Extended Critique--Continued from First Entry

One question I asked the Professor during her talk was whether the discursive approach can be considered prescriptive on a broad range of issues. Given that discourse is vague in and of itself, approaches to interpretation open to widespread debate, and no empirical means to prove causation between the framing of a conflict and action taken to deal with it, I was very skeptical about directly applying the discursive method to specific policy analysis. Professor Hansen gave few concrete details, pointing to the highly complex nature of the approach and its need for greater academic acceptance. Nevertheless, her opposition to the perception of new European immigrants as "the other" and her belief in the accountability of individual policymakers provided a few hints to the affirmative.
Despite the case for the discursive approach and the possibilities it opens, I need to absorb myself in more literature to truly accept its viability to the gamut of foreign policy decisions. I still cling to a view of the international system as existing in an objective state of anarchy with clearly identifiable state and non-state actors responding to acknowledged security threats, both conventional and asymmetrical. I believe Professor Hansen's approach, such as the emphasis on the threat posed by InfoWar and to the individual human (though acknowledging humans in and of themselves are not securitizing actors but part of a collective, with a state being a key element in securitization) is very difficult to fully ascertain and hampers effective policymaking. Resource conflicts, which encourage regional destabilization, inter-state competition, and mass migration, are of far greater danger to global security and international stability than the shaping of news and commentary from the media. One can make the argument that how the media and leaders securitizing issues in policy discourse shape issues hints at possible responses, but due a lack of pattern and causality between these two elements makes focusing on them dubious at best. President Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman made sweeping mentions of democracy, freedom, and the preservation of liberty in their official policy discourse in shaping America's response to the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. While the discourse was similar, the policies undertaken were quite different, with total way aimed at unconditional surrender advanced in the former and containment to preserve spheres of influence in the latter. Using the rhetoric of preserving freedom and democracy has become so commonplace in the West that connection to policy action is very difficult to determine. In the environment of the Cold War, whether the threat posed to American or Soviet interests was officially labeled as one of undermining self-determination and freedom or a matter of state security, the responses were often similar and in line with the accepted international reality.

Posted by Boris Ryvkin on November 14, 2006 02:06 PM | Permalink

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