This collective discussion proposes a novel understanding of intelligence as a social phenomenon, taking place in a social space that increasingly involves actors and professional fields not immediately seen as part of intelligence. This discussion is a response to the inherent functionalism in Intelligence Studies (IS) that conceives of intelligence as a cycle serving policymakers. Instead, our interventions seek to problematize and break with this notion of the cycle and show what an alternative study of intelligence would look like. In the first part of the discussion, we situate our intervention in the broader fields of IS and International Political Sociology. Espousing a transdisciplinary approach, we build our four interventions as transversal lines cutting through a social space in which agents with differing stakes participate and reframe the meaning and practice of intelligence. Intelligence professionals not only have to reckon with policymakers, but also increasingly with law enforcement agents, representatives from the science and technology sector, judges, lawyers, activists, and Internet users themselves. Each move takes a step further away from the intelligence cycle by introducing new empirical sites, actors, and stakes.
The contributions to this Forum on Ritual and Authority in World Politics examine the role that ritual performances play in the constitution of positions of authority and the maintenance of relations of authority in historical and contemporary international relations. The Forum takes as its point of departure three related observations: (i) that recent years have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in ritual as a recurring feature of international practice, but (ii) that this recent interest in ritual has not extended, thus far, to the study of international authority, (iii) in spite of political anthropologists' long-standing claim that the performance of ritual is absolutely crucial to the production of authority. The performance of ritual grounds, makes tangible and enhances various forms of authority, including forms of international authority, historical and contemporary. The contributions to this Forum demonstrate the veracity of that claim in five different empirical contexts-Byzantine diplomacy, early modern cross-cultural encounters, British imperialism in India, military lawyering in America's armed forces, and the casting of ballots in Crimea and the US-and attempt also to explain precisely how it is that ritual served to undergird and stabilise authority in these various instances. The return of ritual in international relations(Jorg Kustermans and Ted Svensson)
What can we learn about the 'international' through the 'transnational'? This article investigates transnational spaces and practices in the context of international law and their transformative influence on our understanding of the international. I argue that the relationship between the transnational and the international is not dichotomous, but an expression of the shifting location of power and authority in social relations across scales. The article contributes to this special issue by tracing dynamics of actualisation and reification of the international in various literatures. Reviewing uses of the 'transnational' in law and International Relations, I first show how the concept was used to unsettle the reason of state that defines both disciplines. The second part explores the relationship of the transnational and international through Bourdieusian studies of international law, in which the transnational is used as a strategic space for action generative of new legal practices and a social space in which actors who hold various capitals participate in shaping international law. Finally, I analyse how international political sociology has unsettled both the transnational and the international through the image of transversal lines cutting across these spaces.I would like to thank Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Janis Grzybowski, Pinar Bilgin, Benjamin Herborth, Karen Smith and three anonymous peer reviewers for their great feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of the article.
This article argues that spokespersons who claim to speak on behalf of a social group cannot escape the structural problem of delegation whereby speaking in someone’s name entails speaking instead of someone. This form of delegated and authorised silencing through the promise of empowerment imposes symbolic violence on a group which recognises the spokesperson as a valid representative, without recognising its own potential disenfranchisement. I build on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological writings on language and symbolic power to theorise the trajectories of authorisation of spokespersons. In doing so, I critically engage with theories in International Relations which rely on a separation between speaker and audience to analyse the legitimation of political speech. Instead, I reformulate the speaker/audience relation through the concept of symbolic power and introduce the category of the spoken-for. When spokespersons struggle over symbolic power, they seek to impose social classificatory categories on social groups and spaces. I illustrate these dynamics in the context of human rights politics in Crimea, showing how various spokespersons are engaged in a symbolic struggle over ‘authenticity’ of their speech and the ‘universal’ of human rights. I conclude by suggesting new lines of inquiry to analyse creative strategies to mitigate the spokesperson problem.
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