Son of Poseidon, Proteus had the enviable gift of telling the future. This made him a precious target. But Proteus valued his freedom. When approached, he evaded his stalkers by changing his shape. Protean power is shape-changing power.
Replying to attentive and sympathetic critics is an experience every author savors. Having pushed our rickety little boat toward the middle of the river, it is thrilling to watch as it takes its own course, tossed back and forth by different currents, hopefully making it to the river's first bend, and perhaps all the way to the ocean we call human knowledge. And even if it does not, it is exciting to have one's ideas discussed by others.
The intent of Protean Power (PP) is not to replace established notions of control power. Rather, the central aim of the book is to explore political potentialities through the variable relations between protean and control power operating in domains of risk and uncertainty. PP is an invitation to rethink what we thought we fully understood but did not. Uninterested in battling windmills PP does not have any ambition to build a new house for the study of international relations. Instead, it gives a little nudge to open the windows in the home we have to let in a fresh breeze. PP is an invitation to ‘rethink’, not a push to ‘remake’.Footnote 1
Truth be told, this is a difficult moment for me. My dear friend, co-author, co-editor, and former student, Lucia Seybert, died in March 2018, a few weeks after Cambridge University Press rushed the first copy to her bedside. She had fought a long and difficult illness with enormous grace and courage. This book became life-affirming, at times perhaps even life-sustaining, work as Lucia was confronting a series of indescribable health challenges and treatment routines. During the last 2 years of her life, the two of us scheduled our bursts of work for those brief periods when she was able to concentrate, uninterrupted by gut wrenching medical procedures. Lucia lived for her two little boys, the other members of her family, and for this book. Without ever having to spell it out, we both understood that PP was an island of emotional sustenance and intellectual engagement while every fiber of her soul and body battled a cruel illness valiantly until the very end. With great sadness, I dedicate this essay to Lucia, confident that she would agree with its general spirit though probably not with all of its specific arguments.
Background
PP had its origin in the financial crisis of 2008 which caught me, like most others, unprepared. Since the crisis left my colleagues specializing in questions of international political economy curiously silent, I immersed myself in some of the literature on risk and uncertainty. Together with Stephen Nelson, I wrote three papers on finance.Footnote 2 We argued that political economists had drunk the economists' Kool Aid of a risk-only world, analyzed trenchantly in this symposium by George DeMartino and Ilene Grabel.Footnote 3 The field of international political economy simply lacked the conceptual tools to deal with the uncertainties revealed by the most important economic event in more than half a century.
Sensing that the discussion of uncertainty and risk in finance pointed to a bigger point about power, my intuition led me to search out literatures and debates outside of the Hobbesian framework of control power and its assumption of a risk-only world. Eventually, I ended up in film studies with its more fluid conception of cultural power. Early on, Stephen Nelson, then a research assistant, provided me with a superb summary of some of the film literature. Eventually, Lucia and I joined forces while I was writing what seemed like a paper on the American movie industry. That manuscript ballooned beyond article-size to become two different papers, one on power, the other on the film industry.Footnote 4 Our repeated attempts at convincing the reviewers of various journals about the value of our approach ended in abysmal failure. An edited book thus became our default option.Footnote 5 Especially prepared for this symposium, Table 1 gives a schematic summary of PP's 12 empirical case studies.
Control and protean power in selected issue areas
Many important contributions resonating with our argument had to be left out of PP for reasons of space (Scott Reference Scott1994). Others we simply had failed to notice or could not include by the time PP went to press. They include Arturo Santa-Cruz's inquiry into US hegemony; Jeffrey Friedman's investigation into ‘war and chance’; Rodney Bruce Hall's addition of Searle's concept of ‘deontic power’ to Barnett and Duvall's typology; Friedman et al. on forecasting; Christopher Walker's ‘sharp’ and Heimans and Timms's ‘new’ power; Mark Cancian's study of ‘surprise’ in great power conflicts; Sidney Tarrow's examination of dualities of ‘infrastructural power’ in America; Michael Beckley's net resource model of power; David Edelstein's argument about the cooperation-inducing aspects of long-time horizons and uncertaintyFootnote 6; Rainer Forst's analysis of justifications as ‘noumenal power’; Robin Hogarth, Tomás Lejarraga, and Emre Soyer's specification of ‘kind’ and ‘wicked’ learning environments; Patchen Markell's inquiry into ‘momentary power’; Giulio Gallarotti's ‘power curse’; Erik Jones's ‘elusive power’; Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi's analysis of ‘political contingency’; and Guillermo O'Donnell's and Philippe Schmitter's reflections on uncertainty and democratic transitions.Footnote 7 This symposium is part of an ongoing conversation about one of the core constructs in international relations, political science, and the social sciences.
Debating protean power
Truth in advertising compels me to acknowledge at the outset that in this symposium PP is blessed with six deeply probing and thought-provoking commentaries offered by Jacques Hymans (the energetic force behind this symposium – for which I am enormously grateful), Emanuel Adler, George DeMartino and Ilene Grabel, Stefano Guzzini, Benoît Pelopidas, and Michael Zürn. Some of them came to this assignment fresh (Hymans, DeMartino and Grabel, and Pelopidas); others had commented on PP during a roundtable discussion convened at the 2018 meeting of the International Studies Association (Adler and Zürn); and the leading theorist of power in international relations (Guzzini) had been an immensely important critic of some versions of PP's all too numerous theoretical draft chapters.
I organize my remarks in the venerable tradition of American court proceedings and report a mixed verdict. Two counts of guilty as charged; two hung juries; and four acquittals. I end with reporting three unexpected gifts.
Guilty as charged
PP is an exercise of empirically driven, theoretically agnostic, constitutive theorizing, as Guzzini aptly observes at the outset of his essay.Footnote 8 The conceptual move of PP has two ambitions: recognizing a politics that has been systematically blocked out of our vision by the very categories we rely on; and providing numerous and diverse illustrations of how to analyze that kind of politics. Since its case studies are no more than initial probes, PP self-consciously avoids premature theoretical closure. PP's argument reaches out to the field of political theory only in the book's concluding chapter, reminding its readers that it is restating an old argument, not making a new one.Footnote 9 What Hans Morgenthau is reported to have said about methods rings true for PP's skeptical view of pure theory and its inclination to ‘splitting’, by making various theoretically intriguing conceptual differentiations: ‘always sharpening its tools, never cutting anything’.
Conceptual ‘lumping’ risks making mistakes by conflating things that should be kept apart. Guzzini insists correctly that PP's lumping strategy pays a price for occasionally overburdening the concept of protean power.Footnote 10 The limits of control power are due not only to PP effects but also the open system ontology that informs PP. By failing to draw that distinction clearly throughout, the book's ontology risks at time being retranslated as explanatory cause. This can overburden PP analysis. Future work should avoid such mixing of the stating of ontological assumption and the tracking of explanatory cause by a more careful differentiation between the two. This would have the added benefit, as Guzzini argues, of drawing a clearer distinction between a theory of action and a theory of domination.Footnote 11 Such clarity is important because, as Guzzini notes accurately, PP is invested in broadening narrower notions of efficient causal explanations to incorporate broader notions of causal explication.
Choosing a global rather than an international perspective, Pelopidas focuses on the possibility of unrepeatable, catastrophes for humanity, such as global thermonuclear war or large-scale environmental disaster – extreme versions of DeMartino and Grabel's cruel N = 1 domains.Footnote 12 For those domains, he argues, the concept of PP opens up a space for thinking about humanity's most basic material vulnerabilities under conditions of radical uncertainty, including the possibility of human and civilizational extinction. But Pelopidas also criticizes PP for introducing a ‘survivability bias’, that conceals from our vision the path to extinction via the unthinkable: omnicidal nuclear war and civilizational collapse.Footnote 13 On this point PP is guilty as charged.
Hung jury
Most students of world politics emulate the ‘scientific standard’ economists assert they are setting. DeMartino's and Grabel's reflections on PP come from the perspective of a discipline that has banished the concept of uncertainty. From their heterodox vantage point economic theory and policy is trapped by ‘epistemic arrogance and the control fantasies of social planners’.Footnote 14 Their quote of Adam Smith's ridicule of economists recalls Leo Tolstoy's equally cutting remark about a celebrated military strategist: ‘In the failure of that war he did not see the slightest evidence of the weakness of his theory. On the contrary, the whole failure was to his thinking entirely due to the departures made from his theory’.Footnote 15 DeMartino and Grabel refer approvingly to Hirschman who opposed ‘isms’ of all sorts and favored ‘perpetual localized experimentation’.Footnote 16 One notable example of this experimentation is the productive incoherence of the governance regime of global finance emerging after the 2008 financial crisis, analyzed in Grabel's prize-winning book.Footnote 17
The main criticism of DeMartino and Grabel focuses on the distinction that PP draws between operational and radical uncertainty, between a potentially knowable uncertainty due to complexity and uncertainty which is not susceptible to any form of calculation. In agreeing with PP that, from the perspective of agents who must act, in practice this distinction is often immaterial, they introduce the productive distinction between ‘reparable’ and ‘irreparable’ ignorance. This adds the practically relevant time frame for action to the distinction between operational and radical uncertainty. In their words ‘the temporal element is key’.Footnote 18 Uncertainty due to reparable ignorance can be dealt with in practically relevant time frames; uncertainty due to irreparable ignorance cannot. Echoing Adler, the gist of this intervention is to greatly enhance the domain of incalculable uncertainty and PP effects and shrink that of calculable risk and control power.Footnote 19
I worry about a sleight of hand here.Footnote 20 First, what is useful and needed knowledge for one may not be for another. Economists and statisticians at one of the world's largest reinsurance companies, Munich Re, make a living shifting the boundary between operational and radical uncertainty so that they can start pricing new products or stop pricing old ones. For them the distinction between two kinds of uncertainty is useful knowledge. For migrants seeking to traverse hostile territories and having to make quick life-and-death decisions it is often useless knowledge. The judgment of what is and is not useful knowledge is situationally specific.
Second, what DeMartino and Grabel call the cruel conundrum of N = 1 domains – the knowledge needed in choosing how to act can only be achieved by making the choiceFootnote 21 – does not eliminate confidence derived from Bayesian updating. Asking herself whether the berries are food or poison, the hiker who is lost in the woods may be able to draw on relevant prior knowledge – the berries she ate yesterday, when she was also lost, did not kill her – to inform her choice. There are situations in which knowledge is necessarily too late. And there are situations in which information updating may help. It depends on the situation.
Third, confronted with radical uncertainty migrants at times put their fortunes in the hands of God and experience the situation – as do, on occasion, terrorists – as one of certainty.Footnote 22 The advantages of clarity of exposition of ‘either-or’ binary choices, like operational and radical uncertainty or reparable and irreparable ignorance, easily gets tripped up by layered realities of ‘both-and’ that migrants (and other agents) face when they confront different kinds of uncertainties along their routes. Still, the coding of the migrant case in Table 13.2Footnote 23 should be corrected, as DeMartino and Grabel insist, to include both operational and radical uncertainty, thus bringing the table in line with repeated discussions of the migrant case in the text.Footnote 24
Guzzini ends his essay with important and inconclusive reflections on the relation between power theorizing and foreign policy practice. His analysis points to the difficulties of coupling the two as tightly as the theorist may wish. He concludes that ‘the ontological, explanatory and practical domain of power analysis do not easily meet’.Footnote 25 While this sounds right to me, my intellectual sensibility favors modesty in searching for loose couplings. For now, PP plays the role of jester at the Court of Convention of control power analysis. Acknowledging explicitly, as this symposium does, the very existence of theoretical pluralism is a desirable first step in a world that reassigns the roles of kings and clowns in different acts of an unfolding play. Informed by that pluralism, scenario thinking about alternative worlds is a helpful second step that is preferable to explanations and predictions based on the assumption of control power operating in the closed system of a risk-only world.
Such scenario-based forecasts offer the best instruments for negotiating our way in unknown and unknowable worlds that we cannot control. Short of calculable probabilities, Tetlock and Gardner's work has taught us that the quality of forecasters varies substantially.Footnote 26 Admittedly, there exists a difference between expert judges who can modify their judgments as they go along without a cost and traders who, once they take a position on a stock, must pay a price if they change their mind at a later date.Footnote 27 But judgments in the realm of the uncertain differ. Invoking Isaiah Berlin, Tetlock and Gardner conclude that hedgehogs who focus only on one big thing are worse forecasters than foxes who scan the environment for multiple sources of information while adapting their cognitive grid and emotional intuition.
Acquittal
Hymans criticizes PP for not engaging seriously the rational choice literature. Rational choice is an import from economics rather than a product homegrown by scholars of international relations.Footnote 28 In their contribution to this symposium DeMartino and Grabel offer a sustained criticism of rational choice in economics with its assumption of infinitely smart agents, rich information environments and a future that can be modeled probabilistically. ‘The resolution of the uncertainty problem was to deny it – to reduce uncertainty to calculable risk. The goal was to establish the technologies necessary for time travel – letting economists see tomorrow, today’.Footnote 29 Hymans is certainly correct to point out that some strains of rationalist theorizing which emphasize preference falsificationFootnote 30 and a ‘global games’ approachFootnote 31 suggest that equilibria can be unstable across a range of different settings. This work provides new foundations for models of unpredictable shifts between equilibria. Telling us that one or several rational choice models can cover the range of observations reported by PP is one thing. Showing us how, is quite another. Here, as always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
My hunch is that this pudding will not be served very soon, if ever. Future progress in modeling uncertainty is of course possible as PP explicitly notes.Footnote 32 But it should be noted also that in the last three decades international relations scholarship has not ventured onto this technically demanding terrain. And game theorists working in this area are theorists with no particular interest or competence in the analysis of politics. Furthermore, rational choice accounts have no answer to why an equilibrium is disturbed, without invoking exogenous shocks or other factors that fall outside of the model. In a risk-only world with common information, endogenously-generated, equilibrium-disturbing shocks are ruled out. This is a weakness that PP seeks to remedy by endogenizing change.
The convergence of micro rationality and macro irrationality that, pace Hymans, invalidates the argument of PP, occurs in a world assumed to consist only of risk. PP makes that point in a sustained critique of two rational choice applications central to the analysis of world politics: deterrence theory and Open Economy Politics.Footnote 33 Contra Hymans' assertion,Footnote 34 it is not for lack of trying that economists have been unable to use their risk-only view of the world to model the film industry.Footnote 35 Just as in finance, they have been defeated by the ontological and epistemic uncertainties that mark that industry. This is not a wholesale indictment of rational choice approaches. In some domains, such as the life insurance industry, not rife with uncertainty, marked by low levels of complexity, and not requiring us to understand how the processes by which contingent events amplify and possibly transform systems, rationalist-inflected theories are appropriate and can be very useful.
Furthermore, central to rational choice, the concept of equilibrium is a weak reed on which to build analysis. Both physics and economics access the world through stylized models which permit us to rigorously derive consequences. Even though neo-classical economics has imitated 19th century physics,Footnote 36 these two disciplines do so by adopting opposing strategies. The concepts of physics have great deductive power whose application is limited by the restricted range of concrete models that link abstract concepts to the world. In contrast, economic concepts have a wide range of application; but they yield deductive results only when located in models with very restricted application.Footnote 37 ‘The claims to knowledge we can defend by our impressive scientific successes do not argue for a unified world of universal order, but rather for a dappled world of mottled objects … The yearning for “the system” is a powerful one; the faith that our world must be rational, well ordered through and through, plays a role where only evidence should matter’.Footnote 38 The concept of PP breaks with the faith Cartwright invokes. It fits very well into her description of a ‘dappled world’.
Finally, PP analysis may suggest sensitivity to costs and opportunities as Hymans suggests; but it does not have to do so. Cost calculations do not occur in a vacuum. They are based on knowledge of the identity of actors. In the calculation of costs and benefits rationalists take those identities as given; analysts of protean and control power dynamics inquire into them empirically as does Phillip Ayoub in his analysis of the LGBT Rights Revolution.Footnote 39 For rationalists the identity of actors A and B are given before the game starts. For a relationally conceived analysis of control and PP, these identities emerge from playing the game. This is the reason why Adler prefers the concept of ‘trans-action’ to ‘inter-action’; it does not assume internal essences.Footnote 40 On this view, the rigidity of a Martin LutherFootnote 41 is not pre-given but emerges from the interplay of two kinds of power as experienced by Luther and the context in which he and the Catholic Church engaged each other.
Zürn's probing comments echo Hymans on the need for greater depth and breadth in PP's analysis. Zürn asks whether ‘the notion of power can be grasped by focusing on any effect of a specific type of response without adding any qualifiers to these effects’.Footnote 42 Because PP operates with two concepts of power, not one, I have no answer to his question. What I can do is to pinpoint the spot where Zürn's analysis falls back into equating power with control power, thus giving up on PP's central task, the analysis of potentialities through PP effects. Doing so, I admit, leaves me feeling the disappointment of a salesman who failed to close a deal. (Happily in this play the salesman lives for another day and the chance for another sale.)
As is explicitly noted, PP's analysis is indebted to Hayward and the late Foucault.Footnote 43 The central point of PP is not providing another application of a relational concept of power, of which, Zürn rightly insists, there have been several.Footnote 44 Instead it is a better understanding of the potentialities concealed by the uncertain and unexpected – a topic left unaddressed in both theoretical and empirical literatures of international relations, and not only in America.
Intentionality and directionality are the two headings under which Zürn develops his argument. He writes that PP ‘comes “in an indirect mode of operation”, thus not requiring intentionality’. This is not quite accurate. PP argues that agents act according to local and situationally specific intentions, but that the indirect PP effects of their actions are often uncertainty-enhancing and system-wide.Footnote 45 Hence the upward and downward arrows on the right-hand, Innovation/Uncertainty side of Figure 2.1.Footnote 46 In this conceptualization PP effects operating in the domain of uncertainty are freed from intentionality aiming at systemic effects; such effects, however, are very much in play in the exercise of control power in the domain of risk.
More important to Zürn is the directionality of power. ‘Directionality is a necessary feature of power. Without directionality, there is no power’, putting some distance between himself and Foucault.Footnote 47 Absent directionality, for Zürn the concept of power is widened unduly which is normatively dangerous and analytically self-defeating. PP argues differently.Footnote 48 Directionality is the mark of control power, circulation that of PP. In developing his argument Zürn returns to the familiar concept of control power as the only concept of power and to the world of actuality as the only one worth understanding. PP and potentiality are pushed aside.
As an example for his argument Zürn refers to brokers who developed new derivative products in financial markets. He writes that ‘they may have exercised protean power’ to the extent that they achieved their goals, making money or avoiding government regulation. Here is the precise point – ‘they may have exercised protean power’ – the salesman realizes that he lost his sale.Footnote 49
Let me reformulate the same episode in the conceptual language of PP. Operating in a world which they experience as risky, the brokers exercised control power in an environment marked by uncertainty. The ensuing crisis resulted in unforeseen PP effects. We unconsciously slip back into the familiar language of control power analysis when we assume that PP can be ‘exercised’.
Collapsing the distinction between two kinds of power and equating PP with the ideas and interests of those exercising control power undermines the central purpose of PP. We need two concepts of power to distinguish the effect of (protean) power from the exercise of (control) power. In PP the concept of control power is not bound to effects; the concept of PP is. If we operate with only one concept of power, we conceal the potentialities that PP wants to uncover. PP then becomes simply another label for existing ones such as ‘productive’ power.Footnote 50 Furthermore, relabeling PP effects as ‘unintended consequences’, a mark of control power analysis, blinds us to PP effects that permit us to explore potentialities rooted in the domain of the uncertain.
That domain, however, is alien to many social scientists' understanding of the world. They feel more at home in the certainties of the Newtonian world. Writing in the mid-1950s, for Robert Dahl the classical model provided ‘the laws of nature as we understand them’.Footnote 51 More than 60 years later, Dahl's dictum remains true for the vast majority of international relations scholars. Yet, no physicist today believes that the classical model is correct. Neither did Hans Morgenthau who insisted that the quantum revolution made it imperative to update our concept of science.Footnote 52 PP sides with Morgenthau rather than Dahl.Footnote 53 The concept of PP has an affinity with core concepts of quantum physics: uncertainty, entanglement, locality, ‘spooky action at a distance’, and, most importantly, potentiality.
Left alone, the salesman pondered why he had failed to close the deal. The obvious answer – customer avoidance of buyer's remorse – merely skims the surface and leaves several questions hanging. Zürn's receptiveness to PP, as he writes at the outset of his essay, dates back to a high school forum about nuclear power in the 1970s. This made me think back to my own German high school years, in particular my physics classes. I was taught about gravity only through the lens of the classical model of physics. Space is an empty container through which gravitation diffuses. Objects make the world. The earth moves around the sun because gravity is a force that inheres in bodies. The larger sun controls the movement of the smaller earth because the greater mass exerts more gravity than the smaller mass. I was not taught about gravity in terms of quantum physics. The gravitational field is space itself. It is created by the linking of individual quanta of gravity. Relationships make the world. The earth moves around the sun because gravity is the bending of space–time by a body with mass.
In Newtonian physics gravity controls. In quantum physics gravity (like PP) is an observable effect in space–time (or social) context.Footnote 54 For conventional views of power, this defies common sense and is hard to accept. For PP forces us to let go of the conventional notion that all kinds of power are exercised. The powerful grip of this convention is probably rooted in the outdated, Dahlian misconception of the laws of nature. Should we perhaps heed the call to ‘waking IR up from its deep Newtonian slumber’?Footnote 55 Should we perhaps listen to Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman for whom the experimentally-confirmed theory of quantum electrodynamics offers a description of Nature that is utterly absurd in terms of our common sense?Footnote 56 And should we perhaps, with Rovelli, entertain the possibility that Reality is not What It Seems?Footnote 57 Why should political scientists not be impelled by the same quest in their analysis of the political world that motivates physicists in theirs of the natural one – to lift just a little the veil of our blurred ignorance to gain a better sense of the fleeting richness and weirdness of life?Footnote 58 With these questions left unanswered, the disappointed salesman called it a day with the consolation that tomorrow might be another, and perhaps better, one.
Because all concepts and theories are unavoidably grounded in other concepts and meta-theories, subsumption is one of the professoriate's most beloved sports. Adler moves the debate about PP onto the terrain of ‘“unspoken” meta-theoretical assumptions about social reality’ about which he has written a fundamentally important book.Footnote 59 The ‘we’ Adler invokes in his central question at the outset – ‘where do we go from here?’ – designates a community of IR theorists as his primary reference group.Footnote 60 While I very much enjoy visiting the House of Theory, share a meal with friends and have a good time, it is not where I wish to bed down or take up residence. Before meeting Adler on his favorite turf, it is worth pointing out that PP's analysis and Adler's meta-theoretical reflections align well on six of his eight points if one allows for some differences in terminology: all agents are creative and agile; expectations, imagination and the future matter; power dynamics are grounded in relational processes; control and PP are instantiated in practices that have feedback effects on power constellations; power and politics are about the actualization of potentialities; and complexity theory and open systems analysis are well suited to capture PP effects.
Contra Adler,Footnote 61 PP does not privilege epistemology over ontology. The figure which he adapts from PP at the end of his essay looks at both risk and uncertainty in analyzing both actor experience (epistemology) and the attributes of the underlying context (ontology). It self-consciously avoids making one or the other dimension primary, offering instead a broad framework to accommodate different styles of theoretical and empirical analysis. The case studies are informed by different theoretical stances as authors explore different matches and mismatches between experience and context. Drawing on Popper (Reference Popper1995) and the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ in quantum mechanicsFootnote 62, for Adler, uncertainty is ‘not merely epistemological but primarily ontological’ due to the indeterminacy of the natural and social world.Footnote 63 Disregarding for the moment the escape hatch provided by ‘primarily’, this is a good argument. There are others. QBism (as in Quantum Bayesianism), for example, is based firmly on experience and subjectivist probabilities. An exponent of the ‘Ithaca Interpretation’, David Mermin has attempted to reduce the core interpretive puzzles of quantum mechanics to the single one of making sense of quantum probabilities. In this view, physics is not the study of something that is given a priori.Footnote 64 It is instead a set of methods for surveying and ordering human experience.Footnote 65
As is true, I suspect, of Adler, foundational discussions about the primacy of ontology or epistemology, remind me of Dr Dolittle's pushmi-pullyu. Accompanying the good doctor back to England, to earn him some serious money in his circus, one of its two heads was talking while the other one was eating. For all its faults, PP's eclecticismFootnote 66 makes it a serious contestant for the Ingenious Table Manner Award. PP steers away from overarching claims about the priority of either the talking or the eating head.
Adler sees the domain of risk and control power as a special case which is forever destabilized, if not today then tomorrow, by PP effects. He agrees with DeMartino and Grabel that ‘all “operational uncertainty” is really “radical uncertainty”’.Footnote 67 The meaning of the word ‘really’ in this bold statement remains opaque. Does the statement describe what the world ‘really’ is like or what we hold the ‘real’ world to be like? In either case, the implication of Adler's argument is unambiguous. ‘Control power [is] a special case of protean power’.Footnote 68 In contrast, PP is agnostic about the primacy of control or PP. It is not trying to offer a comprehensive, unified social theory of apprehending the world. Instead, it proceeds pragmatically by seeking to describe and explain it. Highlighting the overlooked domain of uncertainty and PP effects, PP's theoretical formulation is sufficiently open to make possible compelling analyses of specific political problems in specific political situations. The old adage holds. ‘It all depends.’
The fall of the Berlin Wall illustrates this difference in approach rather nicely. For Adler, ‘it may not have happened at all’.Footnote 69 PP argues instead that, besides the contingent events on 9 November 1989, East Germany's impending financial insolvency constituted a dramatic weakening of the regime's control power that made the opening of the wall an almost forgone conclusion rather than an indeterminate event.Footnote 70 PP's case studies and a century of social science research offer many situations in which politics follows along the experiential and contextual contours of risk without the interference of PP effects.
Finally, Guzzini insists that control and PP should not be conceptualized as standing in a zero-sum relation.Footnote 71 Not so. Precisely because the ideal-typical distinction between the two types of power encourages zero-sum thinking, PP put special emphasis on the overlay and interweaving of control and PP effectsFootnote 72 and distinguished very clearly between three worlds: the world of risk and control power, the world of uncertainty and PP and the world of risk and uncertainty and control and PP.Footnote 73 Furthermore, the 12 case studies provide the empirical material for characterizing different kinds of relations between control and PP summarized both in a separate table and discussed in a separate section of the concluding chapter.Footnote 74 On this score, as on the charges leveled by Hymans, Zürn and Adler, in my reading PP is not guilty as charged.
Unexpected gifts
In extending the reach of PP analysis beyond guilt, hung jury, and acquittal, this symposium also yields three unexpected gifts. Hymans probes the point of agile actors bringing about PP effects. Psychologists like Frank Bond characterize psychological flexibility as the ability to pivot quickly and effectively to ‘acceptance and action.’ Noted science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin catches this when she observes that ‘the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next’. This is in contrast to psychologist Ari Kruglanski's work on cognitive rigidity and ‘seizing and freezing’.Footnote 75 Hymans focuses on the ‘seize and freeze’ camp and thus extends the approach of PP to a new empirical domain. Rigidity rather than agility, he argues, is the most plausible response to the experience of radical uncertainty. In seeking to make the unpredictable predictable, psychological effects can reinforce stasis.Footnote 76
Based on his own work, Hymans provides a number of telling examples, imaginatively extending the range of the PP concept. His analysis could be enriched even further by including the contextual dimension along with the experiential one. In PP epistemology and experience and ontology and context are co-equal. Neither is the ‘essential driver of power’ as DeMartino and Grabel observe perceptively.Footnote 77
Pelopidas writes authoritatively about nuclear war as a possible catastrophe. He also points briefly to the possibility of civilizational collapse in the face of environmental disaster and the potential applicability of PP effect analysis for grasping such calamity. Let me briefly elaborate on his point.
At the threshold of what a growing number of earth scientists call the Anthropocene ‘humans have become geological agents’.Footnote 78 Human activities have become a great force of nature, enmeshing natural and social processes. ‘Albert Einstein’, John McNeill writes, ‘famously refused to “believe that God plays dice with the world”. But in the twentieth century, humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules of the game’.Footnote 79 Human activities are adding new biophysical factors that modify the physical parameters shaping the function of some of Earth's major systems.Footnote 80 Old-style determinism no longer works and neither does the concept of control power. For they do not capture that everything is now simultaneously human and natural and that non-human ‘actants’ (such as microbes and various materials and devices) can fundamentally alter natural and human possibilities.Footnote 81 The world is not inert matter moved by predictable, physical laws. Instead it is acting with often unpredictable PP effects affecting humankind and all other living organisms.
With new uncertainties of various kinds cropping up, past experience of the earth's system no longer serves as a reliable guide for predicting future developments. No place on the earth can any longer be considered as ‘natural’. Instead, man-made nature is becoming ‘artificial’. Deeply entangled with human practices, the universe is ‘undergoing a process of creative becoming’ that is beyond human control.Footnote 82 Nature is not a pristine, unmoved, and balanced landscape that exists apart from man. Human action is making and remaking everything through PP effects, endowing nature with its own agency.
Pelopidas is right on target in arguing that existing international relations scholarship ignores these PP effects and the possibility of civilizational collapse in the face of environmental disasters of unimaginable scope and scale. Between 2011 and 2015 the three leading IR journals published virtually no articles on conventionally understood, non-catastrophic environmental issues.Footnote 83 Attended by scholars from all over the world, the 2015 annual meeting of the International Studies Association featured 1250 panels; only one paper title mentioned the Anthropocene explicitly.Footnote 84 And even though they ranked climate change as the most important issue facing the world, only 2.4% of about 4000 international relations scholars listed the environment as their main area of research.Footnote 85
Culled from PP's concluding chapter, the concepts of imagination, humility, and responsibility, provide the building blocks for Pelopidas's important extension of the analysis of PP effects. Pelopidas and PP agree that overconfidence in controllability and predictability is unwarranted. Analyzing, however, the unpredictable is not a plea for accepting ignorance in the study of global and international relations as part of the social sciences. As Kuran argues, ‘the goal of all science … should be to explain the explicable, predict the predictable, and equally important, separate the knowable from the unknowable’.Footnote 86 Pelopidas extends this line of argument when he insists on our broader scholarly responsibility when confronting catastrophes.Footnote 87 In so doing he helpfully pushes the analysis of PP even deeper into the field of political theory than the book's concluding chapter managed to do.
Finally, Adler's complexification of PP's Figure 1.1 is also an unexpected gift.Footnote 88 A close cousin of PP's conceptualization, it replaces the two categories of risk and uncertainty with four categories (meta-stability, volatility, illusion of control, and no illusion of control) and adds two practices to the four identified in PP. It thus bends that figure creatively around Adler's own tree and his interest in collective learning.Footnote 89 Nothing pleases me more than seeing PP's core idea adapted usefully to a field of inquiry well outside of its main line of vision.
Conclusion
This symposium signals a notable shift away from the mixture of outright hostility, sheer bewilderment, and critical skepticism that met PP's argument when we circulated some of the well over 100 drafts of the theoretical chapters we wrote over the years. Then, most of our colleagues rejected PP as a harmful or superfluous neologism. The election of Donald Trump has given the book's central claim a bit more credibility. At least some of our colleagues appear to accept that sometimes the unfathomable does indeed happen.
There will be no end to debates about a foundational concept such as power. This symposium has raised many issues. Many more lurk in the shadows, including the role of Bayesian statistics for the analysis of risk and uncertainty; the precise relation between control and PP (co-existence and co-evolution, or co-constitution); a richer and more satisfying development of the concepts of experience and reasonableness; and the implications of PP analysis for political resilience and scholarly practice.
PP analysis offers a chance to re-examine an important assumption, common among scholars of world politics, the social sciences, and the public at large: our increasing control over the world we inhabit. Devotees of big data, for example, predict that machine learning may soon be able to predict the future evolution of chaotic systems thus improving weather and earthquake forecasting, the monitoring of cardiac arrhythmias, solar storms, or the monitoring of neuronal firing patterns. In the words of chaos theorist Holger Kantz, ‘The machine-learning technique is almost as good as knowing the truth’.Footnote 90 Similar hopes (and fears) also motivate burgeoning research programs in the social sciences and international relations. In the political, economic, and social world, however, such gains in knowledge, predictability, and control simply push the unpredictable into new domains while concentrating and amplifying it in the process.Footnote 91 The power dynamics analyzed in PP will not disappear in the era of big data and artificial intelligence. Advances in knowledge always create the potential for PP effects in unexpected places and with unexpected results.
PP speaks to a world of potentialities that all too often escapes our dulled imagination. Robert Musil believed that our sense ‘for what is real’ (Wirklichkeitssinn) is matched by our sense ‘for what is possible’ (Möglichkeitssinn).Footnote 92 As was true of Robert Kennedy, many political actors let a sense of the possible guide them in their actions: ‘Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not’.Footnote 93 The pull of the world of potentialities on the world of reality is strong. America's favorite realist, Henry Kissinger, agrees. In the formation of foreign policy ‘everything depends … on some conception of the future’.Footnote 94
PP points to a question left deliberately unanswered. Control power evokes the image of a well-manicured garden, PP that of a wild jungle. Which of the two is the normal condition of life? Does the jungle intrude on the garden or does the garden control the jungle? Readers of PP will come to their own implicit or explicit conclusion as have the authors in this symposium. I believe this is one of those questions we all wrestle with even if we choose not to answer it.
Most books try to nail down an argument and shut the door. PP is a different kind of book. It opens a window, invites the reader to look anew, sense the breeze, listen to a different tune, hopefully yield to the urge of taking an unfamiliar hop or two, and perhaps to start over. To the frequently posed question – ‘how was this possible?’ – the concept of PP offers fresh answers that open up new perspectives on world politics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Matthew Evangelista and Jonathan Kirshner for their helpful criticisms and suggestions of an earlier draft of this essay.
