Sawing Off the Branch on Which We Sit? Critical Realism, Open Systems, and Possible Futures

Abstract

The Political Economy of Global Security: War, Future Crises and Changes in Global Governance. By Patomaki Heikki. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 292 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-415-41672-6). The Political Economy of Global Security is an ambitious and unusual book. It seeks to contribute to peace and security studies by constructing narratives of possible global futures whose main purpose is to promote global peace and democracy. In developing its narratives, the book combines social theory in the form of critical realism (Bhaskar 1986) with the insights of empirico-analytical models, among them classical theories of imperialism and lateral pressure theory. From critical realism, Patomaki borrows a number of ideas, perhaps primary among them that social systems are open systems. Because they are open, social systems are “susceptible to external influences and internal, qualitative change and emergence” (Patomaki and Wight 1999:232). The most important implication is that constant conjunctions (or universal invariances) do not exist in open systems. For instance, the proposition that liberal democracies do not fight each other is a constant conjunction. (p. 20) Although constant conjunctions do not exist, we can gain knowledge of “contrastive demi-regularities,” defined as “a partial event regularity which prima facie indicates the occasional actualisation of geo-historical causal forces or mechanisms over a definite region of time-space” (p. 22). An example of a demi-regularity would be the lower frequency of wars between liberal democratic countries than between democracies and other countries since the late nineteenth century (p. 22). We can identify demi-regularities such as the democratic peace hypothesis, but they are both spatially and temporally limited and too unstable to provide a basis for thinking about the conditions for a future peaceful global order. In other words, in the absence of constant conjunctions, prediction is “fundamentally problematic” (p. 24). This leaves us with a seeming paradox: Prediction is problematic, yet the goal of future studies is to identify possible global futures. If the scenarios of possible global futures are not predictions, then what …