International Political Sociology. Transversal Lines
An interview with Didier Bigo, following the publication of International Political Sociology. Transversal Lines (Routledge), coedited with Tugba Basaran, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet and R.B.J. Walker. This publication is the perfect opportunity to come-back on the creation of IPS (the journal) ten years ago and to question Didier Bigo about the long way this intellectual current has come in ten years.
This work comes out almost ten years after the publication of the first issue of the journal International Political Sociology (IPS) that you cofounded with R.B.J. Walker (University of Victoria). It is a nice “nod” for CERI, who accompanied you at the time.
Yes, absolutely. When R.B.J Walker and I launched the journal, the section of the International Studies Association (ISA) I had created with Martin Heisler had already existed for five years and started to be a real success. However, proposing an additional journal not directed by US colleagues, and putting forward distinctive theoretical lines proved to be a real challenge. All of CERI and its director at the time, Christophe Jaffrelot, supported the project. Additionally, Bruno Latour, who had recently arrived as scientific director at Sciences Po, equally co-financed the journal along with the ISA’s grant. This allowed us to move beyond the “small scale business” of the journals Alternatives and Cultures & Conflicts and to have money to recruit a very competent, professional assistant editor, you, Miriam Perier. The role of Tom Volgy (the secretary general of ISA) was to make ISA an association that acts as a promotor for international relations that would be represented by individuals of all countries. This also helped us a lot. Many groups of researchers who felt marginalized in their national institutions were reunited and found the IPS journal in line for exchanging ideas, constructing collective international projects and especially publishing their articles. Had CERI not been involved from the beginning, this journal would not exist.
Since that era, what path has IPS taken, and can you speak quickly about what IPS is?
International Political Sociology is an intellectual current that largely regroups people everywhere in the world who felt uncomfortable with realist and transnationalist approaches and even more with the way in which some of the “big bosses” who lead the main journals excluded from IR epistemological reflections political theory discussing the international scene, sociological reflections on the transnational political dynamics, and more generally, sociological constructivism, which was in fact only accepted if it was in its idealist version of values, called “soft constructivism”. Sociological constructivism, analysing the practices and dynamics of fields of power and more specifically the struggles between actors around symbolic power—which are not all dependent of state regulations—was not accepted. This sociological move insisting on practices comes from discussions born directly in the section and the journal and was described as the “practice turn” and later on, as the “material turn”.
This originates from the revival of interest for the works of Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour and their different interpretations by IR theorists. These controversies spread beyond the framework of the journal and members of the section and became key issues of most of the important recent works of international relations on the complicated connections between the heritage of American political science from the 1970-80s and the contributions of European political sociology, of socio-historical and genealogical studies of politics, as well as of the impact of political anthropology of globalisation, and finally of the studies of the practices of the “political societies” in the world that refuse to see the western world, either as a model or a counterexample.
In other terms, IPS contributed to some sort of revival, another way of thinking about international relations…
IPS has broken the narrow framework of the international relations “discipline” that considered it held both an object and a specific knowledge. This doing, IPS profoundly reconnected international relations with the other larger domains analysing the political. The breaking of this bounded framework was also made possible by the journal’s major choice, i.e. to accept manuscripts in many languages, and to do the editorial follow-up and peer reviews in the authors’ language before asking to translate it in English, if the text was accepted; a popular practice that encouraged many major international relations journals to align with the new standard.
And on the international scene of journals, if one can say so, where is IPS today?
In 2011—at the end of our first mandate, that is to say, five years—the journal was ranked as one of the first of ten in three different rankings: 5th in sociology, 7th in political science and 7th in international relations. That was extraordinary! Through the impact of the journal, many young researchers, who have gained responsibilities very fast have invested in the section which is now the fourth of ISA, the most cosmopolitan in terms of nationalities, and the one that has the youngest members. It attracts huge amounts of readers, and publishers have understood that very well. They asked us to create a book series as well as a handbook, specifically for International Political Sociology. I therefore returned to serve as co-director of a book series by Routledge. The books are published in paperback immediately and I have to say that they are sold at a very affordable price.
The title of the work that you just co-edited is Transversal Lines. Does this mean that IPS is interdisciplinary? Can one say that the IPS works at de-disciplinarizing the study of international relations? And if so, why do you consider what was, and still is necessary?
The title Transversal Lines aims to challenge firstly the intellectual boundaries setting the international, as a supranational level, and the way it was opposed to the individuals, considered therefore as marginal for IR or to be considered only in their national frameworks. Secondly it reconnects and builds bridges between the disciplinary boundaries that have been opposed (international relations and anthropology) and creates a line which allows their connections with sociology and political theory. Struggling against these fragmentations of knowledge that delimit zones and cut groups of researchers who believe that they have specific and different subjects, is necessary but without actually falling in to the “totalizing imaginary” that would aim at an international political sociology like a meta-discipline, that would search for a “social whole”.
This is why we insist on the fact that in our approach, and the book reports this debate, International – Political – Sociology enables to connect, to reconcile — on the basis of precise observations—what has been fruitlessly opposed as a difference between international relations and other comparative approaches of societies.
You do not oppose international relations and “area studies”…
Not at all, they have to be reconnected, but it goes beyond these questions. Thinking in terms of connections does not mean trying to return to an explanation of the social as a unitary pre-constructed entity. On the contrary, it means understanding the divisions, the intersections, the knick-knacks of the real, and their differentiated temporality. Simultaneously, it is a way to show how the reflexivity on these original forms actually undermines false grandiose syntheses. This reflexivity, born through fieldwork, gives a view of the contradictions and the collusions of the disciplinary doxa of international relations, of sociology and political theory. It also permits the understanding of their mutual blindness. It is therefore an understanding of the international that is not limited to state cooperation and a hierarchy of levels of analysis, on one hand. It isn’t either an understanding of the international that considers itself as global and does not understand all the delimitation effects of borders and boundaries of all sorts. Starting from the relations between actors (and not from the actors themselves) we must think—horizontally—the dynamic processes of power that bind actors together and that structure fields whose logics of attraction and power struggles differ. Therefore, one rediscovers the trajectories, the lines of force, the wrestling matches, the possibilities of bifurcations... similar to Kandinski’s paintings.
Didier Bigo was interviewed by Miriam Périer, CERI
