Mr Joe Ruffell

Professional biography

Joe's research interests include formal organisations, dictatorship, political rhetoric, Stalinism, international politics, Albania, and the North Caucasus.

His project concerns the evolution of Communist Albania from a Soviet ally, through its anti-Soviet alliance with the People’s Republic of China, through to its status as an isolate state after its break with China in the late 1970s. It considers this as result of a radicalisation of internal discourse when the state came under pressure to reform, using several theoretical resources. Historical sociology provides the key notion of a Jacobin semantics developed from the European revolutionary tradition which constructed the world in Manichean and conspiratorial terms. Social systems theory provides an understanding of the communist-party state as an organised system which has eschewed the differentiation common to modern societies, instead attempting to rule a national society through a single hierarchy and with an all-encompassing totalitarian narrative. Foreign policy role theory provides a means to analyse state behaviour shaped by the ideational commitments embedded in the state apparatus and wider society. These resources allow us to consider the withdrawal of Albania from its alliances and the continuing use of high Stalinist methods of repression and purge into the 1980s as a faltering system’s attempt to keep its self-constructed world intact in the face of a changing environment.

Theoretical interests:

• Theories of social differentiation, organisation and communication. In particular those pioneered by Niklas Luhmann, Dirk Baecker, and Gregory Bateson.
• Historical Sociology, particularly the work of Johann Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt.
• Role theory in International Relations.
• The work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort.