Iver B. Neumann

Diplomacy, the arts, and popular culture

Diplomacy usually takes place in settings that are constructed not only with a view to functionality, but also to beauty. Beauty lends status and ambiance to diplomatic sites. The first part of this entry discusses the use of art by diplomats. The second part discusses how diplomacy is represented in popular culture and art. Since very few people have first‐hand knowledge of diplomacy, and diplomacy as such is rarely given much exposure in the news, most people owe their understanding of diplomacy to representations of diplomacy in popular culture and the arts. These representations have legitimacy effects. They feed back into how diplomats represent themselves to the public and, by extension, into how politicians represent issues to the public. In this sense, representations of diplomacy have an indirect constitutive effect on diplomacy.

Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking

We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

Governmentality

Governmentality is a concept that Michel Foucault developed in response to critics that found no subjects in his analyses of power. It refers to how subjects such as states may govern from afar by conducting the conduct of other subjects such as NGOs, individuals etc. This chapter traces the emergence of the concept, relates it to Foucault’s two other modes of power (sovereignty and discipline) and précis its use across the social sciences.

Security, ethnicity, nationalism

In this article, Neumann asks which aspects of ethnicity and nationalism that may be brought into sharper focus if we read these two phenomena with a view to how they have been shaped by security concerns. The first part of the article clears up some problems inherent in such exercises in diachronic concept analysis, and establishes the temporal area of validity for the analysis. The second part argues that the very emergence of the concept of ethnos (and its Roman translation, gens) was immersed in security thinking. It emerged as a way in which Greeks and Romans imposed order on what was outside that was not there before. Ethnic groups became ethnic by being interpellated by a stronger polity, and the process was driven first and foremost by security concerns. The third part illustrates this with a case study of the emergence of Slavic ethnicity. The fourth part of the article discusses how, with the advent of nationalism, there is an inversion. If ethnicity was imposed on subaltern groups, then European empires attempted to deny nationalism to such groups by insisting that they did not have the history to deserve it. Once again, security concerns played a key role, for as rightly seen by empires, nationhood could be an important anti-colonial resource. The paper ends by noting how nationalism invariably underlines the vitality of the Self, and juxtaposes it with the decrepitude of Others. With reference to present-day Russia, I note how the use of such organic metaphors in and of themselves securitize the relationship between nations, for the implication is that the old should disappear for the new to live, and that highlights security concerns on both sides of the relationship.

Power, Culture and situated research methodology. Autobiography,Field, Text

This book explores the extent to which our lives become an important underlying context for data production. Drawing on insights from Gestalt psychology, feminism and post-structuralism, it discusses how to situate yourself in the different phases of research.

Poststructuralists Also Have a Duty of Methodological Care

On Diplomacy (Der Derian, 1987) wasthe first attempt at bringing theory to the study of diplomacy, and it was a solid piece of empirical research. However, I will leave the celebration of these qualities to others, and concentrate on the question of methodology, where the book also has importance for the discipline as such. Methodology, Patrick Jackson (2011) tells us, is the way in which we get our data (the production of which may be by way of many different methods) to tell us something about what lies beyond that data. The area of validity, that is, the domain that the data are supposed to tell us something about, is in this case known Western history; not pre-history, traditionally defined as the period before writing, and not the future.

Russiske nasjonalister vs vestvendte siden Den kalde krigens slutt

Hegemonic-Order Theory: A Field-Theoretic Account

This article outlines a field-theoretic variation of hegemonic-order theory — one inspired primarily by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. We argue that hegemony derives from the possession of a plurality of meta-capital in world politics; hegemons exercise “a power over other species of power, and particularly over their rate of exchange.” Recasting conventional hegemonic-order theories along these lines carries with it at least three advantages: it helps bridge the differences between realist and neo-Gramscian approaches to hegemony; it provides scaffolding for exploring the workings of hegemony and hegemonic ordering across different scales; and it better addresses the fact that hegemonic powers are enabled and constrained by international order itself. After reviewing some of the major variants of hegemonic-order theory, we explore Bourdieu’s understanding of hegemony and cognate concepts. We then elaborate on our field-theoretic approach, with examples drawn from US foreign relations and the Roman Empire. Finally, we provide a longer illustrative sketch in the form of a discussion of Roman ordering and its longue durée influence on social, political, and cultural fields in world politics.

Russia’s Return as True Europe, 1991–2017

Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia has identified itself in opposition to Europe. In the late 1980s, Michael Gorbachev and associates forged a liberal representation of Europe and initiated a Western-oriented foreign policy. Against this westernizing or liberal representation of Europe stood what was at first a makeshift group of old Communists and right-wing nationalists, who put forward an alternative representation that began to congeal around the idea that the quintessentially Russian trait was to have a strong state. This article traces how this latter position consolidated into a full-fledged xenophobic nationalist representation of Europe, which marginalized first other forms of nationalism and then, particularly since 2013, liberal representations of Europe. The official Russian stance is now that Russia itself is True Europe, a conservative great power that guards Europe’s true Christian heritage against the False Europe of decadence and depravity to its west.