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Political Sociology and the Problem of the International

Article  in  Millennium - Journal of International Studies · September 2007

DOI: 10.1177/03058298070350030401

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Didier Bigo R.B.J. Walker

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Political Sociology and the Problem
of the lnternational
Didier Bigo and R. B. J. Walker

This paper revisits the multiple theoretical antagonisms mobilised by

a claimed opposition between the international and the global/local
so as to elaborate the stakes of working through traditions of political
sociology that have been marginalised in most forms of international
relations theory. The paper especially addresses the contribution of
recent work on the social production of limits and borders and the
re-articulation of practices of exception. Resis!i_ng conventions of
international theory predicated on Schmittian accounts of limits in
territory and law, the paper assesses recent claims about sovereignty,
security and liberty informed by a reflection about the way concepts
of field and dispositif may be used in an analysis of the boundaries of
contemporary politics. To this end, the paper draws attention to the
topology of a moebius ribbon as an especially suggestive comparison
with topologies affirming clear distinctions between interna! and
externa! sites of sociopolitical life.

A Problem with the International?

To speak of 'the problem of the international' is already to run into
difficulties. This is a phrase that encourages an assumption that there
is only one problem: the definition of the international as an object to be
examined. It thus encourages a conflation of problems arising from a field
of practices that have come to be identified by the term 'international'
and problems arising from a discipline claiming to speak authoritatively
about a field of practices that is thereby identified. Moreover, it is a
phrase that affirms a belief that this singular but ambivalent problem can
be discussed in and of itself, rather than as part of, or even an expression
of, other problems identified by other terms such as the political, the
cultural, the economic, the anthropological, the modern, or, the term that
is most in question here, the social.
Thus, while our specific brief in this article is to canvass the
possibilities arising from bringing something called política! sociology
to bear upon this problem of the international, this cannot be an excuse
for simply adding the contributions of one unproblematic field of
knowledge to another. We are not dealing here with an interdisciplinarity
that might lead to a long-overdue reconciliation of 1:vvo disciplines. On
the contrary, we are persuaded by a need to accentuate conflicts already
© Millennium: Journal of Intemational Studies, 2007. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.35 No.3, pp. 725-739

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Millennium

expressed in the presence of distinct disciplines so as to understand the

potential implications of what can too easily appear to be convincing
pleas for reconciliation. Any claim to be able to identify a problem
of the international is already inherently risky and will be contested
from many directions. It will especially make a difference whether this
problem is identified as a field of practices, a specific discipline claiming
to speak about those practices, or both at once. Any claim to be able to
speak, describe or make predictions about a political sociology is going
to be risky also, and for similar reasons. Thus, in the present context, we
will be concerned less with an attempt to canvass the many literatures
that might be identified by the term 'political sociology' than to revisit
the multiple antagonisms mobilised by a claimed opposition between
the international and the global/local so as to assess what might be
involved in engaging with traditions of political sociology that have been
marginalised by, though never quite excluded from, most contemporary
forms of intemational relations theory. The argument will lead us to
focus most explicitly on questions about boundaries, whether between
disciplines such as política! sociology and international relations or in
claims about contemporary transformations in relations between national
and international or global and local.
It is never a simple matter to try to add one field of knowledge to
another as if they are already at play in a common field of knowledge. Many
have tried to link the política! and the economic, to take perhaps the most
familiar example, in the hope that putting these two terms together will
overcome constitutive antagonisms between values grounded in claims
about the sovereign authority of the modern state and values grounded in
capitalist market exchange. Two very different understandings, not only of
what counts as an ultimate source of value but also of what counts as power,
authority and política! identity, are at work in this respect and it would be
naive to expect a greater interdisciplinarity alone to solve antagonisms that
reach so far into the formative assumptions of modem political life. Política!
economy, even anintemational political economy, has in sorne respects come
to be a powerful field of analysis in its own right, but while having much
to say about how the antagonisms of state and market have been mediated
historically and structurally, it nevertheless expresses conflicts of principie
without which the contemporary world is more or less unthinkable.
Different, perhaps related, but in any case long-standing difficulties also
arise when the tenns 'political' and 'social', or 'política! analysis' and
'sociological analysis', are put into conjunction, not least as a consequence
of the way politics is construed by those who start their analysis through
assumptions about the social and from the way the social is construed by
those who start their analysis through assumptions about the political.
Thus to bring political sociology to bear on the problem of
the international is to ask for considerable trouble. It is not that this

l. Among many, see Pierre Bourdieu and James Samuel Coleman, Social T/ieory
far a Changing Society (Boulder, CA: Westview Press, 1991); Stephen Hobden, 'You
Can Choose Your Sociology but You Can't Choose Your Relations: Tilly, Mann and

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 Political Sociology and the Problem of the International

cannot be done, or that it has not already been done in ways that are
far from trivial. 1 It is, rather, that the desire to bring political sociology
into contact with the problem of the international raises questions about
why the problem of the international can already be expressed, in part,
as a claim about the absence of a political sociology, and thus about the
mutual exclusions at work in the genesis of these disciplines. 2 In many
respects, claims about the problem of the international already expresses
a long narrative about the origins of what has come to be seen as the
necessary exclusion of the social; or rather, about the necessary exclusion
of any sustained engagement with the social and its replacement with a
minimalist sketch, an unexamined array of simplified clichés, through
which the social can be interpolated somewhere between the familiar
'levels' of man, the state and the system of states. Similar patterns have
arisen in relation to the state, which has regularly been brought 'back
in' even though assumptions about what the state must be have never
managed to go away; or, in relation to culture, despite being ever-present
in claims about nationalism or struggles over values. Any attempt to
bring a political sociology to bear on the problem of the international
engages a similar pattern, as one might gather even from sorne minimal
understanding of the way Max Weber has been understood both as
the paradigmatic sociologist and as a crucial figure in the construction
of sorne versions of the political realism that has been taken to be the
primary influence on what we call the problem of the international.3 As
with claims about a political economy or a political culture, a political
sociology engages with the problem of the international, both as an effect
of historically constituted practices of scholarly knowledge and as an effect
of those historically constituted practices which such scholarship seeks to
examine, though the relationship is never as clear-cut as proponents of
either 'theory' or 'practice' often imagine. For the purposes of this article,
however, the conjunction betvveen political sociology and the problem

Relational Sociology', Review oflnternational Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 281-6; Daniel
Nexon, 'Which Historical Sociology? A Response to Stephen Hobden', Review of
International Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 273-80; Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson,
Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Seymour Martín Lipset, 'Steady Work: An Academic Memoir', The
American Sociologist 34, no. 1 (2003): 112-30; Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity and
Interests: A Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in
Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1989); John Urry, Sociology b eyond Societies: Mobilities far the Twenty-First
Century (London: Routledge, 2000).
2. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
3. Compare Max Weber, Economy and Sociely: An Outline of Interpretive
Sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968) with Weber, 'The Nation State and
Economic Policy', and 'The Profession and Vocation of Politics', both in Weber:
Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), a comparison that give sorne sense of the stakes involved
in the history of interpretation and appropriation of Weber' s work.

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Millennium

of the international will be engaged primarily in relation to the ways

in which a specific discipline invites suspicions that a more sustained
sociological orientation would be a good thing precisely because it
has worked so hard to exclude both a sociological reading of political
practices and a política! reading of social practices, but also to include a
very thin, almost abstract residue within its account of what the problem
of the international must be.

Patrolling the Boundaries of the International

The problem of the international might in fact be specified in many
different ways. Indeed the phrase suggests the potential for intense
debates over what it means to identify the intemational as a problem,
for whom it is a problem, and how it relates to other problems. This
problematic character of the international is now often reduced to a
matter of 'perspectives,' deflecting discussion onto the epistemological
grounds upon which the problem of the international is to be known,
often with ethical qualities being attached to the choice of appropriate
epistemologies. What counts as a problem, or as what sorne might call a
research-guiding question, is thereby deferred in favour of debates about
the appropriate stance to be taken towards that problem as a matter of
legitimate scholarship. The establishment of the discipline itself works
even more effectively in this way, not all the time perhaps, but certainly
when the international is seen as a specific object of analysis, requiring
a specific methodology, or at least a specific range of methodologies. As
an institutionalised and historically constituted practice, the discipline
encourages the assumption that the problem of the international refers
to a realm of reality with clear boundaries about which the discipline
can generate substantial claims to knowledge, whether scientific, realistic
or even critica!. That is, the discipline works by affirming very clear
boundaries as the condition under which the problem of the international
might be engaged, even though it is the very capacity to affirm clear
boundaries and the need to establish the conditions under which clear
boundaries might be constructed that is quite obviously at stake in any
attempt to identify what counts as a problem of the international.
There are many ways of identifying how the disciplinary practices
of international relations work to affirm very sharp boundaries so as
to delimit its specific object of study. The 'levels of analysis' schematic
works especially well to this effect, not least by encouraging analysis of
individuals, states and system of states as autonomous practices, thereby
discouraging attention to the problematic relations between individual
and state or state and system of states that have, in other contexts, been
identified as core sites of antagonism in the organisation of modern
political life, or to the economic, cultural and social practices that sorne
might think provide crucial conditions under which it is possible to
understand the individuals, states and system of states that have so easily
been reified in this pervasive framing of the problem of the international.
As one manifestation of this general tendency, the sharp differentiation of
an inside and outside of the modern state, understood as the line drawn

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 Political Sociology and the Problem of the International

between discrete hierarchical levels quite as easily as between horizontal

jurisdictions of inclusion and exclusion, has worked very effectively to
reduce political sociology to a concern with processes enabling something
like Weber' s monopoly over the legitimate capacity for violence within a
modern nation-state. Political sociology has not only been nationalised,
but thereby deployed to focus attention on a centralised conception of
power and on what Weber understood as the 'professionals of politics'
responsible for the exercise of state power.4 Política! sociology has been
made to work within the limits defined by a discipline that must keep
affirming very clear boundaries in order to keep its disciplinary status
and its capacity to objectify the problem of the international, not in terms
of highly contentious accounts of the boundaries, borders and limits of
modern political life but of what happens when a specific account of
boundaries, borders and limits are simply taken for granted. 5
In this way, política! sociology has been encouraged to participate
in a broad framing of the international as a specific 'object,' requiring a
specific range of methodologies to be deployed within a specific discipline
with clear boundaries that supposedly match the clear boundaries
defining the 'object' being studied. This 'imposition' of a 'legitimate
problematics' of an international as a specific object has frequently been
challenged in terms of epistemological and methodological assumptions
but much less so in terms of the presumed naturalness of the boundaries
between interna! and external, of a dialectic of openness and closure
at work within and without the modern state. This presumed Janus­
like state has justified fonns of política! sociology, and political theory,
articulated within the state, affirming claims both about monopolies over
violence, that is, force and territorial order, and about the necessity of these
monopolies in order to deter or prevent any other form of violence, and
thus to legitimise claims about how we should understand the legitimacy
of violence, force and order. The reduction of política! sociology to the
life of the professionals of politics acting on behalf of such states, and
their relations with their own societies has consequently re-enforced the
capacity of the discipline of international relations to claim to be able to
know about states, nations and societies in its own specific way. Thus we
recognise characteristic narratives about a permanent struggle between
institutions representing populations and having a specific authority
over a particular territory. It may be cal]ed anarchy, a mature anarchy,
a states system, an international society, an emerging form of global
governance, a universalising structure of hegemony or even Empire,
but we can nevertheless recognise a well-bred family of debates about

4. Didier Bigo, 'Grands débats dans un petit monde: Les débats en relations
internationales et leur lien avec le monde de la securité' (Great debates in a small
world: Debates in international relations and their link with the world of security),
Cultures et Conflits 19-20 (1995): 7-48.
5. R. B. J. Walker, 'After the Future: Enclosures, Connections, Politics', in
Reframing the International: Law, Culture, Politics, ed. Richard A. Falk, Lester Edwin
J. Ruiz and R. B. J. Walker (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3-25.

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Millennium

the 'nature' of this 'object,' or 'beast' as many Europeanists like to cal!

it: debates among significantly different 'perspectives' that nevertheless
affirm that the 'object,' or 'problem,' of the international exists as such. 6
As many others have said in various ways, there is an obvious
problem here. The map is not the territory. The discipline is not the
object it studies, or represents, or constitutes. On the other hand, the
discipline is neither simply a set of lenses through which to look at sorne
object beyond nor something that has been produced in isolation from
whatever it is that it claims to study as an object. There is especially a
problem in that an obvious temptation arising from complaints about the
limits of a discipline is to cal! for its erasure; and thus also to cal! for the
erasure of the boundaries, borders and limits that are expressed, indeed
celebrated by the discipline. In general terms this is a very familiar
move. International relations, it is often said, expresses a political
world divided by boundaries, whether as physical borders or limits of
jurisdiction and principle. Those boundaries, it is also often said, are
obsolete, or are quickly becoming so. Consequently, not only are we
told that we need to examine a world without boundaries, but that we
need to replace a discipline still living in a past when boundaries may
have been in place with a discipline living in a present, or a future, when
boundaries have been erased. Although few would put the matter quite
so sharply, the general move is familiar enough. Boundaries are either
here or they are not. State sovereignty is either here or it is being replaced
by something vaguely global, or cosmopolitan. Or, because boundaries
are not disappearing as quickly as had been hoped, or feared, they are
assumed to be back in the same old place, giving international relations a
new lease of life in the name of a nationalism or a realism that has more
staying power than the once-fashionable globalists and cosmopolitans
had suspected.
This pattern is identifiable in claims about the need to bring a
political sociology to bear on the problem of the international. On the one
hand, it is possible to envisage a struggle to work out a more elaborate
sociology of política! life within states, perhaps one befitting a Weber
who has not been reduced either to an existentialist tradition of political
realism or to an account of the professionals of politics working in relation
to a monopoly of legitimate violence within a territorial state on the other,
or perhaps to both. On the other hand, it is possible to envisage a política!
sociology that switches immediately from one form of essentialism to
another, from an essentialisation of a world divided among nation-states
to an essentialisation of a world in which the international has been
erased by or been subsumed within a megadiscipline, a sociology of
the world that extends from global to local, as if accounts of the political
and the social that have been articulated in relation to the problem of the
international can be suddenly transposed to a world that has somehow
managed to get rid of the problem of the international.

6. R. B. J. Walker, 'Lines of Insecurity: International, Imperial, Exceptional',

Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (March 2006): 65-82.

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 Política! Sociology and the Problem of the International

Are we condemned to this by now familiar opposition between

the boundaries assumed and reproduced both by the discipline of
international relations and by the forms of political sociology that have
enabled and been enabled by this disciplinary framing of the problem of
the international and the claim that these boundaries have been or are
being dissolved? How is it possible to assume that the problem of the
international can be solved by the kind of globalising political sociology
that celebrates a society that is somehow beyond ali boundaries, that can
incorporate ali differences within a social order within which the problem
of the international can be subsumed as a mere 'leve!' of governance?
The idea that borders are either permanent or are about to disappear
is so familiar that even if it is easily dismissed as ridiculously simplistic
on man y dimensions it finds expression in many seemingly sophisticated
fields of scholarship. It is an idea that is easy enough to detect at work
within many fields in which the problem of the international is assumed
to be easily dismissible along with the discipline that has presumed to
offer the last word in what it means to engage with the problem of the
intemational. Political sociology is very susceptible to this move, one
encouraging the apparently easy jump from the international to the global
or even to the world - whatever we moderns are supposed to mean by
that notoriously elusive term.
Rather than think of the conjunction between political sociology
and the problem of the international as the possibility of replacing an
outmoded and boundary-obsessed discipline of international relations
with a more properly global sociology in which boundaries, and perhaps
the very possibility of a politics, become quite difficult to identify, we
would suggest that it is precisely in relation to the analysis of boundaries
that are assumed to be either present or absent that a political sociology
can find considerable analytical purchase. The problem is less to find
a new definition of the international or to dissolve it in.to some other
!abe] such as a global politics or a world politics, than to examine very
carefully the way we think about it and in relation to boundaries that are
so easily framed as simply present or absent.

Political Sociology, the Topology of Boundaries, and the Topos

of the International
Boundaries, borders and limits are never as simple as they are so often made
to seem by the lines through which they are usually represented. This is the
case whether we refer to the practices of goverrunents disputing their borders
as physical lines of territorial delimitation, transnational groups organising
markers of identification, or academics defending their discipline, whether
trying to enlarge it by colonising others or jumping to sorne other discipline
because the grass is somehow greener there. Some analysis of how their
topos (or hyle) that has been articulated and justified by practices of drawing
lines is required in order to uncover both the arbitrariness of origins and
the legitimacy of any consensus about the need to have a border as a line
of separation and differentiation, a need that is over and above any more
specific dispute about where the border is to be located.

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