After the Flood

The insecurity that plagues my mind is threatening to flood the pages that follow. The assignment alert signals for the floodgates to open. The insecurity gushes in, submerging the last of ‘delusion’ in the icy cold waters of self awareness. When the current gains stability and the flood develops its course, two fragments of my being are found washed up on the banks of self awareness, ‘I’ and ‘Me’.  

While that's hopefully as far as my flood analogy goes, the relationship with self reflection that I have developed is older and more complex than I am willing to share. At every stage in my life (I’m sure this holds true for some reading as well) I had convinced myself that I was completely self aware. The delusion was unhealthy but it was comforting. As I moved on from one year to the next, it became difficult to not confront the privilege I existed in. I never questioned where the water in the taps came from or where the waste would go. I never had to. 

That is until I had the most ‘un-realist’ - realist experience of ‘seeing is believing’. I saw women and their toddler children emerge from their tarpaulin homes, waiting at signals for those few minutes to collect the water that kept flowing out of the water tanker that was destined for an apartment complex. I learnt that water is a question of (in)security that day. I saw the third party vendors in SNU having to manually segregate the biodegradable and non biodegradable waste despite there being labeled bins across campus. I learnt that waste generation and segregation is a question of (in)security that day. I call it ‘un-realist’ because like Ken Booth so eloquently puts it these are issues that reflect the “profound realist incuriosity about the world's `realities'” (Booth 1994, 8) and yet the manner in which I realized  these issues was to first see and then to believe that they exist, giving them the positivist edge of realism. 

The more I engaged with the un-realist realist issues, I began exploring the possibilities of  the post positivist approach of ‘believing is seeing’. My personal experiences of vulnerability as a young girl began to factor into how I viewed social and political relations. The colleagues and family friends of my parents who had narrated their unfortunate lived experiences of casteism and its multiple manifestations in Indian polity drove me to realize that there is a caste, class, gender perspective on every security issue, including that of the women needing water and the third party waste segregators of SNU. 

*Flash flood of questions that I promise are relevant*

Would the women have enough water to safely menstruate? Are the implicit assumptions of patriarchy requiring her to collect water and use it in accordance with the needs of the family, as opposed to her own sanitation requirements? Do caste practices inhibit access to water and complicate matters further? Are the third party workers in this profession because of the caste dynamics in Dadri? Are they unable to mobilize and refuse to manually scavenge because the administration and vendor organizations work on a similar caste and class based logic? Does the student’s choice to disregard the labels on the bins say something about their caste and class privilege? How are these not ‘national security’ questions? Does designating them as national security concerns resolve the problem at hand? Have I lost your interest  with all these questions?

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I like to believe that I developed what Cynthia Enloe terms as ‘feminist curiosity’ (Shephard 2009, 209). Two words that made ‘me’, the growing IR scholar, grin as I read them because they confirmed that subjectivities matter and so ‘I’ matter. I also believe that Enloe’s forumation can be opposed to (and perhaps complement on some level) the ‘realist incuriosity’ mentioned in Booth’s broad concerns regarding the domination of the objective, singular reality. 

The significance of plurality is an idea that I wholly welcomed only in the last semester when I took a sociology course called the ‘Anthropology of Climate Change’. Early on, we discussed the concept of ontological pluralism in the context of perspectives in the midst of the climate change debate. I realized that the concept had implications much broader than climate discourse. It essentially requested us to respect and accommodate variations in circumstances, perceptions, traditions, identities and the realities that we create. It is a concept that I think security theorists and policy makers have a lot to gain from because the dearth of subjectivity is evident and bordering on harmful.  Booth also succinctly mentions  what I spent a paragraph on by stating that “`Security' is what we make it.” (Booth 1994, 15)

Finally, I think it is worth making a comparison between Ken Booth’s account and the interview of Robert Cox that was assigned to us in the third week. Much of what Booth explains as the connection between self, interests and theory is closely linked to Cox’s famous quote “theory is always for someone, for some purpose” (Schouten 2009, 5). Our ‘socially bestowed identities’ have a direct consequence on the theories we formulate and therefore are not ‘neutral’. As Booth mentions, critical security studies views theories as “constitutive rather than explanatory” (Booth 1994, 16) and acknowledging that theories ‘constitute’ several, interlinked realities is the advantage that critical scholarship holds over realism. 

Through the series of disjointed paragraphs it is perhaps now evident that self reflection for me is messy and complicated among other things. As I conclude this week’s blog post I worry that the sincerity with which I have articulated myself is a concern in the reader’s mind. I’m going to push that pestering thought behind the floodgates for another flood, some other time. As far as the flood analogy goes, after the flood, there is silt. ‘I’ and ‘me’ will hopefully someday become silt.  

References

Booth, Ken. 1994. Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist. N.p.: YCISS Occasional Paper Number 26.

Schouten, P. 2009. Robert Cox on World Orders, Historical Change, and Purpose of Theory in International Relations, Theory Talk#37. N.p.: Theory Talks. http://www.theory-talks.org/2010/03/theory-talk-37.html.

Shephard, Laura J. 2009. “Gender,Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies.” Political Studies Review 7 (2): 208-219.