International Movements Project by Erik Ringmar
This is the talk I gave at the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha... more This is the talk I gave at the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar, earlier this week. The talk is ostensibly about European human rights legislation, but what I really wanted to talk about were religious beliefs. I made a distinction between "beliefs that" and “beliefs in.” Beliefs that we arrive at with our eyes, but beliefs in we arrive at with our ears. Beliefs in require trust rather than scientific evidence. It is through religious rituals that trust comes to be established.
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OUP Handbook on Diplomatic History, 2024
This is a chapter I wrote for a forthcoming Oxford UP handbook on diplomatic history edited by Na... more This is a chapter I wrote for a forthcoming Oxford UP handbook on diplomatic history edited by Naoko Shimazu and Christian Goeschel. It is about dancing diplomats and "neurophenomenology" which is exactly as much fun as it sounds. The chapter also allowed me to finally write something about republican diplomacy in the 19 th century. It is a little known, but I think important, fact that the United States sent no ambassadors abroad for most of the 19 th century. Why?, I wonder. Well, this chapter will explain.
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Religion & Human Rights, 2024
European human rights legislation makes a sharp distinction between "beliefs," on the one hand, a... more European human rights legislation makes a sharp distinction between "beliefs," on the one hand, and "manifestations of beliefs," on the other. While no legislation can restrict a person's beliefs, restrictions on manifestations are sometimes required in the name of public order, safety, or because of the rights of others. In this article I question this distinction by pointing out that many religions privilege practices above beliefs. We engage in religious practices not since we believe, but we believe since we engage in religious practices. European human rights law has it precisely backwards, in other words, and this allows the law to be used to restrict the rights of Muslims to practice their religion.
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This chapter discusses not emotions, but moods. Emotions are psychological states, but moods are ... more This chapter discusses not emotions, but moods. Emotions are psychological states, but moods are features of the interaction between a certain situation and the people who find themselves there. We find ourselves in a mood, we say, and when a large number of people find themselves in the same situation, we can talk about a collective mood. We attune ourselves to moods, meaning that we respond to what the situation calls for. Moods give rise to feelings. When someone asks us "how do you feel?" we answer by giving a report on the state of our attunement. In a case-study, we will investigate the moods of Istanbul, following the lead of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Orhan Pamuk and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
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E-International Relations, 2021
This is a 3,000 word piece I wrote for the E-International Relations website. It discusses Benedi... more This is a 3,000 word piece I wrote for the E-International Relations website. It discusses Benedict Anderson's theory of nationalism, and his famous claim that nations are "imagined communities." I agree with Anderson. Nations are indeed imagined communities, but Anderson knows next to nothing about how the imagination works. The imagination is not a process of seeing pictures "in one's minds eye," but of recalling experiences. Experiences happen in all sensory modalities at once, and they happen to bodies, not just to minds. Rethinking the imagination, we have to rethink nationalism.
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European Journal of Social Theory, 2018
Taking public moods seriously as an analytical concept, this article relies on recent work on the... more Taking public moods seriously as an analytical concept, this article relies on recent work on the moods of individuals as a means of exploring the moods of the public. To be in a certain mood is to attune oneself to the situation in which one finds oneself. Our mood is the report we give on the state of our attunement. A public mood can either be understood as the mood of a certain age, the mood of an audience which jointly attends to a public performance, or the bonding which takes places between bodies which are in closely physical proximity to each other. It is in the public mood that emotions, thoughts and plans for action arise.
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This review article which discusses three books on sleep and dreaming: Evan Thompson's Waking, D... more This review article which discusses three books on sleep and dreaming: Evan Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being, Andreas Mavromatis' Hypnagogia, and Jonathan Crary's 24/7. Topics include lucid dreaming, what happens when we die, and what to do about global capitalism. They day will soon come, I suggest, when multinational corporations can buy advertising space in our dreams.
I became interested in sleep mainly since I'm not getting enough of it, and writing this essay over the past week has kept me up every night.
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The problem of the modern self is the problem of how to provide a self for oneself in a modern so... more The problem of the modern self is the problem of how to provide a self for oneself in a modern society characterized by uncertainty and risk. Confronting this challenge at the turn of the twentieth-century, many city-dwellers fell ill with afflictions of the nerves of which neurasthenia was the most common. Neurasthenia could be cured, the sufferers were advised, if they only learned how to strengthen their will and to assert themselves. Violence, exercised both against oneself and against others, was integral to this project of self-assertion. In a society which is becoming ever more peaceful, the rhetoric of violence will become ever more transgressive, and thus more enticing. Such a society is unlikely to be at peace with itself. As a way to avoid this impasse, we need to think again about the notion of “character.” The thought of John Dewey is helpful in this regard.
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Conservatives have always been critical of the changes wrought by modern society, yet they have n... more Conservatives have always been critical of the changes wrought by modern society, yet they have never known quite what to do about them. Heidegger's discussion of willpower provides an example. Early but also late in his career he advocated a live-and-let-live attitude which reduced the will to an aspect of care, and the self to a socialized being-with-others. For a few years in the 1930s, however, he saw the collective will of the people, as expressed by its Führer, as a way in which the ills of modern society could be overcome. The rhetoric of willpower, we conclude, is not a perennial feature of international politics and peace depends not on philosophy but on moods and the postures that states adopt.
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There is a relationship between modernity and boredom. People in modern society are more bored th... more There is a relationship between modernity and boredom. People in modern society are more bored than people in previous societies. But why? Other authors have identified a number of candidates (alienation, atomization, disenchantment, rationalization, and so on). However, in this article I present a far more straightforward explanation: modern boredom is caused by the new ways in which people in modern society were made to pay attention. If you cannot pay attention, you get bored, and the distinctly modern ways of paying attention created a distinctly modern form of boredom. This is a story about the turn-of-the-20th with obvious implications for today.
Quotes:
"Thumb-twiddling and bubble-wrap popping are the most effective forms of protest under the conditions imposed by global capitalism."
"In the twenty-first-century, only the bored are free."
"Modern boredom, we will conclude, is a result of the way we were separated from tradition, forced to pay attention to our lives rather than to simply live them, and the way we were disciplined and made autonomous and self-directing."
To appear in Boredom Studies: Postdisciplinary Inquiries, edited by Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn. London: Routledge, 2016.
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Boredom Is in Your Mind: A Shared Psychological-Philosophical Approach, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco, 2019
Experimental psychologists ask whether boredom can help us become more creative, yet they cannot ... more Experimental psychologists ask whether boredom can help us become more creative, yet they cannot answer the question since they have no way of investigating how boredom feels. For this we need a phenomenological approach. Who better to rely on here than Martin Heidegger? Boredom, we will say, is the affective state in which we find ourselves once our attention no longer is entrained by the world around us. It is when our attention flags that we get bored. Once this has happened, the question is how we can re-engage with the world. Creativity is a matter of the terms on which this re-engagement takes place. Surprisingly, Heidegger suggests that there is a way back from boredom.
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Despite whatever academics say, international politics is not an intellectual enterprise and to i... more Despite whatever academics say, international politics is not an intellectual enterprise and to intellectualize it is to misunderstand it. Instead international politics, at its most basic level, is a matter of how we, and the collectivities we have created for ourselves, find ourselves in the world. Finding ourselves in the world is first and foremost a task which our bodies solve. Eugene Gendlin's phenomenological psychology, and his focus on the “felt sense,” provide ways of investigating the embodied nature of international politics. No one has so far analyzed international politics the way Gendlin's psychology makes possible. The prospects are exciting.
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In a series of famous experiments, Benjamin Libet claimed to have shown that there is no scientif... more In a series of famous experiments, Benjamin Libet claimed to have shown that there is no scientific basis for our commonsensical understanding of freedom of the will. The actions we are about to undertake register in our brains before they register in our conscious minds. Consciousness arrives too late, as it were, to be included in the chain of causes. And yet, all that Libet may have shown is that long-invoked notions such as " the will " and " freedom " are poor explanations of how actions are initiated. Actions of both a simple and a complex kind, let us instead conclude, take place as we respond to the call of the mood of the situation in which we find ourselves. Action is a way of attuning ourselves. Simple actions happen as long-established habits kick in, and complex actions happen as the mood of a situation comes to correspond to the mood of a story we have been telling ourselves. When it feels right, we just act.
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Non-Western IR Theory Project by Erik Ringmar
The following is a talk I gave at Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday this week... more The following is a talk I gave at Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday this week. I’m discuss the failure of the attempts to turn every country into a European-style nation-state, and I look for alternatives that might work better. I propose three models – an imperial, a nomadic and a network model. All three are inspired by the way politics, including international politics, worked before European colonialism. Since so many nation-states failed, it’s time to try something new, or rather, it’s time to try something old.
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Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a... more Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues.
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TED talk, 2019
This is the video of my TEDx talk from 2019, “What is a non-Western IR theory? The talk is intend... more This is the video of my TEDx talk from 2019, “What is a non-Western IR theory? The talk is intended to provoke — thought, in this case.
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Most universities have courses on "international relations theory" where the basic logic of relat... more Most universities have courses on "international relations theory" where the basic logic of relations between states is laid out and explained. However, a constant complaint from students is that these theories provide a very Western-centric perspective. More than anything the world they describe is made up of nation-states in constant competition with each other. Surely, students argue, it's time to "decolonize the reading list." Many teachers agree and would like nothing more than to add some "non-Western IR theory" to their courses. This, however, is difficult to do since there doesn't seem to be very much of it. Apart from a few notable contributions, writers outside of the West have not had much to say about the way international relations work. This book disagrees. The problem, the argument will be, is the Western description of the world as made up of competitive nation-states. Only writings which take this perspective for granted will be considered as a legitimate contribution to the field. But this was not how the world was understood before Western countries came to colonize it. The logic of the pre-Western world did not operate this way. Moreover, this was not the terms on which many independence movements wanted to achieve their independence. Yet these non-Western alternatives were soon rejected and when the process of decolonization was completed the 2
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Nomad-State Relationships in International Relations: Before and After Borders, 2020
It was more than anything by rejecting the lives lived by nomadic peoples that the state came to ... more It was more than anything by rejecting the lives lived by nomadic peoples that the state came to be seen as legitimate. In the rhetoric of political theorists, the state is legitimate since it is required by Nature, by History and by God. The state is thrice-born, thrice necessary. The Nature which we find inside us demands it, but so does the Nature in which we find ourselves. History, understood as the process by which we come to fulfill our telos, as individuals and as societies, shows the state to be inevitable. And meanwhile God, hovering in the firmament, is overseeing the whole process, making devout believers out of those who fail to be convinced by rational arguments. Quod erat demonstrandum: nomads and a nomadic way of life are against Nature, against History and against God.
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Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, 2018
The Great Wall of China does not exist. There are many walls in China, and bits of walls, and rem... more The Great Wall of China does not exist. There are many walls in China, and bits of walls, and remnants of former walls, but there is no “Great Wall” understood as a unified structure built for a given purpose. The Great Wall is indeed a construction, but it is a social construction erected not in China itself but in the minds of Europeans. In early modern Europe, when China was admired for its wealth and its political stability, the Great Wall was the perfect symbol of the wisdom of mercantilism; in the nineteenth-century, when China was mocked for its lack of progress, the destruction of all Chinese walls was the perfect symbols of the wisdom of exchange. The Great Wall existed because the Europeans decided that it had to exist, and before long they had found it everywhere throughout the country. The eventual result of this work of the imagination was an aggressive European posture and a policy of imperialism.
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In 1915, six months into the bogged-down horror which was the First World War, Sigmund Freud refl... more In 1915, six months into the bogged-down horror which was the First World War, Sigmund Freud reflected on the world that had been lost. Before the war, Europe belonged to all of us, he recalled, and its achievements were our shared heritage. We read all the great philosophers and poets and admired all artists regardless of their nationality. None of them were alien to us just because they spoke a different language. And we went to live abroad too, without regard for borders. There was no need to chose between the gray waters of the Baltic or the blue waters of the Mediterranean, between the snow clad Alps or the green river valleys, since all of it belonged to all of us.
And then all hell broke lose, and the war which engulfed Europe was far bloodier and more destructive than anything previously experienced. The war, said Freud, has " brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn from the other with hate and loathing. " The European of only a few months ago now " finds himself helpless in a world that has grown strange to him when he sees his great fatherland disintegrated, the possessions common to mankind destroyed, and his fellow citizens divided and debased. "
In 1938, after Hitler and the Anschluss, Freud too was forced to take sides. Friends with connections in high places whisked him off to Britain in the nick of time.
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International Movements Project by Erik Ringmar
I became interested in sleep mainly since I'm not getting enough of it, and writing this essay over the past week has kept me up every night.
Quotes:
"Thumb-twiddling and bubble-wrap popping are the most effective forms of protest under the conditions imposed by global capitalism."
"In the twenty-first-century, only the bored are free."
"Modern boredom, we will conclude, is a result of the way we were separated from tradition, forced to pay attention to our lives rather than to simply live them, and the way we were disciplined and made autonomous and self-directing."
To appear in Boredom Studies: Postdisciplinary Inquiries, edited by Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn. London: Routledge, 2016.
Non-Western IR Theory Project by Erik Ringmar
And then all hell broke lose, and the war which engulfed Europe was far bloodier and more destructive than anything previously experienced. The war, said Freud, has " brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn from the other with hate and loathing. " The European of only a few months ago now " finds himself helpless in a world that has grown strange to him when he sees his great fatherland disintegrated, the possessions common to mankind destroyed, and his fellow citizens divided and debased. "
In 1938, after Hitler and the Anschluss, Freud too was forced to take sides. Friends with connections in high places whisked him off to Britain in the nick of time.
I became interested in sleep mainly since I'm not getting enough of it, and writing this essay over the past week has kept me up every night.
Quotes:
"Thumb-twiddling and bubble-wrap popping are the most effective forms of protest under the conditions imposed by global capitalism."
"In the twenty-first-century, only the bored are free."
"Modern boredom, we will conclude, is a result of the way we were separated from tradition, forced to pay attention to our lives rather than to simply live them, and the way we were disciplined and made autonomous and self-directing."
To appear in Boredom Studies: Postdisciplinary Inquiries, edited by Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn. London: Routledge, 2016.
And then all hell broke lose, and the war which engulfed Europe was far bloodier and more destructive than anything previously experienced. The war, said Freud, has " brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn from the other with hate and loathing. " The European of only a few months ago now " finds himself helpless in a world that has grown strange to him when he sees his great fatherland disintegrated, the possessions common to mankind destroyed, and his fellow citizens divided and debased. "
In 1938, after Hitler and the Anschluss, Freud too was forced to take sides. Friends with connections in high places whisked him off to Britain in the nick of time.
Refer to as Erik Ringmar, “Order in a Borderless World: Nomads Confront Globalization,” in Theorizing Global Order: The International, Culture and Governance, ed. Gunther Hellman (Frankfurt: Campus, 2018).
Interestingly, when Europeans and non-Europeans first met, they often spent a long time dancing with each other. That’s right. Before Columbus, da Gama and the other colonizers started killing the natives, they danced with them.
Please refer to as: Erik Ringmar, “Constructivism and First Encounters,” E-International Relations, forthcoming, 2020.
The paper is forthcoming in Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift (Swedish Political Science Review). Thanks to Peter Baehr, Magnus Jerneck and Gustav Lidén and friends at Mid-Sweden University, Sundsvall for comments on an earlier version.
As a result of modernization in the latter part of the 19th century, this continuity was broken up and reason, instincts and habits were separated from each other. Reason was used to discipline instinct and to establish good habits, that is habits that assured a well-behaving citizenry and a productive workforce. The enthusiams generated by the outbreak of the First World War, and the temptation to "go native" in the colonies, were attempts to resist this disciplinary compartmentalization.
Quote as Ringmar, Erik. “How the World Stage Makes Its Subjects: An Embodied Critique of Constructivist IR Theory.” Journal of International Relations and Development 19, no. 1 (2016): 101–25. doi:10.1057/jird.2015.33.
Part I Theoretical Preliminaries Introduction The International Politics of Recognition Erik Ringmar 1 Recognition between States: On the Moral Substrate of International Relations Axel Honneth 2 Prickly States? Recognition and Disrespect between Persons and Peoples Reinhard Wolf 3 Symbolic and Physical Violence Philippe Braud 4 Is a Just Peace Possible without Thin and Thick Recognition? Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller Part II Empirical Applications 5 Spirit, Recognition, and Foreign Policy: Germany and World War II Richard Ned Lebow 6 World War I from the Perspective of Power Cycle Theory: Recognition, "Adjustment Delusions," and the "Trauma of Expectations Foregone" Charles F. Doran 7 Recognition, Disrespect, and the Struggle for Morocco: Rethinking Imperial Germany's Security Dilemma Michelle Murray 8 Self-Identification, Recognition, and Conflicts: The Evolution of Taiwan's Identity, 1949-2008 Yana Zuo 9 Recognition, the Non-Proliferation Regime, and Proliferation Crises Alexandre Hummel 10 Recognizing the Enemy: Terrorism as Symbolic Violence Andreas Behnke Part III Conclusions 11 Concluding Remarks on the Empirical Study of International Recognition Thomas Lindemann
“While I remain convinced that Alexander Wendt's writings constitute a seminal contribution to International Relations scholarship, I must express my reservations regarding many of the conclusions he reaches. Ex-advisees, after all, must not only express their gratitude and their admiration, but also — and perhaps unfortunately — make sure that science makes progress, and that they make careers for themselves.”
The text is also available in Chinese: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/37346663/download_file?st=MTUxOTU2MjE2Niw4MS44OC4xMC4yMzYsNDU3NTAw&s=profile
narrative theory with an empirical study of identity and
political action. It is at once a powerful critique of
rational choice theories of action and a solution to the
historiographical puzzle of why Sweden went to war in
1630. Erik Ringmar argues that people act not only for
reasons of interest, but also for reasons of identity, and
that the latter are, in fact, more fundamental. Deploying
his alternative, non-rational theory of action in his
account of the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years
War, he shows it to have been an attempt on behalf of the
Swedish leaders to gain recognition for themselves and
their country. Further to this, he demonstrates the impor-
tance of questions of identity to the study of war and of
narrative theories of action to the social sciences in
general
Yes, it is an example of the future of academic publishing — open source, open access, no profit, etc. This is the final, published, version.
Please cite as:
Ringmar, Erik. “The Making of the Modern World,” International Relations: A Beginner's Guide, edited by Stephen McGlinchey, E-International Relations Publishing, 2017.
If you are interested in this debate, I would love to have your comments.
Det råder ingen tvekan om att Börje Ljunggren är kvalificerad att skriva om Kina och hans bok är utförlig, men ändå lättläst. Han använder sig både av statistik och egna erfarenheter för att fånga Kina i dag och i framtiden och ger en rättvis och klok bild av landet. Som läsare skulle man dock vilja komma vanliga människor litet närmare. Vi lever i en tid av kinesisk renässans och förnyelse. Stora saker håller på att hända i Kina och många är de västerländska observatörer som vill berätta historien. Böckerna om den kinesiska drakens mirakulösa återuppståndelse bildar i dag en egen, och oftast starkt repetitiv, genre. Börje Ljunggrens Den kinesiska drömmen – Utmaningar för Kina och världen är ett av de senaste tillskotten. På 700 sidor erbjuder han sina läsare en genomgång av en rad redan välkända ämnen: mänskliga rättigheter, civilsamhällets roll, klimatförändring, den globala maktförskjutningen och inte minst tillväxten hos en på samma gång resurskrävande och människokvävande ekonomi. Men man ska inte vara alltför cynisk. Boken är lättläst men också utförlig, övergripande men också personligt hållen och Ljunggren använder sig både av statistik och sina egna erfarenheter för att berätta om dagens Kina och framtidens. Det behövs sådana här böcker. Och det är ingen tvekan om att Börje Ljunggren är kvalificerad att skriva om Kina. Hela hans karriär har varit ägnad åt Asien. Han har inte bara varit avdelningschef på Sida och chef för UD:s Asienenhet utan också svensk ambassadör i Peking i flera år. Den kinesiska drömmen är inte heller hans första bok på temat utan snarare en uppdatering av hans Kina – Vår tids drama, från 2008. I en tid när Kinaböcker blivit legio måste varje tillskott profilera sig och i fallet Den kinesiska drömmen är det författaren själv som gör skillnaden. Man blir hela tiden påmind om att det är en bok skriven utifrån Ljunggrens samlade kunskap. Efter presentationer av fakta och statistik avslutas varje kapitel av personliga omdömen: " Med mina ögon sett … " " Jag bedömer att … " Dessutom är originalspråket svenska och boken är skriven för en svensk publik. Det är våra uppfattningar om Kina som Ljunggren tar sig an – liksom våra missuppfattningar. I vart och ett av de tretton kapitlen läggs en ny dimension till den framväxande bilden
Erik Ringmar, “How to Write an Academic Paper,” Working-papers of the Dept of Political Science, Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey, 2019.
Please refer to as above, but there is no copyright. Feel free to use and spread as you like. Btw, the paper is also available online here: http://ringmar.net/mycourses/index.php/2018/11/16/how-to-write-an-academic-paper/
All the best, happy research,
Erik
Comments appreciated of course (especially if you are an anarchist, Christian, Muslim or other religious believer).
thanks for reading,
Erik