Contemporary Violence

Postmodern war in Kosovo and Chechnya

Cerwyn Moore

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary violence: Postmodern war in Kosovo and Chechnya draws on several years of field research, as well as interpretive IR theory and analysis of empirical source material so as to shed light on contemporary violence. It is now available in paperback for the first time. Drawing on interpretive approaches to international relations, the book argues that founding events and multiple contexts informed the narratives deployed by different members of each movement, illustrating why elements within the Kosovo Liberation Army and the armed forces of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria favoured regional and local strategies of war in the Balkans and the North Caucasus. The book draws on post-positivist analysis and empirical research so as unravel the relationship between narratives, stories and hermeneutic accounts of international relations; regional politics and trans-local identity; globalisation and visual aspects of contemporary security; criminality and emotionality; which together illustrate the dynamics within the armed resistance movements in Kosovo and the North Caucasus and the road to war in 1999. The book is a major addition to a small field of genuinely readable studies of IR theory. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, students, area studies experts and policy-makers seeking to understand the formation of the armed resistance movements in Kosovo and Chechnya. Amongst other things, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, political studies, area studies, as well as those within cultural and historical and sociological studies.

1
Narrative identity and the challenge of literary global politics: towards interpretive pluralism

Some – if not all – contemporary wars are conducted for a multiplicity of reasons by an increasingly diverse set of actors. One corollary of this may be a reading of a broader spectrum of political violence which is neither exclusively political nor military, but is in part shaped by cultural and social forces captured in narrative. Even if narrative approaches have a long provenance in other disciplines, they have only recently touched the shores of IR. And yet, an approach which addresses accounts of narrative identity does much to capture the social, cultural and ontological assumptions which inform our interpretation of war.

This chapter stems from the recent contributions to theoretical debate by focusing on a turn in IR which is concerned with meaning, and which is tied into the real world relations of global politics through narratives.¹ The chapter begins by acknowledging the role of radical phenomenology as one root of interpretivism – which in turn has influenced narrative. The following sections address the theme of narrative identity, drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, before moving on to a discussion of founding events and storied culture. The final sections of the chapter draw these points together by engaging with the literary IR, thereby drawing attention to the challenge of reading literatures.

The roots of radical phenomenology

Although not intrinsic to the analysis which follows, one should also note that a trace can be made from the contemporary use of interpretive accounts of IR. These derive in part from the emergence of the existentialist school of thought which is itself a descendant of the phenomenology of Husserl and, more particularly, Heidegger. In this way, one can recognise that Jean Paul Sartre, in the journal Le Temps Moderne, influenced Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur. Others such as Gabriel Marcel and Albert Camus have developed phenomenology and existentialism in literary form. Elsewhere representatives of the Russian literary movement of the late nineteenth century also expressed a close affinity with existentialism and the ensuing philosophical interpretations of phenomena. In this sense, understanding the phenomenon of war derives from questioning the image and structures of social life, indicating the value of inter-subjective and reflective analysis. Nevertheless, phenomenological approaches to social relations, including those touched upon here in IR, face a set of questions about ‘reality’, which are at once profound and difficult.

Critical realists as well as orthodox positivists and realists would argue that postmodern analysis rooted in phenomenology does not have a position which adequately comes to terms with the ‘real world’.² The response to the criticism that any phenomenological approach denies that there is any ‘reality’ to deal with, or alternatively, holds that if there is a reality phenomenological approaches (which subsume postmodern and poststructural approaches as subsets) are unable to grasp or identify it, is part of a broader argument.

Firstly, it must be recognised that this is not a straightforward either/or argument: there are many positions between the view that there is no reality at all and the view that there is a reality external to the human mind which empirical experience (and empirical experience alone) gains access to in such a way as to facilitate understanding, explanation and prediction. The latter view was so thoroughly demolished by Kant that it is a view few philosophers would defend, although it might be said to remain a ‘common sense’ view. Secondly, one might recognise the powerful criticisms of empiricism, but that those criticisms do not necessarily deny any possibility of knowledge of an external world. These criticisms in contemporary writing can be found in the work of, for example, Quine³ and Putnam,⁴ and in IR are reflected in much recent literature.⁵ Thirdly, this leads to a conclusion that this work recognises that the external world does not only consist of text or discourse, although text and discourse are powerful and important elements of it (what might be called a soft or weak postmodern position).⁶ It argues that the social world is constructed out of an interaction between individuals, networks, groups, language, and past experience.⁷ A similar view is held by Ruggie, who identifies a specific class of institutional or social facts that comprise the world of global politics,⁸ and Onuf.⁹

All this work reflects two core ideas. The first is that the ideas of the construction of social reality in which social analysts themselves take part, a key element of Schutz’s analysis, which passes through to Giddens’ understanding of social theory. Secondly, the idea that what the scholar of social relations is trying to get to grips with is not a physical or material world but a world of meanings, signifiers, significations and understandings, which are integrally (or internally, or logically) related to the actions which are based on them, in such a way that it is impossible to understand social action without understanding the varied meanings and ideas about meanings held by social agents. This leads, thirdly, to an important conclusion, one which has the effect of cutting out a large body of argument. If it is the social meanings and constructions held by agents that are important, especially in a particular context, we do not need to argue either way about whether there is an external reality in general. The question ceases to be important for this purpose, however much it may have a stranglehold on the philosophy of ontology in general. This position is similar to that held by Winch¹⁰ in some respects, but it is not the same; it is not as apparently radical as Winch’s claim, and it is not grounded in Wittgenstein’s theory of language as his work is. Thus one reaches the satisfactory position that we can make an argument about meanings and signification, about the text of ideas and social constructions, without needing to support either the claim that ‘that is all there is’ (or ‘there are turtles all the way down’) or the contrary extreme view that there is a certainly knowable social reality analogous to the material world of an explanation in natural science. It is this moderate yet critical approach, which does not claim that the world is composed only of text or discourse, and which is suspicious of claims that there is a single fixed ‘reality’ without seeking to maintain that there is no reality at all, which consistently informs the analysis herein.

Hermeneutics is ‘concerned with reconstructing the entire arc of operations by which practical experience provides itself with works, authors and readers’.¹¹ Hermeneutics then, captures the processes through which narrative identity is inscribed, through which fictional and historical stories, their production and reception, are apprehended and represented, and then subjects these processes to interpretation. Hermeneutics surrounds, and is embedded within, the production of narrative identity. For Ricoeur, ‘hermeneutics is the theory of the operation of understanding in its relations to the interpretations of texts’.¹² Ricoeur develops this reading of phenomenological hermeneutics, noting how textual analysis draws out lived experience via the transmission of ‘written documents, works, institutions, monuments, which make the historical past present to us’.¹³ This leads to a series of concerns revolving around ‘the problem of multiple meaning’¹⁴ when interpreting texts. Ricoeur notes, for ‘the interpreter, it is the text which has multiple meaning: the problem of multiple meaning is posed for him only if what is being considered is a whole in which events, persons, institutions, and natural or historical realities are articulated’.¹⁵ The question is then, not just about the text and its interpretation – what Ricoeur labels ‘textual hermeneutics’ – but also about context. In order to explore this issue further, Ricoeur moves on to discuss the ‘effect of context’.¹⁶ He argues that the context ‘plays the role of filter; when a single dimension of meaning passes through by means of play of affinities and reinforcements of other lexical terms, a meaning effect is created which can attain perfect univocity’.¹⁷ The question, moving beyond textual hermeneutics, revolves around the way not only how texts are interpreted, but also how they are carried forward through stories. Narrativists note that stories can have a sequential order that connects ‘events in a meaningful way for a definite audience, and thus offer insights about the world and/or people’s experiences of it’.¹⁸ But these mix, merge and blend with literary and historical genres, and shape slices of life.

But this is more than just a starting point: it helps to link work in the fields of hermeneutic, narrative and literary IR, precisely because it entertains questions about culturally inscribed narratives of identity.¹⁹ It does so in at least two ways, first because narratives are themselves sensitive to the richness of work on ethnic connectedness and groupness, which moves beyond reading identity alone.²⁰ Second, the turn to different forms of narrative, be they fictional or historical, offers a space to integrate empirically driven work on social networks, which will be explored in the following chapters. Bearing these markers in mind, the plurality of the interpretive turn sets up a more detailed consideration of narrative developed in the work of Paul Ricoeur.

Narrative and identity

In the social and human sciences a plethora of writers draw on stories, narratives and narratology.²¹ However, the various forms of narrative and narratology have arrived somewhat belatedly when turning to studies of identity in IR.²² In IR, one of these writers, Hidemi Suganami, focuses on studies of war origins. Another, Erik Ringmar, turns to a narrative theory of action. And finally another, Iver Neumann, explores the applicability of narrative for studies of self and other relations. In various ways each has made a significant contribution to studies of narrative and identity, and yet each also suggests ways forward, opening up space for further analysis. For example Suganami identifies a need to read non-Western stories of ‘war origins’, while Iver Neumann’s seminal work invites a critical constructivist reading of identity – which is not focused on the orthodoxy of IR: namely the nation-state. Neumann argues ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: alternative approaches to violence in International Relations
• 1 Narrative identity and the challenge of literary global politics: towards interpretive pluralism
• 2 Kosovo and Chechnya/Kosova and Ichkeria
• 3 Regional politics, trans-local identity and history
• 4 Globalisation and conflict: screening war in Kosovo and Chechnya
• 5 Stories of war in the Balkans and Caucasus
• 6 Criminality and war
• 7 The politics of emotionality
• 8 Networks and narratives: the road to war in the Balkans and Caucasus
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index