Papers by Jamie Gaskarth
International Studies Perspectives, 2019
A series of crises over the last decade have put pressure on Europe's fundamental ordering pr... more A series of crises over the last decade have put pressure on Europe's fundamental ordering principles. In response, German policymakers have scrambled to reinterpret Germany's foreign policy for a new era. To understand this process, the authors utilize an interpretivist approach, analyzing the discourse of German foreign policymakers through the lens of four traditions of thought informing debates: regionalism, pacifism, realism, and hegemonism. The article suggests that despite serious challenges, prevailing patterns of belief centered round regionalism and pacifism, supported by a particular civilian understanding of hegemony, persist. Yet, Germany's allies are challenging this framework and calling for it to accept more responsibility for regional and global security. As a result, a realist tradition is reemerging in Germany's discourse. The taxonomy provided here allows a richer understanding of these debates as well as an appreciation of how policymakers mobili...
British Politics
Brexit threatens to disrupt the fabric of British foreign policy thinking. For decades, policymak... more Brexit threatens to disrupt the fabric of British foreign policy thinking. For decades, policymakers identified membership of the European Community as one of two pillars of British influence (the other being the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States). Together, they allowed Britain to exercise power on a global as well as regional scale. These assumptions were repeated so often that the UK was regularly criticised for lacking policy imagination and avoiding hard choices when the interests of Europe and the United States conflicted. Brexit presents an unavoidable dilemma for policymakers as they chart a new course for British foreign policy. Interpretivism, as set out by Bevir and Rhodes (2003), offers a route to understanding how actors interpret and respond to such dilemmas, via reference to traditions. This article uses their approach to examine the expression of beliefs about Brexit and British foreign policy. In particular, it focuses on two datasets, one a ‘control sample’ of commentary since 2016, the other, the parliamentary debates on the first EU Withdrawal Bill in December 2018 and January 2019. We find a contrasting willingness to evoke traditions in a substantive fashion to understand and justify political choices. In particular, parliamentarians utilise one particular tradition, pragmatism, to marginalise the expression of abstract belief. In the process, they reduce discussion to a technocratic exercise that is unable to manage the conflicts Brexit has brought about. Meanwhile, those MPs that are most creative in their expression of traditions tend to be from smaller regional parties or on the political periphery. The resulting deadlock is evidence of the importance of traditions to interpreting and managing dilemmas of social change.
This chapter is the introduction to an edited volume published in 2015 by Rowman and Littlefield.... more This chapter is the introduction to an edited volume published in 2015 by Rowman and Littlefield. The book includes contributions from numerous internationally-renowned scholars who outline China and India's attitudes to the norms of international society and evaluate how far they are challenging or reinterpreting them for the 21st century.
This paper explores the way military intervention by the UK has been discussed in the House of Co... more This paper explores the way military intervention by the UK has been discussed in the House of Commons in the post-Cold War era and charts changes to the way Britain's role in the world, and the influence of public opinion, are imagined.
On 29 August 2013, the British parliament voted against two motions to censure the Syrian governm... more On 29 August 2013, the British parliament voted against two motions to censure the Syrian government which were expected to lead to military action. The result was a shock to external commentators and was quickly interpreted as a fiasco. This article charts the construction of the severity and agency involved in this fiasco and notes the extremely personal nature of efforts to attribute blame for the outcome. It argues that this process enabled policymakers to downplay underlying trends impacting on foreign policy, including the breakdown of bipartisanship, increasing public scepticism about government use of intelligence and the utility of force, severe reductions in Britain’s capacity to act, as well as a deeper identity crisis about what kind of actor Britain should be in the world. In other words, constructing this event as a fiasco can be seen as a form of denial of Britain’s loss of agency in global affairs.
This article, originally published in French in Grand Dossier de Diplomatie n°25 : Géopolitique d... more This article, originally published in French in Grand Dossier de Diplomatie n°25 : Géopolitique du Royaume-Uni, February 2014, identifies a series of trends in British foreign policymaking since 2003 and outlines continuing problems in marrying purpose and practice in foreign policy given the UK's limited resources and relative decline.
Some of the fiercest debates in British foreign policy in the last two decades have centred round... more Some of the fiercest debates in British foreign policy in the last two decades have centred round one dominating question: how should Britain use military force abroad? Using violence is the ultimate expression of state agency and military behaviour has long had implications for the role a state plays in international society. Whether military intervention is advocated on humanitarian grounds, for self-defence, to enhance national prestige, or assist another friendly state, it is often linked with national role conceptions such as human rights defender, great power, defender of international law, or reliable ally . This chapter examines the horizontal and vertical role contestations that have emerged in British parliamentary discourse in the last two decades. By exploring each debate on the use of force abroad in Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, it traces the development of arguments for and against intervention and links these to differing ideas about Britain's role in the world.
This article aims to understand the UK government’s varied responses to the Arab Spring. The UK w... more This article aims to understand the UK government’s varied responses to the Arab Spring. The UK was criticised for its inconsistent and/or selective responses to popular uprisings in the Arab world. These ranged from providing substantial military support for the rebels in Libya to offering notably muted reactions to government suppression of protests in Bahrain. On assuming office, the Foreign secretary, William Hague, suggested that Britain would have a networked approach to foreign policy with a greater awareness of the bilateral interests that Britain had with other countries around the world. What this article aims to do is offer a provisional analysis of the security, economic and societal networks that the UK holds with states in the Arab world and in doing so to test whether these have any correlation with the British government’s policy towards protests in the region.
This article aims to understand the UK government's varied responses to the Arab Spring. The UK w... more This article aims to understand the UK government's varied responses to the Arab Spring. The UK was criticised for its inconsistent and/or selective responses to popular uprisings in the Arab world. These ranged from providing substantial military support for the rebels in Libya to offering notably muted reactions to government suppression of protests in Bahrain. On assuming office, the Foreign secretary, William Hague, suggested that Britain would have a networked approach to foreign policy with a greater awareness of the bilateral interests that Britain had with other countries around the world. What this article aims to do is offer a provisional analysis of the security, economic and societal networks that the UK holds with states in the Arab world and in doing so to test whether these have any correlation with the British government's policy towards protests in the region.
full. Copyright resides with Wiley. British foreign policy is in danger of strategic drift. A ser... more full. Copyright resides with Wiley. British foreign policy is in danger of strategic drift. A series of international crises in recent years, from the Arab Spring to the Syrian civil war and the Ukrainian revolution, have been met with confused responses lacking a sense of overarching national goals or a systematic consideration of how to achieve them. Upon entering office in 2010, Foreign Secretary William Hague set out the idea that the UK was now operating within a networked world and argued that it should exploit the possibilities of this environment to further British interests. 1 He criticized New Labour for falling into 'a chasm of their own making between rhetoric and action in large areas of foreign policy' and suggested that the coalition government would bring a more strategic sensibility to its policy-making. 2 However, four years on, problems remain. Schisms are developing between the public and elites on important issues such as when it is appropriate to use military force abroad and whether the UK should remain a member of the European Union. The difficulty, as many analysts of foreign policy have pointed out, is that consideration of strategy is heavily reliant upon the identity ascribed to the UK as a global actor. 3 Hague 1 William Hague, 'Britain's foreign policy in a networked world', speech given on 1 July 2010, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/britain-s-foreign-policy-in-a-networkedworld--2, accessed 13 April 2014. 2 William Hague, 'Britain's values in a networked world', speech given at Lincoln's Inn, London, 15 Sept. 2010, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-britainsvalues-in-a-networked-world, accessed 10 April 2014. 3 Patrick Porter, 'Why Britain doesn't do grand strategy',
European Journal of International Relations, Sep 2012
International Affairs, Jul 2011
The global war on terrorism gives rise to a range of legal, political and ethical problems. One m... more The global war on terrorism gives rise to a range of legal, political and ethical problems. One major concern for UK policy-makers is the extent to which the government may be held responsible for the illegal and/or unethical behaviour of allies in intelligence gathering - the subject of the forthcoming Gibson inquiry.
The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility-especially the 'merchant's defence'-with the wider definition implied in political commentary.
The article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.
Foreign Policy Analysis, 2006
The last decade has given rise to a wealth of literature on the ethics of British foreign policy.... more The last decade has given rise to a wealth of literature on the ethics of British foreign policy. However, much of this has focused on a few narrow issues based around specific policy actions. As such, it has largely been reactive and mirrored governmental attitudes to the possibilities in foreign policy and the constraints under which decisions are made. Important issues, such as how the concepts of foreign policy and ethics have been described and enacted historically in Britain, the political effects of these past readings, and how the idea of discussing ethics should be so controversial, are underexplored. To investigate these naturalized understandings, this article conducts a discourse analysis of the articulation of foreign policy in Hansard over the last century. In doing so, it seeks to explore how past expressions of foreign policy and ethics privilege certain ways of thinking about policy and exclude others through their modes of description. The effect of these structures, it is argued, is to suppress democratic dissent and individual accountability and marginalize discussion on the (contestable) ethical basis of policy making and policy behavior.
The International Journal of Human Rights, 2006
Since the announcement of a mission statement for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in May 1997... more Since the announcement of a mission statement for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in May 1997, debates on British foreign policy have tended to focus on the ideas of 'ethical foreign policy' or 'ethical dimensions' and evaluated policy decisions according to how they fit with these frames. However, human rights were a key component of New Labour's approach to foreign policy. By analysing the differing treatment of human rights between the Conservative and New Labour administrations, this article seeks to assess how far policy attitudes have changed in this respect. It also notes the bureaucratic effects that persist -despite an apparent decline in ministerial support.
Review of International Studies, 2010
Recent decades have seen a heightened interest in the ethics of foreign policymaking. This litera... more Recent decades have seen a heightened interest in the ethics of foreign policymaking. This literature has overwhelmingly explored the ethical dilemmas faced by policymakers in terms of situations and the structures -either political/economic, normative and/or linguistic -that shape actions. The subjective experience of ethical decisionmaking in this arena and the character of the individuals making policy choices have been largely neglected. However, the apparently greater scope for moral action in the post-Cold War era, combined with the growth in global institutions designed to enforce individual accountability -such as the International Criminal Court -suggest that more effort should be placed on understanding ethics in terms of the individual. This article seeks to combine the work of political and social psychologists with the philosophical literature on virtue theory to see what new insights these might offer into the ethics of foreign policy. It argues that virtue ethics provide an effective means to critique the morality of foreign policy decisions. This is evinced by an exploration of Tony Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. , students and staff at the seminar series at the University of Plymouth, and the two anonymous reviewers for their immensely helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.
Engagement with my work by Jamie Gaskarth
Drafts by Jamie Gaskarth
Responsibility is a key theme of recent debates over the ethics of international society. In part... more Responsibility is a key theme of recent debates over the ethics of international society. In particular, rising powers such as Brazil, China, and India regularly reject the idea that coercion should be a feature of world politics and portray military intervention as irresponsible. But this raises the problem of how a society’s norms can be upheld without coercive measures. Critics have accused them of “free riding” on existing great powers and failing to address the dilemma of how you deal with actors undermining societal values. This article examines writing on responsibility and international society, with reference to the English School, to identify why the willingness and capacity to use force—as well as creative thinking in this regard—are seen as important aspects of responsibility internationally. It then explores the statements made by Brazil, China, and India in UN Security Council meetings between 2011 and 2016 to uncover which actors they see as responsible and how they define responsible action. In doing so, it pinpoints areas of concurrence as well as disagreements in their understandings of the concept and concludes that Brazil and India have a more coherent and practical understanding of responsibility than China, which risks being labelled a “great irresponsible.”
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Papers by Jamie Gaskarth
The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility-especially the 'merchant's defence'-with the wider definition implied in political commentary.
The article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.
Engagement with my work by Jamie Gaskarth
Drafts by Jamie Gaskarth
The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility-especially the 'merchant's defence'-with the wider definition implied in political commentary.
The article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.