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# The politics of agency
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/fred-halliday-on-political-agency/
- Published: 2008-08-25T02:08:37.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:59:07.000Z
- Author: openDemocracy Supporters
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 19:46

Fred Halliday, the scholar of international relations now based at [IBEI](http://www.ibei.org/web%5Fnew/eng/ibei.asp?ref=opendemocracy.net), the Barcelona Institute of International Studies, has since 2004 written almost seventy [columns](https://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Fred%5FHalliday.jsp) for **openDemocracy** that present compendious and richly detailed insight into globalpolitics and conflicts. His latest article addresses what he regards as an under-recognised theme, one that he argues has current relevance in the context of the Georgia-Russia war: the autonomy of "local agents",including small states often regarded as mere outposts or proxies of larger powers, in launching ill-starred adventures that can havecatastrophic effects.

In characteristic fashion Fred Halliday invokes a range of historicaland international experiences to build his [case](https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-miscalculation-of-small-nations) \- from Cyprus to Korea, Israel/Palestine to Cuba, Iraq to the author's native Ireland. In arguing that to make sense of political events and conflicts around the world there is a need to focus on the agency of more than empires, hegemons, and behemoths, Fred Halliday also presents a challenge:

"There is still a reluctance among many analysts of international relations to believe that local and / or 'small' actors in a political situation - in this case the Georgian leadership - have their own agency, freedom of manoeuvre, and responsibility (a flaw that is shared by that particular kind of American - and of course 'anti-American' - leftist for whom everything that happens in the world must by definition be the United States's responsibility: an understudied genre of vulgar imperialism)."