Foreword

Abstract

Foreword Tamara Sonn (bio) The articles in this issue of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs focus on civil society discourse and its implications for international affairs. The academic field of International Relations, reflecting its modernist origins, is state-centered; it focuses primarily on relations between political and military entities, with economic interests always a central focus and non-governmental institutions at the margins. Civil society discourse—whether expressed through the arts, religious, or secular organizations—have yet to find a place in the standard IR curriculum, leaving students ill-equipped to recognize social discontent and its potential political impacts. Clear examples of the analytic weakness of the traditional approach can be seen in the failure of the foreign policy establishment to recognize the long-standing social grievances that resulted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union, and the 2010–11 Arab Spring. These weaknesses have been noticed. CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote in 1991 of the failure to foresee that the United States would have to intervene militarily in Iran, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon and Kuwait during the previous decade.1 Regarding the Arab democracy uprisings, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2011, "We're facing an Arab awakening that nobody could have imagined and few predicted just a few years ago."2 Michael Walzer reflects on the secular bias of IR and therefore incomprehension of the rise of political Islam in his 2015 The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions. Yet portents of these and many other developments over the past century were clearly evident in the discourse of religious and other civil society actors and in the works of poets, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians. Students trained to analyze the popular sentiments expressed in these discourses could contribute to more comprehensive intelligence gathering. They might even recognize that traditional foreign policy strategies actually contribute to destabilizing social unrest. For example, according to emeritus Georgetown Professor of Government and International Affairs Robert Lieber, "maintaining a secure supply of oil from the Middle East and the Persian Gulf" is essential to our national interest—even if it means compromising our commitment to democracy.3 Georgetown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy Dennis Ross recently argued in support of strengthening U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia despite the state-sanctioned murder of journalist Jamal [End Page 145] Khashoggi "and other human rights violations." In order to secure the free flow of "Saudi oil," we need to "do what we have always done:… balance values and interests."4 This approach is what drove the United States to participate in the overthrow of Iran's developing democracy in 1953, contributing to the anti-Americanism that drove the 1979 revolution and remains a potent threat today. Given the vested interests, it is unlikely that U.S. foreign policy training will change significantly in the near term. But the articles in this volume provide good examples of the kinds of analyses that would help inform more comprehensive understandings of international affairs. They include studies of the manipulation of religious conservatism by rightwing politicians in Brazil, and the political exploitation of disaffected young males radicalized online in South Korea; and the weaknesses (and, by implication, inconsistencies) of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool in China; and the potential strengths of civil society activism in Yemen. Other articles deal with national issues that have important transnational resonances, such as the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on indigenous communities in Latin America. Tamara Sonn Tamara Sonn is Professor Emerita at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Her most recent books include Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring (with John L. Esposito and John O. Voll; Oxford, 2016), Islam: History, Religion, and Politics (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), and Is Islam an Enemy of the West? (Polity, 2016). She has published over one hundred chapters and articles, and her works have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, German, Portuguese, Korean, and Russian. She has lectured in North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the U.S. Department of State...