Scholarly Contributions

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

Professor Said was a prolific thinker and author. These sections contain synopses of some of Said’s writings and analyses in his key areas of interest and discuss the evolution of his thinking on various topics over several decades.

International Relations Theory

Recognized as one of the pioneers of international relations (IR) scholarship,¹ Professor Abdul Aziz Said continuously pushed the boundaries of the field through over five decades of scholarship and practice. He began his career at a time when IR was still considered a new academic field and was dominated by theories of power politics and Western-centric solutions. He promoted a different, humanistic perspective that introduced conversations on values and morality, non-Western experiences, the role of non-state actors, and consensus-building toward a more egalitarian world order. By doing so, Said advanced perspectives that continue to help students, scholars, and policymakers better explain and ultimately respond to the complex challenges and opportunities of our ever-changing world.

Said was one of the early scholars to critique and offer an alternative to the traditional positivist, realpolitik perspectives within IR, in many ways anticipating the field’s “normative turn” over two decades later that brought in ethical and moral considerations with the goal of promoting peace and human rights. When Said wrote the first edition of his textbook, Concepts of International Politics,² with Professor Charles Lerche, Jr. in 1963, mainstream thinking defined state power and security primarily through the lenses of military strength and economic power, advocating for the use of force and coercion when necessary to achieve state interests. Hans Morgenthau’s thesis on power politics was particularly influential, defining international politics as a struggle among states pursuing their own interests and power in order to survive in an anarchic international system.³

Said, on the other hand, emphasized the important roles of values and morality. According to him, international politics is “the prosecution of value differences and grows less from objective environmental conditions than it does from the judgements men⁴ [sic] make about those conditions.”⁵ In other words, relations among international actors cannot be understood solely in terms of power and interests but must take into account the ethical and moral choices that underpin political action. National interests are not universal but “rooted in the deepest soil of social consciousness and cultural identity of a people.”⁶ Power, therefore, must also be understood as just another value – an approach that Morgenthau, whom Said invited to lecture to his classes, ultimately respected.⁷

Dr. Said rejected the realist perspective that treats the nation state as a unitary actor whose behavior in the international system is solely in response to external stimuli and not internal dynamics. In fact, he starts his approach with the premise that a nation state “is composed of human beings, all of whom accept and act upon a set of moral principles.”⁸ Collective moral judgements can serve as an important restraint on state behavior and foreign policy. International moral consensus, for instance, “is now a situational factor with which policy-makers in all states must reckon,” as reflected in commitments and cooperation within the United Nations and other international institutions, or through government alliances.⁹ Said argues that power can be used for both immoral and moral purposes, which stands in stark contrast to the realpolitik paradigm in which states are either “powerful and effective” – able and willing to exert brute force – or “moral and therefore ineffective,” a position he argues is analytically “illogical and indefensible.”¹⁰

Indeed, for Said the IR field of the 1960s and 1970s was facing a “crisis of relevance.”¹¹ Formal approaches to theorizing dominated the field, including the use of mathematical and logical models to produce testable hypotheses and to predict political phenomena. Said was among the first scholars to critique these approaches, pointing out their “penchant for reductionism” and “failure to encompass human purposes as they are expressed in terms of values and ideologies.”¹² He explained it simply: “I looked out the window. Authors in the field were not addressing these issues.”¹³ Said’s work showed how they oversimplified the historical, social, and cultural factors influencing the behavior of states and policymakers.

Said’s contributions to the field also reflect his “lifelong preoccupation”¹⁴ with the emergence of non-Western states as diverse political players within a changing international landscape. Undoubtedly, his personal background – growing up in French-colonized Syria during World War II, starting his career during an era shaped by the Cold War and decolonization as well as his decades-long work in public diplomacy – deeply influenced his scholarly interests in the field. (See A Meaningful Life.) Said inherently recognized the limitations of colonial, Western models to explain the non-Western world, in many ways anticipating the work of later postcolonial scholars by acknowledging the agency and unique aspirations of non-Western actors.

Said asserts that “one should always approach the non-West with the inquiry, Politics for What?” rather than with a preexisting model to which behaviors must conform.¹⁵ His intention in writing his 1968 volume, The African Phenomenon, “was to look at Africa in its own rights – who they are and what they contribute, not through the lens of colonialism.”¹⁶ Interested in how newly formed postcolonial African states respond to the international system and vice versa, Said found they pursued their own paths of modernization, developing nationalisms that sought to reject Westernization and were unaligned with either Cold War bloc. In his 1971 book with Daniel Collier, Revolutionism, Said furthered his argument for understanding political behavior based on the underlying desires and values of people and their context, reminding readers that “the tone and character of Western revolutionism originates in a vastly different environment from the non-West.”¹⁷ Revolution “is not simply a political or military action,” Said and Collier argue, rather “it is a state of mind that sees man [sic] and the state in a process of constant change.”¹⁸ Their suggestion for the US policymaker is to approach revolutions with discernment, allowing the change that is desired to happen unless it indicates a concrete threat. “Where there is a desire for change, there are reasons which must be explored. Stability bought at the expense of change results in a greater evil.”¹⁹

Collaborating frequently with other scholars, Said continuously pushed the IR field beyond its state centrism and traditional approaches to security by acknowledging the role of existing and emerging non-state actors in a changing global landscape. As he explained, “I wanted to address issues on the periphery that were not being addressed.”²⁰ Said examined the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) as “the new sovereigns” in his book of the same name with Luiz R. Simmons, arguing that the decisions of MNCs have as much, if not more, impact as the foreign-policy decisions of nations on the international arenas of conflict and cooperation.²¹ His writings on culture and ethnic identity and on religion also contributed significantly to bringing what were considered peripheral issues to the center of analysis, reshaping the field toward a better understanding of the complex actors and dynamics shaping international relations.

Finally, interdependence, consensus, and cooperation were central themes woven throughout Said’s work. From the first edition of his textbook, Concepts of International Politics, Said challenged the assumption that war is the final response within the international political system, arguing that consensus, as institutionalized through the General Assembly of the United Nations, has taken its place. Subsequent editions expanded on this idea, with the third edition devoting a chapter to cooperative global politics with the aim of creating an equitable new world order that reflects our interdependence and “unity in diversity.”²² He also continued to develop these themes through his scholarship on peace and conflict resolution, human rights and development, and spirituality – topics that he argued need to be taken seriously within the IR field, not separately. Indeed, from his first activities in the field, including as an early member of the International Studies Association that was established in 1959, to his late-career writings on personal transformation and international politics, Professor Said was a boundary pusher, never losing sight of the field’s potential to inspire, build, and sustain a more peaceful and just world.

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