On a Field Trip with Bourdieu

Abstract

How can Bourdieu help us grasp international politics today? How can the concept of “field,” originally coined for analyzing relations within states, provide an understanding of emerging patterns of transnational governance? I argue that Bourdieu provides us with sophisticated analytical tools for exploring the strength and limits of state authority—also beyond the national territory. Moreover, I claim that sovereign state interaction—diplomacy—has developed into a metafield. If we are to understand emerging challenges to state authority, from private companies to international organizations and global media, we need to study everyday activities, which both reproduce and challenge the sovereign state system as a meaningful reality. I illustrate this idea of competing articulations of political authority by focusing on the EU's new diplomatic service, which challenges the very idea of national diplomatic representation. A Bourdieusian reading of “the international” turns traditional IR theory upside down. When neorealists claim that the international system is anarchical, Bourdieu insists that it is hierarchical. When the English School claims that “pariah states and failed states” can be seen as being somehow outside international society relegated to a more abstract international system “with less dense interaction” (Dunne 2010:148), a Bourdieu-inspired approach argues that processes of exclusion are intrinsic to international society. Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, for instance, only becomes a “pariah state” through interaction with the rest of the world. While this might sound like a constructivist argument about the social character of international politics, Bourdieu is not an IR constructivist. Anarchy is not what states make of it because the international is already structured. States come with a history. The marginalization of some states, groups, or individuals can be explained by the changing patterns of cultural and symbolic forms of domination and the competition for power and prestige. To Bourdieu, the particularity of the state as an organization, …