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The responsible intellectual: Adviser and critic
... This was also acknowledged by Morgenthau who after decades of trying in vain to influence the US foreign policy was forced to concede how "power positions do not yield to arguments, however rationally and morally valid, but only to superior power" (quoted in Myers, 1992: 68). Keeping this in mind, a persistent critic risks at worst becoming a permanent outsider or a hermit, or at best a tolerated court jester -harmless but at times at least entertaining (see also Neumann, 2008, who traces the genealogy of the critical intellectual to "the positions of the Holy Fool and the court jester"). A case in point could perhaps be Noam Chomsky whose endless flow of critical books and articles about the US role in the world are likely to have a much bigger impact on the European blogosphere than on US foreign policy. ...
... 9 The last and perhaps the preferred option is to see the two as more fluid strategies that can be applied depending on the context and the issue at hand. Indeed, Neumann (2008) sees the role of an adviser or a critic as a dynamic process. For him it is possible to be both-and and not simply either-or when it comes to the choice of being an adviser or a critic. ...
... Policymaking elites and the general public would then gain a broader set of choices than continuing to explicitly or tacitly support policies that overstate their abilities to avoid future nuclear weapons use. The point is not to reject the possibility of speaking to the elites, but rather to emphasize the need to inform citizens and, if one speaks to elites, to do so beyond their stated needs and their terms of the debate (Neumann 2008;Pelopidas 2014). ...
Security studies scholarship on nuclear weapons is particularly prone to self-censorship. In this essay, I argue that this self-censorship is problematic. The vulnerability, secrecy, and limits to accountability created by nuclear weapons (Deudney 2007, 256–57; Born, Gill, and Hânggi 2010; Cohen 2010, 147) call for responsible scholarship vis-à-vis the general public. This need for renewed and expanded scholarly responsibility is especially pressing given current plans among nuclear-weapon states to “modernize” their nuclear arsenals, committing their citizens and children to live in nuclear-armed countries and, a fortiori, a nuclear armed world (Mecklin 2015). Despite this need, the existing reflexive literature in security studies—calling for greater scholarly responsibility (see Steele and Amoureux 2016; Waever 2015, 95–100)—has neither specifically focused on nuclear weapons nor explored the forms of self-censorship identified here as shaping a modality of responsibility. In making this case, I define self-censorship in nuclear weapons scholarship as unnecessary boundaries on scholarly discourse within security studies.
In this article, I identify three forms of self-censorship: an epistemological self-censorship that denies the normative foundations of nuclear studies; a rhetorically induced form of censorship that leads scholars to stay away from radical reorderings of the world (e.g., world government or the abolition of nuclear weapons) because of the joint rhetorical effects of the tropes of non-proliferation and deterrence; and, finally, a “presentist imaginal” form of self-censorship that leads scholars to obfuscate the implicit bets they make on their considered possible futures and their constitutive effects on the “present” they analyze. I do not claim that these are the only forms of self-censorship. I also leave aside the non-discursive structures of knowledge production and the institutional and political constraints on nuclear studies. However, as I show in the concluding section, these three forms of self-censorship result in an
... The last, and perhaps the preferred, option is to see the two as more fluid strategies that can be applied depending on the context and the issue(s) at hand. Indeed, Neumann (2008) sees the role of an adviser or a critic as a dynamic process. For him, it is possible to be both-and not simply either-or when it comes to the choice of being an adviser or a critic. ...
In the contemporary world also, the academic community is faced with increasing calls for being useful and relevant. But what is the actual space for academic expertise and policy analysis in the making of foreign policy? How do the two coincide and coexist temporally? The article takes its starting point the work of Robert Cox and Fred Chernoff to debate the issue of policy-relevant knowledge and theory. In addition, the article seeks to analyze the spatial and temporal aspects of providing scholarly analysis in the actual making of policy. Drawing from this, the article concludes by sketching out three strategies, or roles, a scholar may apply in trying to get the message across different audience groups and in different contingencies.
Questions regarding the political significance of international relations (IR) and how scholarly practice relates to/constitutes a political practice appear newly resonant, but are longstanding concerns. This article utilizes the growing literature on temporality within international politics to analyze the political potential of these intellectual interventions and generate new ways of framing scholarly practice. We observe two trends within the field. First, IR as a discipline remains largely—although not exclusively—imagined as an English-language discipline generated by scholars in the Global North. Each area's political discourse is currently dominated by fears surrounding foundational political and institutional change due to the rise of racialized authoritarianism within these self-imagined democratic societies. Despite these purportedly dramatic developments, there has not been a similarly dramatic shift in the scholarly relationship with politics. Scholars continue to successfully intervene in their collective presents, but scholarship itself remains oriented toward enduring claims that accumulate knowledge and resist the possibility of “failure.” This paper theorizes the temporality of critical intervention to better relate positively to the bodies that co-constitute our political present. Ultimately, this paper concludes by arguing for a reconsideration of contradiction and failure as frames for thinking scholarly practice in time.
Joseph Pearson) Fearless Speech
- Foucault Michel
Deux intellectuals dans le siècle
- Sirinelli Jean-François