation Resonating with Graeber's understanding of rules as calming, this collection explores how competition is imagined to be capable of authoritatively determining relative value, and how this imaginary is sought after, both as a mode of governance (by institutions promoting competition) and as a technology of self-making (by subjects engaging in competition). For instance, young Indonesians participating in national graphic design competitions have some faith in such competition's capacity to determine who is best (Long, this issue). Likewise, the Chinese government and its citizens trust to a degree that competitive educational systems determine which students are brightest (Rao, this issue). The concept of competition implies an authoritative judgment about the relative value of participants’ actions—whether based on ‘expert’ preference or announced through a structured engagement, such as a 100m race, or a combination of both—rather than a decision about relative value being entirely arbitrary. A claim to authoritatively reveal relative value, however contrived the circumstance, is central to what competition does. Following Malaby, the collection shows how competitive spaces are fraught with contingency because they involve diverse and simultaneous interpretations by audiences, arbiters, and competitors about what constitutes competing, what is worth competing for, and how to do so. This ambiguity creates lived dilemmas—when competitors and audiences balance contradictory expectations or undertake counterposed actions—and affords the reinterpretation and reappropriation of rules and conventions. These dilemmas and affordances initiate opportunities to navigate competitive orders in new ways and generate outcomes other than winning or losing. Such opportunities may be interpretive, shaped by alternative appreciations of value, and/or affective, reflecting experiences that diverge from a competition's desired effects. For instance, Delhi NGOs organize countless competitions in hopes of teaching children to act on discourses that link hygiene, health, and development, but remain constantly anxious that children are participating for the ‘wrong’ reasons. For their part, Delhi children taking part in these competitions do indeed creatively refigure what it means to win and the value they find in performing competition, in ways that frustrate the development aims of NGOs (McCarthy, this issue). Although often intended or understood to authoritatively determine value, generate order, or precipitate predefined change, competition inherently affords alternative possibilities for sociality. While “institutions and their projects” (Malaby 2020: 15) often shape the initial forms that competition takes, institutions—whether development NGOs (McCarthy, this issue), yoga schools (Alter, this issue), state actors (Buitron, Long, Rao, this issue), or religious organizations (Almudéver Chanzà, this issue)—are not the sole determinants of competitive forms and outcomes, as McCarthy's child competitors clearly demonstrate. Hence, the collection focuses on the interplay between institutional desires and the possibilities for alternative meaning and practice that competitive structures afford. Our understanding of what competition does chimes with Jack Halberstam's (2011: 7) attention to “failure, loss, and unbecoming” as generative experiences that develop counter-intuitive and counter-hegemonic ways of being. For Halberstam, failure is not a refusal to take part in a world obsessed with sorting ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ (i.e., one in which competition is imagined to be the ultimate organizing force); rather, failure allows for the emergence of new perspectives in the wake of being identified as a ‘loser’. For Halberstam, only by failing or losing can one reject normative values and reshape normative relations. Dwelling in failure's creative potentials thus offers an alternative to the eternal hopes of success that pervade contemporary capitalism and mask structural inequalities (cf. Hage 2003). Like Halberstam, we dwell on the unexpected outcomes of competition that defy and subvert normative visions of success. However, we do not find competition's affordances to be predicated on outcomes being identified as either success or failure, as Halberstam's (2011) ‘queer art of failure’ demands. Instead, alternative possibilities emerge because what it means to succeed, fail, participate, refuse, compete, or abstain is always contingent and never clear-cut. These alternative possibilities are not simplistically subversive. They can facilitate insubordination by subverting competition's intended effects (McCarthy, Rao, this issue), but also allow people to mediate change in ways that defy absolute moral assessment (Alter, Buitron, this issue). They may also bolster stable collective identities even when they appear to divide communities and foster individualism (Long, Almudéver Chanzà, this issue). Competition's affordances beyond simply winning and losing often sit alongside a continued faith among participants in competition's value-defining capability. Competition's effects emerge from the discordance between expectations and lived experiences of competition. For instance, Chinese students are deeply disillusioned with the promise of meritocracy in an ultra-competitive education system, but rather than rejecting competition, they become passionate about engaging in the ‘better competitions’ that computer games offer (Rao, this issue). Elsewhere, young Indonesians find that competition wins are often not accompanied by the promised rewards, creating a disjuncture between the present and what it could (or should) have been. Although often deeply disappointing, this disjuncture leads them to embrace, rather than reject, an individualistic, competitive attitude toward life (Long, this issue). Competition suggests the possibility of authoritatively determining value and instituting a predetermined social order. Yet in practice, competition generates relationships, spheres of value, objects of interest, and practices that exceed the prescribed and structured modes of relating that it involves. Hence, we theorize competition as inherently generating ambiguity and instability precisely because it involves the under-determinate application of rules and conventions (not despite these rules). Where competition is invoked as a technique of governance and subjectification (whether in capitalist or non-capitalist contexts), we contend that it is inherently unwieldy, always producing meanings and relations that exceed its prescriptions. Future anthropologies of competition should thus consider dynamics of order and disorder as central features of competition's effects in and on the world, rather than focusing solely on its ordering and stratifying effects. Competition's affordances are shaped by and located among the swirl of different appreciations and evaluations in any given instance of competition. Hence, they involve a mediation of social orders and values rather than the imposition of one order or another. The collection shows that competition allows people to place divergent frames of value into conversation, mediate between them, and experiment with new ways of combining and integrating divergent values, practices, and forms of relationship. Competition is thus a practice and process of mediating the divergent rhythms (Bear et al. 2015), socialities (Tsing 2005), and ‘porous social orders’ (Gershon 2019) of a globally connected world. Formulated this way, future anthropologies of competition are poised to address the relationship between structure and change, a dynamic that has long been at the heart of socio-cultural anthropological inquiry.

The relationship between the two superpowers is fraught but manageable if the US plays its cards right

Despite the meeting between presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping in California this week, at which the two leaders agreed to resume military communications, relations between the US and China remain fraught. Some Americans refer to a new cold war, but China is not like the USSR. The US had no economic interdependence with the Soviets, whereas it has half a trillion dollars in trade with China.

Offensive realists are right: China's growth has destabilized regional stability in the post-Mao period. Our statistical analysis of China's initiation of military conflict shows that its economic power has had significant and positive effects. In addition, China was more aggressive toward its territorial dispute opponents, although the United States’ Asian allies were no more likely to be military targets than other Asian states. In short, China's greater power made the country more assertive, rather than cooperative, toward Asian states and major powers. This leads us to expect that China will maintain its current uncompromising and firm position in the South and East China Seas if its economic rise continues. Also, China's growth will accelerate its resolute protection of core interests in strategic and economic matters. Two objections are possible to the argument presented here regarding China's growth and aggression. First, some may argue that a stronger China was dragged into more conflicts with foreign actors. China's rise to become a major power might not have changed its goals and strategies as much as it increased the emergence of conflict-laden issues. As it is now connected more deeply and extensively with foreign actors, China will face more international issues, and some conflict will be unavoidable. However, as explained earlier, this study's dependent variable was not conflict involvement but conflict initiation. Of course, there have been some historical cases of over-balancing, as seen in European countries before World War I. But this study shows that China has become more prone to conflict initiation as it has gained greater economic capability. Second, some may question the proposed relation between conflict initiation and regional stability. China might, for example, become more prone to low-intensity conflict but not to high-intensity conflict. According to this view, China's growth could increase some tensions but still not seriously destabilize regional stability. Whereas Germany's growth drove Europe into two world wars, China might not pursue the German route but might instead seek its own pathway to a peaceful rise. We agree that there is little probability of an all-out war between China and other major powers, but the absence of all-out war does not imply regional stability. Many international rivalries, such as those between the United States and the Soviet Union or between South and North Korea, have presented serious threats to the participants even though direct high-intensity military conflicts have not occurred. Even low-intensity sources of conflict, such as military threat and military displays, can seriously harm regional stability, especially when they happen repeatedly.

Second, critics of offensive realism point to countering factors such as the “democratic peace” or international institutions. However, an evolutionary perspective raises new doubts about the significance of such evidence. The very existence of these phenomena, not to mention the extreme efforts and expense they continually require to function, only supports the point that international politics needs very special and powerful arrangements to prevent people from acting as offensive realists—predisposed as they are to do so. And, even then, these arrangements often fail to work. When the stakes are high enough, individuals as well as states all too easily revert to egoism, dominance, and fear. Third, critics point to international cooperation among states as evidence against offensive realism. We realize international cooperation is prevalent, but that does not mean such cooperation is easy to obtain. On the contrary, it is famously hard to initiate and maintain from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, which is why this topic continues to fill huge volumes of scholarly literature in economics and political science.208,209 As we have emphasized, cooperation is easy to explain where it brings clear mutual benefits to the self-interest of those involved, such as trade or military alliances (in which case offensive realism is as good an explanation of cooperation as any other theory). Collective action to attain public goods, however, is much harder to attain because of the threat of free-riders (as demonstrated, for example, by the slow response to climate change, the reluctance of states to accept Syrian refugees, and Eurozone fiscal responsibility). Where extensive international cooperation does occur, it is often only by virtue of a hegemon willing to sustain it, and cooperation quickly breaks down if core interests and security are put at risk. Furthermore, cooperation is often itself a means to power maximization in the formation of military and security alliances—and thus, cooperation can be a prediction of, not a challenge to, offensive realism. Where a state’s own security is threatened or the state becomes vulnerable to exploitation, alliances offer one means of increasing or preserving power. Similar patterns are evident in nature. Animals do not constantly fight. Natural selection generates contingent behavior because it is more effective than blind aggression. Individuals bide their time, form coalitions and alliances, and cooperate with others, but they also seize power where the opportunity arises. States are much the same. In international politics, the bigger problem may be aspiring hegemons—states that do not need to cooperate to obtain what they want.

A recurrent criticism of any theory of international relations based on the role of individuals is why we should expect individual behavior to tell us anything about state behavior. We recognize that many factors may affect the behavior of states, including bureaucracies, types of government, culture, international institutions, or the international system itself, but we also recognize, as traditional theories of international politics have from the time of Thucydides, that humans affect state behavior as well.Reference Levy202 Many factors come between an individual leader and the behavior of a state, but that does not mean leaders have no effect at all. We see several reasons why human behavior is an important predictor of state behavior in the context of this article. First, the preferences of individual citizens are, at least to a degree, represented in those elected to—or tolerated in—office, and those preferences may also be seen in the goals of the state. Second, bureaucracies and organizations are designed, run, and led by human beings, whose own dispositions influence how they function. Third, state leaders are the actors who make important strategic decisions from a set of options, and they are potentially affected by their human dispositions and those of their advisers, even if their actions are tempered by checks and balances. Fourth, group decision-making may actually amplify the influence of human dispositions; it is groups of men that are especially prone to behaviors associated with dominance, aggression, and coalitionary psychology.Reference Baumeister, Boden, Geen and Donnerstein203,Reference Janis204,205,206,Reference Wrangham and Wilson207

Evolutionary theory makes three major contributions to the offensive realist theory of international politics: (1) a novel ultimate cause of the primary traits of offensive realist behavior (self-help, power maximization, and fear); (2) an extension of offensive realism to any domain in which human actors compete for power (e.g., civil war, ethnic conflict, or domestic politics); and (3) an explanation for why individual leaders themselves, not just states, behave as they do. Novel ultimate cause and theoretical foundation Our theory advances offensive realist arguments without seeking an ultimate cause in the anarchic international state system. Offensive realism based on evolutionary theory makes the same predictions for state behavior, but the ultimate causal mechanism is different: human evolution in the anarchic, dangerous, and competitive conditions of the late-Pliocene and Pleistocene eras. Evolutionary theory explains why humans are egoistic, strive to dominate others, and make ingroup/outgroup distinctions. These adaptations in turn serve as a foundation for offensive realism—what Mearsheimer independently identified as self-help, power maximization, and fear. The central issue raised by our theory is what causes states to behave as offensive realists predict. Mearsheimer argues that anarchy is the fundamental cause of such behavior. The fact that there is no world government compels the leaders of states to take steps to ensure their security, such as striving to have a powerful military, forging and maintaining alliances, and acting aggressively when necessary. This is what neorealists call a self-help system: Leaders of states are forced to take these steps because nothing else can guarantee their security in the anarchic world of international politics. We argue that evolutionary theory also offers a fundamental cause for offensive realist behavior (see Table 1). Humans evolved in a state of nature where competition for resources and dangers from other humans and the environment were great. Humans survived (and note that several other Hominin species did not) by virtue of evolved behavioral traits—among them egoism, dominance, and the ingroup/outgroup bias—which were adaptations to competitive ecological conditions. These traits help to explain why humans (including political leaders) will behave, in the proper circumstances, as offensive realists expect them to behave. In sum, evolutionary theory offers realist scholars a natural-scientific behavioral foundation for offensive realism. Human evolution explains why people seek control over resources, why some of us (particularly males) will seek to dominate others in order to achieve and maintain a privileged position in a dominance hierarchy, and why we are suspicious and wary of other groups.150 Since the leaders of states are human, they too will be influenced—perhaps especially influenced—by this evolutionary legacy as they react to the actions of other states and decide how to respond.151,Reference McDermott152,Reference McDermott153 Extensions of offensive realism to other domains The second contribution of our theory is that it offers an explanation of the behavior of humans in a wide variety of contexts extending beyond international politics. Our evolutionary theory of offensive realism is unlimited in time, explaining behavior from the ancestral environment to the present day, whereas offensive realism is conventionally inapplicable prior to 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia established the European state system. Our theory is also unlimited in domain, explaining behavior wherever there are human actors and weak external constraints on their actions, from ancestral human groups, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, free markets, and international relations. The theory might thus be extended to explain the behavior and actions of many phenomena: the Roman Empire, warfare among Papua New Guinean or Native American tribes, the European conquest of South America, the race for the American west and the failed Mormon and Confederate secessions, the imperialist scrambles over African colonies, institutions like the medieval Catholic Church, commercial organizations from the East India Company to Coca-Cola, the struggles of rival ethnic groups the world over, and the ruthlessness of electoral campaigns. Table 2 illustrates the range of domains to which an evolutionary theory of offensive realism applies. Note that the table captures key patterns, not universal behavior. Clearly, not all individuals or businesses or states act the same way all the time or in all circumstances. Behavior varies considerably, just as standard offensive realism predicts for states, and countervailing forces would sometimes mitigate power-maximization strategies—although the very need for and difficulties of those countervailing forces help to demonstrate the fact that offensive realist behavior remains an underlying problem. Indeed, part of the beauty of evolutionary approaches is their ability to predict sources of variation—the socio-ecological conditions under which we should expect to see humans acting (in this case) more fearful and more self-interested, and pursuing more power maximization, rather than less. Older versions of evolutionary theory sometimes presented strategies and behaviors as fixed or “hard wired.” Modern biology stresses the contingent, context-dependent nature of behavioral adaptations, which generates finer predictions for when we should expect to see different types of behavior.Reference Davies, Krebs and West155 This is an important point to which we will return. Wherever actors are left to compete with each other by relying on their own devices (whether in the human evolutionary past or today), we predict that actors within those systems will exhibit similar behavior, not least self-help behavior to maximize power. Offensive realists can thus explain more than the behavior of states or great powers. If anchored on evolutionary theory, offensive realism allows new insights to elucidate why individuals and substate groups are self-interested, vie for power, and fear each other, and it can explain political behavior and war that occurred long before the creation of the modern state system in 1648. Explaining leaders’ lust for power The third contribution of our theory is that it identifies a more explicit role for leaders (see Table 3). Mearsheimer’s offensive realism argues that states gain power to ensure security. That certainly may be, as he attempts to demonstrate. However, an overtone of this argument is that power or domination is distasteful for leaders—that they tolerate it only for the sake of their state’s security. Leaders are forced to maximize power when perhaps they would rather cooperate or share power with others. By contrast, our theory posits that a tendency toward offensive realist behavior, however modulated by other tendencies, would have conferred a fitness advantage in the environment in which humans evolved and should thus have led to dispositions to seek and like power. Indeed, a wide range of empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests instead that humans, especially men, not only want to be leaders but also enjoy the pursuit of power (as well as its material fruits).156,Reference Robertson157,158 The force of this motivation is frequently revealed in victors’ expressions of the satisfaction of conquest. As Chinggis Khan is purported to have said: “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes.”159 Although not usually expressed in such stark terms, the pleasure of competition and victory has been widely recognized as a feature of human nature from classical times to the present day, and success in competitive interactions and the domination of others are known to increase testosterone and dopamine responses in men—the so-called victory effect.160 Such dominance behavior is, we suggest, exaggerated among leaders because they are generally ambitious and competitive, and usually male. Moreover, the very acquisition and exercise of power itself is known to inflate dominance behavior further.161

It is still possible to treat China as a geopolitical rival without stoking anti-Asian hate. This is feasible, however, only if policymakers work assiduously to delink foreign policy from domestic rhetoric. Instead of casting all official Chinese behavior as a threat to the American way of life, leaders in Washington must be clear about the concrete threat that Beijing actually poses to the United States and its values—keeping their criticism limited to specific actions: Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims or its intimidation of Taiwan, for instance. Deploying sweeping language such as “malign influence” or “existential threat” to explain the complex relationship between the two countries will inevitably lead to the criminalization of Americans even loosely connected to China or Asia.

A China policy based on a balanced assessment of Beijing’s actions would advance U.S. interests far more effectively than conspiratorial language about China’s supposed desire to dominate the United States. Demonizing an entire nation leads to the demonization of Asians at home. Until policymakers stop using China as a punching bag for all of the United States’ woes, Asian Americans will continue to be at risk.

https://www.e-ir.info/2023/08/17/buddhism-and-global-ir-from-part-of-the-whole-to-part-of-the-whole/]//ETang

The intellectual tradition of Buddhism is highly diverse regarding approaches and sects, and it is unreasonable to see it as a single coherent system of thought. The Buddhist turn in International Relations (IR) can perhaps be traced back to the monumental scholarship by Stephen Chan, Peter Mandaville and Roland Bleiker’s Zen of International Relations published in 2001. Since then, there have been no significant developments in the study of Buddhism and IR. However, with the emphasis of Global IR on non-Western knowledge traditions, Buddhism is beginning to draw an increasing amount of scholarly attention. In this article, I would like to focus on Buddhism as more of a crossroad of political, philosophical and scientific inquiries. This aspect is essential because it looks at ontology beyond general understandings of diversification in IR, thereby aligning it with the development of ‘relational theory’ which corresponds to the discussions on ‘pluriversality’ and ‘anthropocene’, the perspectives that are gaining momentum in recent times. Since the initial intervention by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon (1999), the relational debate has seen significant developments in IR (Nordin et al. 2019, Trownsell et al. 2021). And this debate seems to have taken an ontological focus. The focus on ontology is unsurprising, given the assumption during the relational discussions that the subjects and their existence are created (or strongly influenced) through mutual relationships. In fact, relationality is not simply created between independent subjects but it constructs them. In the most radical form of relationality, the subject itself does not exist, i.e., the existence as we think of it (including ourselves) is a web of relations, not necessarily something that is inherently autonomous. Conversely, when the web of relations disappears, the eyes of the web (i.e., the subjects) disappear. In this sense, any essentialist notion of existence is logically impossible in this radical relational theory, which, in turn, informs recent discussions on the actor-network theory and anthropocene. From a Buddhist perspective, which places relations at the centre of existence, an ontological focus through such relations is unavoidable. For Buddhism, being means suffering. Why does everyone suffer? When this question is seriously considered, being is ultimately transformed into relations. For Buddhism, existence is only a phenomenon, simply a result of relationality, and cannot exist in itself without relationships with others. We suffer because we cannot take the truth that we are only phenomena. We believe and persist that we are actively and consciously living. It is our persistency and false perception that leads us to this conclusion. However, any beings are phenomena according to Buddhism. We are like waves in the ocean. The phenomenon of waves cannot exist as waves if you scoop a wave with a bucket and bring it back home. It is not a wave any more. It is just water. We are waves. If a wave persists in being a wave, it creates suffering. We are like waves produced by the relationship between water, wind, time, space, observer, etc., and if any one of these is absent, waves cannot exist, like us without others. It is important to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating such Buddhist thoughts into IR. The present article aims to achieve this goal. It begins with an overview of Buddhism’s tryst with IR, especially the inferences derived from the notion of relationality. It then establishes Buddhism as a meeting ground of three distinct areas: religion, philosophy and science. Finally, it discusses how these three areas can allow Buddhism to contribute to Global IR discourses. Buddhism and Relationality While Chan, Mandaville and Bleiker’s Zen of International Relations (2001) brilliantly depicts the relationship between ontology and epistemology, the ephemeral nature of the concept of security, and the contemporary obsession with existence through Zen, William J. Long’s A Buddhist Approach to International Relations: Radical Interdependence (2021) is based on an extensive knowledge of Buddhism. Of these, the reign of King Asoka, which Long extensively focused upon in the book, deserves a special mention. King Asoka was the third king of the Mauryan dynasty of ancient India (third century BC). Asoka turned Buddhist after the Kalinga War, by that time he had already conquered most of India. This change of heart was prompted by the massive death and destruction he witnessed. King Asoka’s rule based on Dharma (Buddha’s teachings) is reported to have multicultural and multi-religious connotations. This was due to King Asoka’s religious discernment that the Dharma is not a creed of one religion but applicable to all. This open political system is the ideal type of Buddhist governance and is still often brought up where politics and Buddhism intersect. These books seem to be good introductions to Buddhism and IR, but when it comes to the question of relationality, they do not seem to be sufficient. The debate on relationality in IR has been very much on the rise over the last twenty years, with Jackson and Nexon’s pioneering article “Relations before States”, which appeared at the end of the twentieth century as a new development in constructivism. A special issue in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs titled “Towards Global Relational Theorising” (Nordin et al. 2019), a forum in International Studies Perspectives titled “Differing about Difference: Relational IR from around the World” (Trownsell et al. 2021), and an E-International Relations article “Recrafting International Relations through Relationality” (Trownsell et al. 2019) are worth mentioning here. These works address a variety of relationalities, including constructivism, Confucianism and indigenous cosmology, and articulate a new dimension of IR theory. This trend is rapidly developing, and the International Studies Association’s annual conference in 2024 will be held in San Francisco under the theme “Putting Relationality at the Centre of International Studies”. Of these, a particular focus has been on Confucianism-based relationality theories here for the purpose of contrasting with Buddhism. Confucianism-based relationality theories are an argument developed by Chinese scholars, primarily represented by Qin Yaqing. Confucianism centres on the five relationships embedded in society and this leads to its original moral theory (Qin 2018): namely, the relationships of master and servant, father and son, elder and younger brothers, husband and wife, and friends. As can be seen from these five, the relationality in Confucianism is vertical, except for the last one, friendship. In other words, Confucianism assumes a social image stabilized on the basis of hierarchy. This hierarchy is very important to Confucianism, and various rituals are performed to maintain it. In this sense, Confucianism has been inherited as the moral code of the ruling party. From the perspective of IR, it can be seen in very solemn and fixed ritualistic relationality, such as the tribute system. Tributary states such as Japan before the Edo Shogunate and the Ryukyus until the formal annexation to Japan in the late nineteenth century, regularly paid tribute and showed a certain level of courtesy to the Chinese Empire (i.e., Ming and Qing). In response, the Empire would show its authority by giving several times the amount of the tribute as a souvenir. It is a well-known fact that this ritual was very important for the maintenance of the empire and that political stability in East Asia was brought about through this ritual (Kang 2010). In contrast, there is a Buddhist thought of IR that is also a religion-based theory of relationality originating in the Asian region. In contrast to Confucianism, which emphasizes rituals to maintain a stable hierarchy, Buddhism has always had a perspective of the world that changes and never stays the same. All things are impermanent, and everything is in flux. Eternal existence is ‘nothing’, and existence that we know of is only an illusion momentarily created by the web of various relationality (karma). This very radical relationalism is definitely not the ideology of the governing side. It was meant to liberate ordinary people from suffering pains such as poverty, illness and ageing. Buddhism as the Intersection of Religion, Philosophy and Science Buddhism, which began with Buddha in India, was succeeded by many branches after Buddha’s death. There are many variations of Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism is said to be relatively close to ancient Buddhism and is mainly found in South-East Asia, whereas Mahayana Buddhism emphasizes the idea of ’emptiness’ and has been widely spread in East Asia; and Tibetan Buddhism is characterized by its esoteric Buddhist tendency. Until now, Buddhism has basically developed at a certain distance from the political parties. In contrast, the position of Buddhism in Japan is more subtle. Although Japan is known as a Buddhist country, its Buddhism has developed in a very unique way: Buddhism in Japan was closely associated with politics during the Edo Shogunate from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and also worked in favour of colonialism during Japan’s imperialist period. It is well known that the Kyoto School, which developed a philosophy based on Buddhism, similarly glorified WWII (Shimizu 2011, 2022b). In recent years, Buddhist scholars have emerged who take a critical view of this history, and there is a movement to clarify the war effort of Japanese Buddhism at the time (Nakanishi 2013, 2016; Otani, Yoshinaga, and Kondo 2016; Sueki 2006; Victoria 1997). Although not elaborated further here, this issue is unavoidable when considering the contribution of Buddhism to IR studies. When considering the contribution of Buddhism to IR, it is necessary to focus on the relationship between Buddhism in general and Mahayana Buddhism in particular. As is well known, a new form of Buddhism was created around the third century with the advent of the Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna opened the path to nirvana (liberation from the cycle of birth and death), which had been promised only to practising monks, to all laypersons. Nāgārjuna (1995) claimed that this new Buddhist movement, unlike the various variant offshoots, was a movement going back to Buddha’s original Buddhism. Although the truth of this claim is not known, there is no doubt that at least his version of Buddhism had a significant influence on the subsequent development of Buddhism in East Asia. This is because Buddhism took on a new raison d’être as its teachings were opened up to the general public. Subsequently, this new development in India was extensively transmitted to East Asia through China. Unlike Indian Buddhism, which was taken over by the Hindus and virtually marginalized until recently, Buddhism in East Asia has been building up its own position continuously since its propagation. In China, it was divided into the Tendai (Tiantai), Kegon (Huayan), Pure Land and Zen sects, which were directly transmitted to Japan. Despite the variations of Mahayana Buddhist sects, the concept of peculiar relationality underlies all of them. Mahayana Buddhism differs significantly from other theories of relationality, given its philosophy and science. Mahayana Buddhism’s similarity to Western philosophy has been, regardless to say, indicated numerous times in the past. The proximity to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and to some extent Heidegger, has been pointed out in various ways, but in recent years particular attention has been paid to the proximity between Mahayana Buddhism and quantum theory. The concept of relationality in Buddhism is called ‘engi’. This is also translated as ‘dependent origination’, a worldview which claims that existence is always dependent on relationality to other existence. Everything we think of as existence is a phenomenon which has only ephemeral life. And it is reiterated in many Buddhist texts that existence is based on relationality and does not exist independently of them. This is particularly characteristic of Mahayana Buddhism, and many Mahayana sects use the term ‘emptiness’ (ku) to describe this relational world. In this argument, there can be no existence of the self before the existence of the other, and it is only the relationships that create the self and the other. In other words, there is nothing before the relationship. Therefore, it is indeed ‘empty’. The Kyoto School, which developed its own philosophy based on Buddhist motifs, adopted the idea of emptiness and produced a genealogy of the so-called philosophy of nothingness in the first half of the twentieth century (Nishida 1947, 1948). There, they developed a new philosophy based on the premise that the subject is nothing and is produced by relations. However, their philosophy did not necessarily deny Western philosophy, but on the contrary, was a philosophy to further develop the philosophy of the Western tradition (Sakai 2010a, 2010b). What they argued for was the emptiness of the subject and the fragility of existence, as well as a philosophy of human existence that fundamentally connects the West/East divide (Nishida 1951). In this sense, the contribution of Kyoto School philosophy to the contemporary discourses on Global IR (a cluster of knowledge-forms that seek to bridge the West/East divide) is immeasurable. At the same time, however, the Kyoto School philosophy is the most abominable in the history of Japanese thought. Like the Buddhist organizations during the interwar period, the School too affirmed colonialism and supported Japan’s imperialist territorial expansion (Kosaka, Nishitani, Koyama, & Suzuki 1943). For reasons of space, we cannot go further into this issue either, but interested readers should refer to various studies that specifically focus on the Kyoto School’s war collaboration (Arisaka 1996; Heisig & Maraldo 1995; Osaki 2019; Shimizu 2011, 2015, 2022a; Yusa 1995). In what ways, then, does Mahayana Buddhism, which is premised on the ephemeral nature of these subjects, intersect with science? In the recent publication Helgoland, a leading Italian quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli spared a chapter for Buddhism. Quantum theory, as we all know, is the field of physics that studies the ultimate microscopic world, where it has become clear that, oddly enough, when we look at the world at the quantum level, nothing there essentially exists. Everything we regard as existence is a phenomenon which is produced by relations with others (Rovelli 2020). This is due to the fact that the smallest unit of the world is a wave. This wave becomes a particle the moment the observer observes it. The wave disappears as soon as a relationality with another existence is established. This is the so-called ‘collapse of the wave function’. This phenomenon overlaps with the Mahayana Buddhist idea that all existence is based on the concept of dependent origination that suggests that all beings do not exist independently but emerge through the relationality of engi. Buddhism and Global IR What does this idea of existence as a phenomenon mean in the field of Global IR? Karin Fierke (2022) describes in the postcolonial context that the world we think we know is a snapshot of a series of events. The subject (self) exists as an observer witnessing a constantly changing world, and this relationality gives rise to self and others. In this context, existence is not an individual affair. The self and the other do not pre-exist but are produced by the relationship. She goes on to say that “parts, including individuals, are always already bound up in the whole, just as the whole is in the parts”, thus the self-other relations are not an ‘inter-action’ but an ‘intra-action’ (Fierke 2022, 313) This ontological argument overlaps with the idea of Quantum Holography developed by Chengxin Pan (2020). Here, the part is not merely a part of the whole but, at the same time, a mirror reflecting the whole. A part is the whole, and the whole resides in a part. This expression is compatible with the Hua Yan view within Mahayana Buddhism. The idea of ‘one and many’ is similarly advocated there. Parts (many) are different representations of the whole (one) and vice versa. This expression particularly makes sense in the contemporary context of Global IR. IR theories from different regions are not simply a part of the whole of IR, but the whole is within a part. In other words, the current international situation is localized in each region in its own way, which in turn affects international relations as a whole. It is not only a spatial relationship of whole and part but also a temporal relationship of whole and part, i.e., a continual process of multiple partial local-global interactions that affect the whole international situation – that is, a flow of relationality ‘from part of the whole to part of the whole’. More to the point, Mahayana Buddhism is also suggestive of the position of the researcher. Mahayana Buddhism posits a unique entry called Bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas are those who have the virtue to attain Buddhahood but do not enter nirvana and stay in the secular world to help ordinary people attain Buddhahood. A Bodhisattva can be said to be a being who accompanies people in their sufferings and difficulties and accumulates virtues together with them. He or she does not look at people from a third-party perspective but actively bears the suffering of these people. Therein lies the significance of the existence of a Bodhisattva (Shimizu & Noro 2021). What, then, is our position as researchers of Global IR? The idea of Bodhisattvas forces us to question the meaning of engagement with the theory and practice of IR. Why do we study IR? What is the ethics of the researcher in a world of impermanence? These questions must be asked again and again. Finally, it should also be mentioned that a critical analysis of Buddhist perspectives must be made. This is because non-essential Buddhist teachings can easily be essentialized, as I explained above. At least, historically, such cases seem to be very common. The war collaboration of Japanese Buddhism and the affirmation of imperialism by the Kyoto School referred to in this article must be examined in detail and with a critical perspective. In this sense, the study of Buddhism and Global IR needs to be conducted from two aspects: the ideological aspect drawn from its doctrines and the history of Buddhism in relation to politics.

Studies of war speeches by world leaders have described the power of language to frame situations (emergency or war) and defined in terms of its influence on frames, images, narratives, metaphors, and emotions (see Gross & Ni Aolain, ). In their study of the rhetoric and legality of war, Gross and Ni Aolain () link the functions of language with the complexity of decision-making for American policy makers following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2002, and concludes that ‘the adoption and adaptation of the language of emergency and war by presidents’ is ‘a significant political and legal tool’ (p. 244). Campbell and Jamieson () describe a President as a ‘choice architect’, and ‘skillful presidents not only adapt to their audiences; they engage in a process of transforming those who hear them into the audiences they desire’ (p. 244). The study further argues that ‘the language used in the framing of the relevant events and issues is not only shaped and informed by reality, but also, in itself, constitutive of what that reality may be … ’ Thus, ‘meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors … the president being the chief storyteller … ’ (p. 245). Literature in rhetorical studies has further established the character of war rhetoric especially those that describe the features of American presidential speeches. For example, Rzepecka () analyzing the ‘continuity and shifts in war messages of George H. W. Bush in 1991 and George W. Bush in 2002’, identifies some characteristics of presidential war speeches such as thoughtful consideration, narration of events, and a call to unanimity and dedication. According to Benjamin ( cited in Rzepecka, , pp. 226–7), presidential war messages perform two basic functions; firstly, they give the historical outline of the justification for war, and secondly, they offer a description of the president’s aims and objectives. Lordan () suggests six predictable discursive features of presidential war rhetoric as follows: (i) the enunciation of self-protection (ii) the representation of the enemy as the aggressor (iii) the just war theory (iv) the moral superiority of the war option (v) the inevitability of conflict and (vi) the guarantee of victory. Indeed, while these features are common in presidential speeches and also exist in the Putin-Zelensky rhetoric, our study identifies other features that perhaps may have responded to the peculiar situation of the Ukrainian war and those that belong to the war of words or linguistic violence. Some persuasive strategies of war messages identified by Rzepecka (, p. 227) include the argument structure, fear tactics, techniques used to reinforce the good intentions and morality of the message, simplification (of message content in certain situations) and a shift in emphasis. Gross and Ni Aolain () further adds that presidential rhetoric addresses two socially constructed target populations (i.e. ‘us’ and ‘them’) – ‘us’ who need protection and the ‘dangerous others’ who threaten us (p.250). Thus, war rhetoric recognizes the ‘united community of patriots’ and identifies and names the enemy (see also Oddo, ) Galtung () argues that there is a link between language and war and that it is almost obvious to identify what words stand for at the semantic level even though some remain in euphemism. However, the internal structures of war texts usually betray hidden messages tilted in favor of war or peace. During the war, non-palatable truths are distorted and suppressed through language in order to protect the sensibilities of the war or rationalize and justify acts of war such as pride, hatred, self-esteem or contempt for others. Elgin () further adds that often, violence exerted by individuals or nations is preceded by some form of violent language (see also Chiluwa & Ajiboye, ).

To forge articulations and convince others of the validity of their interpretation of reality, participants in policy debates can utilize different rhetorical strategies (Jackson , pp. 28–45). They might try to fix their preferred meaning of a commonplace (specifying), or challenge an opponent’s formulation, for instance by undermining the legitimacy of the speaker, distracting the audience or challenging the accuracy of the claims advanced by the opponent (breaking). Other options are to apply an established resource, such as widely available narratives, metaphors or analogies, to a new situation; to introduce a commonplace on the fringes or outside of the debate; or to develop a new commonplace (joining). That said, deploying existing rhetoric resources with which audiences are already familiar is far easier than developing entirely novel articulations (Krebs and Jackson , p. 45). Paying attention to the broader political arena in which different policy concerns compete is therefore crucial; we can assume that this context at any given time provides a substantial supply of rhetoric resources familiar to the audience that skilled speakers can draw on to develop more specific representations in a concrete debate.

In this rendition of the role of rhetoric in politics, state behaviour provides a necessary background context that allows for the emergence of different representations and policies. However, which representation persists depends on the more specific mobilization of rhetoric resources. Dueck (), for instance, demonstrates that Soviet behaviour during the Cold War provided an important, albeit indeterminate background context that could have supported different policy options for US foreign policymakers – such as rollback, spheres of influence or cooperation. Nonetheless, containment was able to establish itself despite these other plausible options. For our purposes, we can assume that China’s international and domestic conduct over the years have provided a necessary background condition for the general interpretation of a threatening China without which the more specific representation of an ideological threat – brought about through the mobilisation of rhetoric – would not have been possible.

[Davies, W. (2017). The promise and paradox of competition : markets, competitive agency and authority. In The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (pp. 37-72). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529793734]

The rhetoric and performance of neoliberal authority involve appeals to ‘evidence’ and economic evaluation as the test of legitimate competitive activity. A great deal of expert and institutional work goes in to making these appeals publicly viable, as we shall see. However, empirical evidence always arises from institutional and pragmatic concerns, and on the basis of certain vocations and perspectives. Value neutrality and scientific objectivism have their own ethical and institutional preconditions. What counts as a valid empirical representation of a dynamic, competitive situation will depend heavily on one’s own position in relation to it. Consider the various perspectives surrounding a game of professional tennis, and the different matters of ‘fact’ that are at work as a result: each player strives to focus their minds on winning the next point; their coach needs to form an expert view on how their performance can be improved; the umpire needs to make sure that the rules are being enforced correctly and fairly; the audience keep looking at the scoreboard; and the gambler in the betting shop is only interested in the final score. In dynamic situations, with multiple perspectives at play, there is rarely an ‘ultimate’ empirical representation that is valid for all. On the other hand, the neoliberal promise of competitive forms of organization is that they will periodically produce clearly distinguishable ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ that all will agree on.

In order to resist this combination of escalating “China threat” narratives and anti-Asian racism, we need a counternarrative strategy. Although it is important to critique problematic claims, a counternarrative must do more than simply negate our opponent’s narratives. We do not respond to “Chinese people are a threat” by saying “Chinese people are not a threat” because that response can actually just repeat the association between “Chinese people” and “threat” that we want to disrupt. Instead a counternarrative provides a positive alternative framework for how to understand actors and issues. Such an alternative must confront the underlying narrative structures: the dehumanizing and deindividualizing narratives about people of Chinese descent and others who are perceived to be Chinese, and the US–China binary that portrays the US and China as the embodiment of incompatible principles that are doomed to conflict. Here are some key elements. Counter the notion that all Chinese people form a homogeneous collective by portraying a diversity of identity, opinions, etc. Promote narratives of solidarity showing that people in China and people in the US of Chinese descent experience similar problems to the majority of Americans, and that we can solve our shared problems through shared struggle. There is a need for improved education about the diversity of people of Chinese descent in the US and the overall AAPI community as well as improved education about AAPI history. Counter “China threat” narratives and break down the US–China binary with narratives that show the biggest threats to most people in the US to be those shared across borders, which require international cooperation to create shared solutions. This includes the climate crisis, the pandemic, global poverty and inequality, and a global economy based on the oppression and exploitation of working people everywhere. We need an alternative narrative about the place of the US in the world. So long as American exceptionalism remains the dominant form of American identity, the growing power of China will continue to feed narratives that China is a threat to the US and to American people. Recent polls show that increasing numbers of Americans are rejecting American exceptionalism, but in the absence of a compelling, progressive alternative, it will remain dominant

When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2009, the Obama administration was just getting its footing as caretakers of the War on Terror.

Our focus then was truly global dominion. That meant, yes, killing and capturing whatever the intelligence process coughed up as bad guys no matter who they were or where they were. But also, technologically, our fixation was on “prompt global strike”—the idea that the US should be able to reliably put warheads on foreheads anywhere at anytime without constraint.

The link between extraction and violence has been a major theme of political economy and political ecology for some time. Key works in political economy have contributed an important analysis of the relationships between resource-based conflict and geo-politics, the structure of the international economy, and nationallevel political and economic competition over rents and territory (Homer-Dixon, 2001; Harvey, 2009; Mitchell, 2011; Ross, 2012). The political economy of resource conflict also explores the linkages between the opening of new extractive frontiers and civil war (Auty, 1993; Humphreys et al., 2007). Despite the frequent expectations of wealth produced by new discoveries, the resource curse literature argues that the exploitation of “point” resources commonly generates low levels of economic growth and a series of adverse effects on governance, including authoritarianism, militarization, regional secessionism, chronically unstable governments, and high levels of conflict (Lynn-Karl, 1997; Collier, 2000). Despite widespread acceptance of the resource curse concept both in academic and policymaking circles, significant critique is now made of its common rational-actor and behaviorist assumptions, particularly the view that extraction necessarily represents an opportunity for elites and the weaponized to maximize their advantages and wealth. This analysis of extractive violence is now countered by a growing body of studies (McNeish and Logan, 2012). Instead, these studies highlight the roles of history and social structure in guiding or catalyzing the direction of political actions (Rosser, 2006; Stevens and Dietche, 2008; Omeje, 2008). While some writers highlight a heightened level of conflict resulting from either naturally occurring or politically induced resource scarcity (Kahl, 2006), a contrasting body of literature suggests that such conditions can also lead toward increased cooperation (Wolf et al., 2003). There is also a growing understanding that the study of extractive violence has been positioned too often at the national and international levels. This has fed reductionist assumptions regarding the inevitability of civil war or the paradox of plenty in resource-rich societies (Lynn-Karl, 1997; Collier, 2010). Moreover, it has left understudied the relationship between sub-national political dynamics and extraction. In contrast to the costs of extraction emphasized by political economy, political ecology has emphasized the close relationship between environmental costs and impacts on local life and culture, from corruption to changing patterns of consumption (Peluso and Watts, 2001; Le Billon, 2001; Le Billon and Bridge, 2012). While a “political ecology of the subsoil” is still in its early days as compared to political economy (Bebbington and Bury, 2013), a growing literature recognizes the need to study the emergence of extractive conflicts over the distribution of costs and benefits associated with the subsoil. For example, water can become unavailable or contaminated, while few of the supposed financial benefits of its use in extractive processes are accrued in the community (Kirsch, 2014; Perreault, 2017). Another important strand to the political-ecological study of extractive conflicts considers the way that natural resources are differentially valued and understood in different contexts (McNeish et al., 2015). There is a growing awareness that environmental goods such as water, land, and soil cannot be understood in merely physical terms. For example, the concept of “waterscape” recognizes water as a “socio-natural entity” (Loftus, 2009) rather than as something to be theorized purely in material terms. Boyer’s (2017) recent proposals for energo-power as a means to express an alternative genealogy of modern power further contribute to a biopolitical take on extractive violence, arguing that our very bodies are intertwined with the pipes and ductwork of energy installations and the logic and expression of extractive politics. The environmental impacts of extractive activities are also increasingly recognized in political ecology as leading to the formation of environmental movements in defense of rural livelihoods and resources (Li, 2015; Bury and Bebbington, 2015), and visible expressions of an “environmentalism of the poor” (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997). This rich bibliography, only partly surveyed here, provides an important foundation for this volume. However, there is much room to build on this to understand the expressions of violence in a hyper-extractive age. Volume contributors draw on the analytical benefits of both political economy and political ecology by employing multiple scales of analysis, economic and cultural understandings of how value is differentially created, and the possibility of combining structure and agency in decoding power relations. Here we also suggest the need to understand violence not only as physical action but also as a force with a plurality of expressions and consequences. Kiechel, for example, in her chapter on the built environment, comments, “In a seeming paradox, construction involves destruction—not only of raw material stocks, but often of local economies excluded from benefit, of the socio-spatial fabric of neighborhoods, and of construction workers themselves.” The built environment, she suggests, whether beneficial or oppressive in its social and ecological effects, owes its very existence to extractive actions. In highlighting these connections Kiechel provides a powerful new twist to previous studies that highlight the links between technology and asymmetries in global exchange and that uncover the relationships between ecology and power. In an earlier comment on imperial thermo-dynamics, for example, Hornborg (2001) argued that we should reconceptualize “the machine”—or industrial technomass—as a species of power and a problem of culture. As technological devices multiply exponentially in a vain attempt to make life “efficient,” “luxurious,” and “productive,” Hornborg argues that on planet Earth everything is a zero-sum game, and that one person’s gain is always another’s loss. Kiechel’s extension of technomass from machines to the built environment not only updates the civilizationary nature of this zero-sum game, but its violent reconfiguring of humans and nature, animate and inanimate life, or what Hornborg terms biomass. Our volume explores the multiple dimensions, scales, and local contexts of this global reconfiguration. Evidence and discussion of the violence against nature caused by resource extraction is visible in all contributions to the book. We concur with other studies that highlight that oil and petrochemical production has led to dumping millions of barrels of a cocktail of chemicals, drilling fluids, and formation water into our seas, rivers, and forests. Mining practices, including those for rare earths, have caused river courses to change and heavy metals and chemicals used in processing to leach into drinking water and aquifers. Persistent toxic leaks, periodic catastrophic spills, large-scale mining, and oil-exploitation projects play important roles in opening areas of sensitive biodiversity and human population to industrial development. Extractive activities involve the construction of supporting infrastructures such as roads, pipelines, hydro-electric dams, pylons and cable networks, ports and storage facilities (see Watts for a detailed characterization of these infrastructures in the oil assemblage). Many of these projects have their own direct costs for the environment and encourage problematic destabilization and displacement of human populations. The visible violence against nature is also being waged on human populations and individuals who dare to stand in the way of extractive development. In the chapters by Le Billon and Middeldorp, Graddy-Lovelace, Watts, and Richardson and McNeish, we see the extent of the physical violence waged against land defenders by the actors involved in resource extraction. In doing so, we mirror in our academic work the reports produced by journalists and human rights organizations that highlight a rising trend of violence against land defenders across the world. For the Past three years the The Guardian newspaper and the international human rights non-governmental organization Global Witness have worked together to form and update a global database that attempts to record and map what they call “a murder epidemic.” In its 2019 report, Enemies of the State?, Global Witness highlighted that on average more than three “land defenders” (civil society leaders, human rights activists, indigenous and peasant leaders) were killed every week in 2018. These attacks occurred in relation to extractive industries such as mining, logging, and agri-business. The report also reveals how countless more people were threatened, arrested, or thrown in jail for opposing the governments or companies seeking to profit from their land. Our work extends this picture by pointing to the relationships that exist between legal and illegal actors, companies, and politicians involved in the business of resource extraction. It also discusses the manner in which these relationships background the manipulation and circumvention of laws, regulations, and consultations meant to govern the sector, as seen in particular in the chapters by Graddy-Lovelace and Le Billon and Middeldorp. In their chapter, Glaab and Stuvøy study the nexus between extractivism and violence. Their work argues for a need to push beyond obvious violent impacts and their common normative explanations. In common with many of the other chapters, their work emphasizes the structural nature of extractive violence at different scales e.g. its character as horizontal and vertical (Watts); its grounding in histories of structural racism and criminalization (Graddy-Lovelace); its positioning within capitalist and now multipolar geo-politics (Li and Shapiro). However, their theoretical analysis goes even further. Arguing that “violence is ambiguous and transcends the local/global divide,” Glaab and Stuvøy suggest that researching violence in extractivism brings into discussion the multi-scalar and hetero-temporal character of violence. Instead of thinking of scales as separate, they stress the need for a focus on entanglements (Tsing, 2005). The global is in this perspective not a separate scale, but part of scale-making processes. Such a perspective moves a focus away from the directly observable to what is commonly unseen, or what they more precisely define as “site effects”—violence as built into structure, symbolism, and space; and the temporalities of violence on humans and the environment as both fast and slow, both immediate and incremental. Significantly, Glaab and Stuvøy recognize that the degree, character, and manifestation of extractivism have changed in the neoliberal age. This signposts the need for a more comprehensive, or suitably entangled, meta-narrative of our extractive age and the place within it of resource extraction and related violence. Watts’s chapter makes a particularly significant contribution to such a meta-narrative. His chapter here on extractive value formation in the global oil assemblage not only lays bare the complex licit constellation of science, technology, rent-seeking, and financial speculation, but also its hidden deep reliance on the illicit and criminal. Building on our colleagues’ observations and analysis we also suggest here that Mbembe’s (2019) deep, and necessarily complex, characterization of necro-politics could represent a timely meta-narrative in this regard. Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is a “decolonial” meditation on the current epoch—one defined by a sense of global realignment, an inward turn, and the reorganization of space and being between the living and the dead. Acknowledging the renewed rise of the extreme political right and the camps imprisoning migrants, Mbembe posits that we live in an epoch defined by a politics of enmity and separation. If globalization and neoliberalism were said to shrink the world, Mbembe now sees a backlash of retrenchment and borderization. Democracy, he suggests, has begun to embrace its dark side, or nocturnal body, based on the historical fuel of the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. Necro-politics entails the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe, 2003, pp. 39–40). To this end, a necro-economy encourages as one of its central features the predation of natural resources in which violence on humans and nature are justified, and populations are displaced and eliminated in the causes of consumer- or energy-protection and security.