Postări
Sociology and Social Work
9 Schitu Magureanu
Bucharest 010181
www.sas.unibuc.ro
International Political Sociology:
Syllabus, Fall 2024
Draft as of March 6, 2024
Ionel N Sava, Senior Lecturer
Background: How to understand ‘a world which is politically fragmented, but where everyday lives are interconnected’ ? (D. Bigo). International political sociology (IPS) has emerged in early 2000s as a sub-field of social theory of international politics. This course introduces the main European schools on critical international and security studies (Paris / Foucault School; Copenhagen Security School / Waever & Buzan; Aberystwyth School / Keen Booth) and it discusses ways to avoid theoretical fragmentation and to advance a more emancipatory approach of world politics.
Hence, IPS course engages a bottom-up approach of everyday life and non-military security using a variety of theoretical approaches (critical school, feminism, emancipatory, vernacular culture, postcolonial, environment, human development). The main emphasis is on social practices and a sociological approach to the international and political.
International scholars are occasionally invited for online debate.
Objectives:
- To understand key-concepts of IPS and place them within the specific category (critical, feminist, emancipatory).
- To compare different schools using a sociological perspective.
- To understand the origins, to compare and evaluate the available resources and strategies for IPS theoretization as well the expected outcomes.
Requirements: The course is structured into an equal number of courses and seminars. For roughly 12 weeks we shall deliver lectures and discuss in the seminars next day (1,5 hours each).
A well-known textbook in English is provided for this course and at least two articles / papers are recommended for each major theory or school. All reading material is made available on the MsTeams Platform provided by the University of Bucharest. An institutional Email address is required for registration.
In most lectures / seminars I invite you to comment and ask questions in the hope that your interest is not that much in consuming course material but to participate and contribute your own way. Studying International Political Sociology is not about passive learning but active participation alongside assimilation of main ideas and theories.
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Her Excellency T Heyden, Ambassador of Sweden, Lecturing Sociology and Social Work Students |
In-Class Assignments : You are expected to show up in the scheduled 12 plus 12 graded in-class assignments throughout the Semester. Hence, I am committed to engage you in direct classroom discussions and also to use all physical and technical auxiliary devices in order to fulfil the course goals and requirements. Laptops, tablets and smart phones could be used as to help you participate and still preserve your mobility. Snacks and beverages are permitted.
A minimum 60 percent attendance is usually recommended for you to be accepted in the final exam. Highest participation will account for 20 percent of your final grade. It should reflect your contribution to at least four seminars as well regular (spoken or written) comments to other discussions or practical activities we are engaged in.
Readings : You are advised to download the textbook / the Critical Review paper available on the MsTeams group. This is a comprehensive yet compressed sociological literature on IPS that informs you on the subject and provides you main knowledge in the field as well. A number of additional articles / papers are also provided for each major school or theory to be lectured and discussed in the classroom. While this is the usual course intake, additional readings are recommended in order to deepen a certain theory or author. Same idea could be expressed in totally different contents so you should search for it in more than one place. For each end every student, the course is a good opportunity to enlarge knowledge in the field of IPS beyond the formal course frame.
Writings: Should you notice something relevant for class discussions or just for yourself, I encourage you to write down Comments, Summaries or/and Reading Notes (up to one page!) to be uploaded on your MsTeams personal page or to the group wall so everyone could share your points with the next in-classroom discussion.
Therefore, another 20 percent of your final grade is to be granted for the in-classroom discussions and writings you contribute during the Semester. There is no counting of these contributions as it is not that much their number but their clarity and quality to be evaluated.
Time frame: In both Readings and Writings the students are expected to use no more than one hour per day. With 1.5 hours for each Lecture and Seminar it totals 10 hours per week for this course.
Exams : There is one final exam at the end of Semester. The exam consists of a written essay of 6 to 8 pages on a International Political Sociology school, theory or author at your choice. You are expected to interpret in your own words that theory, to argue its relevance and utility and make sociologically proficient comments before to conclude the essay. The paper accounts for 50 percent for your final grade and it is due for evaluation one week in advance of the exam day as announced by the Secretariat. It is to be presented in-class with your colleagues as public audience. Additional questions are customarily ask to improve your chances for better grades.
Courses and Seminars – to be introduced in due time
Readings:
A Critical Review Literature is available for download from the MsTeam group.
For each of the 12 courses and seminars, specific bibliography is recommended.
Editorial In:
Political / Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS)
Author: PARISS Editorial Office / Didier Bigo Online Publication Date: 13 Jul 2021
Since publishing our second issue, the Covid-19 pandemic has continued to devastate our political, social and economic worlds and it has been difficult to escape the feelings of unease and exhaustion caused both by the disease and governments’ responses to it. For the third issue of pariss, we continue in our reflections on the forms of obedience generated in response to the pandemic, and on the strengthening and consolidation of previously existing emergency and exceptional measures. In the first volume of issue two, we publish five articles that extend, discuss and open up new perspectives compared to last year’s issues.
We open with two texts, each of which questions what is likely to become embedded in our daily lives as a result of the past eighteen months of virus containment and health crisis discourse.
The first text, entitled Crisis and Critique: On Preparedness, Authoritarianism and the Regulatory State- is an interview with Carlo Caduff, who reminds us that the pandemic, as seen by epidemiologists working for governments, is always managed in the form of a short-term crisis based on the assumption of a constant infrastructure to safeguard (hospital beds, oxygen production). Within this framework, a paradigm change around how to think about health infrastructure is never on the table.
Reconceptualising ‘responsibility’ as slowing down and thinking outside of a crisis framework, Caduff instead considers the structural conditions of the emergence of Covid-19, weighing the role of the health sector against sectors like defence or commerce. Drawing synergies with the work of Barbara Stiegler, Caduff also ponders on what a different relationship with the global ecosystem would mean for future global health; an ecosystem which current capitalism has profoundly changed. This attitude of many governments to present the situation as an unexpected crisis to be dealt with as an emergency, instead of proposing structural reforms, resonates with the work of Sara Gandini, Andrea Fumagalli and Cristina Morini on Italy’s early lockdown and on Ní Aoláin’s paper on the contemporary exercise of emergency powers in pariss 1(2). In the same spirit as Carlo Caduff, Ní Aoláin showed how the legal provisions of emergency, despite their diversity of purposes, do not meet their stated objective as much as they lead to substantial advantages for the executive powers in place, and that the resulting imbalances of power (in relation to the political opposition, the judiciary courts, etc.) lead to local and national measures that result in disregard for international obligations and human rights. It is only by linking ecological perspectives, those of health economies and those of exceptional powers that we can find the beginnings of an explanation at their intersection.
The second article by Félix Tréguer, entitled The Virus of Surveillance: How the covid-19-Pandemic Is Fuelling Technologies of Control- explores the relationship between the digital world and the modalities of covid management through the discourse of crisis. The author shows how the response to the pandemic, mobilising emergency resilience rather than infrastructure planning, promoted the argument that governments had to innovate in order to act quickly, thereby justifying the implementation of already existing digital control technologies on the grounds of risk prevention and their ultra-fast transmission capacity. These moves have accelerated the state’s entanglement with large private groups due to a lack of autonomous infrastructure, and have strengthened the latter, even when the government’s official discourse claims to call for more control. This trend is now being seen in the arguments around vaccine patents.
Recalling the historical links between medical rationality and surveillance, Treguer sees an actualisation of a society of control that will remain with us even if vaccines reduce mortality rates. With this reading, Tréguer echoes Ivan Manhoka’s reflections that we published on telework in 2(1). Both authors mention this new neoliberal art of governing through nudging and encouraging individuals to take responsibility for themselves and for others. Will we then see a pandemic shock doctrine as Naomi Klein has suggested? In any case, backtracking applications, facial recognition technologies, the lifting of certain bans on medical data and their use for developing algorithms seems to have created opportunities to develop surveillance programmes far beyond Covid management. The world of tomorrow now seems more like an acceleration of some old neoliberal trends than a series of new utopias.
In future issues, we plan to extend this analysis by looking more closely at the relationship between health, research and education, in line with the work of Barbara Stiegler. Through comparing the health and education sectors, broader patterns emerge which sees professionals dispossessed of the control of their craft and future thanks to the reinforcement of the prerogatives of a class of administrators preoccupied with financial management and communications strategies. What we have called the misery of the academic and research world must both continue to be an object of permanent reflection, but it must also be articulated with the misery of the health world and other social universes.
The second theme of the issue revisits the reflection on the international uses of a Bourdieusian political sociology (Dezalay on the internationalization of state nobilities) and explores the mechanisms of economic governance that led to the subprime crisis. Using a critical apparatus of Bourdieusian origin, Didier Georgakakis and Frédéric Lebaron examine these mechanisms as they function in the European Union in their paper, The field of European economic governance and austerity policies: Exploratory elements (2002–2012). Choosing to forgo quick generalisations about neo-liberalism and the European Union, an explanation which is often invoked but seldom analysed in any depth, these authors investigate in detail the sociological dimension of the institutions. This allows them to understand the resilience of austerity policies, despite the production of alternative discourses.
Analysing the social field of the different actors via multi-correspondence analysis, Georgakakis and Lebaron show that the deafness to reforms is a by-product of the policy process, outlining the binding force of the field of European economic governance as a social space where various actors are fighting for the structural logics of reproduction and transformation of the global economic and social order to be materialized. Their results provide a detailed mapping of the power relations in the field of economic governance in Europe, which is also extremely useful to see whether and to what extent changes in the actors and organisation or orientation of the Commission can influence the interplay of wider interdependencies.
In a bold and extended article entitled Designing-With/In World Politics: Manifestos for an International Political Design, Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander show that Bourdieusian inspiration does not necessarily mean a univocal methodological prism and that analytical frameworks must constantly be adjusted to the field. Concepts should never turn into essentialised notions, but are “thinking tools”, the use of which must change our “praxis” by going beyond the traditional framework of reporting on observed practices by writing articles. For Austin and Leander, this implies going beyond the “monastic” activity inherited from the objective, indignant or inspired report, and to go towards a politics of style that not only challenges the dominant language canons but goes beyond them by pushing the “authors” to find themselves embedded in different dimensions of human activity, and to practice material and aesthetic modes of action. For Austin and Leander, integrating a broader range of material-aesthetic practices into International Social Sciences (iss) is not merely a responsible position, but also an ethical imperative, infinitely more desirable than their reading of iss at present whereby social scientists are framed as remaining on the outside and at a distance. This is particularly important when considered alongside the contemporary prevalence of global violence, injustice, and oppression.
Without taking up that responsibility, they argue, social scientists abdicate the possibility of a more worldly and socially-embedded social science with the possibility to evoke alternative political futures. This is a task where design and imagination are central, especially when forms of violence and injustice have invested this world and are not only reducible to physical violence.
In some ways the text of Arnaud Kurze and Christopher Lamont, via a parallel line of thought, proposes similar moves around the field transitional justice, peace and reconciliation. As the authors explain in a paper entitled Breaking the Transitional Justice Machine: Exploring Spatiality, Space Travel, and In-between Spaces in Research Practice, transitional justice scholarship operates at a positivist level, or is trying to explain certain, and desired, outcomes rather than destabilizing and unsettling unequal power relations. Drawing on postcolonial literature, the authors argue that barriers to moving our understanding of transitional justice forward are both conceptual and methodological.
Conceptual hurdles are visible through narrow justice demands often limited to the context of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, thus normalizing injustice in liberal democratic and postcolonial contexts. Instead, they propose an alternative design by expanding the conceptual lens of transitional justice to include racial, socio-economic, and postcolonial injustice, and, second, by advancing a more critical methodological approach that puts at its center unequal power relationships, and new methods of investigations. They are inspired by Liu’s work on ‘in between spaces’ of social fields and the role of social actors she describes as “guardians, brokers or space travellers”. For example, youth activists are often untethered from existing understandings of transitional justice deeply embedded among practitioners and therefore advance demands that often are dismissed as falling outside the scope of what transitional justice has been designed for or can deliver. Opening up discussions to include their praxis however can change profoundly what a reflexive dimension of transitional justice can do.
