Opinion | On Ukraine, China and beyond, why geopolitical ‘experts’ often get it wrong
- Country specialists too often fail to connect the dots between national and global structures
- Former diplomat Hans Kuijper charts a new course for country studies which breaks down intellectual walls and uses technology to understand how countries behave
Hans Kuijper, a retired Dutch diplomat and exceptional sinologist, has written an indispensable guide to understanding where country studies have gone wrong, and how we can use systems thinking and computers to improve them.
His book is a tour de force into the philosophy of social science, drawing on his reading of ancient Chinese and Western philosophy, science and current country studies.
The book’s thesis is quite simple: country studies have an explanandum (something to be explained), but so-called country experts do not have an explanans, a tested or testable theory that not only explains, but stands out from scientific theories in different disciplines such as geography, demography, ecology, politics or economics.
Thus, “China experts” unjustifiably claim to explain China, despite basing their writings on a single discipline, as if they are knowledgeable about everything concerning the country. As the saying goes, “no ant can see the pattern of the whole carpet”.
Kuijper has identified a fundamental gap in conventional country studies. If you study a country (part) without taking a crude look at the world (whole) or considering how interaction simultaneously affects the parts and the whole, you are making conjectures without a testable theory.