Theorizer and Theorized: An interplay of Agency

 The Intervention of the Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David

Courtesy : The J. Paul Getty Museum 

Ken booth in his article “Reflections of a Fallen Realist” sets out to encounter the question of his self-perception, and its dialectical relationship with evolution of his study as an IR scholar and theorizer of strategy studies. The attempt is made to know how, contrary to conventional realist assumption, the concrete and more so “real” changes taking place “out there” in the international arena are contingent on one happening “in here”; inside the subjectivity of the individual pursuing and theorizing the given world.  Booth’s academic career starts from the positivist lineage wherein “seeing is believing” and the emphasis is on the sustained and uninterrupted empirical observation of a phenomenon. Yet, the contents of the experience must be constrained and orderly in certain ways, and these ways are determined not by what is given to the senses but by the self-activity of our understanding in constituting the unity of perception: the fact that all my possible experiences are so connected that they are in principle ascribable to the same self. This “self”, in sociological terms, is bifurcated in I and me. The psychological and cultural, respectively.

Here, the category of “me” in cultural terms is explicitly structural and a function of broader institutional and social identification providing an action specific “social role”. This role is sustained and bestowed in regular acts of social recognition. A security analyst is made into one by regular association with specific institutions. The “I”, on the other hand, as a dimension of self is more amorphous; given its reflexive tendencies to form and attain meaning; and in practice influenced by identifications such as gender, race, upbringing and so on. Giving it much nuanced- phenomenological bearings. Humans are a meaning creating species, and the creation and recreation of identity is an important part of the (international) politics of meaning. Security and insecurity themselves play an important role in the making of meaning (Booth). And if international relations are as, Christine Sylvester phrases it to be, “Relations international” the meaning and practice thereof is to play a significant role in our understanding of security and agency.

For the writer(me) the coming together of a sustained “I” independent of immediate causal affects and fully imbibed with a self-conscious subjectivity came through a series of “sensitizing events”. They jolted the hitherto unrealized dimensions of the world and brought out the “I” from it’s natural, ignorant state of limbo. Making, yet unnoticed dimensions to illuminate in novel and modified light; in effect making one sensitive to what was earlier known as category of abstract knowledge.  One such “sensitizing event” was chanced upon in a conversation with female friends, pursuing bachelor education in Delhi University. Writer had known them since school days, ambitious and smart, they talked about persistent fear of sexual harassment they were living in. The experience they shared was convocation into the horrors of nonchalant gender harassment passing off as normal in the city. This encounter single handedly turned the once statist assumption of security and policing into a jeopardized idea. The failure of state here to ensure and protect from a sustained form of violence revealed the impotence rarely accounted for in the realist assumption of world politics. In one moment, the matter and form of violence and insecurity were made so intimate to the personal being; leading to an inevitable moderation in not just one’s social attitudes “me” but also phycological ones “I”.

The implicit understanding of security, and thus desired peace, hitherto is one influenced by the idea of securing state in all its manifold dimensions, for it alone is the securing pivot of larger security interests of the subjects of the state. This, formulation however takes anarchy of international politics as a starting point and thus seeks to establish some resemblance of order in the practice of theorizing it; yielding the dichotomy of war/ peace. This perception is fundamental to the problem of gender violence, since it very much dissolves the problems of every day, in between existence of sustained, systemic violence. While the security of the sate is to prevent from a slip into anarchy, to establish order; this pursuit of order in manifolds ways tends to violence. State itself becomes a source of violence, by practicing violence towards a perceived threat but also by the virtue of being myopic to human subjectivity. Thus, the particular sensitizing incident in question reveled the gendered nature of relations: personal and international. State as an analytical conception is in reality a function of relations performed by gendered bodies, thus the identification of its violence, as opposed to security, must be deeply embedded in such gendered understanding. Moreover the phenomenological undercurrents of this understanding  also problematizes the notion of analyzing the acts of Violence since the analysis is surely conducted by gendered bodies susceptible to further reciprocating the violence it attempts to dissect and make a subject of inquiry.

 Hence, conducted analysis of self and its insecurity must inform our attempts to offer more nuanced theories of security that focuses analytical attention on the complex construction of agency and violence, within individual and in ones suspended being in the international world. This analysis renders the normative idea of security into a realm of exercised interposing by both theorizer and theorized. A specific, Problematique field of practice. At the core of which remains the notion of sovereignty and its defense and imposition. The promised approach seeks to conceptualize the sovereignty of the individual, not as an abstract imposed allegory but as a mode within the larger matrix of “Relations International”.   If we want to rethink or reconstruct the concept of security, therefore, it is necessary that we keep an eye on the entire field of practice. (Weaver) Aim shall be to identify the desired agency we exercise (and lack)  in the matrix of International relations and appropriately assigning instrumentality, identified by self identification, within the theorizing frame work to each aspect and mode of agents interacting.

Citations 

• Booth, Ken. “Security and Self Reflections of a Fallen Realist,” YCISS Occasional Paper Paper 26: October 1994.
• Shepherd, Laura J.  ‘Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies’. Political Studies Review 7. 2009. (2): 208–19.
• Waever, Ole. "Securitization And Desecuritization", On Security, By Ronnie D. Lipschutz. On Security: Chapter 3: November 2002