International Relations

Cities provide a good illustration of the ontology of the theory of assemblage ( link ). Many forms of association, production, logistics, governance, and population processes came together from independent origins and with different causal properties. So one might imagine that unexpected dynamics of change are likely to be found in all urban settings. The medieval period is not known for its propensity for innovation, out-of-the-box thinking, or dynamic tendencies towards change. One thinks rather of the placid, continuing social relations of the English countryside, the French village, or the Italian town. There is the idea that a stultifying social order made innovation and change difficult. However, studies of medieval cities over the past century have cast some doubt on this stereotype. Henri Pirenne's lectures on the medieval city in 1923 were collected in Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade , and there are numerous clues indicating that Pirenne found ampl...

Social change and historical events are highly contingent processes, in a specific sense: they are the result of multiple causal influences that "could have been otherwise" and that have conjoined at a particular point in time in bringing about an event of interest. Contrast this situation with what we are looking for when we seek an explanation of a change or event. When we explain an event, we show how and why it was not random or accidental; we identify a set of circumstances that made it necessary or likely in the given circumstances. Contingency and explanation therefore seem to be in tension with each other: a wholly contingent world is perhaps one in which explanation of particular occurrences is impossible. The appearance of contradiction lessens when we realize that "contingent" is not the same as "random" or "uncaused". (See an earlier post for an effort to disentangle a number of related causal concepts; link .) When a uranium atom dec...

In  Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World  General Stanley McChrystal (with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell) describes a new, 21st-century conception of organization for large, complex activities involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of major sub-tasks. His concept is grounded in his experience in counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq. Rather than being constructed as centrally organized, bureaucratic, hierarchical processes with commanders and scripted agents, McChrystal argues that modern counter-terrorism requires a more decentralized and flexible system of action, which he refers to as "teams of teams". Information is shared freely, local commanders have ready access to resources and knowledge from other experts, and they make decisions in a more flexible way. The model hopes to capture the benefits of improvisation, flexibility, and a much higher level of trust and communication than is characteristic of typical military...

At the end of the nineteenth century -- which was also of the end of the Qing Dynasty -- China was not "modern". Its political institutions had crumbled, it had not substantially incorporated new technologies and forms of economic organization, and its military was still equipped with mid-century weapons and tactics. And, of course, the conditions for peasants and landless workers were abysmal; here is J. R. Tawney's description in a review of Chen Han-seng's 1936  Agrarian Problems in Southermost China  ( link ): Not only the whole surplus, but a large part of the cultivator's bare livelihood is skinned off by the landowner. As a result, the peasant falls increasingly into debt, and what the landowner and tax-collector leave, the usurer takes. "We close our survey, then," writes Dr. Chen Han-seng, "upon a note of misery beyond which human experience can hardly go, except in times of catastrophe." So much for the author's account of the fac...

Critical realism pays particular attention to the enduring structures that underlie various social orders and processes. But as argued in an earlier post , CR also needs to be able to provide a vocabulary for describing the "subjective" and normative aspects of the social order. Margaret Archer's evolving theory of morphogenesis provides resources for discussing precisely this dimension of the social world. The most recent volume of collaborative research emerging from Archer's morphogenesis research project, Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity  (2016), is highly relevant to the ontology of normative features of the social world. The book focuses on the stability of legal systems in changing societies; but it is relevant to broader issues of normative coherence as well. The book includes contributions from a dozen contributors, and there is an admirable degree of focus and coherence across the chapters. Particularly interesting to me were chapters by Doug Porp...

In the dystopian vision of the future described in William Gibson's Sprawl novels, there are few people with normal jobs, regular sources of income, retirement plans, and health insurance. Instead, there are hackers, freelance security guards, software traffickers, criminals at many levels, and a few distant corporations with scientists and managers. It is a grim picture. But how distant is that future from our current trajectory? Is that pretty much where we are heading? With the effort to shed 24 million Americans from health insurance; with the disappearance of "good" industrial jobs; with the rise of the gig economy; with the super-extreme development of inequalities of income and wealth, based on privileged positions in the financial and tech economies -- do these trends not seem like early-stage Gibson? Philippe van Parijs has long been an advocate for a very fundamental change to the legal and economic structure of a capitalist democracy, the establishment of a uni...