BISA at 50: Reflections and perspectives – Democracy and human rights challenges
In the last article for our 50th anniversary: reflections and perspectives series, former BISA Chair, Professor Ruth Blakeley, takes a look at the events that have shaped the discipline over the past 25 years.
As I considered 50 years of BISA, I focused on the area of the discipline I have worked in, and offer some reflections on the impacts the 9/11 terror attacks have had for global governance, international law, and Human Rights struggles. The 9/11 attacks occurred during the week I handed in my dissertation for my Masters degree in IR in 2001, so book-ended the start of my career.
BISA scholars can be proud of the work they have done over the last 24 years to demonstrate the significant challenge that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, following 9/11, posed to assumptions of an onward entrenchment of liberalism, and of marshalling the evidence to suggest we should be much more circumspect about progress. They have questioned the End of History thesis, which argued for the triumph of liberalism and the normalisation and extension of rights. Instead, many BISA scholars have pursued research agendas that document ongoing extreme violence in the service of elite state and corporate interests, on continuing and worsening conditions for women and girls, on the gross inequalities between the world's richest and poorest, and on the devastating impacts our geopolitics and economic systems are having on our natural environment.
But a question I have found myself asking over the last few months, is whether we paid sufficient attention to the risks of the return of authoritarianism and the seizure of the state by corporate power at the very heart of the world’s most powerful democracy? With hindsight I worry that we were slow to realise that the response to 9/11 was going to lay the ground for the assault on democracy and human rights, and the destruction of international norms and laws that we are now witnessing, and with devastating consequences. I also think we realised too late how much international institutions have been chipped away at, substantially eroded and undermined over the last 24 years. They are now in need of life support. We see this most starkly in Gaza, Ukraine, as well as in the devastating wars in Sudan, the DRC, and in the complete destruction of the livelihoods and freedoms of Afghan women and girls.
Critique of international institutions and their failings, including their Eurocentric origins, their servicing of powerful interests, their partiality, their bureaucratisation and their equivocation, has been important and necessary. I have been the author of plenty of this critique myself. But through the work I have done on torture conducted by the CIA and many allies, including the UK, in the aftermath of 9/11, I have also come to learn that however flawed and fragile, international institutions are absolutely critical in holding state power to account. I now think there is an urgent case for scholarship which buttresses those institutions even with their many flaws. They are critical to the protection of hard won and very fragile freedoms, and in the case of UNRWA for example, literally the right to life. We have a responsibility as scholars to defend them, support them, demonstrate their importance, and provide them with rigorous, evidence-based data and analysis to do their work and do it better.
"..through the work I have done on torture conducted by the CIA and many allies, including the UK, in the aftermath of 9/11, I have also come to learn that however flawed and fragile, international institutions are absolutely critical in holding state power to account."
BISA has been a stalwart of fostering research that is relevant, pressing and genuinely amplifies the voices of the most oppressed, as well as highlighting the threats faced by communities and non-state actors seeking to challenge the excesses of state and corporate power and elite interests. Over the last 50 years we have seen a very plural discipline emerge, with scholars taking the core tenets of IR e.g. power and its use, the role of the state and of international institutions, subjecting those tenets to more critical reflection, and asking whose interests are served and whose are not by power in global politics. BISA scholars have taken these ideas and explored them in all sorts of contexts and with a genuine appetite for seeing power through the eyes of those on its receiving end. The range of areas in which our scholarship engages is also impressive, with working groups that explore a very broad range of issues, including global health, gender and sexuality-based inequality, war, terrorism, violence, and climate destruction, among many others.
The questions I have posed here relate to a broader concern I have, and a sense of responsibility I think we all have, to mount a compelling defence of the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences. Our disciplines are under attack. This comes in the guise of lazy assertions that our disciplines are obsessed with woke. But those lazy critiques are powerful and gaining ground with devastating consequences for scholars and students in the US and elsewhere. We need to be on the front foot in demonstrating the rigour of our work. We need to show how we use our skills to undertake meticulous, defensible and replicable research and analysis. Joining forces with others, including the Academy of Social Sciences Campaign for Social Science, we need to show that there is sophistication in our marshalling of large amounts of data, that we are capable of making sense of complexity, and providing evidence-based solutions to address the world’s most pressing challenges. We also need to challenge prevailing but mistaken populist views.
Thanks to the technological advances we have enjoyed over the last 25 years, we have amazing opportunities in research that the founders of BISA could only dream of. We have very easy availability of primary and secondary sources through digitisation, and far greater connectivity with scholars and with those we study - often without even having to travel. I was reading recently about the Costs of War project which, among other things, is currently examining the environmental costs of the war on Gaza and, more broadly, the climate impacts of US defence and security agendas. Contributors to the Costs of War project include some UK IR scholars and BISA members. Projects like this show us what is possible and allow us to really push the boundaries of our work and make a genuine difference in exposing the impacts of war, violence, and climate destruction - all driven by the pursuit of naked power. I hope projects like this will inspire us all to be ambitious in our efforts to tackle these challenges in interdisciplinary ways and in global partnerships with scholars, journalists, international institutions, NGOs and most importantly, those people whose lives our discipline seeks to improve.
"We need to be on the front foot in demonstrating the rigour of our work. We need to show how we use our skills to undertake meticulous, defensible and replicable research and analysis. Joining forces with others, including the Academy of Social Sciences Campaign for Social Science, we need to show that there is sophistication in our marshalling of large amounts of data, that we are capable of making sense of complexity, and providing evidence-based solutions to address the world’s most pressing challenges."
We would like to thank all the contributors to our 50th anniversary article series: Jack Holland; Tim Edmunds; Juanita Elias; James A Malcolm; Brent J Steele; Julia Calvert and James Scott; Assala Khettache and Eve Harrison-Taylor; Lauren Rogers and Mariana Vieira; Charlotte Weatherill; Nicholas Wright; Michael Cox; Helena Farrand Carrapico and Juliet Dryden; Ruth Blakeley; and all of the former chairs who sent in their reflections - part one and part two.
