Interstitial Power in Fields of Limited Statehood: Introducing a “Weak Field” Approach to the Study of Transnational Settings

Abstract

How does field theory unfold at the transnational level? How tailored is it to weakly differentiated international settings featured by limited statehood? By raising such questions, I do not wish to echo the analyses of those who consider that Pierre Bourdieu's work as quintessentially “franco-centric” and, as such, incapable of producing fruitful research hypotheses beyond its initial context of emergence. As Loïc Wacquant has argued in his foreword to the English edition of The State Nobility, questioning in terms of “field of power” offers “a systematic research program on any national field of power provided that the American (British, Japanese, Brazilian, etc.) reader carries out the work of transposition” (Wacquant in Bourdieu 1996[1989]). In fact, the large range of usages of Bourdieu's theoretical toolbox suffices to prove its value when applied to or confronted with other cultures or other time periods. It may even be argued that such heuristic qualities are particularly relevant to the study of international affairs. Here, more than in any other research domain, there is a need to consider power relations beyond the political and administrative sites of command and to consider the wider set of competing institutions, professions, and resources in which power (forms of domination and types of legitimacy) is defined and actually operates. Here more than in any other research domain, there is a need to counter the effects of disembodied historical accounts of reified collectives (“states,” “NGOs,” “international courts,” “experts,” “politicians,” “civil servants”) colliding with one another. As field theory populates these institutions with competing actors and tracks their socialization, personal trajectories, and professional careers, it proves particularly suited to unveil transnational and cross-sector circulation of ideas and models. As such, it is a powerful research device when it comes to tracing the socio-genesis of transnational institutions and groups as well as the power relations in which they are embedded.

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