Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Chris Armstrong

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Matt Perry and Chris Armstrong. Chris is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, winner of the 2023 Lynton Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association and the author of A Blue New Deal (Yale University Press), an accessible and popular book about the politics of the ocean. He primarily works on issues at the intersection of global justice and the environment. He has published 6 books in total (including with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press), over 50 journal articles and numerous articles in popular media, including The Guardian and The Conversation. Matt spoke to Chris about his experiences writing for a wider audience, his motivations to do so, and what tips he might have for others hoping to do the same.

Matt Perry: Thanks again for agreeing to chat! First, I’d like to ask you why you decided to pursue a career in Political Theory, and what factors led you to address the topics your work focuses on?

Chris Armstrong: When I was at school, I had no conception whatsoever of what political theory might be, or even that it existed. People in my family didn’t go to university. I didn’t really realize you could think about power, ideologies, culture and society in quite an analytical way until I picked up a sociology textbook secondhand.

I announced to my teachers that I was going to completely change all the A levels that I had been intending to do, away from sciences, and then went off to university to do Politics and Sociology. I then did my master’s in International Relations. Still, I was fairly untutored in political theory until my PhD, and in that sense I’ve found my way slowly into the (sub)discipline from the outside. I did my PhD on gender inequality. I set myself the task of investigating whether Michael Walzer’s theory could help us think about gender inequality, which was an interesting project. I’ve been finding my way since then, and I’ve shifted the direction of my work a few times. I moved into thinking about global justice first and then thinking about more environmental issues.

Right now in my career, I’m really appreciating the fact that a lot of what I read is science, history and law. And I kind of read quite indiscriminately across disciplines. In a sense, what I’m doing there is finding my way back to the beginning, where I just read indiscriminately and was interested in everything.

MP: That’s great. I have a second general question before we get onto your public engagement: what do you perceive to be the role of academia, and more specifically the political theorist?

CA: I’ve never been particularly impressed by claims about the authority of political theory. I mentioned I did my PhD on Michael Walzer. Walzer is not someone I work on now. But one thing I was impressed by was his deflationary account of political theory. He essentially thinks that the political theorist is just one more citizen: a participant in public debate, but nothing more than that. I like that idea. It is a very democratic commitment to reasoning with your fellow citizens, arguing with people, not claiming that you’ve arrived at some kind of deep truth that the population just have to fall in with, but that we should have a continual commitment to engaging with others.

MP: That resonates with me, too. I wanted to ask you: what are your own motivations for public engagement in general, but also for writing your book, A Blue New Deal?

CA: Whilst thinking about global justice in my previous work, I got more and more interested in environmental issues. And I suppose at some stage, it dawned on me that there was this big, missing element in many political theory discussions about climate, environmental protection, territory, and natural resources: the ocean.

It’s probably the biggest carbon sink, definitely the biggest ecosystem, and it contains most of the territory on our planet, but it is often simply missing from political theory discussions. You can find bits of political theory on the ocean, of course. But you mainly have to go back to Grotius and the people who engage with him, or to Carl Schmitt, if that’s to your taste. But in the tradition of analytical political theory and reasoning about territory, territorial claims, and justice, it’s missing. And that’s intellectually interesting, but it’s also deeply problematic, if it is in fact the biggest haven of biodiversity, the biggest carbon sink, and so on. So one track that I was going down was to try to persuade other political theorists to engage with the ocean.

I suppose in the end I realized that talking to fellow political theorists was important, but not the only thing that I wanted to do. The more I learned about the governance of the ocean, the more I realized how massively dysfunctional it is. I felt that I needed to do my bit to stage an intervention to raise the public profile of these issues as much as I could, while also trying to persuade other political theorists to actually engage too. Over time, I’ve engaged more with speaking to ordinary citizens, people outside academia, NGOs, and so on. That’s come to feel more important.

MP: Of course, there’s not just a missing focus on the ocean in political theory as a discipline. It seems to be something that’s more broadly reflected in politics too. So it makes sense that those two pieces came together. It’d be good if you could tell us a bit more about your book — what are the key claims?

CA: So, what I try to do in the book is to persuade people that we are going through a double-edged crisis. We’re familiar with the idea that the ocean is facing an environmental crisis, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, you name it. But we also face a crisis of inequality in the way that we govern and relate to the ocean. The human impacts on the ocean are not being evenly caused by everybody, and the benefits from human interactions with the ocean are not being accrued evenly. This is a world in which some are benefiting from burgeoning ocean industries and others are not.

To some extent, the environmental piece is reasonably well understood and people in the sciences have made that case. My distinctive contribution was to draw those strands together and say that when we think about the environmental crisis, we should also always be thinking about questions of social and global justice. We have these hierarchies of power and influence that we also need to reckon with. Some people benefit from what gets called the “Blue Acceleration”, a creeping industrialization of the ocean. I argue we can’t really have good solutions to environmental problems that don’t also tackle these gulfs in power and advantage. The book draws those two things together and argues that we need to think a bit more ambitiously about the way that we are governing the ocean.

MP: One of the things I find impressive about the book is the way it draws together different topics: there’s history, ocean science, policy, and ideal theory. But the framing is around this practical proposal of the Blue New Deal. Did you have this idea already when you started writing? How did you come up with this framing given how encompassing the topic is?

CA: The Blue New Deal framing actually came in fairly late. In the beginning there was just a sense that there were three components to the project: (i) what’s wrong with contemporary ocean governance? (ii) How did we get here? And (iii) how can we do better?

I was going to call the book Ocean Justice: Political Theory for a Blue Planet. My editor at Yale quite sensibly pointed out that no one would know what that meant (like me as a kid, the general public don’t know what political theory is). So, she actually came up with the idea of naming it A Blue New Deal. I, as a theorist, flipped one way and the other and then thought, actually, she knows what she’s doing. Editors know much more than authors do about marketing.

But the Blue New Deal framing is ameliorative, not the end-result I endorse. Chapter 9 is titled ‘A Blue New Deal’, and Chapter 10 ‘Beyond the Blue New Deal’. Chapter 9 is asking how far we could get given existing institutions, and the argument is that we can get pretty far. We might do much better in bringing together a focus on socioeconomic injustice and environmental protection, even relying on existing institutions. But that isn’t entirely satisfying because I think existing institutions are deeply flawed. So, in chapter 10 I ask much grander questions about the way we think about and govern the ocean.

MP: I’m interested in what the uptake was like after releasing the book. What further public engagement did the book invite and how have people received the ideas you defend?

CA:  It’s all been great and kept me very busy in a way I was unused to. Unlike typical academic books where you wait a couple of years for reviews and citations, the response was immediate, largely thanks to my publisher’s publicity operation. There were reviews in newspapers, and I was invited onto podcasts. I was continually and positively surprised to find out that my book had in fact reached a wider audience and that people wanted to engage with it. There were two different kinds of audience. The first were policymakers and people with power. For instance, I got invited to go and talk to the board of this entity called Crown Estate Scotland, who govern and maintain the Scottish coastline.

But I also engaged with less formal audiences, such as Ocean Rebellion, a spinoff from Extinction Rebellion. They’re a vanguard of people, many of them artists, who are trying to raise the public media profile of ocean issues. Initially, they were pretty much exclusively focused on the environmental protection angle and not really on social and global justice. I’ve tried to encourage them to bring those things together.

In general, I’m much more engaged in speaking to NGOs and ordinary citizens, and getting them thinking about whether blue growth and the blue acceleration are the priorities we ought to have. Going back to the Walzerian idea of the theorist as another citizen arguing with his or her fellow citizens, I feel much more comfortable speaking to civil society actors and campaigning groups. I prefer trying to raise the profile of ocean issues, rather than trying to get the ear of princes, to use the political theory cliché.

MP:  That’s interesting. One thing it would be great to know is what the whole process of publishing for a wider audience has been like? What are some of the key challenges you faced?

CA: One self-imposed challenge was flip-flopping about what kind of book I wanted to write: public-facing, academic, or somewhere in the middle? I’m happy with where it ended up, but I wasn’t especially clear about that at the beginning. If I wanted to turn that into advice I would say: be really clear from the beginning about the exact audience you want to engage with.

If you’re going to take things seriously, you really need to read mass market books, or books that are in that hybrid academic/commercial space. I ended up in quite a good place, probably in part because I had a really good editor, but it’s obvious in hindsight that if you want to write a book that communicates to a wide audience, you ought to be reading lots of books that already do that, because there is a specific approach and method of addressing the reader. For instance, by working in lots of examples, using historical tidbits, and relying on real world cases — these are things that define the genre. It’s a bit different from the work that we academics are used to producing.

MP: That makes me wonder: has writing for a broader audience influenced your writing style more generally?

CA: That’s a really good question. I found the process of writing for a general audience really liberating. When writing for academics, you’re always thinking about qualifications, and considering the two or three interlocutors who are metaphorically sitting on your shoulders, or worrying about giving deference to various literatures. When you’re not writing for an academic audience, you don’t have that anymore. I found that very freeing. Instead, you’re trying to lay out a case as simply as possible — to cut things to the bone and get to the basics.

If there’s a wider lesson that I’ve learned from doing that, it would be to take some of that freshness and accessibility back into my academic work. I’ve always in my academic work taken accessibility quite seriously. But maybe I take it even more seriously now. You can communicate fairly complex ideas to a wider audience without sacrificing too much. Going forward, I might leave behind some of the formality, and so many gestures towards literatures. There’s a sense in which lots of academic work is quite literature-driven, whereas I suppose the work I’ve done more recently is issue-driven or ideas-driven, first and foremost.

MP: That’s really interesting. How did securing the book contract differ from typical academic publishing?

CA: The way things worked at Yale was quite different to my previous experiences in academic publishing. There was much more editorial input and a clear sense from the beginning that this was a project that the editor really liked. The book did go to academic reviewers, but this seemed to be a more advisory role compared with in mainstream academic publishing. To secure a contract, you need to find out what the editor is interested in, what they published previously, and what gaps there might be in the roster that they are hoping to fill. There’s no guarantee of success. But essentially, you have to tell a story about not just why this is intellectually interesting, but why it has broad appeal now. Timing, I think, is much more important.

MP: That’s helpful. I’ve got two more questions for you. First, I wondered how your public facing work has been received within the discipline of political theory.

CA: I’m not entirely sure. One kind of attitude is that there is primary work at the level of ideals and normative arguments, and secondary, “applied” work that shows the implications of those ideas for particular issues. There can appear to be a hierarchy between these. The thought might be that the work I was doing in A Blue New Deal might not be quite so cutting edge conceptually, that it is essentially a translation of normative ideals for a wider audience. I do think that is absolutely what I’m doing — I’m not claiming to be doing cutting-edge conceptual work and I’m unashamed about that. But I also think that “applied” work is really important and that we should be doing more of it.

Another attitude concerns the mission I had to try and persuade other political theorists to take up the issue of the ocean — which I don’t feel has been massively successful. One explanation for why is the view that “Chris has got this” so others don’t need to address it, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen. Again, with my subsequent book about the biodiversity crisis, I’m explicitly trying to open up issues to other academics, providing a map of the territory and introducing major debates in the hope others will join me and make their own contributions. I don’t want to do it alone.

MP: Yes, applying normative theory beyond academia and opening up discussions to others are both really key. My last question is: what’s on the horizon next for you? Will you continue with more public-facing work?

CA: I am excited to continue this trajectory and write another book about the ocean that is exclusively for a public audience rather than being a hybrid — but more on that soon!