Beyond the Veil of Knowledge: Triangulating Security, Democracy, and Academic Scholarship PDF
Preview Beyond the Veil of Knowledge: Triangulating Security, Democracy, and Academic Scholarship
Revised Pages Beyond the Veil of Knowledge Is there a need to remodel constructivism to be more politically attuned? Be- yond the Veil of Knowledge suggests that essentially contested concepts are a key medium that politicians use to try to minimize public resistance to their polit- ical goals. For constructivists, this means that the social construction of social knowledge and the social world ought better to be understood as the sociopolit- ical construction of sociopolitical knowledge and the sociopolitical world. Intersubjective knowledge is very important, but so is background knowledge that is sociopolitically orchestrated in line with political agen- das and by political and rhetorical means. The fixation of meanings closes off democratic contestation and, when it is successful, places democratic agency in limbo and degrades democratic deliberation and its beneficial qualities. Piki Ish- Shalom calls for an engaged academy: an academy that mobilizes its resources to engage society and the polity to prevent the wa- tering down of democracy, while helping to create a space for criticism. In this book, he suggests several concrete measures for engagement, within the three spheres of individual theoretical work, the academic community, and society and polity. Piki Ish- Shalom is Associate Professor of International Relations at the He- brew University of Jerusalem. Revised Pages Revised Pages Beyond the Veil of Knowledge Triangulating Security, Democracy, and Academic Scholarship PIKI ISH- SHALOM University of Michigan Press F Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2019 by Piki Ish- Shalom All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published January 2019 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978- 0- 472-1 3120- 4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12466- 4 (ebook) Revised Pages This book is dedicated to Emanuel Adler and Shlomo Avineri, who took me soaring high above the clouds. Revised Pages Revised Pages Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I: Concepts and Politics 1 F Theoretical Framework 17 2 F Essentially Contested Concepts: Democracy and Security 43 3 F The Essential Contestedness of Concepts and Politics 69 Part II: Engaged Academia 4 F The Responsibility to Engage 97 5 F The Individual Level: Zooming In, Zooming Out 105 6 F The Second Level: The Community of Communities 117 7 F The Third Level: Structural Problems 133 8 F Traveling Forward in Time: Forecasting and Realizing the Spread of Democracy 151 9 F Moving Away from the Heart of Darkness: Advising the Security Sectors 175 Conclusions: Having an Engaged Academia in a Conceptually Contested Environment 195 Appendix: “Megalim Olam” 205 Notes 211 References 219 Index 239 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9852588 Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments We live in (yet again) troubled times, in which democracy is on the defen- sive. When I started this project, sometime around 2010, my worries were mainly for the state of democracy in my own country, Israel. Since then more and more countries have entered the orbit of democracy in duress. This process lent urgency to my project, urgency that I could not face ex- cept in the tranquil and unhurried manner of academia. This is probably why it took me almost a decade to write and publish this book. I cannot but wonder how much longer it would have taken without the sense the urgency. The years it took to write this book explain the long list of people I want to thank. I will start and end my acknowledgments with the same addressees of my first book, a good sign for some continuity in my way of thinking and living. I hope the book will prove that on top of the con- tinuity there are also advantageous changes and development. Thus, my first thanks go to those known by the professional title of “anonymous reviewers.” They are “us” in the broadest sense, in the amorphous way that academia is a community, an amorphous way I will try to concretize and morally argue for in the second part of this book. My gratitude, indeed, is to all of us who review and being reviewed, while keeping our sanity and sense of responsible scholarship. I am especially grateful to those many anonymous reviewers who met this project in its article and book forms, reviewed it, commented on it, and pushed me to improve my arguments and make the book what it is (though, as always, the mistakes still in it are my own personal intellectual property). But there are also those I know by name who in various ways have helped me in writing this book. I offer my thanks to my two research as- sistants, Viki Auslender and Or Israeli, who might well have lost hope that anything would come out of this project but kept at it. And then there are colleagues, some of whom read parts of the manuscript, many of whom
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