Franck PetitevilleProfessor of Political Science at Sciences Po Grenoble and at the Pacte laboratory
How would you define objectivity in the social sciences?
A teacher-researcher's objectivity is a standard of professional ethics that is normally so deeply rooted in his or her practices that he or she does not have to constantly ask the question ("Am I being objective here?"). Even so, the objectification of the social facts under analysis gives rise to an irreducible tension with regard to any axiological "drift". In class, the distancing of value judgments does not always prevent "spontaneous slacking off" in debates with students. When discussing Trump's foreign policy, for example, I sometimes referred to it as "grocery store diplomacy", to reflect its purely transactional nature (how much does it cost American taxpayers to fund the UN, NATO and the WHO? Why remain in the Paris climate agreement, which penalizes the competitiveness of the American economy in the face of China? Can I get a political scandal involving the Biden son's possible business dealings in Ukraine in exchange for US military aid to that country? etc.).
On the other hand, the process of objectification necessarily leads to the critical deconstruction of certain notions of common sense (political in particular). On a personal note, I can't talk about current terrorism without first recalling the stigma inherent in a notion never claimed by any bomber (who will always claim to be a "resister, martyr, fighter, revolutionary", etc.). I also reject the notion of a "war on terror" (invented by Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks), which places terrorist violence on the same level as military violence, thereby losing sight of the specificity of terrorism as an asymmetrical relationship to violence on the part of a group or individual who precisely does not have the means to wage war - in Clausewitz's sense - against a state. However, since this confusion of genres between "war" and "terrorism" was maintained by President Hollande and a great many commentators during the 2015 attacks, I may have given students the initial impression of having a biased point of view on the subject.
Similarly, in my courses on migration, the notions of "migration wave" and "migration crisis" seem to me to need to be systematically deconstructed. I try to demonstrate to students that we should be talking about a "crisis of asylum policy" in Europe, that the metaphor of the "migratory wave" doesn't correspond to the reality of the figures, that the "security" stakes (in the continuum commonly established between "immigration and insecurity") are very largely on the side of the migrants who die in large numbers in the Mediterranean, who suffer detention, racketeering, torture, rape and slavery (documented) in Libya, or who are victims of refoulement (illegal under refugee law) by European states (Hungary, for example).
In short, the objectification of social facts presupposes a process of deconstruction that can be seen as subjective. But (international) social facts are stubborn: all we need to do is document them to objectify the analysis.
Is researcher neutrality possible and desirable?
In answer to this question about neutrality, I'd first like to point out that, as a teacher-researcher rather than a researcher - and, what's more, as a generalist teacher of international relations - I'm first confronted with this question when I teach on a very large number of subjects, many of which go beyond the scope of my own research, and which are therefore primarily fuelled by my reading.
On several of the subjects I mentioned earlier, I don't know what it means to be "neutral", except to demonstrate complete civic apathy. For example, as a European citizen, I am outraged that the European Union and its member states have abandoned all rescue operations in the Mediterranean in recent years. For a long-standing supporter of European integration, I see this as a betrayal of the values the EU has enshrined in its treaties for decades. Among the events of recent years, I have also been outraged that the United States could unilaterally invade Iraq on spurious grounds, causing at least 100,000 deaths (the majority of them civilians), and creating the breeding ground for the "Islamic State", without G. W. Bush ever being held to account for the victims of this war before an international court. I also believe that Putin has on his hands the blood of countless Syrian civilians crushed under Russian aviation bombs since autumn 2015.
Obviously, I can't say all this in class, or in the books or articles I write. But here again, the facts are stubborn, and allow us to objectify things (cf. for example, on the war in Syria, the "César" dossier on torture and mass executions in the Syrian regime's jails, the multiple vetoes placed by Russia at the UN Security Council against any resolution aimed at declaring a humanitarian truce in the bombardments, to clarify responsibility for the use of chemical weapons, or to refer the crimes committed to the International Criminal Court, as well as the investigations of the UN Human Rights Council, the documentation gathered by numerous NGOs and journalists, etc.).
Finally, when it comes to such matters, I fully accept the detour via normative political theories, in particular the philosophical doctrine of the "just war". In fact, I don't see how I can teach a course on war without mentioning the conceptually rich debates on the conditions for legitimizing the use of armed violence. On this point of intersection between empirical political sociology and normative political theory, I endorse the conclusions of Pierre Favre's fine epistemological book, Comprendre le monde pour le changer in which, at the end of a career dedicated to the imperative of axiological neutrality, he finally invites his colleagues to place their knowledge more explicitly at the heart of the debate in the city.
How important are methods to you as a researcher?
Before talking about my own research, I must say a word about "international relations", whose research methods are not always highly valued in the social sciences. In fact, the field of international relations lends itself well to essayism: over the past twenty years, countless books have been published on terrorism and jihadism, written by "self-proclaimed experts" in search of bestseller status. Some academics also play this game: the worldwide impact of Samuel Huntington's essay on the "clash of civilizations" in the 1990s - a work that completely distorted the Braudelian conception of civilizations to say that Islam has "blood on its borders" with all other civilizations - did great damage to the scientific reputation of the study of international relations.
However, the study of "international relations" (which can be defined as all relations - whether cooperative or conflictual - conducted across state borders) is in fact open to multiple disciplines: sociology, political science, history, geography, economics, law, anthropology, etc. The diversity of research methods employed reflects this disciplinary diversity. Political scientists conduct interviews with diplomats, jurists exegete international treaties, anthropologists carry out participant observation in international organizations, historians work on diplomatic archives, and so on.
Turning to my own research, the priority I generally give to pedagogy has recently led me to give priority to writing a textbook on international organizations for students, a type of publication for which questions of method do not arise as they do for empirical research.
Nevertheless, in 2020 I also coordinated a collective work on the UN General Assembly, in which I wrote part of a chapter analyzing the role played by the Assembly in orchestrating an international debate on nuclear disarmament. I had to collect the texts of the very many resolutions adopted by the Assembly on this subject since 1945 (around twenty a year today on various aspects of nuclear disarmament), contextualize them historically and legally (opinion of the International Court of Justice on the "legality" of the use of nuclear weapons, clauses of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on disarmament), back them up with the main theories on nuclear disarmament ("realist" skepticism, "nuclear taboo" for constructivism, etc.), and analyze the diplomatic debate on nuclear disarmament.), and analyze the diplomatic debate provoked by the treaty adopted by the Assembly in 2017, which prohibits the possession of nuclear weapons (a treaty that came into force at the beginning of 2021), and which now places France in a posture of defensive justification of its persistent status as a nuclear power.
Could you present an example of research, ideally from your own work, to illustrate the issues and tensions surrounding objectivity and neutrality in the social sciences?
In the field of international relations, there can be considerable methodological tension around the same subject. In the study of civil wars, for example, quantitativist authors seek to account for the evolution of the number of armed conflicts and their "lethality" over time, to model the "predictive" factors of these conflicts, to establish correlations between the democratic/authoritarian nature of states and their mutual propensities for war, etc. Needless to say, this type of approach is not perceived as very legitimate by anthropologically-inspired researchers. Needless to say, this type of approach is not seen as very legitimate by anthropologically-inspired researchers, for whom studying a country at war means staying in or near the country, getting to know its history and culture, possibly speaking its language, and above all conducting interviews as close to the ground as possible with belligerents or former belligerents, humanitarian actors, diplomats, etc....
For a vitriolic critique of civil war modeling, see Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro. Personally, I find both approaches useful to the debate, provided they are not mutually exclusive. That said, if I'm trying to understand the issues at stake in a complex conflict like the one in Yemen today, I'd rather read the work of a CERI researcher like Laurent Bonnefoy than that of an American colleague who has incorporated the Yemeni conflict into his model...
As far as my own research is concerned, I am open to various criticisms regarding the bias of my neutrality and objectivity. With regard to my analysis of the role of the UN General Assembly in promoting nuclear disarmament, deterrence theorists might accuse me of naivety and insignificance: what's the point of taking an interest in a treaty banning nuclear weapons, which is likely to remain symbolic if it is rejected by the nuclear powers? My answer is that if a majority of more than 120 states support the treaty at the UN General Assembly, it tells us something about the increasingly critical stance of international diplomacy towards the closed "club" of nuclear powers. When students ask me whether France should ratify this treaty (and therefore renounce its nuclear weapons), I remain ambiguous. Of course, a large country like Brazil does not need nuclear weapons to ensure its security. But Brazil doesn't have a neighbor like Putin's Russia, which only understands the balance of power (of which nuclear deterrence is a part).
Conversely, when I criticized European foreign policy and the idea that the EU embodied a "normative power" on the international stage, I was criticized for having had a "rather heavy hand" on the EU. In retrospect, I think the record of the last ten years of EU "diplomacy", particularly on the periphery (Ukraine, Libya, Syria, etc.), has proved me right.