Dr Jaakko Heiskanen: “We are not inherently or naturally ethnic … It is the modern international order that makes the world seem to us this way.”
Dr. Jaakko Heiskanen recently finished his PhD at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His thesis titled “The Ethnos of the Earth: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and International Order” won the Lisa Smirl Prize for the best Politics PhD completed in 2019-2020 in Cambridge. His work has been published in International Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict and International Theory.
In the second of our series of interviews with academics we admire, Dr. Heiskanen talks to Editor-in-Chief Emil Sondaj Hansen about his award-winning thesis on ethnicity and international order, conceptual history and what violence in translations means for a Global IR.
To begin with, I was wondering if you could speak to your own path into academia and what drew you specifically to the field of IR?
There was no grand long-term plan to really go into academia. I started off studying history at Cambridge for my undergrad, partly because I thought it was relatively flexible in terms of future career options. You can turn a history undergrad into a lot of things – you can go from history into law, from history into international relations (as I ended up doing), you can stay on the historical path, or you can go into teaching quite easily. Then for my masters, I wanted to do something a bit more contemporary, a bit more ‘relevant’, so to speak. International Relations seemed to open the way towards the policy-making world as well. So, I switched to IR for my masters and then ended up doing a second masters on what was basically political geography. I really enjoyed studying IR, and it was during the masters that I came up with the topic for the PhD and started to seriously consider an academic career. I enjoyed the PhD a lot, I really enjoy research, and I don’t want to stop yet, so, currently still in academia.
That sounds like quite a interdisciplinary background, ranging from history to political geography. Has that shaped the way you approach IR?
With history, there was always this problem of contemporary relevance in the background. In a way, when you study history, you are studying the past for the sake of the past. There is value in that project in itself. When I then switched to IR, coming from a history background, IR seemed extremely ahistorical. The theories you’re confronted with when you first start studying international relations – Kenneth Waltz’s ‘Theory of International Politics’, democratic peace theory, all of that – coming from a history background, they seemed ahistorical, overly simplistic, almost naïve. But, on the other hand, IR seemed to provide a very powerful set of theoretical tools to try and make sense of world politics. So one of the basic themes of my research has been an attempt to bring together the best of both worlds. To try and bridge the empirical depth of history with the theoretical tools of IR.
Do you think historians and IR scholars are slowly getting better at talking to each other?
I am not entirely convinced about that. I think there is still a big divide between the two disciplines. What is definitely happening is that there are more IR scholars interested in history. More scholars, including myself, are now located in this subfield of IR that brings historical or historical-sociological approaches to international relations. However, the disciplinary divide is partly due to differences in interests, differences in the kind of questions they ask – so I am not sure it can ever be completely bridged. There are some sub-fields and specialists, people who are interested in similar topics, that can speak across the disciplinary boundary, but I think the overall divide remains quite stark.
Moving on to your main intellectual influences, who would you say has shaped your intellectual trajectory the most?
“There is always a remainder, something that is left out, something that does not quite fit into the conceptual framework that we have for a particular context.”
There are a lot of them, but if I have to pick just one, I have to say Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher. I started reading him during my masters – I don’t think you ever really finish reading him. But once I started to understand his works (and that took a lot of time and effort) it really opened up new avenues for my thinking. Through his work, it became possible for me to try and negotiate between the two key pitfalls that you tend to encounter in IR, and also in social and political sciences more generally. On the one hand, there is this positivistic commitment to scientific truth, objective truth, while on the other hand there is this ‘post-modern’ relativism where everything is just interpretation and/or shot through with ‘politics’. Derrida’s work shows both of these positions to be untenable. It’s probably not the only way to negotiate between these pitfalls, but I have found it to be one of the more nuanced, sophisticated and careful engagements with these issues. And even now, if I find myself stuck with an idea, I often go back to Derrida and read him for inspiration.
You say that it was difficult to finally get a grasp of Derrida. It seems to me that for some of these post-structuralist authors – Derrida, Lacan, Žižek, there is a relatively high barrier of entry for engaging with their ideas. Did you experience this yourself? Do you think post-structuralist work needs to engage more with the accessibility of their ideas?
I believe Einstein said, ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler’. If you are interested in pursuing difficult questions to the end, I think you eventually have to make some sacrifices in terms of making your work simple or popular. In my case, the path toward ‘post-structuralism’ started with first reading Waltz’s ‘Theory of International Politics’, then I moved on to Alexander Wendt’s constructivist critique of that, and then from that to the post-structuralist critiques of Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker. Then I was pretty much at the barrier of IR, so the next step was to follow the references, to read who these people were reading, which was often Derrida or Foucault. I presume this kind of path is more accessible, and more common, than just picking up Derrida straight away.
Moving a bit more onto your specific work and research interests. Just in a few sentences, before we dive deeper, how would you describe your work?
I’m interested in the macro-historical processes that IR scholars would call something like systemic or structural change. This is also why I found Waltz’s work, for example, really interesting, because he is concerned with these major structural shifts that the international system undergoes. But I take a very different approach to Waltz, coming at systemic change through the lens of conceptual history. You could think of my research interests in terms of three clusters: first there is the theoretical-philosophical side, which is composed of conceptual history, Derrida’s work and ‘post-structuralist’ philosophy more generally, among other things; second there is the question of international systemic change and IR theory; and the third cluster would be something like nationalism and ethnicity studies. It is the intersection of those three clusters that has informed my work.
You’ve written in your 2019 article in International Political Sociology on nationalism and sovereignty, that we should study concepts in order to ‘further the understanding of the ontology of modern international relations’. First, what does it mean to ‘further the ontology’ of IR, and second, why do you think that is an important task?
In a way, the ontology of modern international relations is the starting point of the article. I take as the starting point this basic ontological division of the world into the insides and the outside of states, but then I try to go beyond that, to understand not only the ontological arrangement itself but also how its limits and ambiguities work. I do that by drawing on Derrida’s work on ‘hauntology’, which instead of focusing on that which is present, focuses on that which is absent but through its very absence has ontological effects. So, for Derrida, the motif of hauntology is the spectre or the ghost which is neither fully present nor fully absent. In that sense, my work is not necessarily centred on concepts and ontology; in some sense I precisely try to decentre concepts and ontology. But in terms of the question of importance, I think the study of concepts, which are the constitutive units of any ontology, the constitutive units of social reality – is important because they shape the way in which we understand the world around us. Concepts circumscribe and delimit the way in which we navigate the social world. In that sense, to study concepts is to study the limits of our imagination. It is important, intellectually and politically, to understand those limits, to understand their historical origins, and to understand how our concepts, which we often take for granted, structure our behaviour and our being-in-the-world.
Exactly on that point of concepts structuring our behaviour and being in the world – when you study concepts and the limits of our imagination, do you not risk reifying these concepts and attributing them a certain power through your study of them?
The problem of reification is not specific to the study of concepts. There is a minimum reification that takes place no matter what you study, in the sense that you are taking something as an object of study. Even if your purpose is to show that something is socially constructed, to deconstruct it or to show how it is historically contingent, you still have a minimal reification in order to do all that critical work. I think that applies to whatever you have as your object of analysis. And in that sense, the more important question is ‘how do you approach your subject?’. In the case of the study of concepts, do you approach them based on certain pre-conceptions about where you expect your analysis to take you? Or do you let the subject matter lead you, even if it takes you somewhere you maybe did not expect? And this applies both ways. On the one hand, there are these myth-making histories. Nationalist histories are the obvious example, where you take a concept of the nation and then project it into the distant past. You create this myth of a linear continuity into the past and then it serves political purposes in the present. That is a very problematic way of studying concepts. But on the other hand, I think it is equally problematic if you make an ideological commitment to, in sort of a Foucauldian genealogical spirit, revealing ruptures and contingencies. If you go out looking for ruptures and contingencies, then you might miss out on important continuities and structural patterns. So, it is problematic both ways. My advice, if you study the history of concepts, is to follow the subject matter, to follow the concepts and just let them do the talking. Listen to the stories that the concepts tell you.
But that phrase in particular seems to suggest some sort of agency on the part of concepts, right? For instance, you have written that it’s the ‘aporetic quality of sovereignty that makes international relations work’. Would you say that sovereignty then has a productive power of its own, a sort of agency?
I do not think that concepts have an agency or productive power of their own. The question implies this division into agencies and structures, or people and discourse, and I am not sure they can be so easily separated. Concepts do not float free of the social world, they are of the social world – but that is not to deny that they have productive effects. I would subtract the ‘of their own’ from your question. Take the sovereignty example: as I argue in the paper, sovereignty as a concept indicates the site of a contradiction or an aporia where opposites meet and it seems you can go no further. Or you could think of it as a limit between the inside and the outside. It marks a limit, a conceptual dead-end, where thought becomes blocked, in a way. And it is because of this structural function of the concept of sovereignty that when you study it, when you read the theoretical literature of sovereignty, you can always see the concept dividing: internal sovereignty/external sovereignty, domestic sovereignty/international sovereignty, positive sovereignty/negative sovereignty, sovereignty as law/sovereignty as fact, and the list goes on. By looking carefully at how a concept ‘moves’ in our discourse – the concept of sovereignty, for example, ‘moves’ through this splitting function – we can trace certain structural patterns that shape the potentialities of our political discourse. The ‘movement’ of conceptual structures reveals certain contradictions, certain limits, and certain possibilities of where we can take our discourse.
The other thing I wanted to say about the question of agency is that it also depends on your level of analysis. If you focus on specifics – a specific person, a specific event, a specific speech act – then, of course, it is human agency that comes to the fore. But if you zoom out onto the structural level, the systemic level, the macro-historical level – whatever you want to call that – then it is concepts and conceptual history and concepts-as-actors that become more pronounced. So conceptual history is one particular way of studying discourse. If you are interested in the specifics – a specific event, a specific individual – then conceptual history is perhaps not the best approach to take. That kind of analysis might be better served by something like Quentin Skinner’s work on speech acts, or the study of rhetoric. If we take conceptual history roughly as Reinhart Koselleck, the pioneer of conceptual history, meant it, then I think it is better suited to the study of macro-historical developments and broader structural changes. Conceptual history only offers us a partial history, it does some things well, but then for other things you have to supplement it with other approaches. It is one way of studying discourse.
On the partiality of conceptual history that you mention. How do you pay attention to the material in contrast to the ideational, when studying concepts?
This slightly problematic division of the world into the material and the ideational does not necessarily apply if you understand discourse more broadly, or ‘writing’ more broadly, in a Derridean sense. Because concepts, in a way, are material. In the first place, there is the fact that concepts always manifest themselves materially. They are either written down or they are spoken. We cannot study concepts without the materiality of concepts. But then there is also the fact that concepts are embedded in a concrete historical and social context. This is why I prefer the term ‘concept’ to the term ‘idea’, because an idea seems to be something that is just in a person’s head. An idea is a thought, whereas a concept, at least in the German sense of Begriff, from the verb greifen, ‘to grasp’, is something much more concrete. A concept grasps social reality in its concreteness and in that sense also in its materiality, rather than just being an idea in someone’s head. So I’m not sure it’s possible to study concepts without paying attention to the material. In fact, the distinction between the material and the ideational is itself a conceptual distinction.
Going back to something you mentioned earlier on this inherent split in sovereignty that you’ve encountered in your study. Together with Dr. Dylan Loh, you explored this ‘liminal’ space of sovereignty, and specifically how various actors such as ISIS, indigenous organizations, NGOs and multi-national corporations operate in this liminal space between the domestic and the international. What do you think these liminal spaces tell us about the limits of our imagination, as you also mentioned earlier, as well as the stability of the ontology of the system?
The objective of the paper was to look at this collection of actors that do not seem to fall either inside or outside the state. I think these liminal actors reflect the fact that no ontology, no system, no conceptual framework is ever fully closed, ever fully sutured without remainder. There is always a remainder, something that is left out, something that does not quite fit into the conceptual framework that we have for a particular context. Then there are some concepts that mark these limits, like I said earlier. Sovereignty is one such concept, marking the limit of the inside/outside framework that is so popular in IR. There is a whole bunch of these actors that we explore in the article that do not fit into this inside/outside framework. These actors are hidden away by the concept of sovereignty. Yet at the same time, they are profoundly influenced by that concept, and also have effects on that concept, because they live and act in a world of sovereign states. But it is difficult to discuss these actors from the prevailing framework of IR. So, of course, what you can do, and what often is done, is you just say ‘Okay, we drop the inside/outside framing, and we’re going to look at something else’ – global politics, world politics, social movements, whatever. But then you lose sight of the inside/outside framing and those ‘inter-national’ questions that matter most for IR. It seems like you can either pick the inside/outside framing of the world, in which case you lose sight of a bunch of stuff, or you drop the inside/outside framing and focus on all kinds of other actors that exist in the global or transnational realm, but then you lose sight of what IR and international politics seem to be about. It seems as though you have to make this choice. What we attempt in the paper is to try and provide a conceptual framing that would allow you to deal with both options at the same time, without having to forget about one or the other. So, we try to expand this concept of sovereignty to encompass what has been called the ‘third space of sovereignty’ by Kevin Bruyneel. So there is the inside of the state, the outside of the state, and then this third space, this liminal space where all these other actors reside, which are often silenced by the prevailing framing in IR.
I get the sense that you are not very fond of binary divisions.
I love them! They are the basic building blocks of order. If you want to create order, you create insides and outsides, you create categories. Order almost inevitably tends to involve some binaries. That is what makes conceptual analysis especially interesting, because concepts, as something that order the world around us, often acquire their meaning through binary oppositions. Not all concepts are structured in a binary manner, but often some of the key concepts are. And I think these conceptual binaries provide some of the most critical and interesting locations where we can target our analysis. That is where we can find out most about the history or the politics of our prevailing conceptual frameworks – including what they silence, what they leave out.
So do you think the study and exploration of these binary spaces is particularly destabilizing, if what constitutes order are these binary oppositions?
It can be, yes. Analysing binaries can help to reveal their limits, and thus offers possibilities for destabilizing hierarchies. But also – and we discuss this tension in the paper with Dylan – counter-intuitively, identifying liminal actors that seem to fall beyond the binary, is often the best way to clarify the binary. If you identify ‘failed’ states or ‘contested’ states, for example, that is one of the best ways to clarify what being a ‘proper’ or ‘successful’ state is about. So the exploration of binaries is not inherently destabilizing. It can be destabilizing, but it can also serve as a way to clarify the existing order of things, to identify the exceptions that prove the rule. And in that sense, the deconstruction of binaries is not inherently one thing or another, it is just an especially productive area for critical thinking about the system. I do not think there is necessarily a politics associated with it. Politics is something that the scholar then adds on top.
On the point of limits and limitations as well, in your recent piece on translations, you discuss the relationship between translation and international hierarchies. You argue that there is a certain ‘foundational violence’ to be found in translations. Could you explain in what sense translations are violent?
The basic model of translation is that two things that are different can be made equivalent: a text in language A can be made to signify in language B. In that sense, almost by definition, the act of translation fails to recognize the otherness of the other. It tries to transform the other into something that is the same. Translation reveals the other to be the same as the self, just in a different guise. It is in that sense that translation entails a violence towards otherness, a violence towards difference. But then, this inherent symbolic violence of translation is often compounded by concrete power hierarchies. In the paper I focus on the long nineteenth century, which of course is the age of European imperialism, so the translation of European concepts into other languages and vice-versa is informed by the framework of European imperial rule and all the concrete violences associated with it. So, there are at least those two dimensions involved in the violence of translation. Of course, no translation is perfect, so the difference between the texts is never completely erased. That is why you often have translator’s notes and annotations and things, to clarify word choices and so on. These supplementary notes signify the failure of the translation to fully do away with that difference. I use the term ‘foundational violence’ very specifically and very literally because, as I argue in the paper, the violence of translation is not only destructive, but also creative. Social order and social communication depend on translation – whenever there is interpretation, there is translation. And in that sense, the foundational violence is quite literally something that founds: it creates something, it creates social order.
“We always assume that people have ethnicities, that it’s a standard feature of human existence, to be divided into ethnic groups. But if it’s so natural, why did we invent the term in the twentieth century?”
In terms of this violence in translation, how do we square that with recent calls for a ‘Global IR’ that engages with various regional understandings of specific concepts? Does your work on translation imply the impossibility of such a project?
The term ‘Global IR’ can be used in several different ways, but I think the specific phrase ‘Global IR’ has mainly been associated with what is essentially an additive project. The aim is to move from Eurocentric IR to Global IR by addingnon-Western voices, by adding other national approaches, other regional approaches, beyond just the European or Western one. So, there’s this additive project. From an ethical or political perspective, I understand why it’s appealing and why it might even be a necessary project, or at least a necessary first step. But there is also a potential limitation or problem here because, it seems to me, this additive project struggles to question the basic conceptual framework of IR. It’s as if it says ‘here are some national or regional perspectives on X’ without questioning X itself. And in that sense, it is a form of methodological nationalism or methodological regionalism. It is somewhat ironic that this project actually ends up retreating from the universal and the global into the particular and the local, even though it claims to move towards ‘Global IR’.
And this is where I think the study of conceptual history and translation can offer an important contribution to this search for a more ‘egalitarian’ form of IR theory. If you focus on conceptual exchanges and entanglements, it helps to break down these ingrained ideas of the nation and the region that tend to dominate our thinking. It helps to show how things flow across linguistic, national, and regional boundaries. At the same time, these flows are shaped by the violence that we just discussed – there are asymmetries and hierarchies, concepts moving more in one direction than in the other. One of the main objectives of my paper on translation is precisely to theorise the hierarchical pattern through which our modern political concepts – concepts like nation, state, civilisation, and so on – came to be globalised. This was a process that was both global and Eurocentric. These were concepts that emanated from what we call Europe, that were translated from European texts into other languages and then taken up around the world. We are talking about a global process in which European concepts of nation, state, and civilisation were reappropriated and turned against European imperialism, for example in the form of anticolonial nationalism. Therefore, while it is true to say that much of mainstream IR is incredibly Eurocentric, it’s also true to say that, on some level, IR is also already global. There is a certain ambivalence within Eurocentrism, which means that being Eurocentric and being global are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
I want to make sure that we cover your award-winning PhD thesis. You trace the origins and development of the concept of ethnicity. What did you discover about this concept and what drew you to the study of ethnicity in the first place?
I was interested in nationalism already during my undergraduate years, while studying history. Then, during my masters, I was writing this coursework paper on nationalism and happened to find out that the word ‘ethnicity’ was invented in 1953. That was according to the book that I read at the time. I have since discovered that the date can actually be pushed back to 1920, but that’s still really new. Anyway, I was curious – what is this category that we call ‘ethnicity’ and take for granted? We always assume that people have ethnicities, that it’s a standard feature of human existence, to be divided into ethnic groups. But if it’s so natural, why did we invent the term in the twentieth century? Of course the details of the PhD changed as I was writing it, but the basic topic remained the same. Essentially, why was the concept of ethnicity invented and how does it shape our understanding of international order?
To try and be brief, the answer that I give in the thesis is that the concept of ethnicity is a symptom of the modern states-system; it is a symptom of the passage from the hierarchical imperial order of the nineteenth century, to what we call the ‘anarchical’ international order of the twentieth century. The predecessors of ethnicity, of which race and tribe were two of the most prominent ones, have a clearly hierarchical connotation, which reflected this division of the world on an imperial basis into the colonial periphery and the European core. This imperial system was reinforced by racial and civilizational hierarchies, and the concepts of race and tribe reflected that. In contrast, the concept of ethnicity has a more pluralistic connotation. It is a more neutral concept, compared to race and tribe which, at least during the colonial-imperial era, acquired these extremely pejorative connotations. In the same way that the concepts of race and tribe reflected this imperial system, the concept of ethnicity reflects this seemingly pluralistic and egalitarian system of formally equal sovereign states. I think this is also a good illustration of the way in which concepts shape and are shaped by the way we imagine the world. Ethnicity is often thought of as something that falls far beyond the scope of IR – I’ve had people ask me if I’m an anthropologist or sociologist because I study ethnicity. But in fact, there is this very intimate connection between the concept of ethnicity and our contemporary political order. They are very, very closely intertwined and, in a way, it is the modern international order that makes us ethnic. We are not inherently or naturally ethnic. It is not a part of the human condition. It is the modern international order that makes the world seem to us this way.
And what specific functions have ethnicity played out in relation to the international order?
There’s several. One is to reconfigure the concept of race which had structured the nineteenth-century imperial order. W. E. B. DuBois famously talked about the ‘global colour line’ as the problem of the twentieth century. In contrast, it would be nonsensical to refer to a ‘global ethnic line’. It does not make sense to us conceptually. We often think of the terminological shift from race to ethnicity in the 1950s as just an attempt to replace a derogatory and problematic term with something more neutral. And that is true – ethnicity was a more neutral replacement to the problematic term that was race. But this terminological shift also entailed a fundamental shift in conceptual perspectives. Whereas race was intrinsically intertwined with this hierarchical ordering of the world, the concept of ethnicity lacks this international or global dimension. Ethnicity is seen more as a domestic matter. And you can make a similar argument about the concept of the tribe, except here it is a global civilizational hierarchy, rather than a racial one, that becomes transformed once you replace the concept of tribe with the concept of ethnic group. There’s a lot more I could say, but overall the function of ethnicity is to make human diversity compatible with the ‘anarchical’ understanding of the modern international order.
That sounds excellent, I am looking forward to reading the book version, hopefully soon. What’s next, now that you’ve completed your PhD?
I am going to start the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Cambridge this fall, which is a three-year postdoc. The new project is on the concept of the nomad. The idea is to explore the relationship between nomadism, territorial statehood and the de-territorialising force associated with global capitalism, and to trace how this nexus has developed historically by focusing on the concept of the nomad and its development.
Final question, do you have any advice to young scholars or students considering embarking on a career in academia?
Unfortunately, these are very difficult times, with the pandemic and the recession. Even those people who are just a couple years behind me, or even one year behind me, in the process of looking to start an academic career, will face a very different reality to me. But there are two pieces of advice that I was given and that have helped me a lot. One is to read broadly, and as much as you can. Even if you want to pitch yourself to a particular field, even if you teach a particular field, even if you publish in the journals of a particular discipline and go to the conference of a particular discipline, try and read more broadly, because it is in the cross-fertilisation between disciplines that you find some of the most interesting insights. Going beyond disciplinary boundaries helps us to take our thinking forward, even if you then end up translating it back into your own discipline. The second piece of advice is ‘networking’. I hate this word and I often dislike the practice as well – it seems so artificial and self-serving – but I have to say that it has been a great help to make connections and even friends in the academic field during my PhD. It has made the whole process a lot more enjoyable as well. Of course, it is going to be very difficult in the current environment, with everything being cancelled, but if you can, when you can, attend conferences and workshops, set up reading groups with your friends and colleagues, and try and connect with people. Hopefully the situation will get better soon. Mostly in terms of the pandemic going away, but also in terms of people getting better at doing things like this remotely.
Transcribed by Alice Tort
This conversation has been edited for clarity.