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Systemic evil and the international political imagination

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Abstract

In light of the persistence of discourses of atrocity in the post-Holocaust era, and with the resurgence of talk of evil that followed 11 September 2001, it is clear that the idea of evil still possesses a powerful hold upon the modern imagination. Yet, the interplay of evil and the political imagination – in particular, how different images of evil have shaped the discourses and practices of international politics – remains neglected. This article suggests that evil is depicted through three contending images within international politics – evil as individualistic, as statist and as systemic – and their corresponding forms of collective imagination – the juridical, the humanitarian and the political. It argues further that the dominance of the juridical and, to a lesser extent, the humanitarian imagination obscures our ability to imagine and respond to political evils of structural or systemic violence. Drawing on the example of global poverty, this article contends that the ability to portray and critically judge systemic evils in international politics today depends upon enriching our narratives about indefensible atrocities and reimagining our shared political responsibilities for them.

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Notes

  1. The topic of the imagination, whether in politics or elsewhere, is fraught with conceptual and methodological complexities that are beyond the scope of this article to address. One problem is that the imagination or the ‘imaginary’ is often contrasted with what is ‘real’. But it is a mistake to suppose that the imagination means merely ‘illusory’, since of course the imagination can have very real effects and virtually all political actions must be interpreted in terms of how the ‘the political’ itself is imaginatively framed. Thus, although the argument here takes evil to be a really existing phenomenon, this phenomenon is always portrayed and understood in varying ways through discursive interpretations and symbolic representations; what is considered evil and why is a deeply meaningful yet also contested aspect of the human condition. In contrast to many contemporary works on evil in IR, then, I focus on the interplay of the idea and the reality of evil in the political imagination and not merely on the discourse of evil as a rhetorical device.

  2. This tendency is reflected most prominently in the recent discourse (and purported practice) of ‘the responsibility to protect’; see for example Hehir (2010).

  3. In The Atrocity Paradigm, Card (2010) focuses on harms produced by ‘culpable wrongdoing’, while she revises her view in Confronting Evils to focus on harms produced by ‘inexcusable wrongs’. The latter view is, I believe, better able to accommodate the notion of systemic evil.

  4. To avoid confusion, then, what is being suggested is that liberation from coercively imposed systemic material deprivation is a necessary though not sufficient condition for acquiring and exercising effective political status and agency; it is a precondition for the creation of the properly human political condition. Stated otherwise, my concern is not with economic inequality per se, but with how global poverty destroys political status and agency.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tony Lang, Christopher Hobson, Anna Gels, and the International Politics reviewers for their comments, as well as the participants of the workshop ‘Evil in International Politics’ for their enthusiasm and feedback.

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Hayden, P. Systemic evil and the international political imagination. Int Polit 51, 424–440 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.20

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