An Interview With Robert Vitalis

An Interview With Robert Vitalis

An Interview With Robert Vitalis

By : Robert Vitalis

[Robert Vitalis has a PhD in Political Science from MIT and is currently full Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a specialist in the political economy of the Middle East, but in the late 1990s, he began to explore records that appeared to upend the history that international relations scholars told about the origins of the field. His growing interest in racism as a force in world politics and in the works of W. E. B Du Bois influenced the writing of his account of the Jim Crow organization of life under the Western oil companies in the Persian Gulf (see America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, 2005) and culminated in his revisionist history of the international relations discipline and its Black internationalist counter-tradition, White World Order, Black Power Politics: the birth of American International Relations (2015). His latest book, Oilcraft: The Haunting of U.S. Primacy in the Gulf, will be published later this spring.]

E-International Relations (EIR): Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

Robert Vitalis (RV): This is probably not what young and ambitious theorists want to hear, but I hardly identify with a field at this point in my career, and no longer organize my undergraduate teaching as if disciplines matter. The critical area studies and political economy traditions with which I identified are dead. Political science has turned its back on what area studies after Edward Said’s Orientalism understood as essential to challenging power. See Zach Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East for details.

International relations is in a worst state since critical voices and perspectives have faced even more formidable opposition. Consider the new mission statement by the current leadership of the Centre for Advanced International Theory at Sussex, which identifies the essential need for research “free of the requirement for direct policy relevance and reflexive of the knowledge/power nexus.” And now think how impossibly wide the gulf is between what they call for and what every leading political science and international relations department in the United States considers to be the prime directive of their research, teaching, and institution building since September 11. I have tried attending job talks and seminars, since my department chases the same six “star” candidates that its competitors do in each field each year, but no longer do so.

Basically, I have stopped reading journals and teaching articles as well. I teach books exclusively, and get great pleasure and inspiration from reading across disciplines. Quinn Slobodian’s The Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, and Amy Offner’s Sorting Out the Mixed Economy are next on my list. I am looking forward to reading Dan Nexon’s new book, which he has co-written with Alexander Cooley, Exit from Hegemony. I love Patricia Owen’s new project on women in international thought. I have done what I can to make sure the work of folks like Isaac Kemola (Making the World Global), Neha Vora (Teach for Arabia) and Pascal Menoret (Graveyard of Clerics) make it into print. And I have made it a point to support the hiring and promotion of those in the United States who come closest to the Sussex ideal in their combining theory and international relations (e.g., Jairus Victor Grove, Alex Barder, Dan Levine) even though the approach in my own work is far different from their own.

EIR: How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

RV: The question makes it easy to invent or romanticize my past, which I will try to avoid. I suppose I have been wrestling with my original ready embrace of two different although at times intersecting fields–maybe genres is better–in the study of US imperialism and where and how they lead us astray. The first is the revisionist tradition in what used to be called diplomatic history associated with William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin school. I was still an undergraduate, back from a year study abroad in Egypt and Israel (not a common thing in 1976), and took a seminar in diplomatic history with Carolyn “Rusti” Eisenberg, then a young scholar working on Cold War foreign policy. I have been wrestling with the adequacy or not of their and the more brutalist neo-Marxian variants of societal or innenpolitik or instrumentalist or structuralist answers to what drives US foreign policy since. The second is what we used to call historical comparative political economy or dependency and post-dependency approaches to roughly the same issue as seen from and experienced by places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I suppose there is a third literature or genre, namely Said’s critique of orientalism and its afterlives, although it played a less important role than the others in what I do.

In my book America’s Kingdom, I depicted the same intellectual trajectory as follows: “When I started this project, I described myself as a political economist, and I thought of political economy as a kind of excavation project of material lying beneath the surface of ideology and culture. Now at the end of a decade-long endeavor, I tend to use a different metaphor, and think of my work more in terms of reverse-engineering of particular processes of mythmaking.” I called White World Order a sequel to America’s Kingdom and its account of the unbroken past of hierarchy on the world mining frontiers. I said that professional international relations did something similar to what the oil companies’ agents did in rewriting history, even if “some may still believe the oil sector orders of magnitude more important to the twentieth century than the knowledge industry.”

In my newest book, Oilcraft—we are still going around with the marketers about the subtitle, but roughly How Scarcity and Security Haunt U.S. Energy Policy–due out next summer, I return to the “raw materialism” that has misled the left now for decades. Thirty years ago, Fred Halliday skewered the “vulgar Marxist explanations of American foreign policy” that reduce complex determinations to the quest for “raw materials and markets.” It has only gotten worse since, as I show activist intellectuals as actively engaged in mythmaking as clients of the Saudis are.

EIR: What is the importance of Black History Month and what does it represent to you?

RV: It invites us to set the record straight. It has mattered to the way my daughter, who is in third grade, is learning US history in comparison to how I did in the early 1960s. Yet two often repeated criticisms make sense to me. One is that the changes are less than ought to be the case and the effect of having a Black History Month is paradoxically to prevent more sweeping and comprehensive changes in how we view the past. The other is the inevitable romanticization of figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others in the rewritten textbooks and on the History Channel, and so forth. What my work represents is an effort to take seriously the challenge that Black studies presents us all, in fields that folks have long argued are far removed from the issues raised by it.

EIR: Recently you engaged in a historiographic debate on the development of the discipline of international relations in the United States. What are the most common myths surrounding the origin of the discipline and how has its teaching contributed to erasure of its racial and imperialist character?

Was there a debate? No one has challenged the book so far on any point raised in it. As I said in White World Order, the findings are or ought to be considered banal. We have a discipline that historically takes as its raison d’être resolving the security dilemmas of the state (and critics might think legitimating its exercise of power), emerging at a time when the great however irrational fear was as Lothrop Stoddard put it and was celebrated for doing so, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” My book “discovers” exactly what we would expect, all else equal. What troubles various leading figures in the discipline and such intellectual middlemen as Gideon Rose in Foreign Affairs is my suggesting that the ideas that undergird hierarchy, including belief in the superiority of some, the inferiority of others, ones that animated the disciplines’ forgotten leaders, have a long half-life. A venerable tradition in Americans self-understanding, both in popular culture and in the high scholarly arts is to presume we have turned the corner on the past of racism, segregation, and the like. It is my suggesting otherwise that has generated the only not serious and rather emotional criticism of the book to date. Rose told his readers that I have made an important contribution to rethinking the past but I clearly believe that the United States today is “evil.” Ironically, it is precisely the same claim that true believers made about my alleged motives or unstated views in my last book America’s Kingdom.

EIR: In the preface of your book you explain how you discovered that Foreign Affairs was originally called the Journal of Race Development, whose editorial board was composed by controversial scholars such as Ellsworth Huntington, who openly embraced environmental determinism. How influential was biological and geographic determinism in the making of American international relations?

First, there was nothing controversial about Ellsworth Huntington at the time. Rather, he was considered required reading, and his ideas about environmental determinism were taken as gospel. The only controversial scholar on the first editorial board was W. E. B. Du Bois, both because some saw his 1903 essay collection Souls of Black Folk as beyond the pale save until his later book Darkwater, which was even more controversial. And as I note in the book, another reason why Du Bois was controversial was because Harvard actually trained him. That said, I think we have not actually ever assessed the continued influence of biological/geographic/environmental determinism on the field from then till now.  Kaplan was busy resurrecting selected parts of Mackinder who is still treated as some kind of great father of geopolitics; there was “lateral pressure” theory for a while treated as essential to the discipline when I was a graduate student. Many other examples might be cited. In addition, as I note in the book, no one has traced the significance of US political scientists writing in Mankind Quarterly, a journal of scientific racism founded in 1961 and still around today.

EIR: Could you explain the Howard School and its main proponents? How does their work contribute to the understanding of racism in world politics?

RV: Acknowledging the conceit (“school”), Howard University in Washington DC was a kind of flagship or most prestigious of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, and what I show in the book is that a set of scholars not usually recognized as having any role to play in the discipline of international relations understood themselves as seriously concerned with theory and dedicated to upending key parts of the then dominant paradigm. That dominant paradigm was that imperialism was a blessing bestowed on inferior folks or a necessity due to that inferiority. They—Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, E Franklin Frazier, Eric Williiams, and Merze Tate—whatever their differences in approach, Marxist commitments, and so forth, savaged these ideas. Reading them would require us minimally to rewrite the history of the critique of imperialism to recognize that they got there first, before the William Appleman Williams and Immanuel Wallersteins of the world. They influenced African and Caribbean intellectuals for sure, but the white academy did not read them because they would not hire them or publish them in their journals. Consider my claim that Ralph Bunche is probably the only president of the American Political Science Association who was never published in the discipline’s journal. Political science embraced him as a symbol of its own enlightened attitude toward diversity without knowing a thing about his scholarship.

EIR: How important is it to deconstruct and retell the disciplinary history of international relations?

RV: Here is why I think it is. You or your readers may disagree. It exposes the pretense of originality and the seemingly upward curve of knowledge at the hands of those that the TRIPS survey and other star-making machinery rank as the top five or ten or twenty greatest minds of the field. It helps deflate the dream that IR is or is becoming a “science” and not, as it always has been and will be, an “art.” I do not blame younger scholars for believing otherwise or acting “as if” it were the case. To do so would be to sabotage one’s own career. It is still fiction.

A second consequence, as I hope my book makes plain, is to reveal just how parochial, or perhaps provincial is the better term, international relations is in the United States. It is no less culturally constituted and blinded than that world that we like to imagine beyond the “ivory tower.” I should say that I now realize that it is these consequences and not simply that I was bringing forgotten or unknown Black scholars into the tradition that led leading lights to work overtime to keep my project from getting funded.

EIR: What is the most important advice you would give to young scholars of international relations?

RV: I was reluctant to answer this question because I have grown so cynical about the profession, which indeed now operates like other parts of the cultural economy of stars, high salaries, exploitation, and the like. But there is one thing I would urge them to consider, as I make clear in my book. What we do matters and has consequence primarily in the classroom, the department, the university, and the professional association, and we ought to strive for a fairer, less sexist, less racist academy. The dream of mattering to the state or to social movements is mostly if not completely a fantasy.

[This interview is part of E-International Relations' Black History Month features. The interviews speak to the fundamental aims of Black History Month and discuss current research and projects, as well as advice for young scholars. This interview was originally published by E-International Relations on 10 October 2019.]

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The Chronicle of Higher Education Interviews Jadaliyya Co-Founder Bassam Haddad

The following interview was conducted by Ursula Lindsey with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad in preparation for a feature about Jadaliyya for The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature was published on 29 September 2014 and can be accessed by clicking here.

Ursula Lindsey (UL): Could you send me any statistics on the readership of Jadaliyya? I would like to get a sense of the overall size of the readership, and how it is geographically distributed.

Bassam Haddad (BH): We have become much less interested in numbers after having passed an important threshold in 2013, but we do not totally ignore them! Unfortunately (because one would like to see an alternative), the best indicator of the growth and expansion of readership has been “Facebook Reach,” which increased from around fifty thousand per week during the first six months in 2010–2011, to one million in 2012–2013, and surpassed 2.3 million in 2014. We actually stopped monitoring such numbers as closely, but know that our social media and classroom presence continues to increase steadily as our Facebook followers have surpassed 130,000. These followers are pretty active in circulating our content, and constitute a large part of how Jadaliyya content is disseminated. Twitter is another indicator. However, we refrain from tweeting too much, as shown by our tweets-to-followers ratio—which is perhaps among the highest (9900 tweets and twenty-seven thousand followers), at about thirty percent. The closest we have seen in our field is about forty-five to fifty percent. This reflects the extent to which each post/article, and/or tweet, is generating interest. It is important to note that our Arabic reading audience, world-wide but mainly in the region itself, has quadrupled since 2011, and now constitutes almost thirty to thirty-five percent of our readership, a testimony to how local informed readers elect to turn to Jadaliyya frequently—largely because our writers on local matters are either writing from the region or are intimately connected with the region.

As to other forms of tracing numbers, such as unique visitors, they seem quite inconsistent because the extent to which Jadaliyya is read not only via Android, iPhone, and iPad apps, but also because of the unusually large level of circulation of PDFs via huge email lists (which we are on and we see!) and, most importantly, its ubiquitous presence on syllabi (for instance, our unique visitors to the site hover around 500,000 a month, while most read Jadaliyya off line via email, PDF, or apps). Our Middle East scholars/educators/researchers list, now combined with that of Tadween Publishing, our sister organization, tops eight thousand engaged Jadaliyya readers who are increasingly assigning material from Jadaliyya.

The reason this happens is not only because we have good content. There is plenty good content if one searches the net carefully. Rather, it because of four very specific reasons: first, our good content has a long shelf-life, an outcome that is built into the editorial process; second, Jadaliyya content serves as an explicit resource or reference, through twelve topical and country/region-specific Media Roundups, profiles and archival posts for reference use, as well as weekly pedagogical reviews of new books, films, documentaries, art exhibits, and relevant social media items; third, Jadaliyya, in conjunction with Tadween’s blog, has become the space that most educators/researchers constantly visit for matters related to academic freedom, publishing, and higher education in the region as well as the United States and Europe; finally, our Jadaliyya content is selectively tapped to produce books and pedagogical publications that are published by Tadween Publishing and other publishers like Palgrave and Pluto Press, giving more gravity, and more longevity, to Jadaliyya content. One important source of such readers is JADMAG, of which we have so far produced five issues geared to educators, and chock-full of resources that are compiled and categorized at the end of each issue. (see www.JadMag.org or www.TadweenPublishing.com for more information). 

This source of readership is constantly expanding as Jadaliyya seems to be the only available site for such content (now quadro-lingual), and is our litmus test and what keeps us on our toes from day to day. The reason we emphasize this source in relation to numbers and quality is because the population of students reading Jadaliyya material based on educators’ choices is increasing exponentially at times, and serves as our most consistent source of readership with time especially that newcomers from that sphere become loyal readers. 

It is no surprise that the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) consistently sends us their critical public letters to publish when they want to reach the broader academic and research/journalist communities, including beyond the United States. It is not something you see consistently on any other website. And this applies to various other organizations that would like to reach the same expansive cohort (based in the United States, Europe, or the Middle East), including the new Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS).

Our colleague and professor of Arabic literature at Brown University, Elias Muhanna, who also runs his own popular blog, Qifa Nabki, commented openly at a conference that he does not know a professor teaching the modern Middle East who does not have a variety of Jadaliyya articles on their syllabi—an honor that ranges from rare to unique when it comes to similar online publications. 

UL: We discussed stories that caused particularly strong debates, and you mentioned the critique of DAM`s video. Are there any other pieces that sparked debates?    

BH: Just to clarify, this last piece sparked more than a debate, as some folks where actually unhappy with the approach—though we are still in good communication with the concerned parties (e.g., DAM) given our approach to the matter. The pieces that sparked debate, discussion, and the like are actually many, and I am not sure it would be fair to single out a handful. However, the notable pieces that drew heated debates and attention revolve around the July coup in Egypt, or around the nature of the Syrian uprising. But this is almost a continuous variable, and still sparks heated discussions that reflect the polarization on these matters among concerned publics. Nonetheless, we continue to get serious engagement—even if sometimes a bit over the top—from detractors on various topics, from Palestine and Syria, to articles on sexuality, Islam, and even literature and film. The fact that detractors of the entire publication continue to engage and critique reveals a sense of legitimacy that even this cohort associate with Jadaliyya. For a critical publication, this is priceless, and we think we will fail if we do not maintain that level of quality and legitimacy.

UL: What are the most common criticisms or suggestions for improvement your get? Do you think they are valid? Where do you see room for improvement? When I last saw Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon in Cairo, he said, for example, he thought the site might publish less so as to focus more on the quality of the writing. 

BH: Oh, dear, there are all kinds, and so many of which come from us, the editors, given that various page teams are relatively autonomous. Our position on critique is simple: we ignore any critique at our own peril. This does not mean that all criticisms are equally valid. They are not. It does, however, mean that we take them seriously and assume their validity until we can illustrate otherwise to ourselves and to others. In most instances, critiques do include a modicum of validity, and our responsiveness to nearly every single significant line of critiques (based on a compilation) is the reason we keep growing in quality and numbers. We surely miss some, and we surely make mistakes even in assessing critiques—but these represent a minority of cases within our practice. Based on what we have heard, we see room for improvement in soliciting even more writing from the region; in working harder to get more pieces from the scene, on intractably controversial matters, like Syria; and we agree that we, like any successful publication, can get too comfortable with its status quo of readership and contributors. But questions like yours, and internal discussions based on similar observations, push us on a quarterly basis to make a deliberate and explicit effort to reach out. This is in fact why we dramatically expanded the Arabic section (in terms of readership and contributors) during the past two years. 

All in all we operate on a five-year plan of sorts (despite the problematic association with five-year plans). At this point, as we are still in our fourth year, we are establishing ourselves as a serious and perhaps the go-to publication for informed readership. But you will soon see some changes that will expand our scope and spice things up a bit in a productive direction, at a time when we need not worry as much about the basics and daily operations. Our challenge, actually, is to maintain the essentially voluntary-based nature of Jadaliyya. Therefore, much of what we have focused on during the first years of establishment involves building the best team there is, or what we think is such, under these circumstances. It is a continuing challenge, but it has been working since 1992 when the parent organization, the Arab Studies Journal, started.

As to the question of quantity verses quality, we exercise a mean purge every quarter, precisely to avoid the false impression that quantity is synonymous with quality. Surely, we fail here and there. However, the one development since 2013 has been the reduction of the output rate—which we view as having been somewhat unavoidable as this is how you connect with new readership and contributors in the early stages—from about 175 pieces per month to about 110-120 (though this includes all posts and reports, etc.). But this challenge continues, and—frankly—we hold ourselves to standards that are not observed in comparable publications that either focus on one country, or one approach (e.g., Foreign Policy), or one audience, or one language, or one discipline, etc. So we have to make up our own standards for a new kind of publication. All this takes time, and we welcome any criticism that allows us to meat our challenge. We are not sensitive to productive critique at all! We will fail without it. 

UL: You mention detractors of the site—any examples?

BH: Every new initiative gives rise to critics, and that is a good thing. What is interesting about Jadaliyya’s critics, most of them at least, is that they critique and stick around for the most part—largely because of what they tell us verbatim at times: “We expect more from Jadaliyya,” or something of the sort. Now the question of who these critics are depends on the issue, and often our biggest critics on one topic are our biggest fans on another. Syria is a good example where we get flack from both pro-opposition corners and anti-opposition corners, but you would find avid readers of other Jadaliyya pages among both varieties. Do we have critics that do not think Jadaliyya is worth reading at all? You bet! There is very little we can do to convince those voices otherwise. Having said all of that, the fact is that Jadaliyya has filled a gap and presented a centrifugal force around which critics of mainstream discourse on the region in the United State and beyond hover. That in and of itself has generated detractors. 

UL: It seems to me that Jadaliyya has a pretty clear, consistent identity, both in its politics and its theoretical orientations. The people who edit and write it are generally the same age and peer group, and many have known each other for a long time. Do you think you have a wide enough variety of views? Do you feel like Jadaliyya has been able to spark debates outside of a community of like-minded contributors and readers? 

BH: [One factual note: the editors and contributors are by no means of similar age or belong to similar social circles—not after 2011, regarding the latter comment, and have never been, regarding the former comment. We have had more than a thousand contributors and the Jadaliyya team surpasses eighty people living in different countries now. Any cursory view of any fifty consecutive posts reveals a variety that easily surpasses most comparable publications. As for views, it is a political challenge, not always a question of diversity. See below.]

This is the one-million dollar question. Yes, any good publication must struggle with this dialectic of building a readership based on a particular kind/nature of knowledge production, but then expanding it to attract new readership and contributors while retaining the reason for its success. Are we guilty of not doing this perfectly? Absolutely. Have we gone far beyond most other publications to allow for serious internal differences and reach out to new and alternative views? Absolutely. But that does not exhaust the question. As mentioned above, we are in the building stage, and we view a good part of the shortcomings as related byproducts. However, this is one of our fundamental goals as we enter and complete our fifth year, and it will not come without its risks, risks we are very happy to take. Most importantly in reference to sparking discussion or debates, Jadaliyya articles have been written about and discussed in conferences and in social media in ways that have actually jump-started broader research questions and helped set research agendas—not to mention the impact of Jadaliyya on the carriers of junior writers who make their debut there and then get picked up by other institutions who are hiring, paying, and producing knowledge. The list is pretty long.

Having said that, two comments are relevant here. First, we are not and do not pretend to be an open forum for all views. Though I suspect you recognize that and you are not asking about why we do not highlight and invite problematic (racist, sexist, classist, etc. writers), but rather, from within the perspective we support, we may still afford more variety—and that is totally fair, and the above addresses our need to meet this challenge in increasingly better ways.

The second comment is political, and refers to the context within which Jadaliyya and other publications emerged in recent years. We see ourselves as a counter-discourse in relation to the dominant and quite entrenched discourse on the Middle East in the United States primarily, but also beyond. We also see ourselves in the same manner in relation to the petro-media empire of some Arab states. In this context, we are trying to provide an alternative reference point for sound daily analysis on the region. To establish that difficult reality and standard, we have had to be more focused on consistency and quality, sometimes at the expense of maximum diversity. So, we are not, per se, seeking diversity of “views” in the absolute sense, which is a matter/goal that speaks more to liberal concerns that are often divorced from realities of power and its direct relation to dominant discourses. However, where we have room to improve on this particular point, which is how we understand your question, is to establish even more diversity “within” the “general” perspective we endorse. And, yes, we do have some work to do in that respect, but not always for lack of trying. We are fighting an uphill battle and we also have to pay attention to the challenge of dragging everyone along while expanding this spectrum (i.e., the million-dollar challenge/question above). The years ahead will speak louder than any words regarding our genuine interest in making this happen within the context of a counter-discourse movement.

Also, we do not pay our writers, and this restricts us by excluding many careerist writers who might have provided a diversity of sorts despite differing views.

Finally, it is important to note that beyond the essentials, we have ongoing viewpoint disagreements within Jadaliyya regarding content and particular pieces. We think it is a testament to the absence of a rigid conception regarding which particular views are welcome.

UL: Finally, there is an argument that young academics should focus on scholarly work and publication and not "waste" their ideas and time on writing for web sites and other venues. How do you respond to that? 

BH: We totally agree in principle, considering the kind of online publications and quality that proliferates. And whereas we would give the same advice, we cannot ignore the fact that the strategic position of Jadaliyya within the academic community can be a plus for rising academics who would like to be read and heard. Last year alone, several folks within and outside Jadaliyya remarked to us how valuable their Jadaliyya contributions were in capturing the attention of employers/academics in the hiring process. This semi-exception is borne out of the fact that Jadaliyya has indeed become the go-to place for academics generally, despite what this or that observer can say, sometimes legitimately, about the quality of this or that post. We just have to make sure that this continues to be kept to a minimum in the coming five, or ten, years!

So, in short, it depends. In the case of Jadaliyya, publishing there can be used strategically to enhance one’s chances of getting an academic job. We used to think that this was not the case before we were told otherwise by employers and during academic interviews. Used properly, it can be a plus, and this is not confined to Jadaliyya, as there are a number of quality publications out there. The world is changing, and the academic community is following suit, even if at a few steps behind.

UL: Are you planning on publishing anything soon on Obama`s war on ISIS?

BH: Yes, we have published a number of pieces addressing the rise and nature of ISIS, in both Arabic and English, and, beginning the week of 22 September, our fourth anniversary incidentally, we are publishing a regular media roundup specifically on ISIS-related articles. Stay tuned!