Symposium: Culture and Otherness in Principal-Agent Theory

[This is a post-publication review symposium] This symposium invites reflections on Eric Rittinger’s article “Arming the Other: American Small Wars, Local Proxies, and the Social Construction of the Principal-Agent Problem” (2017). Rittinger seeks to combine insights from rationalist principal-agent theory with the dynamics of identity relations as investigated principally by constructivist scholars, and to utilize this combination as a way of explaining variations in how the United States recruited and managed local actors to fight its wars by proxy. As such his article aims to make both a theoretical and an empirical contribution. Empirically, Rittinger argues that how the United States recruited and utilized local proxies depended on the particular way that the “otherness” of those proxies was understood. Accounts of selves and others shaped the strategies that the U.S. put in place, and those strategies cannot be explained without paying careful attention to the narratives of difference that he locates in the archival material he utilizes. In particular, Rittinger argues, changing characterizations of local proxies—as either biologically or culturally flawed—led to different interpretations of the potential problems in controlling those proxies, and thus led officials to adopt different approaches to mitigating those problems, ranging from outright paternalism to less direct tutelage. Theoretically, Rittinger rethinks principal-agent theory through a broadly constructivist lens. The problem of managing agents who have been retained in order to carry out the principal’s task is Rittinger’s point of departure, but he does not follow a rationalist road from that point. Instead of looking to ex ante specifications of strategic interests and deriving potential solutions from there, he examines the ways that situated social actors conceptualized and enframed the situations in which they found themselves, and use those narratives as the basis for his analysis. In this way, the piece also explores the persistence of techniques of marginalization even as foreign fighters are acting on behalf of a patron state. These cultural aspects of war shape the ways that violence is practiced in a stratified, hierarchal international arena. In his contribution to this symposium, Tarak Barkawi argues that Rittinger does not go far enough in a sociological direction. Barkawi suggests that Rittinger focuses too much on the unidirectional construction of the local proxies by the United States, and as such does not sufficiently get away from the essentialist framing of orthodox principal-agent theory. By contrast, Srdjan Vucetic suggests that Rittinger’s article opens new vistas in the study of “racialized security contracting,” and wonders about Rittinger’s dichotomy of biological versus cultural alterity. Alexandra Gheciu concurs, and argues that it might be more productive to think of these as competing discourses of alterity, and to trace actual policy outcomes to the dynamics of that competition. Rittinger then responds to his interlocutors.