"In his new book, Daniel Drezner, renowned political commentator and Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago, applies contemporary theoretical approaches of IR to an interesting, although imaginative, case study: the threatening rise of zombies.
According to the author, each theory of IR provides different possible outcomes: realism would suggest an eventual "live-and-let-live" arrangement between the humans and zombies; liberalism would build a counter-zombie regime and a system of collective security centred upon long-term state interests, while constructivism, with its emphasis on identity and the social construction of reality, would focus on shaping a pluralistic security community in order to prevent further zombies outbreak and, concurrently, socializing existing undead into human society.
Testing the practical utility of realism, liberalism and constructivism against a worldwide zombie infestation has been, cleverly, the first attempt at theorizing a suitable model for making this complex set of different paradigms useful even in a political global environment characterized by the sociological concept of risk society. As a matter of fact, the possibility of a zombie invasion falls within the famous "unknown unknowns" paradigm of international security. As former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described it, "there are risks we know about, and risks we don't know we are running, and finally there are things we don't know we don't know": in this last case, the first concern for policy-makers and government officials should be to prevent and to adopt proactive policies against hypothesised future harm. The conclusion drawn by Drezner over the usefulness of contemporary IR theories in a risk society context is rather disappointing: for him, the ability of these approaches in explaining current global threats and challenges is literally circumscribed.
To remain in the realm of uncertainty and risk as identified by Rumsfeld, another potential though unreal example that could be used in order to value and assess the rightness of Drezner's final statements, is related to the UFOs world. Surprisingly, and differently from the zombies' category, a journal article about UFOs and international relations has already been released four years ago, and precisely on Political Theory. In this very well-known piece of paper Alexander Wendt and Robert Duvall state that the UFOs issue challenges directly the concept of sovereignty as devised so far. As a result, the sole existence of extraterrestrial aliens, and not their aggressive intentions or behaviours that characterize creatures intrinsically hostile to humans like zombies, could cast serious and dangerous doubts on the current system of states.
At this point, a question arises: if aliens threaten the concept of state sovereignty, upon which current IR theories are rooted, then could realism, liberalism and constructivism pose a solution to that? Put it simpler, can IR theory as conceived so far still be useful within a risky world repleted with "unknown unknowns"? In order to address a satisfactory response, three steps are needed: first of all, presenting the argument put forward by Wendt and Duvall; secondly, advancing hypothesis on IR response to the aliens threat and understand which common point they share against an existential menace; finally, drawing a conclusion about war as an effective counter-measure and risk management tool.
The most important argument posited by Wendt and Duvall, developed from the thinking of Jacques Deridda, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, claimed that "UFO ignorance is political rather than scientific": namely, both scholars sustain that official denials of extra-terrestrial aliens are grounded on the notion that these aliens own superior technology to humans. Therefore, such superiority could undermine the anthropocentric nature of human worldviews, just like their existence undermines some physical laws. Accordingly, in the absence of any scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life, political sovereignty remains an exclusively human concept. This is the reason why modern states have not devoted sufficient scientific resources to the UFO problem…"
Full article here.
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Amicalement
Armand
has been watching some documentaries lately set in the Western Desert, and was inspired to create this...
