That’s a “Hard no” from me: the questions we really need to ask

ABSTRACT

Sarah Gansen and Patrick James ask: “is a turn toward systemist graphics the way forward for more effective study of Canadian foreign policy in particular and IR in general” (Gansen and James, this volume, p. 18)? My response is no. In fact, it’s a “hard no”. Not only is this not the way forward for the study of Canadian foreign policy, it is the wrong question to be asking about Canadian foreign policy in terms of theory, practice and teaching. The way forward is by asking questions about who we are and who we want to be as a subfield, not about embracing models that take us further from the questions that we need to ask of ourselves.

RÉSUMÉ

Sarah Gansen et Patrick James posent la question suivante : un tournant vers les graphiques systémiques est-il la voie à suivre pour une étude plus efficace de la politique étrangère canadienne en particulier et des Relations Internationales en général (Gansen et James, ce volume, page 18) ? Ma réponse est non. Non seulement ce n'est pas la voie à suivre pour l'étude de la politique étrangèr canadienne, mais c'est la mauvaise question à poser sur la politique étrangère canadienne en termes de théorie, de pratique et d'enseignement. Pour aller de l'avant, nous devons nous demander qui nous sommes et ce que nous voulons être en tant que sous-domaine, et non pas adopter des modèles qui nous éloignent encore plus des questions que nous devons nous poser.

KEYWORDS:

• Canadian foreign policy
• systemism
• feminist
• intersectionality

I’m a White, middle-aged, cis-gendered, settler woman who is a feminist scholar and full professor. I’m starting this commentary with the description of my positionality because it is central to my response – who I am, my lived experiences, my Whiteness, gender, ability and my very profound privilege – all inform my response to the question posed by Sarah Gansen and Patrick James at the end of their introductory overview. They ask: “is a turn toward systemist graphics the way forward for more effective study of Canadian foreign policy in particular and IR in general” (Gansen and James, this volume, p. 18)? My response is no. Not only is this not the way forward for the study of Canadian foreign policy but it is also the wrong question to be asking about Canadian foreign policy in terms of theory, practice and teaching. The way forward is by asking questions about who we are and who we want to be as a subfield, not about embracing models that take us further from the questions that we need to ask ourselves.

This is not a “comfort text” (Zalewski, 2006, p. 47). These words, in a piece written by Marysia Zalewski (2006) kept going through my head as I reviewed the overview chapter by Gansen and James, because I knew what my response would be and I knew that writing in first person would make some folks uncomfortable. Frankly, this text is not meant to make us feel comfortable. Actually, I hope that some readers feel distinctly uncomfortable after reading my commentary because it’s time for the field of Canadian foreign policy to come to terms with the ways in which many of us are complicit in the making, creating, fostering spaces that obfuscate and deny the structural violence – the silences – the marginalization – that are all part of our field and that many of us have a role in constituting. This argument isn’t new. I’ve made this argument before, but my hope is that given the way over a year of a pandemic has exposed historical and existing inequalities in the academy, I’m hoping … in some small way … it will make a difference.

Before I get to the elements of my commentary that are likely to be (or I hope) deeply uncomfortable for some folks, let me say that when I was invited to provide a commentary, I was quite forthright and I said that this kind of work wasn’t really what I did and as a critical feminist I was unlikely to buy into. The editors were OK with this and I want to acknowledge how much I value the openness to critique that this invitation showed. It shows a commitment to the inclusion of a host of voices and perspectives that doesn’t always exist in the academy and that is something that should not get lost in the text below.

I also want to acknowledge that some scholars and students may find the systemist approach appealing. For students, in particular, the use of visuals can be used to simplify arguments and perspectives. Graphs, charts and concept maps all serve to support learning beyond mere text and they are often very useful tools. There are lots of templates out there to engage in this kind of work both in terms of visual representation and more text-based templates to “simplify” arguments, the website of Dr. Raul Pachego-Vega (2021) being one of the best sources for our students. I’m not sure about the language of variables and nodes and “blue parallegrams (orange diamond)” and “purple hexagon” we find throughout the chapter necessarily makes the visuals more accessible or simplified but I do agree that the use of visuals can facilitate learning to a higher degree than all text, all the time.

I’m unconvinced that systemism “averts a debate about the virtues of qualitative versus quantitative methods” (Gansen and James, this volume, p. 7). To use a model such as systemism to “simplify” the work of scholars such as Cynthia Enloe (2004) or Marysia Zalewski (2020) or the work on narrative, autobiography and International Relations (Inayatullah, 2011) just sort of feels like some sort of positivist imperialism where the language of “system-macro and system-micro” becomes privileged. Through the claims of a new model for all of Canadian foreign policy or International Relations there is a violence done to the voices and methods of scholars and practitioners who have worked for decades to expose, complicate and challenge silences (Parpart & Parashar, 2018). Stienstra (1994–1995), 25 years ago, asked if the silence in Canadian foreign policy could be broken and while we may wish to argue that some silences have been broken, we still have a long way to go and embracing “systemism” as presented in this volume is the wrong path. This is not a neutral approach.

Gansen and James apply systemism to the Kim Richard Nossal, Stéphane Roussel and Stéphane Paquin (2015) textbook. The Nossal, Roussel, and Paquin (2015) text is fundamentally important to the field because it was first written in French and then translated into English and because of the way it brings to bear the insights of Francophone scholars, to a predominately Anglophone community. The creation and content of this text challenges the hegemony of English Canadian foreign policy scholarship. But all of this gets lost in the visuals.

Moreover, in the application of systemism to the Nossal et al. (2015) textbook, there is a creation of a chart of shapes and lines that justify, and reinforce the silences and erasures that exist in the text itself. I’m sure someone might respond that systemism isn’t about the critical treatment of texts but rather the visual representation of texts, but the point is … that these visuals have power … they represent the field … the visuals hide the exact issues we need to talk about. The work of creating the visuals assumes the text is neutral, denies the emphasis on power in the text, privileges traditional state-based constructions of sovereignty, accepts a narrow definition of state-based diplomacy as foreign policy and replicates the denial of Indigenous perspectives and Indigenous nationhood. Gansen and James accept without comment the treatment of historical cleavage in Nossal et al. (2015) as an English-French cleavage. Nossal et al. (2015, p. 99) write: “because of the marginalization of First Nations in the process of European settlement, the fundamental cleavage in Canadian politics was historically between English-Canadians and French-Canadians”. First Nations, Metis and Inuit Peoples were not simply marginalized – they were dispossessed. They were denied their lands, languages and cultures through the actions of English-Canadians and French-Canadians, which include my forefathers and foremothers. By uncritically placing “history duality” into blue or green shapes we simplify our way to visuals that replicate and repeat fundamental colonial assumptions and become complicit in the maintenance of past and present injustice and ongoing colonial violence.

Now is not the time for more abstraction, for the creation of visuals based on positivist assumptions. Now is not the time to “manage a field’s complexity” (Gansen and James, introduction to this volume, p. 6). Now is not the time for more theoretical erasure of methods and epistemologies that provide us insight into the everyday lived experiences of people who are often relegated to black boxes (or orange questions) of abstract analysis. As Roxanne Doty (2001, pp. 525–526) writes

Theories have become commodities, adorning us, dangling like gaudy jewels from our intellectual egos … Too often they fail to do justice to what is happening in the world to flesh-and-blood people. They almost always fail to recognize and take responsibility for the violence of their own representations.

Now is the time to embrace the messy and complex (Beier & Wylie, 2010, p. 14) and to reflect on our roles in the perpetuation of multiple sites of erasure and silence.

Before I proceed with suggestions for going forward, I want to remind readers to go back to my opening statement about positionality. I flag this because my comments are based on my experiences and therefore they are inevitably biased and inherently limited by my privilege. I’ve witnessed racism, by way of example, but it is not my everyday lived experience and I cannot and do not seek to represent the views of those for whom racism is an everyday lived experience in the academy. I am not an Indigenous person. I am a settler. I am White. I’m not trying to make settler claims to innocence (Tuck & Yang, 2012) and assuaging my guilt for all the unseeing and unlearning, and thus complicity in the making of an environment not welcoming and open to diverse views about our field. I’ve failed so many times. I’ve been reminded by students and Elders about the ways in which my everyday practices are grounded in unexamined colonial modes of behavior (Smith & Yahlnaaw, 2021).

I cannot make claims to know the experiences of my friends and colleagues but I can, at least, try to be accountable for my own limitations and the limitations of my work. If, as a subfield, we are going to take seriously “equity, diversity and inclusion” (and that phrase feels like just a polite reference to many harms done) surely those of us in deeply privileged positions have to work to create welcoming, open, reflective spaces in our classrooms, in and through our writing and in our many professional spaces.

Nor do I wish to diminish the decades long invisible, and often hidden, work of challenging biases, sites of oppression and acts of hostility that take place within the academy. I cannot know what work everyone is engaged in. However, the #BlackintheIvory tweets tell us we have a long way to go. The racial profiling of a Black graduate student at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, tell us that we have a long way to go (see Larsen, 2019). The gendered impacts of COVID-19 on our female colleagues, tell us we have a long way to go. Yolande Bouka, in an interview with Women in International Security (WIIS) makes the following comment: “IR scholars must be willing to ask critical questions to unsettle what “just is”. To say “it has always been this way” is not a valid reason to maintain a norm. We must ask ourselves, “how else could it be if we open our minds and our perspectives to what is really out there?” (Murphy & Bouka, 2020). Her comments are equally as applicable to Canadian foreign policy scholarship and teaching.

Now is not the time to adopt methods/approaches that provide us with more “Just the Facts Ma’am” (Enloe, 2004, p. 41) images of the world in which we live. Now is the time to embrace the Jackson Pollack (Enloe, 2004, p. 23) version of the world. With that in mind, here are some reflective prompts to challenge the “uncuriosity” (Enloe, 2004, p. 3) that potentially comes with methods such as visual systemism. Now it is the time to reflect on who and what we want our subfield to be.

Who do you cite? Are you wedded to what Duriesmeith (2020) calls the “malestream”? Do you cite all the same folks, all the time, thus reinforcing their status in the field or do you actively work to build a diverse repertoire in your writing that at least acknowledges competing perspectives? There are other strategies, as outlined by Ann Towns (2019), but this very minimal gesture is at least a start.

What about your course outlines? Many course outlines are available publicly online and it’s clear that in some cases there is a concerted effort to include diverse perspectives and approaches in our teaching of Canadian foreign policy. However, if we only adopt Nossal et al. (2015) or Bratt and Kukucha (2015) we deny our students access to a vast body of literature that asks provocative, disruptive and timely questions. We recreate, in our course outlines, the margins.

And don’t think our students are not aware of the gaps in our curriculum. If we show genuine openness to their ideas and insights, they’ll remind us of what we’re missing. And if we actually include diverse voices and perspectives in our teaching, we signal respect for those diverse perspectives and provide openings to our students.

And if we wonder, as many have over the years, about the “state of the field” (Black & Smith, 2014; Bow & Lane, 2020), let me posit that if our students don’t see themselves in our courses, if they don’t see the complexities of their lived experiences across a range of intersections, why would they think it’s a field that is relevant to them? The catalyst for future scholars is often found in our undergraduate teaching. If we present a field that looks like it hasn’t changed in decades, then where do our current undergraduates fit? There are the external variables related to the way the academy more broadly is functioning that we cannot control, but we cannot underestimate our own role in undermining the future of the sub-field.

I will also note that we do need to be mindful of conflating gender with women, and adding women, or Indigenous peoples or race, and stirring. I get that the preceding statement contradicts my comment about who we cite but it is our responsibility to engage in the nuances of the literature as much as we might, for example, engage in the nuances of defence spending. So really, what I’m advocating for is for those of us with great privilege to ask: what does an intersectional course on Canadian foreign policy look like?

Let me also ask Do you take seriously the “Calls to Action” of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015)? If we take seriously the calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to critically interrogate our curriculum, surely that applies to the teaching of Canadian foreign policy. Do you include Hayden King’s (2017) piece on the “Erasure of Indigenous Thought in Foreign Policy” in your teaching? Are you willing to engage in a problematization of the Canadian state that reveals the colonial foundations of our entire academic project? Do you take seriously the issues exposed by Black Lives Matter? Are we, the ones most privileged, actually engaging appropriate anti-racist practices in support of our Black colleagues and students in all facets of the academy?

I know there is some work being done by many allies to build more inclusive spaces in the various sites of construction of our field. I know this. I can see it in some journal articles. I can see it in some course outlines, but not at all in others. I can see hints of it in some textbooks, but not at all in others. I see it in the work of the Feminist Working Group (2021) report on consultations regarding Canada’s feminist foreign policy and in the wealth of scholars (Mason, 2019; Morton, Muchiri, & Swiss, 2020; Rao & Tiessen, 2020) who have engaged in thoughtful assessments of the Feminist International Assistance Program, only a few of which I can cite here. But I also wonder who isn’t responding to the work on a feminist foreign policy and why. I see the impressive work being shared by feminist colleagues on sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces (Eichler & Gagnon, 2021; von Hlatky, 2021). I see the work being done to raise issues of importance by the LBGTQI community (Aylward & Brown, 2020; Husband-Ceperkovic & Tiessen, 2020). This kind of work … theses voices … they all get lost if we move toward the creation of visual images of Canadian foreign policy – people should not be jammed into squares and circles and be made into node and variables.

So when Gansen and James ask: “is a turn toward systemist graphics the way forward for more effective study of Canadian foreign policy in particular and IR in general” (Gansen and James, this volume, p. 18) – my answer is no. In fact, it’s a “hard no”. I’ve been engaged in feminist work in Canadian foreign policy for a long time. I have seen changes for the better but there are times that I just feel like I’m asking the same questions over and over again. So no. Now is not the time for systemist graphics. Now is the time for a hard look by those of us most privileged at the ways in which we are complicit in the making and remaking of a discipline that erases the voices and perspectives of too many.

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Notes on contributors

Heather A. Smith

Heather A. Smith is a Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia.