Waking IR Up from its ‘Deep Newtonian Slumber’ 1

The Complex Ontology of IR

When he urged IR to come out of its ‘degenerating’ Newtonian repose, Ruggie specifically beckoned that the discipline re-engage with the reality of international life. As he pointed out with chagrin and frustration, ‘the term “ontology” typically draws either blank stares or bemused smiles’ from the IR community. ⁸ The contention is that IR is plagued by attention blindness – that is, because of its preoccupation with ‘reductive theories about “the logic of anarchy”’, ⁹ it cannot discern the vast and heterogeneous reality of global affairs. Owing to its Newtonian commitments, mainstream IR views reality ‘not as a continuous flux … but as a series of instantaneous “snapshots” extracted from this flux’. ¹⁰ Thus, as Lebow suggests, the dominant accounts of inter-state relations miss the ‘open-ended, nonlinear nature of the social world’. ¹¹ He insists that the ‘confluence and consequences [of international politics] are best envisaged as a complex, nonlinear system’, ¹² ‘in which multiple interrelated chains of causation have unanticipated interactions and unpredictable consequences’. ¹³

The ontology of complexity therefore provokes a reckoning with the multiple possibilities of becoming and becoming-other inherent in the pervasive ambiguity of global life. ¹⁴ As Popolo demonstrates, such commitment reflects the philosophical engagement of Gilles Deleuze and his insistence on ‘the continuous precipitation of new life and new meaning’. ¹⁵ Of the three books under review, the volume edited by Joseph and Wight engages with the issue of ontology most explicitly. A unique feature of this collection is that it offers the first comprehensive account of Scientific Realism (SR) – one of the strands in the complexification of IR. SR originates in Roy Bhaskar’s work on the philosophy of science. Its application to IR is described explicitly as a ‘shift from epistemology to ontology’. ¹⁶ The reason for this shift is the understanding of reality as ‘stratified’ between the actual, the empirical and the real. ¹⁷ This stratification addresses three of the key ontological claims animating the complexification of IR: (i) that the international is emergent; (ii) that the international is irreducible to and much more than its constituent parts; and (iii) that the international is subject to unexpected and (often) radical transformations – that is, small alterations in initial conditions can lead to profound changes in outcomes. ¹⁸

In this setting, SR asserts that the world with which IR engages, self-organises in complex and contingent ways. This observation is also confirmed by the other two books under review. For instance, Lebow frames world politics as ‘an open system whose outcomes are sensitive to – if not always the result of – chance, agency, and confluence’, ¹⁹ while Popolo depicts international life as an ‘irreversible’ process that ‘grows out of complex systems to determine its own rules of development’. ²⁰ Yet, what distinguishes the collection edited by Joseph and Wight is the confrontation with the ‘ontological issue of the different layering of the social (and natural) world’. ²¹ Conventionally, IR has tended to ignore that international politics both inhabit and are embedded in complex spaces. In this respect, SR infers one of the greatest ontological boons of complexified IR – the recognition of the ‘totality’ ²² of human and non-human interactions in global life.

Newtonian IR has been exclusively anthropocentric and inspired by the ‘Enlightenment belief in a “makeable world”’, according to which human/socio-political systems (such as civil society, states, international organisations, etc.) are both detached from (not only conceptually, but in practice) and in control of the ‘non-human’ environment in which they occur. ²³ It is worth pointing out that such diverse and profound considerations of the complex ontology of international politics are intended not merely as a criticism of Newtonian IR, but also as a provocation for re-engaging with the ongoing and overlapping interconnections animating global life. In fact, the radical totality of human and non-human interactions has recently been framed as ‘posthuman IR’. Following SR’s recognition of the qualitative and quantitative difference between human and non-human systems, the ‘complex ecologism’ of ‘posthuman IR’ uncovers that the ‘world is not divided into territories in which bounded societies of humans live under singular political authority and in the context of discrete natural environments’; ²⁴ instead, global life is ‘a complex interweave of numerous systems nested, intersected and embedded in each other, all undergoing processes of co-evolution and linked by innumerable feedback loops’. ²⁵ SR echoes this ontological commitment by describing world affairs as complex interactions ‘between people and each other, their products, their activities, nature and themselves’. ²⁶

An Epistemology for the Complexity of IR

As it can be expected, the inclusive ontological purview of the complexity paradigm presents a number of analytical challenges. Yet, as the proponents of SR indicate, assertions about the appropriate ways of describing the world emerge from the ontological assumptions of what the world is like. ²⁷ Thus, on a meta-theoretical level, the problem stems from the realisation that we can never be fully cognisant of the underlying mechanisms and processes of global life, because this will imply ‘knowing the not knowable’. ²⁸ Lebow explains that the contingency of our knowledge reflects ‘the critical importance of non-observables and non-systematic factors’. This should not, however, be taken as an indication of the impossibility to provide robust IR interpretation ‘rooted in non-linearity and confluence’. ²⁹ In this respect, the acknowledgement of the limits of our knowledge can become a very productive analytical point of departure.

While all three books under review pay attention to epistemological concerns, Popolo’s endeavour specifically addresses this aspect of complexified IR. In fact, he ventures that the complexity paradigm provides a ‘genuine Epistemic Revolution’, which renders the Newtonian paradigm ‘obsolete’. ³⁰ What is revolutionary about this approach is not only its debunking of the common wisdoms of ‘scientific IR’, but also its dedication to ‘“uncertain knowledge”, where uncertainty is regarded and accepted as an intrinsic quality of nature and not as a result of imperfect knowledge’. ³¹ The suggestion is that by focusing mainly on stable, equilibrium configurations, the study of IR has remained consciously ignorant of a whole ‘new species’ of discontinuous intuition. ³² Thus, by painting itself in to the Newtonian corner, the disciplinary mainstream has, on the one hand, evaded the need to recognise that there are dynamics which are not only unknown, but probably cannot ever be meaningfully rendered comprehensible, and, on the other hand, stifled endeavours that can engage in thoughtful deliberation and productive management of the discontinuities, complexity and non-linearity of global life.

There are several important features underpinning such an approach to knowledge. Firstly, the contingency of both global life and our ability to know it makes it impossible to construct predictive explanations of outcomes. Lebow is quite emphatic when he asserts that ‘[v]ariation across time, due to the changing conditions and human reflection, the openness of social systems, and the complexity of the interaction among stipulated causes make the likelihood of predictive theory – even of a probabilistic kind – extraordinarily low’. ³³ Thus, the proponents of the complexity paradigm ascertain that due to its over-reliance on predictive theories, mainstream IR ‘must be totally discarded’. ³⁴ A further reason for such rejection is the observation that the production of knowledge by Newtonian approaches has also limited ‘what is open for debate’. ³⁵ For instance, due to the preoccupation with inter-state relations, the discipline produces foot soldiers for this or that theoretical approach to international anarchy rather than students genuinely interested in observing the complex patterns of global affairs.

Secondly, the unwillingness to engage with the unpredictable becoming of global life reflects the patterns of linear causality that still seem to inform the disciplinary mainstream. The issue of ‘complex causation’, ³⁶ as Lebow puts it, aims to enhance sensitivity to the unintended consequences of international interactions. Such effects defy the conventional focus on purposive behaviour. In fact, it is ‘chance, confluence, and accident that often play a determining role’ in global life, rather than intentionality. ³⁷ The complexified IR thereby intends to supplant reductive explanations by considering the ‘conjuncturally determined’ patterns of world affairs. ³⁸

Thirdly, the complexity paradigm critiques the way in which Newtonian IR has theorised international developments by focusing on major events. Lebow indicates that this bias towards events-thinking belies the predisposition ‘to think of big events as having big causes’. ³⁹ For instance, the origins of war are usually attributed either to singular events or to the resolve of specific individuals, rather than ‘the result of nonlinear confluences’. ⁴⁰ Thus, the focus on both spatially and temporally proximate causes underpins the blindness to the complex interactions of global life, which turns the disciplinary terrain into a frozen expanse of accidents. Complexified IR evinces that ‘mainstream IR cannot talk about underlying process, only about systems and units’. That is why it advocates the abandonment of the ‘talk of levels of analysis in favour of complex, layered assemblies of social relations’. ⁴¹

The three-step of such epistemology for the complexity of IR intends simultaneously to rethink and reinvent the study of international politics. Interestingly, all three books under review are in agreement that this should be done through the ‘demystification of science’. ⁴² Such demystification entails the rejection of the Newtonian ‘scientific fallacies’ ⁴³ and the acceptance of ‘the fact of epistemological realism: namely, that all beliefs are socially produced, so that knowledge is transient, and neither truth values nor criteria of rationality exist outside of historical time’. ⁴⁴ It is also worth pointing out that while assisting the explanation ‘of our chaotic and unordered world’, the complexity paradigm is idiosyncratically self-reflexive about its own epistemological investments in a specific understanding of the international and readily concedes that ‘knowledge sometimes has the effect of accelerating disorder’. ⁴⁵

The Methodology of Complexified IR

The ontological and epistemological assumptions of complexified IR underpin how it examines international politics. Commentators have noted that the complexity paradigm has already spawned a variety of innovative approaches ranging from agent-based modelling and computer simulations to scenario-building and intuitive judgement. ⁴⁶ The proponents of SR frame this development as ‘methodological pluralism’, which makes possible the ‘direct observational access’ of the patterns of international affairs. ⁴⁷ Popolo insists that in this way the methodology of complexity assists with gaining a deeper understanding of ‘our own human experience’. ⁴⁸

Of the three books under review, the issue of how to study the complexity of global life is addressed most consistently by Lebow. What is unique about his project is that he offers a detailed and coherent account of probably the most understudied and underutilised approach in IR – counterfactual analysis. Inhabiting the realms of speculative thinking, counterfactual analysis generates ‘what if’ conjectures, experiments and scenarios to assess the validity of different reality claims. Lebow offers several fascinating and poignantly thorough case studies of such what-iffing – for instance, had Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria not been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 would World War I have occurred, or if Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had lived to the age of 65 would the Holocaust have taken place.

What such speculative thinking does is to disrupt the accepted disciplinary narrative and question what is perceived to be the ‘normal’ course of events. By insisting on the ‘plausibility of alternative worlds’, counterfactual analysis lays bare the ‘contingency of our own world’. ⁴⁹ In this way, Lebow convincingly demonstrates that the speculative method of counterfactual analysis provides powerful experimental tools for liberating IR from the tyranny of linear logic and allows it to construct ‘more sophisticated understandings of how the world works’. ⁵⁰ At the same time, counterfactual histories map out potentialities of how the world may work. Lebow is quite blunt that Newtonian modes of thinking lead IR into the rut of accounting for ‘transformative events in terms of single factors’. ⁵¹ Lebow’s meticulous consideration of counterfactual analysis unveils that complexified IR offers intriguing heuristic devices that both challenge conventional wisdoms and provoke analytical imaginations.

The Ethics (and Practice) of Political Action under Complexity

The cognitive patterns of complexified IR demand meaningful engagement with the self-organising ambivalence of global life. In this setting, the contention is that ethically oriented political action requires both the acknowledgement of and responsible adaptation to the turbulent reality of international interactions. ⁵² For instance, Lebow indicates that ‘ethical beliefs and expectations’ inform our ‘understandings of the world and how it works’. ⁵³ The ethos of political action under complexity therefore demands accepting to live with ‘the fundamental principle of uncertainty whilst moving away from the very modern idea [that] the role of reason [is to provide] certainty for decisions on human action’. ⁵⁴ Such a framing also suggests the emancipatory potential embedded in and emerging from the ‘explanatory critique’ of complexified IR. ⁵⁵

Normatively speaking, the ethics of political action under complexity demand the development of relevant knowledge about the minimal conditions for resilient and sustainable living. Thus, in summarising the ethical implications of the complexity paradigm in the three books under review, it can be inferred that the ethos of political action discussed by them hinges on three principles: (i) precautionary principle – stressing the need to develop ‘the art of working with uncertainty’; (ii) humility principle – recognising that ‘action escapes the will of the actor’; and (iii) resilience principle – developing the adaptive capacity to ‘expect the unexpected as the norm’. ⁵⁶

Such consideration of the ethical underpinnings of complexified IR suggests that political action does not occur in a vacuum, but in idiosyncratic and dynamic spatio-temporal context. ⁵⁷ At the same time such engagement contributes to the conversation on what being free under the conditions of complexity might mean. The following sections briefly tease out the policy and normative implications for political action under complexity. Such suggestions are underpinned by the key ontological position of complexified IR – that the ‘international’ encompasses the global life of human/socio-political and non-human/biophysical interactions. As Ernst Haas reminds us, ‘ethical choices have evolutionary consequences’. Thus, while ‘the state of nature’ is no longer just a fictional narrative but ‘the most pressing of practical issues’, there has been insufficient attention to the policy and ethical choices demanded of decision-making in such a complex context. ⁵⁸

Conclusion

It has become expected of policymakers, pundits and scholars to refer to a whole raft of global problems – from the economic downturn to climate change – as complex. While the complexity of these issues is indeed staggering, the term complexity is used merely as a descriptor of the intricate nature of these challenges. However, as the three books under review demonstrate, complexity is not an accidental word, but a key to the understanding and explanation of global life. Therefore, all three studies position themselves within the small, but resilient, oeuvre of complexified IR.

A key feature of this literature is its rejection of the linear reductionism dominating the IR mainstream. In fact, some proponents of the complexity paradigm have suggested that such pandering to a truncated representation of the reality of global life has turned IR into a ‘miserable science’. ⁶⁹ As this review article has demonstrated, at the heart of this misery is IR’s conception of ‘science’, which has no space for the uncertainty and randomness of global life. This ambiguity was not lost on the so-called fathers of the discipline. For instance, Hans Morgenthau was well aware of ‘the inevitable gap’ between ‘the science of political science’ (or, what he also called, ‘good – that is rational’ – international politics) and the fact that the ‘political reality’ of world affairs ‘is replete with contingencies and systemic irregularities’ (or, what he labelled, international politics ‘as it actually is’). ⁷⁰

It seems that IR has forgotten Morgenthau’s injunction that reality is far more complex than his account suggested. As the books under review evidence, the complexity paradigm provides a much-needed corrective to the ‘deep Newtonian slumber’ of IR. While exposing the ‘scientific fallacy’ of the discipline, it demonstrates that ‘an alternative understanding of IR’ is ‘not only possible, but also necessary’. ⁷¹ A critical feature of this alternative understanding is the non-anthropocentric ontology of complexified IR. It asserts that ‘only thinking beyond the human condition can allow us to fully appreciate history as becoming, as the nonlinear process which fully reflects the nature of the vortex of time’. ⁷² At the same time, a complexified IR offers a non-linear engagement with the dynamics of global life, which perceives the future as uncertain and the present as irreversible.

Thus, going back to the query with which this review article began – ‘Is IR a science?’ – the complexity paradigm suggests that it is much more pertinent to respond to the questions, ‘What kind of science?’ and ‘Science to what ends?’ The three books under review offer distinct, yet veritable, paths through which these issues can be interrogated. Equally significantly, the authors of these prescient investigations have also produced the kind of IR studies that are bound to trigger debate and invite (if not beckon) their readers to pursue further the ideas discussed on their pages. Most poignantly, perhaps, the three books under review have demonstrated that the cognitive crisis in the conventional study of IR becomes the beginning of its complexification.