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Interview – Arjun Chowdhury

13 0
05.04.2024

Arjun Chowdhury (PhD Minnesota) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia where he teaches introductory and graduate courses on International Relations and Security Studies. His primary areas of research include conflict, security, peacekeeping and foreign policy studies. He is the author of The Myth of International Order: Why Weak States Persist and Alternatives to the State Fade Away (Oxford: 2018), which won the Robert L. Jervis-Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association as well as the Hedley Bull Prize in International Relations from the European Consortium for Political Research. He is currently working on a new approach to systemic IR theory and an article from this project is forthcoming in Security Studies.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

In recent years, I have been most excited by work in historical IR – e.g. recent books by Swati Srivastava, Ayse Zarakol, Andrew Phillips but there are lots of others I can name – and how it has pluralized our view of world politics. Some of this work has expanded attention to different types of actors, like private companies and pirates, and imperial and racialized patterns of world politics. I will note that the latter themes are not new: Siba Grovogui, Sankaran Krishna, Roxanne Doty, and others were writing about this in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. I have argued elsewhere that the prior scholarship represents a road not taken at a time when there was great theoretical ferment in the field. That ferment has resulted in greater pluralism, yes, but also greater fragmentation. Which brings me back to the recent works in historical IR: to see these important themes being revisited now gives me hope that we can incorporate them into our theoretical frameworks.

Specifically, I think that by looking at the protean nature of thinking about race, or human variation more generally, which is associated with material power – it was the more powerful actors who espoused racialist views – we can arrive at a better theorization of how ideas have effects on world politics. The modal understanding of constructivism, which identifies the effect of ideational phenomena like norms because they militate against self-interest is exhausted in terms of theoretical insight. Ideas can exercise effects even when they are associated with power and self-interest, but to identify these effects we need some variation in ideas themselves, and that’s what historical IR gives us.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

While I don’t subscribe to all of the views associated with the approach, I have become more sympathetic to the neoliberal/public choice argument that regulation and state intervention can have negative consequences. I’ll elaborate more on this below, but I came to understand in the research for my book that as the power of the state and its role in everyday life has expanded, we in the study of IR have oddly moved away from seeing the state as a threat to its’ own people, which an earlier generation of scholars like Ted Gurr or James Scott were quite........

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