International organization at war: NATO practices in the Afghan campaign

Schmitt, Olivier

doi:10.1177/0010836717701969

Cited by 15 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…18 See the systematisation of: Kustermans (2016), 177, quote: 185. 19 See the excellent study by Schmitt (2017), which is also one of the few existing detailed IR participant observations. 20 Pouliot (2016), 2.…”

Section: A Bourdieusian Structuralist Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It appears that such 41 Pouliot (2016), 94-5, 102. 42 Schmitt (2017), 509; Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence ( 2016), 11-2. 43 See for good recent summaries of this literature: Hallams et al (2013).…”

Section: Mapping the Structure Of The Nato Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Huysmans (2002).29 Pouliot (2016);Adler-Nissen and Pouliot (2014), 889-911. Mérand (2010), includes national policymakers but without going into too much detail.30 Graeger (2016);Schmitt (2017), 502-18.31 Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992),104-5. …”

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confidence: 99%

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Creating common sense: getting NATO to Afghanistan

Münch¹

2021

J Transatl Stud

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This article raises the question of how NATO became bogged down in Afghanistan. I scrutinise how the alliance became involved in Afghanistan and how it formulated its strategy. In doing this, I follow the general premises of practice theory. However, instead of the common focus on diplomats and their everyday doings, this article suggests an approach that pays more attention to the structure of the field of positions. I demonstrate that the actions of permanently seconded representatives of member states and of NATO’s administrative cadre were crucial in drawing the alliance into Afghanistan. I argue that their actions significantly contributed to the creation of a fatal common sense: namely that the alliance had to become and remain engaged even in the absence of clear political goals. This provided the basis for a means-focused and endless mission.

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Section: A Bourdieusian Structuralist Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mapping the Structure Of The Nato Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creating common sense: getting NATO to Afghanistan

Münch¹

2021

J Transatl Stud

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“…Bourdieu’s approach requires a ‘field’ in which agents compete for symbolic and social positions, but Bourdieu himself failed to produce a general theory of fields (Fabiani, 2016; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012), which led him to study already established and clearly delineated fields. Transposed to the study of international politics, this approach very often leads to closely associate a field with a particular site (Neumann, 2013), through the study of specific ministry of foreign affairs (Lequesne, 2017; Pouponneau and Mérand, 2017), embassies (Cornut, 2015) or multilateral organisations (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014; Bicchi and Bremberg, 2016; Cooper and Pouliot, 2015; Schmitt, 2017; Wiseman, 2015).…”

Section: A Practice-based Approach To Foreign Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

How to challenge an international order: Russian diplomatic practices in multilateral security organisations

Schmitt¹

2019

European Journal of International Relations

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Many policy and academic debates focus on the extent to which Russia is a revisionist power challenging the ‘liberal world order’. However, there is little agreement on the primary motives explaining the behaviour of Russia, some pointing to her unsatisfied great power ambitions and neo-imperial ideologies, and others to genuine security concerns. Adjudicating those claims is important because of their policy implications for engagement and/or deterrence towards Russia. This article contributes to this debate through a theoretical contribution to practice-based approaches to International Relations. Using De Certeau’s understanding of practices, it analyses Russian diplomatic practices in multilateral security organisations and illustrates how this helps infer foreign policy motives, contrary to the field-specific relationalism of Bourdieu-inspired practice approaches. Empirically, it builds on 126 interviews and participant observation in three multilateral security organisations (the United Nations, the NATO–Russia Council and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe). The article shows that at least since 2014, Russian diplomats in the three organisations consistently defend policies and use narratives that reveal more interest in status recognition, sometimes at the expense of security concerns.

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“…This is precisely what is being contested by the 'intervening powers' in humanitarian and anti-terrorist engagements. A fourth, more contextual, factor is that, in the context of multinational operations, the political labelling of opposing forces is carefully negotiated between the governments involved, thus favouring the resort to euphemisms (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot 2014;Schmitt 2017). Therefore, political leaders, especially in multilateral settings, avoid producing a clear and coherent discourse on the enemy, especially when its content appears to take on the shape of doctrinal and/ or official formalization.…”

Section: From the Political Muddling Of The Enemy To Its Relativementioning

confidence: 99%

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them: ‘the enemy’ as object of controversy in contemporary Western wars

Olsson

2019

Critical Military Studies

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An authenticated document published in 2008 by Wikileaks and entitled 'NATO in Afghanistan: master narrative' implicitly makes clear that the 'enemy' should never be recognized as an enemy of NATO by its personnel. This is the point of departure of this article, dealing with the different and partly incompatible uses of the notion of the enemy by (in particular) politicians and the military in contemporary Western conflicts. In this paper I do not give an a priori meaning to the signifier 'enemy'. I am here interested in the consequences of the loss of previously institutionalized and official definitions of the enemy and the resulting relative avoidance of the term in contemporary wars. At the same time I show how this loss of meaning allows for the cohabitation of widely divergent usages of the term by distinct state-professionals (politicians, diplomats, military leaders, international lawyers.. .). These uses are at the same time logically incompatible but pragmatically complementary. I hence highlight that the absence of a clear understanding of what enmity implies has become an asset in contemporary unrecognized 'asymmetric wars'. This confusion around the word 'enemy' enables these actors to speak different languages to different people and to engage in 'wars against enemies' while presenting them as 'police operations against criminals'.

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International organization at war: NATO practices in the Afghan campaign

Cited by 15 publications

References 22 publications

Creating common sense: getting NATO to Afghanistan

Creating common sense: getting NATO to Afghanistan

How to challenge an international order: Russian diplomatic practices in multilateral security organisations

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them: ‘the enemy’ as object of controversy in contemporary Western wars

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