Abstract
Why do international security experts and policymakers draw analogies between various contexts? Do they use analogies to help them better predict the future consequences of their actions? Or do they employ analogies for other purposes? This article analyzes how policymakers and experts draw on “forward analogies” (i.e., analogies between observed causal relations and expected causal relations) to advance diplomatic negotiations in a particularly hard context: the deliberations of the weapons of mass destruction Free Zone in the Middle East. In situations in which diplomacy is blocked by the unwillingness of parties to start negotiations, this article claims that forward analogies can not only serve a predictive purpose, but also a constitutive purpose: analogies help “constitute” the reality of regional orders (such as the “Middle East”) when their ontological status as objects of deliberation and intervention is problematic. Yet, their successful operation depends on their ability to respect pre-existing cultural scripts and cultural taboos. Furthermore, their constitutive effect remains circumscribed to specific contexts in which forward-looking discussions are clearly distinguished from official negotiations. By highlighting the cultural embeddedness of forward analogies, this article draws upon developments in cultural sociology to advance the burgeoning literature on future-oriented practices in international relations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Cited in Feldman and Toukan (1997, p. 101).
Diplomats had in mind the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty, the strategic arms reduction treaty (START), the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty (Feldman and Toukan, 1997, p. 82).
By doing so, they have distanced themselves from other sociologists of expert communities inspired by Pierre Bourdieu (Dezalay and Garth, 2002; Pouliot, 2008; Bigo, 2005; Stampnitzky, 2013), who focus on processes of institutionalization, social capital transmission and transnational network formation.
The same lesson is referenced by Israeli policymakers (Heller, 1994, p. 100).
Some, however, argue that historical references just serve ex-post window-dressing purposes and have little influence on the decision-making process (Jervis, 1976).
Protention is an interesting aspect of conversations that needs analysis, as showed by many studies inspired by ethno-methodology since Garfinkel (1967).
Indeed, track-II meetings allow all participants to see how diplomats mobilize real-life negotiating skills in unofficial talks – an experience which can teach lessons about the interactional dynamics that could occur if these proposals were tabled for real. The complicity between protention and trajectory, which is the focus of Bourdieu’s field theory (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013, p. 919), could also be interesting to analyze.
Doing so would require the kind of minute data to analyze how participants rely on protentions (Gibson, 2011a) to anticipate when to speak and when to stay silent – the kind of data used for instance in Gibson’s (2011a) study of the Missile Cuban Crisis, which he based on audio-recordings of the conversations between experts.
Real negotiations actually occurred in the background, leading for instance to the joint Israeli-Jordanian declaration in 1993 (Feldman, 1997a, p. 9), and their 1994 bilateral peace treaty, which called both parties to enlarge their talks to regional actors by committing “themselves to the creation, in the Middle East, of a Conference on Security and Co-operation in the Middle East (CSCME),” (art. 4.1.B), modeled after the European precedent, http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/peacetreaty.html.
The United States and Russia organized a series of conferences convened in Moscow (January 1992, September 1992) and in Washington (May 1992, September 1992) to assess the lessons of Europe for the Middle East.
It was only after the September 1993 Oslo agreements, by which Israel recognized a Palestinian interlocutor, and after the peace treaty signed between Israel and Jordan in 1994, that some normalization between some of the states involved occurred without sanction (Barnett, 1998).
For instance, as Brynen (1994, p. 53) writes, “the primary purpose of confidence building measures in Europe in the 1980s was to stabilize the postwar territorial status quo,” whereas, “in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict [or in the Syrian-Israeli conflict], the reverse is true.” – see also Krause (1994, p. 270).
The exception was Eastern Germany, which no Western state recognized as a state.
In fact, this widely held belief that “operational” measures came first was actually a historical post-hoc reconstruction of the Helsinki process (Kremenyuk, 1994, p. 250).
However, they did not look for an exact probability of such a relation of causality.
The participants in ACRS did not explain why the Soviets failed to anticipate the consequences of such a clause among Polish and Hungarian dissidents, who could then voice their concerns for human rights in Eastern Europe (Ben Dor and Dewitt, 1994, p. 17).
For Bateson (1972, pp. 206–207) a “double bind” takes the form of a primary negative injunction (of the form: ‘do not do this’); complemented by a positive injunction (‘do that’), which contradicts the first one; to which is added a third injunction (of the form ‘stay there’), which makes it impossible to escape the tensions.
Regarding NNWS’ safeguarding obligations, the NPT says that “[t]he safeguards required by this article shall be applied to all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful [my emphasis] nuclear activities within the territory of such State, under its jurisdiction, or carried out under its control anywhere” (art. 3.1). The NPT leaves obscure how the IAEA could be involved in verifying nuclear disarmament.
This is in contrast to Habermas’s (1995, p. 117) normative definition of deliberative justice which “rests on the intuition that… from an [transparent] interlocking of perspectives emerges an ideally extended we-perspective.”
The same proposal was also expressed outside the ACRS deliberations: for instance, the U.N. General Assembly commissioned a report in 1990 to the Secretary General, whose conclusions made it clear that a Zone could adopt more rigorous “verification procedures” than those adopted by the IAEA (Feldman, 1997a, p. 160).
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres had publicly said that after Israel signed peace with all the member-states of the Zone, it would only take two years for Israel to start the nuclear disarmament phase (Landau, 2008, p. 13).
Israel pointed to the fact that the IAEA had failed to conduct “short notice” and “challenge” inspections in order to maintain good relationships with member-states (Feldman, 1997a, p. 154).
This is why others have proposed that the “Middle East” be modeled after “Africa,” and that Middle Eastern states should look at the Pelindaba Treaty (Miller and Scheinman, 2007).
The process of institutionalization started in 1994, as Feldman (1997a, pp. 14, 15) underlines, as the ACRS activities forced inexperienced central administrations in many Arab countries to “develop a cadre of experts” and to “appoint individuals and small governmental bodies to prepare for ACRS activities, creating small bureaucratic islands that had gradually developed more than a fleeting interest in arms control.”
Egypt only obtained a complementary “Resolution on the Middle East,” which called all NPT signatories to facilitate the creation of the Zone (Feldman, 1997a, p. 222), as a face-saving token. The NPT Review and Extension Conference did not mention Israel by name.
Neither was the Egypt-led boycott of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) followed by Arab states, most of which had signed the CWC by the end of 1993.
Seen from the point of view of legitimacy, positively ignoring (or “obviating”) the military past (like the story of many campaigns and battles) as an object of knowledge allowed Kahn to de-legitimize the monopoly that military professionals had over military knowledge, and speak to a broader American public.
References
Adler, E. (1992) The emergence of cooperation: National epistemic communities and the international evolution of the idea of nuclear arms control. International Organization 46(1): 101–145.
Alexander, J. (2004) Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. Sociological Theory 22(4): 527–573.
Alexander, J. and Smith, P. (2002) The strong program in cultural theory: Elements of a structural hermeneutics. In: J. Turner (ed.) Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York: Kluwer Publishers, pp. 135–150.
Andersson, J. (2012) The great future debate and the struggle for the world. The American Historical Review 117(5): 1411–1430.
Andersson, J. and Rindzeviciute, E. (eds.). (2015) The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future. London: Routledge.
Aradau, C. and Van Munster, R. (2011). Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. Routledge, NY: Routledge.
Barnett, M.N. (1998) Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Ben Dor, G. and Dewitt, D. (1994) Confidence building measures in the Middle East. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 3–32.
Ben Dor, G. (1999) Regional culture and the NACD in the Middle East. In: K. Krause (ed.) Culture and Security, Multilateralism, Arms Control and Security Building. New York: Routledge, pp. 189–218.
Bigo, D. (2005) La mondialisation de l’(in)sécurité ? Réflexions sur le champ des professionnels de la gestion des inquiétudes et analytique de la transnationalisation des processus d’(in)sécurisation. Cultures et conflits 58: 53–101.
Bourdieu, P. (1987) The force of law: Toward a sociology of the juridical field. Hastings Law Journal 38: 805–53.
Brynen, R. (1994) The Palestinians and confidence building measures in the Arab–Israeli conflict: The implications of statelessness. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 33–70.
Bundy, M., Crowe, W. Jr. and Drell, S. (1993) Reducing Nuclear Danger: The Road Away from the Brink. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Diffence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cerulo, K. (2006) Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Clarke, L. (2007) Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in Popular Imagination. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Cohen, A. (2010) The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press.
Colonomos, A. (2014) La politique des oracles: Raconter le futur aujourd’hui. Paris: Albin Michel.
Desrosières, A. (1993) The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dezalay, Y. and Garth, B. (2002) The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dowty, A. (1994) Confidence and security building: The Israeli domestic dimension. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 72–92.
Eliasoph, N. and Lichterman, P. (2003) Culture in interaction. American Journal of Sociology 108(4): 735–794.
Feldman, S. (1997a) Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Feldman, S. (1997b) Israel’s national security: Perceptions and policy. In: S. Feldman and A. Toukan (eds.) Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East. New York: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, pp. 7–31.
Feldman, S. and Toukan, A. (1997) Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East. New York: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers.
Foucault, M. (2009) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978. Paris: Seuil.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Garofano, J. (2004) Historical analogies and the use of force. Journal of Cold War Studies 6(2): 64–68.
Gera, G. (1994) Reflections on confidence building in an intricate regional security complex. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 149–164.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2000) Simulating the unthinkable: Gaming future war in the 1950s and 1960s. Social Studies of Science 30(2): 163–223.
Gibson, D. (2011a) Avoiding catastrophe: The interactional production of possibility during the cuban missile crisis. American Journal of Sociology 117(2): 361–419.
Gibson, D. (2011b) Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor.
Guilhot, N. (2011) Cyborg pantocrator: IR theory from decisionism to rational choice. The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47(3): 279–301.
Ginzburg, C. (1980) Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and scientific methods. History Workshop Journal 9:5–35.
Habermas, J. (1995) Reconciliation through the public use of reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s political liberalism. Journal of Philosophy 92(3): 109–131.
Hacking, I. (2004) Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heller, M. (1994) Confidence building measures and Israeli security concerns. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 93–116.
Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jones, P. (1997) Arms control in the Middle East: Some reflections on ACRS. Security Dialogue 28(1): 57–70.
Kahn, H. (1960) On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kaye, D. (2007) Talking to the Enemy: Track Two Diplomacy in the Middle East and South Asia. California: RAND.
Khong, Y.F. (1992) Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Knorr Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Krause, K. (1994) The evolution of arms control in the Middle East. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 267–290.
Kremenyuk, V. (1994) Russia’s role in peacemaking and confidence building in the Middle East. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 249–266.
Kuklick, B. (2006) Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In: J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: Washington University Press, pp. 12–44.
Lakoff, A. (2007) Preparing for the Next Emergency. Public Culture 19(2): 247–267.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, C. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Landau, E. (2008) ACRS: What worked, what did not, and what could be relevant today. Disarmament Forum 2: 12–20. http://www.unidir.ch/pdf/articles/pdf-art2727.pdf.
Landau, E. and Kaye, D.D. (2011) Disarmament efforts in the region: Lessons from the arms control and regional security talks. In: B. Kubbig and S.-E. Fikenscher (eds.) Arms Control and Missile Proliferation in the Middle East. New York: Routledge, pp. 27–38.
Levy, J. (1994) Learning and foreign policy: Sweeping a conceptual minefield. International Organization. 48(2): 279–312.
Mallard, G. (2008) Can the Euratom Treaty inspire the Middle East? The promises of nuclear regional authorities. The Nonproliferation Review 15(3): 459–477.
Mallard, G. (2014) Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mallard, G. and Foradori, P. (2014) The Middle East at a crossroad: How to face the perils of nuclear development in a volatile region. Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 24(4): 499–515.
Mallard, G. and Lakoff, A. (2011) How claims to know the future are used to understand the present: Techniques of prospection in the field of national security. In: C. Camic, M. Lamont and N. Gross (eds.) Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 339–377.
May, E. (1973) “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, M. and Scheinman, L. (2007) Israel and a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East. In: M.B. Maerli and S. Lodgaard (eds.) Nuclear proliferation and international security. New York: Routlege, pp. 137–152.
Mische, A. (2009) Projects and possibilities: Researching futures in action. Sociological Forum 24(3):694–704.
Muniesa, F. and Callon, M. (2007) Economic experiments and the construction of markets. In: D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds.) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 163–189.
Neustadt, R.E. and May, E. (1986) Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. New York: Free Press.
Olick, J. (1999) Genre memories and memory genres: A dialogical analysis of May 8, 1945 commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany. American Sociological Review. 64(3):381–402.
Pelopidas, B. (2011) The oracles of proliferation. The NonProliferation Review 18(1): 297–314.
Pénet, P. and Mallard, G. (2014) From risk models to loan contracts: Austerity as the continuation of calculation by other means. Journal of Critical Globalization Studies 7:4–50.
Polletta, F., Chen, P.C., Gardner, B. and Motes, A. (2011) The sociology of storytelling. Annual Review of Sociology 37: 109–130.
Porter, T.M. (1995) Trust in numbers. The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pouliot, V. (2008) The logic of practicality: A theory of practice of security communities. International Organization 62(2): 257–288.
Ragin, C.C. (1989) The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Rawls, J. (1985) Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical. Philosophy and Public Affairs 14(3): 223–251.
Reich, B. (1994) The United States and the Arab–Israeli peace process. In: G. Ben Dor and D. Dewitt (eds.) Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East. Boulder: West View Press, pp. 221–248.
Riles, A. (2010) Collateral expertise: Legal knowledge in the global financial markets. Current Anthropology 51(6): 795–818.
Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Savelsberg, J. and King, R. (2005) Institutionalizing collective memories of hate: Law and law enforcement in Germany and the United States. American Journal of Sociology 111(2): 579–626.
Schwartz, B. (2011) Rethinking conflict and collective memory: The case of nanking. In: J. Alexander, R. Jacobs and P. Smith (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 529–563.
Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shaker, M. (2010) Nuclear power in the Arab world and the regionalisation of the nuclear fuel cycle: An Egyptian perspective. Dædalus 139(1): 1–12.
Shaker, M. (2014) Regionalizing nuclear energy in the Middle East: Making progress on the nuclear- and WMD-free zone. Global Governance 20: 517–528.
Smith, P. (2006) Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Solingen, E. (2000) The multilateral Arab–Israeli negotiations: Genesis, institutionalization, pause, future. Journal of Peace Research 37(2):167–187.
Stampnitzky, L. (2013) Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented Terrorism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taussig, K.-S., Hoeyer, K, and Helmreich, S. (2013) The anthropology of potentiality in biomedicine. Current Anthropology 54(S7): 3–14.
Tavory, I. and Eliasoph, N. (2013) Coordinating futures: Toward a theory of anticipation. American Journal of Sociology 118(4):908–942.
Torpey, J. (2006) Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Trachtenberg, M. (1999) A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Treverton, G. (1993) Finding an Analogy for Tomorrow. Orbis. 37(1): 1.
Wagner, J. (1978) The organizational double bind: Toward an understanding of rationality and its complement. The Academy of Management Review 3(4): 786–795.
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the conference on Predictions in International Security, (March 2012), organized by Sciences-Po Paris, and to the John L. Loeb Conflict and Consolidation Workshop (November 2013), Harvard University. Many thanks to Kerry Chance, Ariel Colonomos, Jean Comaroff, Noah Feldman, Michèle Lamont, Jocelyn Viterna, and the other participants for extremely useful feedback. Research for this paper has been made possible by the support of various Crown Family Middle East Research Awards (2010 and 2011) provided by Northwestern University, and the support of a Jean Monnet Fellowship (2011–2012), provided by the European University Institute (Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mallard, G. From Europe’s past to the Middle East’s future: The constitutive purpose of forward analogies in international security. Am J Cult Sociol 6, 532–562 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0049-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0049-3