Hayward R. Alker (1937–2007), an American scholar of deep humanitarian devotion, demonstrated the importance and the practicality of ethically grounded, empirically rigorous studies of global relations.  His lasting contribution to what we anachronistically refer to as “international  relations” (IR) is seen in his corpus of publications [1] but also in the sensibility and ontological and epistemological commitments of his students, those he mentored, and a growing number of scholars around the world.[2] That he and his work were held in high esteem by his colleagues in the United States and abroad is evidenced by the fact that he was elected to the prestigious position of president of the International Studies Association (1992-1993), the predominantly North American scholarly association for the field.  Yet his work since the mid 1970s was well out of the mainstream of American International Relations, and it is fair to say that he has been  more appreciated and widely cited outside the United States than within [3]. Recently, there seems to be an upsurge of interest in his work, perhaps because of the notice occasioned by his untimely death, but also because his work is uniquely suited for helping us deal with the complex, multidimensional problems facing us in today’s world.

In reviewing the arc of Alker’s scholarly contributions over time, a discontinuity is obvious; a continuity is more subtle, but also critically important.  The discontinuity is between his initial work in what might be called normal science and his later research that is truly inter-disciplinary and inter-methodological.  As an accomplished mathematician (he had earned an undergraduate degree in math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before continuing in political science for the doctoral degree), Alker first made a mark on the field early in his career with mathematically sophisticated approaches to politics.  Examples include a factor analysis based article in the American Political Science Review entitled “Dimensions of Conflict in the General Assembly” [4] and his first sole-authored book, Mathematics and Politics [5].  Writing in this genre, he was at the cutting edge of making political science more science-like, and his approach fit with the dominant behavioral, positivist agenda of American International Relations.  In the mid-1970s, however, he became dissatisfied with mainstream approaches to the use of mathematics in political analysis – and particularly dissatisfied with the use of inferential statistics in ways that were, in his view, inappropriate given the limitations of the evidence [6].

Alker further raised intellectual questions about the foundations of rational choice approaches as a basis for political analysis.  To him, finding the formal logical solution to a game was insufficient for understanding the politics. Alker admonished researchers that people are complex and the only ontologically and epistemologically sound response is to avoid stripping away that complexity.  All actors have “multiple identities and interests.” Consequently they should not be treated as “unitary, voluntaristic utility maximizers”[7]. The simple intervention of conducting experiments and asking people what they were thinking as they engaged in making strategic choices was a more appropriate way to understand the practical judgments that people actually make, rather than the idealized “rational” choices assumed by mainstream scholars[8].

Alker’s turn to inter-disciplinary and inter-methdological research led him to seek ways of integrating social science and humanistic approaches to understanding global politics. He did not shy away from using computational methods [9] or formal logical tools [10], but he also drew upon textual interpretation [11].  His work teaches us that we must use all of the appropriate knowledge-making tools that we have from the social sciences but also (and perhaps even more importantly) from the humanities, in order to uncover the complex, contested narratives of life on this planet.  In short, Alker makes us ask: What knowledge – what kind of evidence, what kind of data — do we need to make the world a better – a more peaceful, more just, more personally, socially, and ecologically healthier – place?

For Alker, “data making” was one crucial step in this process.  He was not particularly interested in quantified data – GDP, or the number of battle deaths.  He was interested in the historical narratives that communities use to tell and retell what has transpired.  Furthermore, he was particularly interested in how different communities understand and attach meaning and facticity to narratives in conflicting and overlapping ways.  Thus, in building compilations of evidence and in conducting analyses, Alker’s approach requires the researcher to have a truly “realistic” view of the world we are trying to explain, understand or even predict, and that a realistic view requires multiple points of view, an expanded notion of what the study of IR is about, and a willingness to understand the contingent and tentative nature of what we do.

The subtle continuity in his research can be seen in his ethical commitment to peace and justice, which can be found in all of his research.  Every project he undertook, from studies of the General Assembly in the 1960s [12] in his social scientific period to the analysis of fairy tales in his latter period [13], was chosen with the aim of understanding how to make the world more peaceful and more just.  In his later work, he became more explicit about the role of normativity in global studies scholarship. We live, Alker asserted, in a world in which people are “willing to kill, to die, or to be killed” because of “the economic, cultural and political historicities… [that] give meaning to their collective experiences.”  Our task as scholars is only meaningful if we seek to address this heart-wrenching fact through our rigorously pursued scholarship.  He called for an “emancipatory empiricism,” a “research orientation” for peace research (and, by implication, for global studies more generally) that would “make us free  — from past falsehoods, the possibility-distorting representations, continuing oppressions, even war itself” [14].  He focused on language and narratives for this purpose, and he envisioned an intentionally incomplete, revisable compilation of knowledge about the world from which one could seek means of resolving conflicts and finding peaceful solutions.  Referring to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, Alker noted “the constitutive role of substantively persuasive speech acts, precedential-normative-historical story telling, and identity transformations in the possible development of pluralistically, sociologically integrated, i.e. peaceful, international relations” [15].

The lessons of an Alkerian approach to global studies and the reason that Alker’s scholarship resonates so well now is that we as scholars and as humans must find ways to organize and analyze the multitude of voices and the many forms of violence in the world in order to find paths toward just resolution of conflict.  Though much of US scholarship remains overly committed to positivistic, rationalist ideals that are ultimately unrealistic, some scholars in the US and many in the rest of the world are much more open to humanistic as well as social science methods, to normatively driven inquiry, and to complexity and multiple truths.  Alkerian sensibilities mesh well with the attention to language seen in critical security studies [16], with the historical groundedness of the English School [17], with the emancipatory emphasis of post-colonial approaches [18], and with the decentering of the West by scholars in the “worlding” approach [19], as well as other eclectic approaches to understanding global politics in the broadest, most inclusive sense.  For these perspectives and similarly critical ones, Alker’s emphasis on discovering  “discursive validation – reasoned, critical, and constructive appeals to truth” – provides an important theoretical key.  It is now our obligation to open doors.

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Renée Marlin-Bennett is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and co-General Editor of the International Studies Association’s International Studies Compendium Project and its publication, International Studies Online.  Her most recent book is an edited volume entitled, Alker and IR: Global Studies in an Interconnected World, published by Routledge. Her website is https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu/rmarlin2/RMBweb/; she tweets every now and then as @marlinbennett; and she occasionally blogs at http://marlin-bennetts-world.blogspot.com/ and http://anembodiedworld.blogspot.com/.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Norms, Norm Violations, and IR Theory
• Opinion – Coronavirus and the Need for Global Governance
• Low-Cost Institutions: The New Kids on the Global Governance Block
• Global Governance and COVID-19: The Implications of Fragmentation and Inequality
• Diffusion Across International Organizations
• Humanitarian Interventionism Is Dead, Long Live Humanitarian Interventionism