![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and on liminality in aid worker biographies, two connected arguments are developed. First, through the exploration of the routinized practices of politicians’ field trips the article shows how these journeys not only remain confined to the ‘auxiliary space’ of aid/intervention, but that it is furthermore a staged reality of this auxiliary space that most politicians experience on their journeys. The question is then asked, second, what politicians actually experience on their journeys and how their experiences relate to their policy knowledge about conflict and intervention. It is shown that political field trips enable sensory/affectual, liminoid and liminal experiences, which have functions such as authority accumulation, agenda setting, community building, and civilizing domestic politics, while at the same time reinforcing, in most cases, pre-existing conflict and intervention imaginaries.
Acknowledgements
This article is the product of what could be rightly termed a ‘slow science’ project that has accompanied me for some years now and has profited from a number of people and institutions. I am grateful to my interview partners at the German Bundestag and the Bundeswehr for engaging conversations, and the WIPCAD centre at Potsdam University, and especially Professor Maja Apelt, for hosting me during my Berlin fieldwork. Thanks also to the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, BIGSSS, Bremen University and Jacobs University Bremen for a research fellowship during which the archival work of this project took place. Last not least, a big thank you goes to the editors of this special section and of JISB for patience and support.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University's Department of International Politics, Wales, UK. Previously she held positions at Bremen University, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg and in a research project at Nottingham University Ningbo. She was also a visiting research fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Studies (HWK) and the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), at the Uppsala Forum for Democracy, Peace and Justice, and at Potsdam University. Currently, she is interested in exploring ways of knowledge production in conflict and intervention politics through projects on transnational think tanks, urban legends of intervention, myths in international politics and, not least, politicians’ field visits. She has also worked extensively on international state- and peacebuilding, armed conflicts, and political charisma. ([email protected])
Notes
1. Telephone interview, development NGO representative, Berlin, 1 Sept. 2015.
2. All interviews were held in June 2015, four in person in Berlin and one by telephone. All interviewees preferred to remain anonymous. All quotes from German-language documents and interview transcripts have been translated.
3. These would need to be added to the above figures to get a more accurate picture of German MPs' official travel activities and spending, but due to access constraints it was impossible to collate this information.
4. The majority of foreign travel is directed at other European countries including Turkey. In 2012, among the total of 642 parliament-financed travels of a total cost of circa €3.9 million, were the following visits to zones of conflict or intervention: Afghanistan (12), Bosnia and Herzegovina (3), Colombia (6), Cyprus (9), Kosovo (9), Lebanon (3), Liberia (2), Libya (1), Israel (11), Myanmar (11), the Palestinian territories (8), Sierra Leone (4) and South Sudan (5)—roughly 13 per cent of total journeys (Deutscher Bundestag Citation2013, 46–52). This figure has to be taken with a pinch of salt, however, since it is not clear from the statistics whether the topic of the journey was violent conflict/intervention or another political issue. Overall, the great majority of official visits are individual journeys by single MPs.
5. Interview with parliamentary staff, Berlin, June 2015.
6. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
7. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
8. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
9. The following impressions are based on several personal and telephone interviews with Bundeswehr soldiers who had been on missions in Afghanistan, conducted in 2011–12.
10. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015. The question of the authenticity of experience that journeys to conflict zones provide is also discussed in the literature on political tourism (see Belhassen, Uriely, and Assor Citation2014; Clarke Citation2000).
11. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
12. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
13. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
14. The major part of the literature on the ‘emotional turn’ in IR with its focus on distinct emotions, while being closely related to my argument here, does not exactly match the type of sensory experiences politicians seem to be going through on field visits and which may or may not crystallize in distinct and conscious emotions (for overviews see e.g. Bleiker and Hutchison Citation2008; Crawford Citation2000; Wolf Citation2012).
15. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
16. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
17. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
18. According to an anecdote, a number of MPs from different parliamentary parties spent a nice evening on a famous train line and decided, as a sort of fun challenge, to refer to this joint train journey in their speeches back home (regardless of the topic talked about)—apparently to the annoyance of ‘uninitiated’ colleagues from their own parties, who lacked the insider knowledge and bonding experience of the train journey.
19. Personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015.
20. This part of the speech was directed at the party DIE LINKE, which is the successor party of the GDR's Socialist Unity Party and ideologically the most left-leaning in the Bundestag. Due to its exceptional principled objection against military involvement, it has become the home of many pacifists who were formerly members of other parties, especially the Green Party (BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN) and the Social Democrat Party (SPD).
21. The Green Party stresses that it was also the first party in the history of the Federal Republic to organize such a joint journey for its party and faction boards.
22. For example, the field trip findings/report by van Aken et al. (Citation2011) fostered the Left Party's objection to any military involvement in South Sudan, which at the time had been decreasing in favour of some sort of humanitarian involvement (personal interview with MP, Berlin, June 2015).
23. This claim is so far based on anecdotal evidence; a comprehensive comparative analysis of politicians' travels to zones of conflict and intervention in different Western (and perhaps non-Western) states is yet to be conducted.
24. Hajer gives the example of Dutch MPs whose attention to and understanding of the problem of forest dieback and acid rain was crucially influenced by an excursion to a dying forest. Symposia and personal meetings with academics and experts are seen to play a similar role in providing sensory experiences.