Professor David Chandler

Here you will find some of my most recent work. If you just want to gain a quick idea of some of the themes of my current research, I have highlighted a few pieces with READ THIS. More information on publications is available here.

'British forces: a token army of occupation’, Spiked-Online, 14 October 2008. The Iraqi PM’s attack on Britain’s lack of commitment in Basra has shot a hole in the government’s ‘Iraq Story’.

READ THIS: 'Normative Power and the Liberal Peace: A Rejoinder to John O’Brennan', Global Society, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2008), pp.519-529. ISSN 1360-0826

Abstract: This rejoinder to John O’Brennan reasserts the case that the EU enlargement process has a depoliticising effect, which weakens the connections between Western Balkan states and their societies. It suggests that O’Brennan’s response is more apologia than analysis; evading issues raised by asymmetrical relations of power between the EU and Western Balkans states. Here the EU is idealised, with the ascribed status of a ‘normative actor’ projecting power merely through ‘soft power’ mechanisms. The points raised in response seek to clarify that the more ‘muscular’ use of conditionality and direct management of policy reforms inevitably limit the possibilities for public and political debate and consensus-making and distance political elites from their societies. In particular, the use of political conditionality is highlighted, to demonstrate that whether ‘hard’ powers of imposition or ‘soft’ powers of conditionality are used matters less to those on the receiving end of external imposition than to the EU itself, which has attempted to distance itself from its use of executive powers in the region.

READ THIS: 'The Revival of Carl Schmitt in International Relations: The Last Refuge of Critical Theorists?', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2008), pp.27-48. ISSN 0305-8298

Abstract: This paper seeks to question the ‘critical’ readings of Carl Schmitt's understanding of international law and the use of force in international relations, particularly the approaches taken by many critical cosmopolitan theorists and many post-structuralists who have used Schmitt to distance themselves from, and to critique, American foreign policy, especially under the Bush administrations. I suggest that these critical theorists engage in a highly idealised understanding of Schmitt, focusing on his contingent political conclusions, using his work descriptively rather than analytically. It is argued that the idealist approach to Schmitt stems from these commentators’ concerns to describe their work as critical rather than from any attempt to use Schmitt’s underlying ontological framing of the relationship between law, ethics and the use of force to develop analytical insights into the practice and jurisprudence of the international sphere today. The revival of Schmitt in International Relations therefore tells us more about the crisis of critical theorising than the relevance of Schmitt’s analysis to today’s world.

'The "Bosnian model" is no model for Georgia', Spiked-Online, 15 September 2008. Turning sections of the Caucasus into international protectorates will not deliver anything like democracy.

'Georgia: Russia’s first "Western-style" war', Spiked-Online, 28 August 2008. Far from the Russian Bear reasserting its Great Power, its foreign policy, like Britain and America’s, is uncertain and erratic.

'Human Security: The Dog that Didn't Bark', Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 4 (August 2008), pp.427-438. ISSN 0967-0106

Abstract: This review article, suggests that thirteen years after human security was first taken up by the United Nations, its integration into the policy-making and policy-practices of leading Western states and international institutions, has revealed that talk of two different ‘paradigms’ - the radical counter-position of ‘individual’ and ‘state-based’ approaches, or between ‘critical theory’ and ‘problem-solving’ frameworks – has been much exaggerated.

READ THIS: 'Human Security II: Waiting for the Tail to Wag the Dog: Rejoinder to Ambrosetti, Owen and Wibben', Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 4 (August 2008), pp.463-469. ISSN 0967-0106

Abstract: In my original review article, ‘Human Security: The Dog that Didn’t Bark’ (2008), I sought to highlight the dangers of idealism, inherent in advocacy (by academics and policymakers) of human security frameworks, which were held to empower the vulnerable and marginalised. The three respondents suggest that human security frameworks could play a more useful radical and critical role than I allow and wished to investigate the potential of human security frameworks to critique and challenge power relations. In this rejoinder, I wish to explain why this is the wrong starting point for a critical appraisal of human security theorising. In posing the questions of what human security can achieve, these critical advocates of human security argue that the tail of human security can wag the dog of international policy practice. They fall into the idealist trap of seeing allegedly critical speech acts and radical academic theories as having agency and doing the work of transforming the world.

'"Svet" ne može da se nadoknadi globalizacijom', Plave Strane, Danas (Belgrade), 12-13 July 2008. Kostas Duzinas i Dejvid Čendler o "svetskoj vlasti", EU, Balkanu, vanzemaljcima.

‘G8 summit: a global displacement activity’, Spiked-Online, 8 July 2008. Western governments’ desire to globalise big issues - from poverty to climate change - is an attempt to escape real responsibility for policymaking.

Comments in Michał Potocki, 'Serbia o krok od Europy', Dziennik (Poland), 13 May 2008.

Review article: 'From Security to Insecurity: Kaldor, Duffield and Furedi’, Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.265-276. ISSN 1467-8802.

'The Rise and Limits of Biopolitical Critiques of Human Rights Regimes' draft paper for the international conference, 'The International Human Rights Regime Since 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives', University of Pittsburgh, 17-19 April 2008.

'Iraq and the Problematic Discourse of Defeat', draft presentation for the Roundtable 'Globalization, Statebuilding and the Occupation of Iraq II', 49th International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, 28 March 2008.

'Humanising Haditha', Spiked-Online, 18 March 2008. By showing all sides as victims of war, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha can only find ‘common humanity’ in our ability to suffer.

READ THIS: 'IA Forum Interview: Professor David Chandler', International Affairs Forum, Centre for International Relations, Washington D.C., 17 March 2008. IA-Forum speaks with Professor Chandler about Western interventions in the name of democracy promotion. By Katharine Slocombe.

'The Human Security Paradox: How Nation States Grew to Love Cosmopolitan Ethics', keynote at the international conference, 'Globalization, Difference, and Human Securities', Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan, 12 March 2008.

'What's Next for Kosovo and Serbia?', studio interview (view programme), CNN, 22 February 2008.

'After the Serbian elections', studio interview (view programme), Four Corners, Press TV, 4 February 2008.

'After the Serbian elections', interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 4 February 2008. Interview comments in Perro de Jong, 'Serbs vote for Europe', Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 4 February 2008.

'Why Karzai was right to reject Ashdown', Spiked-Online, 29 January 2008. He relished his role as colonial overlord in Bosnia, so it's not surprising the Afghans don’t want Paternalistic Paddy anywhere near their country.

'Avrupa Birliği Ulus İnşaasi: Liberal Barişi Ab Genişlemesiyle Güven Altina Alma’, Stratejik Öngörü, TASAM (Turkish Asian Centre for Strategic Studies), Vol.12, No.1, 2008, pp.13-20.

'Keeping humanity secure?', Spiked Review of Books, Issue No.9, January 2008. The new focus on ‘human security’ in the debate about international relations suggests there should be an even more meddlesome form of policing of other states’ affairs. No thanks.

'Is the UN a Waste of Time?', panel debate, hosted by Andrew Gilligan (view programme), with Hazel Smith, programme advisor to the UN World Food Programme (North Korea) and professor in international relations at Warwick University and Sarah Lesniewski, senior project officer for the Women's Budget Group and member of the Fawcett Society. Forum, Press TV, 20 January 2008.

'Kosovo’s Declaration of Dependence', Spiked-Online, 15 January 2008. Hashim Thaci, one-time guerrilla turned PM of Kosovo, has promised to break away from Serbia. It's independence, Jim, but not as we know it.

'Britain’s key weapon in Afghanistan: the bribe', Spiked-Online, 3 January 2008. In allegedly trying to buy off a local Taliban leader, British officials have shown a haughty and colonial disregard for the Afghan government.

2007

'The EU’s Promotion of Democracy in the Balkans: The Power of Simulation and the Simulation of Power'. Draft paper prepared for the British International Studies Association Annual Conference,
Cambridge, 17-19 December 2007.

Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate the EU’s democracy promotion and statebuilding policies in the Balkans through the use of Jean Baudrillard’s conceptions of ‘simulation’ and ‘hyperreality’ as a response to the crisis of representation. It does this to suggest that the assertion of the power of the EU in the Balkans cannot be fully understood in traditional terms of imperial hegemony. Rather, it is suggested that the EU seeks to simulate its own position of power through the use of foreign policy issues, particularly that of ‘member state-building’ in the Balkans. It further argues that, in the process, the EU exports forms of non-representative governance - the simulation of government - in the states that are being externally built and integrated into the European Union. This framework is also used to raise some broader questions over Baudrillard’s view of ‘simulation’ as blurring the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ – Does it make any difference to the people of Bosnia whether the EU’s semi-protectorate regime is a product of simulation or of representation?

READ THIS: 'The Security-Development Nexus and the Rise of "Anti-Foreign Policy"', Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.10, No.4, (2007), pp.362-386. ISSN 1408-6980.

Abstract: Current debates and discussions of the emerging security-development nexus tend to portray this as signifying the increased importance of the problems of non-Western states to Western policy-makers. This paper seeks to challenge this perspective and analyses how the policy ‘nexus’ reflects a retreat from strategic policy-making and a more inward-looking approach to foreign policy, more concerned with self-image than the policy consequences in the areas concerned. Rather than demonstrating a new seriousness of approach to tackling the security and development problems of the non-Western world, the discussions around this framework betray the separation between policy rhetoric and policy-planning. This reflects the rise of anti-foreign policy: attempts to use the international sphere as an arena for self-referential statements of political mission and purpose, decoupled from their subject matter, resulting in ad hoc and arbitrary foreign policy-making.

'Britain's theatrical war against the Taliban', Spiked-Online, 11 December 2007. British troops are not fighting the 'good fight' in Afghanistan; they are hiding behind US airpower and taking towns from weak forces.

'Introduction: Inside the Bosnian Crisis', Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Special Online Supplement, 'Inside the Bosnian Crisis', 1 December 2007. Full issue available here.

Abstract: On 1 November 2007 Bosnia’s Serbian prime minister Nikola Špirić resigned bringing government to a standstill. Richard Holbrooke, the US architect of the Dayton peace agreement, highlighted in the Washington Post the warning of Raffi Gregorian, the US deputy High Representative in Bosnia, that ‘Bosnia’s very survival could be determined in the next few months if not the next few weeks’. The European Union has circulated to its member state ambassadors a document recognising that: ‘The eruption of the long-simmering political crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina has painfully exposed the failure of the most intensive effort ever at internationally-supervised statebuilding.’ However the current crisis is resolved, it is the underlying problems of the framework of international regulation in the country, which is the central concern of this special supplement of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

'Warum hasst Gordon Brown Politik?', Novo Magazin, No.91/92 (Nov 2007 - Feb 2008), pp.18-19. David Chandler über den Skeptizismus der Politiker bezüglich politischer Veränderungen.

'The high representative for Bosnia still runs it like a feudal fiefdom', Guardian, 20 November 2007. Bosnia's political crisis is the result of EU intervention, not action by Russia or the Serbs, says David Chandler.

'What about democracy for Bosnia?', Spiked-Online, 6 November 2007. Western commentators fret about dictatorships in Burma and Pakistan yet turn a blind eye to the EU's colonial rule in 'over-emotional' Bosnia.

'Brown gives a whole new meaning to "liberty"', Spiked-Online, 29 October 2007. The British PM treats freedom as a stuffy British tradition, through which he might 'connect' with an atomised public. Thomas Jefferson he ain't.

Comments in Ceri Dingle, 'Africa Strand', Battle in Print, in association with the Battle of Ideas, London, 27-28 October 2007.

'What Future for Britain's "Ethical" Foreign Policy?', Debate with Alan Mendoza, Battle in Print, in association with the Battle of Ideas, London, 27-28 October 2007.

'European Union Statebuilding: Securing the Liberal Peace through EU Enlargement’, Global Society, Vol.21, No.4, (2007), pp.593-607. Special issue: ‘The Liberal Peace and Post-war Reconstruction’. ISSN 1360-0826.

Abstract: This paper suggests that the liberal peace, secured by state-capacity building in the process of EU enlargement to the Balkans, hides a dual process taking place within the political establishment of the European Union. On the one hand, the EU seeks to project its power into what is perceived to be a vacuum in the region, on the other hand, the EU seeks to avoid the direct political responsibilities associated with empire. This exercise of power and avoidance of responsibility is driven by the EU’s own lack of confidence in its expansion to the east, particularly with regard to its ability to legitimate this project to the citizens of EU member-states. However, the consequences of the policies which seek to denial the power exercised by the EU are destabilising ones for the Balkan states, where the relations of power are separated from relations of accountability. This tends to create weakened states which have international legal sovereignty but lack genuine mechanisms for politically integrating society. The pre-existing fragility of state-society relations in this region means that these relations of domination risk exposing the weakness and external dependency of political elites and the discrediting of the European project.

Review of Andrea Kathryn Talentino, Military Intervention after the Cold War: The Evolution of Theory and Practice (Athens: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 2005), International History Review, Vol.29, No.3, (September 2007), pp.691-3.

READ THIS: 'Hollow Hegemony: Theorising the Shift from Interest-Based to Value-Based International Policy-Making', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol.35, No.3, Special Issue: Theorising the International, September 2007, pp. 703-723.

Abstract: Today, attempts to explain the post-Cold War shift away from interest-based to value-based policy-making are increasingly caught in a cleft stick between Post-Realist (e.g. neo-Gramscian and post-structuralist) revelations of hegemonic power relations and Post-Liberal (essentially Constructivist) assertions of the transformative power of ideas, communicative networks and emerging international norms. This paper suggests that neither Post-Realist nor Post-Liberal approaches are able to tell us much about the interrelationship between interests and ideas in the current historical conjuncture. This is because neither framework can easily countenance a disjunction between material 'interests' and the discursive forms in which power is projected internationally. Using the ontological focus and epistemological framework adopted in Karl Marx's study of the crisis of political subjectivity, and the consequential retreat into idealism, of the German Ideology, this paper argues that a materialist grounding of ethical declarations of value-based policy does not necessarily lead back to the direct, or even indirect, interests of hegemonic powers. Rather, it indicates an era of 'hollow hegemony' marked by the lack of instrumental policy-making and the inability to construct a clear political project cohering values, frameworks and strategic interests.

'Worldview: The Petraeus Report', (view programme) Alan Mendoza of The Henry Jackson Society is joined by Prof. David Chandler of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, Paul Smyth, head of the Aerospace and Information Studies Programme at the RUSI, and James Denselow of the Council for Arab-British Understanding. Following the findings of the Petraeus Report, released last week, Alan and guests discuss whether this is just a case of "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" and ask what it will mean for the strategy in Iraq. Worldview, 18 Doughty Street TV, 20 September 2007.

'France is now more gung-ho than America', Spiked-Online, 18 September 2007. As he threatens war on Iran, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner is living up to spiked’s warning that he is ‘the most dangerous man in Europe.'

Abstract: It would seem that international statebuilding has arrived practically de nouvo, fully formed at the end of the Cold War, with commentators trying to extract lessons from the new practices of international administration in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Iraq. The more historical approaches which seek to guide international statebuilding draw on institutionally similar circumstances under the League of Nations and the United Nations. The more conceptually minded analysts suggest that the field is a new one and that it is still too early to rush to judgement on techniques and practices. This paper seeks to draw out some pointers to a missing genealogy of international approaches to statebuilding in policy discussions about ‘transitional states’, particularly in relation to sub-Saharan Africa. It suggests that two areas which can be usefully drawn upon are the discussions of colonial ‘transition’ in the 1920s and discussions of post-colonial ‘transition’ in the 1960s. Both sets of policy-orientated discussions of transitional states implicitly focussed on the problem of the relationship between subject or post-colonial states and their societies. These discussions posed the problem in terms which set them apart from discussions of domestic political forms of administration and political management. This paper suggests that it is in these debates, on the specific distinctions between the management of non-Western state-society relations and domestic state-society relations, that the missing genealogy of international statebuilding can be found.

'Reviving the idea of the "good war"', Spiked-Online, 12 September 2007. The French and British governments are cynically using and abusing the situation in Kosovo to try to resurrect support for liberal imperialism.

'Rizici unilateralnog priznanja', interview with Branka Trivić, Radio Free Europe, 23 August 2007. David Chandler, profesor međunarodnih odnosa na londonskom Westminster univerzitetu ističe u intervjuu za Radio Slobodna Evropa da bi uniltarelano priznanje nezavisnosti Kosova izazvalo podele u regionu. U intervjuu koji sledi Chandler najpre odgovara na pitanje kako bi Evropska unija reagovala ako bi došlo do unilateralnog priznanja Kosova.

'Why does Gordon Brown hate politics?', Spiked-Online, 13 August 2007. A new book suggests that it is politicians' own low horizons and scepticism about political change that leads to apathy amongst the masses.

'David Cameron’s Rwandan distraction', Spiked-Online, 25 July 2007. Why the Tory leader prefers to pontificate about poverty 4,000 miles away rather than tackle problems in his constituency: washed-out Witney.

'Politics as Religion', CSD Bulletin, Vol.14, No.s 1 & 2, (Summer 2007), pp.23-25.

'The White Liberal Democrat's Burden', Spiked-Online, 28 June 2007. Paddy Ashdown may have been a failed politician in Britain, but the former Lord of Bosnia now fancies himself as a free-floating colonialist who can fix the world's problems.

Abstract: This paper outlines the limits of the conception of ‘global space’ at the centre of attempts to establish the existence of certain communicative norms of ‘global civil society’. It particularly focuses on theoretically asserted claims made for an idealised global public sphere which are the basis upon which theoretical structures of communicative values and global norms are constituted. These, in turn, are used to inform normative critiques, from the standpoint of ‘global civil society’, which challenge present international practices. The concluding sections outline the limitations of this political project, highlighting the problematic, de-socialised, nature of these conceptions of ‘global space’; which, in lacking any mediating framework, between the asserted ‘moral autonomy’ of actors in global civil society and the global norms allegedly derived from them, makes communicative global civil society theorising innately conservative in character.

READ THIS: 'The Death of Foreign Policy', Spiked-Online, 13 June 2007. What will foreign policy be like under Gordon Brown, or David Cameron? Similar to what it was like under Blair: a desperate search for purpose overseas.

'International Tribunals: Not fit for purpose', Spiked-Online, 6 June 2007. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor refused to turn up to his trial in The Hague this week, claiming the court was a sham. He has a point.

‘Serbia and Europe: who’s ruling who?’, Spiked-Online, 16 May 2007. Many are shocked that Serbia has been made president of the Council of Europe, yet they turn a blind eye to the EU’s blackmail of elected Serb politicians.

'Empire in Denial: From Bosnia to Iraq', Conflict IN FOCUS, Regional Centre on Conflict Prevention, Jordanian Institute of Diplomacy, Issue 18, April 2007, pp.2-4.

Abstract: This paper argues that the lack of purchase of traditional territorial constructions of political community does not necessarily indicate the emergence of new post-territorial forms of political belonging. Rather, the claims made for new ‘immanent’ or ‘emerging’ forms of post-territorial political community reflect the highly individuated forms of political activity which have accompanied the break-down of domestic social and political links. This breakdown of territorial forms of belonging has facilitated the development of a variety of unmediated forms of expression of individual claims, tending to privilege the individual over any communal collectivity. This discussion paper concludes by suggesting what the possibilities of a reconstitution of political community might imply.