# The Political Anthropology of Internationalized Politics

Thomas Bierschenk

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/1937

DOI: 10.4000/anthropodev.1937

ISSN: 2553-1719

**Publisher**

Presses universitaires de Louvain

**Printed version**

Date of publication: 25 October 2022

Number of pages: 245-247

ISBN: 978-2-39061-270-4

ISSN: 2276-2019

**Electronic reference**

Thomas Bierschenk, "The Political Anthropology of Internationalized Politics", *Anthropologie & développement* [Online], 53 | 2022, Online since 08 December 2022, connection on 18 December 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/1937; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/anthropodev.1937

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Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
# The Political Anthropology of Internationalized Politics

Klaus Schlichte and Sarah Biecker (eds.), 2021, Lanham, Md., Rowman & Littlefield, 220 p.

Thomas Bierschenk*

Does the International Relations (IR) subdiscipline of political science need approaches from anthropology? In particular, should it utilise anthropology's core methodology, ethnography? The editors and contributors to this volume believe that the answer is yes, and thus contribute to an ongoing conversation. Here and there over the last 20 years, English-speaking political scientists have propagated an 'ethnographic turn' (see also an earlier contribution by one of the editors: Schlichte, 2013). In French-speaking Africa-related political science, following the lead of authors like Jean-François Bayart and Jean-François Médard, it has been standard practice since the 1990s to refer to anthropological perspectives, as any even cursory perusal of journals like *Politique Africaine* and *Anthropologie & développement* reveals. At the same time, the anthropology of development (often also using African situations as examples) has increasingly turned to topics that have traditionally been attributed to political science over the last 30 to 40 years, such as public services, modern local politics and democratic elections, as readers of this journal are well aware.

In their introduction, the editors identify three fields in which IR and the anthropology of politics come into particularly close contact, if not actually overlap: recently, in the deconstruction of essentialist notions of the 'state' conceived as a homogeneous entity; second, in the empirical study of public bureaucracies; and third, going back to the 1980s, in the study of 'development'. In the editors' opinion, the usefulness of the ethnographic method lies above all in its epistemological reflexivity and theoretical and methodological openness. They hereby open a discussion that continues from Chapters 2 to 7 of the book, most explicitly in the two chapters following the introduction. Christoph Bueger (Chapter 2) rightly criticises the fact that in political science (and, I would add, even in contemporary anthropology and its neighbouring disciplines) there is often a very loose understanding of ethnography. Frequently, he argues, the term does not designate long-term participation in the everyday life of the researched actors, but is used for any kind of observation, no matter how superficial, and for one or two individual interviews. I also support his observation that research on experts changes the classic epistemological problem of proximity and distance

<footnote>* Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany; biersche@uni-mainz.de</footnote>
between researchers and those being researched. However, I do not think that researching 'global connections' inevitably requires that the notion of the research 'field' should be abandoned, as he suggests. Rather, it increases the number of 'social spaces' the researcher has to zoom in on (which, by the way, is more manageable by a team than a single researcher). The argument that researching 'configurations of praxis' instead of social fields with clearly demarcated borders (but who still claims that they exist today?) does away with the access problem seems to me to be refuted to a certain degree by other contributions in the book. To start with, it is discredited in Chapter 3 by Sophia Hoffmann, who argues against the universal applicability of an ethnographic approach, which she has found impossible to apply in highly securitised situations, such as the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan.

The following four chapters deal with local arenas at different positions in the policy chain. Julian Eckl (Chapter 4) is interested in the production site of global social engineering – in his case global health policy. He uses the example of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and shows that from an ethnographic perspective the WHO is both an international collective actor and a social arena (he uses the term forum). This is followed by three chapters on 'local' (in fact, rather national) arenas: that is, sociopolitical fields in which global security policies are vernacularised. Tessa Diphoorn (Chapter 5) analyses the internationalised policing policies of Kenya and South Africa, Tomas M. Martin (Chapter 6) studies prison policies in Uganda, and Jessica L. Anderson (Chapter 7) studies peace-building institutions and practices in Somalia.

Somewhat abruptly, the last two chapters emphasise a different point. Kai Koddenbrock and Mario Schmidt (Chapter 8) argue that IR should be expanded towards, and integrate, international political economy (IPE) and focus on the study of global capitalism; while Sarah Biecker and Klaus Schlichte (Chapter 9), inspired by science and technology studies, promote 'technologies of government' (defined as bundles of actors, practices, devices and discourses) as the central object of IR research. However, in these two latter contributions, the connection between IR and political anthropology, which was highlighted in the introduction as being of central importance, fades into the background, and individual results of ethnographic research have a merely illustrative function.

In fact, these two chapters explicitly raise a central question that is never addressed, either in the introduction or in the various contributions: What do we actually mean by IR today? Is the term even still appropriate, and if not, what term would be? In fact, the very title of the book does not refer to international relations, but to 'internationalised politics'. The term is never explained in the book, however, so one wonders how it relates to other terms such as global structural policy, global public policies, international state-building and global social engineering (Bierschenk, 2014; Babül, 2017, see my review in this issue), or to influential concepts like 'travelling models' (Behrends et al., 2014; Olivier de Sardan, 2021)? A different, but related, question is raised by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan in the Afterword: whether the boundaries between political science and anthropology are not increasingly dissolving into the study of 'internationalised politics'. The resulting transdisciplinarity would then be not so much a happy marriage, but rather an (equally happy) *ménage à trois*, through the inclusion of sociology. In fact, like Olivier de Sardan in the last paragraph of the
book, I would also include global historiography in such a (hopefully) happy arrangement,
as a discipline that has recently become increasingly interested in both the history and the
local memory of development policy (see the present issue n° 53 of this journal on *La mé-
moire du développement*).

In short, this is an exciting intellectual project with solid individual contributions, but it is
somewhat uneven as a book. The minor formal oversights (misspelled authors' names or
titles of books and articles) are also regrettable.

***Bibliography***

Babül E.M., 2017, *Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey*, Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press.

Behrends A., Park S.-J., Rottenburg R., 2014, *Travelling Models in African Conflict Resolution: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering*, Leiden, Brill.

Bierschenk T., 2014, “From the anthropology of development to the anthropology of global social engineering”, *Zeitschrift für Ethnologie*, n° 139(1), pp. 73-98.

Olivier de Sardan J.-P., 2021, *La revanche des contextes. Des mésaventures de l'ingénierie sociale, en Afrique et au-delà*, Paris, Karthala.

Schlichte K., 2013, “Was die Politikwissenschaft von der Ethnologie lernen kann (What political science can learn from anthropology)”, in T. Bierschenk, M. Krings and C. Lentz (eds.), *Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert*, Berlin, Reimer, pp. 249-264.