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Peter Vale is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, and Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics Emeritus at Rhodes University. In this interview, he reflects and expands on his recent chapter ‘Crossings and Candles: Reflecting on International Relations’ in Foundations of International Relations (2022, Bloomsbury).
How did you first get involved in thinking about International Relations?
As the chapter suggests, I have been living and thinking about my place in the international – and IR as a template to understand it – most of my life. Indeed, it has helped to shape my very identity…my sense of it is that the discipline has followed me, as much as I have followed it.
In terms of your journey from one-time student to academic, how did you find your way into this profession, and can you give a brief summary of your career thus far?
Largely less, than more, I started as a journalist, but was increasingly drawn into the academy. My initial interest was at the foreign policy end – but that clashed with finding a way in which mainstream Realism (which was all that was on offer) could help to rid the country of the wretched apartheid system. That largely failed, mainly, because the Cold War constantly got in the way… So, I increasingly crossed that great South African divide which was (as it remains), race. A late rush of activism, and some pointed academic writing, got me into trouble with the late-apartheid state who paid me the compliment of seizing my passport for just over a year. The authorities were far more interested in my partner, Louise, who was working in education. Under emergency regulations, she was detained for several months by the security police.
The end of the Cold War speeded apartheid’s demise: the resulting transition was an interesting (and enticing) period. With others, I tried to stand between the two sides when it came to building a new diplomatic corps and fashioning a new foreign policy. But it was quickly plain that the skills academics were not wanted by either side. This said, some ghost writing in which I was involved continues to have had a lasting impact on policy debates. After this, I had brief flirtation with higher education – and its disciplining technologies: at one point I crossed into HE management but quickly return to the real thing.
In recent years, I have followed the discipline to places unfamiliar to me – India, the Philippines, Singapore, and Brazil: in each place, IR seems to be an awkward fit.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
When I started out in the field there were few critical thinkers in the field especially in South Africa. Luckily, however, social thinking in the country was in the midst of an exhilarating upheaval which was loosely associated with New Left thinking elsewhere. It was to have a dramatic impact in Sociology and on the study of History. At one point, I lived in both theoretical places – in IR and in a kind of academic double life! This ended when I encountered the Aberystwyth School. That set me off reading in (and thinking about) Social Theory which remains, in my view, still largely underexplored in IR. But my enduring concern has been the issue of race in/and IR…this issue, and the poverty line which overlaps it, remains the biggest issue facing the world after, of course, climate change.
Do you think it is more important for academics (and students by extension) to dedicate most of their time to understanding the world, or instead actively to working to change it?
What a question? Can I answer it in an oblique fashion by saying that my favourite journal – by a long, long shot – is the Melbourne-based, Thesis Eleven.
Where do you see the most exciting research and debates happening in and around the discipline of International Relations?
Decolonisation, decolonisation, decolonisation…
What is the most important advice you could give to students who are starting their journey with International Relations?
First, never stop asking Lucius Cassius’ question, Cui Bono? And, secondly, the more languages you learn to speak, the more you’ll understand.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
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