Deborah Avant, Ph.D.
Deborah.Avant@du.edu
University of Denver
Country: United States (Colorado)
About Me:
I am the Sié Chéou-Kang Chair for International Security and Diplomacy and Director of the Sié Center at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. My research has focused on civil-military relations, and the roles of non-state actors in controlling violence and generating governance. I have written or edited five books (most recently Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence and most famously Who Governs the Globe? and The Market for Force: the Consequences of Privatizing Security), along with articles in such journals as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Security Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and Foreign Policy. I was the innagural editor-in-chief of the International Studies Association’s Journal of Global Security Studies and was president of the International Studies Association in 2022-23. I am now writing on the governance that has grown out of crises - in the US and globally around business and social justice, climate change, cyberspace.
Research Interests
Political Violence
International Law & Organization
Military Intervention
Networks And Politics
Global Governance
Civil-military Relations
Civil Society Organisations
Private Security
Multistakeholder Initiatives
International Relations Theory
Gender and Politics
Countries of Interest
United States
Peru
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Scholars endeavor to understand the world in order to make it better. To do that, they should pay attention not only to probability but also possibility. I argue that accepting, and centering, the uncertainty endemic to the human condition and human relations could lead to at least two productive shifts. First, it could encourage holding tensions between particularity and generalization, description and theorization, and complexity and simplicity rather than resolving them a priori. This would promote more genuine thinking about the issues we study. Second, it could encourage critical reasoning about both epistemological bias and the limits of utopian ideas, leading to more serious ethical and normative considerations. I encourage honest conversations about the ubiquity of uncertainty and braver efforts to hold tensions, use our judgement and think. Holding space for unpredictability and imperfection promises to both yield better arguments about probability and open up insights into what is possible. It will thus foster research that best meets the demands of our time.
Social scientists must grapple with how to pursue knowledge about an uncertain and complex world. This challenge is accentuated when scholars wish to engage responsibly with policy-makers and the public in the interests of social betterment. In this article, we use the scholarly literature on uncertainty and complexity to examine how these issues complicate the practice of engaged scholarship. We ground our analysis in interviews with publicly engaged scholars on the ethical challenges they have faced and how they have navigated uncertainties and complexities in their applied work in peace and security. We identify four broad ethical dilemmas associated with publicly engaged scholarship and propose ways that scholars might begin to navigate these challenges. Our analysis urges greater acceptance of uncertainty and complexity in the social science community and associated epistemic humility in collective scholarship, pedagogy and public engagement.
We argue that corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies can shape political contexts to mediate or exacerbate the resource curse. Using a relational pragmatic approach—one that recognizes actors are dynamic and focuses on the interactions that shape how they see their interests—we develop expectations about two ideal type CSR strategies: transformational and transactional and their relational implications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through the examination of two mines in Peru. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2017 and 2018 and secondary research, we show how one mine’s transformational strategy connected the company to common, or public, concerns in ways that rearticulated politics to dampen curse dynamics. The second mine’s transactional strategy narrowed its local engagement in ways that reduced its influence and played into curse dynamics. This research illustrates both the value of pragmatic approaches for integrating CSR into governance and the way in which CSR strategies can help mitigate the resource curse.
What has made the United States a global leader? Though analysts often attribute American success to a combination of resources and ideas, a subtle undercurrent in these arguments points to pragmatism and the creativity it often generates as an important part of the story. First theorized by American philosophers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pragmatism emphasizes that creativity can reshape how we see norms and interests to make cooperation more likely. After discussing the basic elements of pragmatism and its intersection with prominent international relations arguments, I show how the creativity that pragmatism envisions appears in each of these books. Though the collected authors do not label themselves as pragmatists, piecing these pragmatic elements together demonstrates the importance of creativity for key global leadership moments in the twentieth century, as well as important, if under-appreciated, governance innovations in the twenty-first century. It also offers insights into how the United States might move into the future.
In 2004 private military and security companies lacked effective transnational governance. Ten years later, however, an agreed-upon framework drew these services within established international law. It inspired various complementary nonbinding instruments and instigated changes in government policy. Hegemonic order theories, whether realist or liberal,would expect this change to reflect shifts in US preferences. But the United States displayed no initial interest in transnational coordination. I build an alternative explanation from pragmatism and network theory. A Swiss-led process created connections among stakeholders around the problem of regulating private military and security companies. Relatively open interactions among participants spurred original ideas, which in turn appeared useful for addressing the issue. Their usefulness, led more actors to “buy into” the process. This relational-pragmatic account offers new ways for understanding the nature and development of governance.
Books Written:
For years, scholars focused primarily on macro-narratives, states, and violent actions to understand conflict. Recent research, however, has challenged each of these foci. Analyses of micro-dynamics have shown that violence can escalate inadvertently as the product of local opportunism apart from the macro-narrative. Studies have shown that it is not only states that are consequential for conflict; businesses, social movements, local civic and religious organizations, international NGOs, and a wide variety of other actors impact conflict trajectories. And, contentious politics scholars have pointed to the wisdom of considering violent and non-violent actions in tandem. We build on these threads to examine the repertoire of civil action during conflict. In so doing, we highlight the non-violent agency of various groups and the mechanisms through which civil action can 1) create space to preserve or build relationships even in the midst of violence, 2) reduce levels of local violence, or 3) contribute to the resolution of the conflict.
In the last fifteen years, there has been a surge of writing about new forms of governance constituted by various mixtures—often termed networks—of state and non-state actors In these new modes of regulation, authority to govern does not reside exclusively with states but is wielded by a variety of actors at different levels, including national bureaucrats, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational corporations, and business associations. Building on the insights of these studies and network theory’s foundational logic, we propose a framework for the study of a power politics that goes beyond states alone– what we call the new power politics. We examine networking—or building relationships—as a dynamic force through which agents can shape their future fates and governance outcomes. We also look at the relations surrounding particular issues as “networks” and explore how the positions of actors in these networks, the distribution of ties, and the quality of ties, can offer insights into (1) why governance arises around some security issues and not others and (2) the concerns governance serves.
Academics and policymakers frequently discuss global governance but they rarely consider who actually does the governing. This volume focuses on the agents of global governance: ‘global governors’. The global policy arena is filled with a wide variety of actors such as international organizations, corporations, professional associations and advocacy groups, all seeking to ‘govern’ activity surrounding their issues of concern. Who Governs the Globe? lays out a theoretical framework for understanding and investigating governors in world politics. It then applies this framework to various governors and policy arenas, including arms control, human rights, economic development, and global education. Edited by three of the world’s leading international relations scholars, this is an important contribution that will be useful for courses, as well as for researchers in international studies and international organisations.
The role of private security in Iraq is simply the latest chapter in the private security boom. While the state’s monopoly Weber wrote about was exaggerated from the start and there has been a role for the private sector in security for some time, in the last two decades that role has grown and is larger and different now than it has been since the foundation of the modern state. Private security companies now provide more services and more kinds of services including some that have been considered core military capabilities in the modern era. Also, changes in the nature of conflicts have led tasks less central to the core of modern militaries (such as operating complex weapons systems and policing) to be closer to the front and center of maintaining security, and private security companies provide these services readily. Furthermore, states are not the only organizations that hire security providers. Increasingly transnational non-state actors (INGOs, multi-national corporations, and others) are financing security services to accomplish their goals. A burgeoning transnational market for force now exists along side the system of states and state forces. This book describes that market and its impact on states that contract for private security services, states that try and regulate the export of private security services, and the non-state actors (companies and NGOs) that increasingly authorize security.
Book Chapters:
In: The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited: Moral Challenges in an Era of Contested and Fragmented Sovereignty, Daniel R. Brunstetter and Jean-Vincent Holeindre, eds. Georgetown University Press.
Other:
The "great game" for control of precious metals not only carries geoeconomic and geopolitical complications; it poses a serious dilemma for democracy across the globe. In the race for critical minerals, states and mining companies use various coercive and non-coercive tactics to secure and sustain mineral concessions. These often lead to negative consequences such as clientelism, corruption, violence, inequality, and limited economic development. Sustainable and equitable outcomes and stability in regions affected by the new Great Game demand that we pay closer attention to the ways in which climate change and responses to it are reshaping ideas and decisions about rights, responsibilities, and recompense in democracies.