Peter F. Trumbore is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, and currently serves as Chair of the International Studies Association Online Media Caucus (OMC). He received his Ph.D in 1999 from the University of Connecticut after spending nearly a decade as a newspaper editor. His research falls into the broad categories of international conflict and conflict management, and foreign...
This piece is the second in a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Writing about America’s economic strategy deficit got me pondering why the United States had such a stunted economic imagination. How could the government that many consider to be the global economic hegemon be inept at economic statecraft? For one thing, I think the popular impression of America as...
I wrote the first draft of “What’s it Like to Be a State?” sometime in late 2017, during an unusual time in both my personal life and my research career. I was about halfway through my PhD at the University of Cambridge and was feeling both immensely homesick and quite bored—trapped in a small town that felt ripped from the Victorian era. I filled my free time watching large numbers of pre-recorded NBA games and, also, for some reason, reading philosophy of mind….
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...