Dr Brent J. Steele is the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair and University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He has been the co-editor in chief of Global Studies Quarterly, a journal of the International Studies Association, since its inception in 2020. Before moving to Utah, he was at the University of Kansas from 2005-2013. He is the author of Vicarious Identity in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021), with Chris Browning and Pertti Joenniemi, and Restraint in International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which co-won the ISA Theory section book award for 2020. His most recent articles have appeared in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Global Environmental Politics, and Cooperation and Conflict. He teaches courses on US Foreign Policy, Interpretive Methods, International Ethics, and International Relations.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
I’d point to three areas, one within my own research community and one beyond it. The first, within ontological security studies, is more of a general trend of innovation by early and mid-career scholars doing excellent conceptual work within OSS. I’m risking naming those folks here because there’s so much going on that I fear I’m leaving some folks out, but the work on anxiety in OS drives has been vibrantly engaged and retheorized because of the contributions of Nina Krickel-Choi (again among many others), as has the reinvigorated debates on state personhood that Bianca Naude’s book fostered. I also find the new twists on old concepts, like Lauren Rogers’s work on ‘ontological stress’ and Ben Rosher’s on ‘intergenerational anxiety’, so useful towards gaining better precision in OS studies. Finally, I’ve been lucky enough to be in a working group on ‘Creating Ontological Security’ that includes a lineup of earlier career scholars, which has culminated in a forthcoming special issue of European Journal of International Studies co-edited by Cornelia Baciu. Of course, those examples only scratch the surface of what work is being done in OSS that has pushed it forward as a research community.
A second, which I see as related to that last thread in the above paragraph on creativity, is illustrated by work on ‘creating’ and ‘making’ in International Relations, including forms of art as resistance to violence. This is reflected in the outstanding recent special issue of Security Dialogue that Marie Berry and Milli Lake edited on ‘Creative and caring resistance to violence’, as well as a forum that we published in Global Studies Quarterly on ‘Making International Things, co-edited by Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander. I often assign Michelle Weitzel’s article from that forum to my students on ‘Material-Aesthetic approaches’ because it is a vivid example of the many forms of expression beyond writing that we as scholars can and do engage in to think creatively about the world. It’s probably because we’re in an era where AI mish-mash is being shoved down our throats from almost every direction, so I find expressions of artistic creativity in the context of global politics refreshing and uplifting.
Third, the Women in the History of International Thought (WHIT) project has in my view revolutionized the way in which we think about and teach International Relations. We published a special issue of GSQ that was one of the expressions of that project, which gave Jelena and I even more appreciation for it.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
Some of my ways of viewing the world have changed, but I also just generally think I’ve gained a bit more complexity on how I approach studying and teaching it. I suppose if there are changes it’s that (1) I’m not sure there are socially meaningful ‘formative experiences’ that bind together generations anymore, since most of younger folks’ experiences are so mediated and fragmented (as I note below), and (2) I used to see disruption, just general dislocating practices or ontological insecuritizing moves, as productive. But I’m probably a bit more conservative now in that I see order, routine, ritual, rhythm, and even some structure, as incredibly important for resistance. So much of the past quarter century of US politics and US foreign policy has been based on disruptions, grooving on the rubble, and ever-present ‘flare-ups’ that I have swung in the opposite direction a bit more. And while writing my book on it, I gained a bit more sympathy to practices and perspectives that value restraint (including the traditionalist Just War one, noted below).
You serve as co-Editor in Chief for the Global Studies Quarterly, an Oxford University-associated publication that prioritizes submissions on topics underrepresented in academia. What subjects, regions, or perspectives do you feel are sorely missing in traditional conversations on international relations?
There will always be perspectives sorely missing in traditional conversations but that dynamic should not be a barrier – both to locating those perspectives beyond those conversations and making traditional ones more inclusive. I think what’s most important is being willing to change the traditional practices that marginalize those subjects, regions and/or perspectives. And I do think IR is becoming more inclusive of voices in those conversations, both because of the work we have tried to do at GSQ as well as what I’m seeing more broadly at journals and presses.
GSQ’s founding mandate was for better outreach to the Global South. We realized early on that only so much of that can happen in traditional ways, ie: through CfP’s and outreach at the annual ISA meeting. It’s difficult of course because of restrictive visa policies during conferences, symposia, and workshop in the Global North, for scholars from these regions to travel. During my time as co-EIC, it’s been somewhat easier for the reverse – for us to travel to conferences in the Global South and meet with scholars there, chat with them about the submission process, etc. I think that has slowly but surely moved the needle. I am not sure what the other ISA journal rates are, but most estimates put Global South representation in ISA at around 20%, which is in line with where we are going. Our editorial board at GSQ is around 20% Global South, our submissions as of our last report were also around 20% from the Global South, and our publications with at least one author from the Global South are just short of 20%. That’s not perfect, we hope it will be more, but it’s better than when we started. And I’ve enjoyed meeting so many excellent scholars based in the Global South that I wouldn’t have if not for GSQ. That said, if we are looking more broadly for better and broader representation in academia, we have to keep working at it. I think and hope we will.
In an essay from 2014, Norms of Intervention, R2P and Libya, you speculate that the 2011 U.S.-led intervention in Libya was propagated by statecraft practitioners influenced by the foreign policy failures of the 1990s. What is the definitive failure that the next generation of diplomats and statesmen will be influenced by?
I’m glad you asked a generational analysis question, because this is one area where my thinking has changed markedly (as noted in my answer to your earlier question). While I think generational ebbs and flows explain US foreign policy (and the foreign policies of some other countries), and can be useful to frame our expectations for struggles over foreign policy perspectives, I think the notion of a ‘definitive failure’ is harder nowadays to be internalized or shape or form across a generation in ways in which those failures did through the early part of the 21st century. The fragmentary social media landscape with algorithms that reinforce priors, and platforms that involve the proliferation of AI slop, make it harder for emerging generations to be ‘formed’ by the same thing. Normally I’d say that the catastrophic US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should loom large for a while, but I always had a sense that despite proclamations by commentators and even some scholars that Trump was a ‘dove’ or ’isolationist’, I always knew he and his base were looking for future adventures, albeit conducted in slightly different ways than the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists before them. So we have Venezuela and Iran, and his ‘antiwar’ base hasn’t left him. That base includes plenty of Gen Xers, Millennials and even Gen Z. The hope with a generational transition is that course corrections can and eventually do happen. But I’m not sure that occurs anymore, precisely because the notion of ‘a’ formative experience is less apparent.
Your academic publications sometimes frame strategic and methodological questions in international relations through the lens of history. For example, your 2005 article, Ontological security and the power of self-identity: British neutrality and the American Civil War, where you proposed an alternative understanding for Britain’s decision to remain neutral in the American Civil War. Is this an approach that should be utilized more often?
Yes, and I wish I’d never abandoned doing historical work during the few years I did (late 2000s and early 2010s). I always loved getting lost in history but sidelined that for a bit mid-career. Three developments helped get me back to being more historical. First, the creation of the Historical IR section of the ISA in the mid-2010s was big, because it got me back into conversations and attending panels and meeting people who are very historically oriented. A second was a series of papers on ‘critical security history’ that culminated in an article I really enjoyed writing with Faye Donnelly, that got me thinking about the relationship between security, identity and history. A third development, and during the brief time I was on twitter when it was still functional, was being exposed to the amazing work of historians, reading their works and listening to them on podcasts. It’s ironic, I think, that in the same era that has involved a dreadful collapse of humanities jobs in academia, some of the most exciting and powerful work in the discipline of history continues apace, through both published works but also other outlets like podcasts, lectures, and the work of directors and curators of museums and memorials. All of this has shaped how I’ve approached a number of my arguments and projects. I find historical cases and contexts so useful for both my research, in tracing out arguments and concepts and seeing them work ‘back then’, as well as for lectures and illustrations in my teaching. The latter is where you can really make history ‘alive’ for students in ways that chatbots and AI platforms simply can’t, despite what higher ed administrators and the EdTech industry might confidently tell you.
In the early 2000s, you expressed skepticism regarding the just war doctrine, citing the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of how it can be abused for political purposes. How have recent U.S. interventions in Venezuela and Iran influenced this perspective?
I was much more averse to the Just War Tradition (JWT) back then because I saw it so easily manipulated by those in power. But nowadays, in those two cases you mention, where basically no Just Cause was provided by policymakers for their aggrandizement and aggression, I think the JWT can be useful as a vernacular for having discussions, especially in a classroom. I’ve been enjoying working with my longtime collaborator and friend Eric Heinze recently on a series of articles that engage the Just War tradition broadly, and the work being done within and beyond the JWT nowadays is so vibrant. This has made me more driven in exploring the ethics of war (and violence) within that tradition, while also giving me a vernacular to express my extreme discomfort over [gestures at everything].
Your 2021 book, Vicarious Identity in International Relations, explores the concept of vicarious identity within the context of international relations. Specifically, how state and non-actors obtain identity through the experiences of others. What is an example of this in practice?
In the book, Chris, Pertti and I argue this happens every day through our sports teams and family members. I vicariously identify, with all of my heart and soul, with the Chicago Bears, for instance. Likewise, I had such joy when my daughter’s basketball team won a tournament, and celebrate whenever my son does well on an exam he spent time studying for. And so we applied vicarious identification as a process happening between actors in international relations, including but not limited to states. There’s been a growing interest in vicarious identity demonstrating additional examples – perhaps the most vivid ones are seen in British and the Baltic states’ identification with Ukraine, intergenerational Vicarious Sacrifice and heroism in the UK (Joseph Haigh’s work), and Minseon Ku’s fascinating examination of a 1972 China-US summit that served as a way for each countries’ publics to experience vicarious identification. Conversely, when vicarious identification is challenged, as I think happened in the case of Denmark vis-a-vis the US (a vicarious dyad we explored in the 2021 book) over the issue of Greenland earlier this year, that can also be a dynamic worth exploring. Danes took to the streets in Copenhagen in late January and clearly expressed the shock, and anger, they were experiencing with the turn that the US had made under Trump. Something similar seems to be happening with the US-UK ‘special relationship’ (another chapter of our book), at least between Trump and Starmer.
What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?
Don’t take too much advice from people like me, old and imperfectly recalling what their past was like let alone projecting that on to you. I see so much autobiographical extrapolation via bad mentoring, scholars putting their re-collections on to ‘saving’ you that it just ends up as bad advice. This happened, on steroids, on old twitter, which I probably and unfortunately contributed to as well. But it still happens in all sorts of micropolitical spaces. So, take the advice you get from mentors and mentoring networks with some circumspection. That stated, surround yourself as best as you can with supportive, positive and engaging people. You’ll find plenty of people who criticize and interrogate everything, and that’s useful, and ok – up to a point. But you need supportive and enthusiastic folks too. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a group of folks who are some of the best friends I have in life, to share not only accomplishments but also to work through challenges with over the years, and decades. Their support and enthusiasm helped me push through some dark times, and there’s always dark times.
Finally, try and find joy in, and be passionate about, not only the outcomes and accomplishments we seek in our work. Dig the processes that go into those too, like writing and revising (on your own, NOT with generative-AI), reading, listening, thinking, conversing, and exploring. Those processes, those moments of intense focus and concentration when you are just immersed in something intellectually (and even politically) important and uplifting … that’s the juice that keeps you going.
