I appreciate this opportunity to remark on Adam Lerner’s (hereafter, just ‘Adam’), excellent 2020 International Theory article on state consciousness. I recall first chatting with Adam about this paper when it was still in development, over a coffee in Prague at the 2018 European International Studies Association (EISA) annual meeting. Some of what I’ll mention here will be a rehashing – but also rethinking – of what I told him then. To...
state takes precedence over their own lives. Focusing on states as persons distracts us from how violence travels across levels of analysis. States don’t do violence to one another. They inflict violence on actual living beings.
Alexandria Innes is a researcher in the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London, and a lecturer in International Politics. Alexandria specialises in the international politics of migration. Theoretically, her research is situated at the intersection of migration studies and critical security studies in International Relations. Her current project contributes to the Violence, Health and Society Consortium, funded by the UK...
I have mixed feelings about Adam’s article. On the one hand, I think it does a very good job of outlining the realist metaphysical argument for treating states and other similar corporate actors as conscious, or as having minds, if you’re the sort of person who needs that. On the other hand, I am not the sort of person who needs that, and I’m not sure who is. The awkwardness of international politics is a vastly...
A state of mind is a contagious thingSpread it around you never know what the future brings…Marillion, “State of Mind” n his later writings, Ludwig Wittgenstein spends quite a bit of time thinking about the problem of exactly what we are doing when we refer to the “inner” state of some entity, as juxtaposed with “outer” evidence of that entity’s behavior. We see someone grab at their arm and yell “ouch!”, and then...
Way back in the summer I commissioned a symposium on Adam Lerner's provocative 2021 International Theory (vol. 13, no 2: 260-286) article, "What's it Like to be a State? An Argument for State Consciousness." Questions of consciousness pervade the social sciences. Yet, despite persistent tendencies to anthropomorphize states, most International Relations scholarship implicitly adopts the position that humans are conscious and states are not....
Simon Pratt is a Lecturer in Political Science at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Prior to this he was a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies, in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol, and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he...
As long as international organizations have existed their relationships with their member states have been conflict-ridden. States use numerous methods to influence international organizations according to their interests or to contest the authority and policies of international organizations, including by reducing financial contribution, threatening withdrawal, and by actually exiting. Between 2014 and 2020, the United States cut its...
Gisela Hirschmann is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She holds a Ph.D. from Free University Berlin, Germany. Prior to her appointment at Leiden, she was Assistant Professor (Junior Professor) for Global Governance and Humanitarian Action at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She held a Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship at the European University Institute (EUI) between 2015 and 2017, and a...
Peter Cutler is living the quiet life of a Princeton professor when the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate asks him to become his foreign policy adviser. Cutler takes the job and his gambit pays off: the presidential candidate wins and Cutler is appointed to be Under Secretary of State in the new administration. As he becomes more and more absorbed in the new environment, he is shocked to learn how ruthless political life in Washington...
Zoltán Fehér is a diplomat-scholar. He is currently an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center at the University of Notre Dame and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for American...
Back in the Duck of Minerva's heyday, Jon Western was one of its anchors. Indeed, it wasn't that long ago that we were talking about his returning. Jon said that he'd gained important perspective on the state of higher education from his time as dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke. He wanted to share that with a broader audience. That won't happen. Jon died on Saturday. I don't have the details. Just a...