I wrote a doctoral thesis on British investment in Argentina before 1914, rather in the dependentista tradition, trying to explain how the power of what we’d now call transnational corporations shaped the Argentine economy and – to some extent – the state and its policies. But jobs in Latin American studies were few and far between, and economic history was becoming the hard course for history undergrads or the soft one for economists, not much liked by either (and not much esteemed by colleagues in the mainstream of the two disciplines). So I more or less fell into a job at Warwick, developing courses in International Political Economy – or international economics for the innumerate. Great fun, helping to invent a new sub-field. After that my two interests, in IR and South America, continued in a fruitful tension.
In your book More Than Just War you criticize the just-war tradition. What are the flaws in the just-war theory, and what is a more coherent form of military ethics?
Since publication I’ve written a lengthy paper summarizing my book, due to be published in an edited collection edited by Franziska Quebec in a year or two, and the argument has changed a little. It was the formulaic character of the just-war tradition was revived over the past forty years or so that bugged me. But it’s true that I thought the tradition as a whole excluded the variety of ways of war and of rival ethics of war that I found in imaginative literature.
I’d now say that to take a step back and take seriously the way Augustine and even Aquinas lodged discussion of war within discussion of charity, and of virtue more generally, opens the way to a fusion of Catholic and pragmatist approaches in a single tradition emphasizing virtue and character.
Would an ends justify the means approach to international relations, in which the United States acted with military aggression to incorporate the rest of the world be in line with American ideals? Do we have the military structure to successfully conquer nations in the 21st century, specifically Latin America?
I’m half inclined to echo Ghandi’s quip: ‘American ideals? – That sounds like a good idea!’ Seriously, A US imperialism of the sort you describe would be entirely inconsistent with what’s best in the country’s political tradition; besides, it’s one thing to conquer and another to govern. If Iraq and Afghanistan taught us only one lesson, that surely is it.
What would the layman find most interesting and accessible within your research? (this is where we would like for you to “nerd out”)
I’m asked to ‘nerd out’ about my research. I had to Google this, and find that it means to get (over-)excited about something that isn’t cool. (‘Cool’!) Well, you asked for it. I think my next book will interest more people than anything I’ve written before. It’s working title is ‘Radical Sisters’, and it’s a collective biography of four sisters, daughters of a wealthy London lawyer, who espoused every Left-[wing cause going between 1840 and 1890, including the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy, and women’s suffrage. Of what I’ve already published, I think my 2007 ‘American Civilization’ (that Ghandi quip again!) has had most impact despite its rather obscure publication. The easy way is to read the short version in Foreign Affairs en espanol around 2009? (which is the closest I ever got to Obama!
If you were to give advice to a student thinking of pursuing a PhD international relations, what advice would you give them?
Unless you are determined to be an academic (the long hours, the low status, the relative poverty…)work for an NGO, a TNC, the UN, an army or a diplomatic corp for a few years, and save the PhD for when you’re burnt out at 40, still capable of critical reflection on practice, and content to enter the monastery.
With all the funding in the world, what would you have researched and how?
Ah! In my heart of hearts I am a very traditional historian, believing that academics shouldn’t buy themselves out with big research grants leaving their students to be taught by short-contract TAs, that historians need to see their sources themselves, and that teaching and research go hand in hand. Given unlimited funding, I might well have bought myself out of teaching and admin and stuck to the history of international business, perhaps ending up in the other Cambridge like my distinguished colleague Geoff Jones. But if I’d done that I would never have gotten interested in the ethics of war (teaching officers makes you think carefully about that!) or South America as a distinctive society of states (that came out of running a masters course on South American IR, which I only did because I was asked to take on the directorship of Cambridge’s Centre of International Studies. So with unlimited resources I would have been the poorer.