Abstract
If the tension between realism and liberalism provides the main axis of debate within international studies, there is also a series of critiques that have been addressed to one or both of these approaches. Two lines of analysis have been paramount in that regard. One line starts with the post-modern work inspired by Foucault and others, and is represented for instance by the writings of Rob Walker. It then winds itself through the Habermasian critical theory exemplified by the work of Andrew Linklater, and finally culminates in the constructivist literature mainly identified with Alexander Wendt’s work. The goal of that literature is to show that a series of assumptions about the nature of knowledge, identity, and interest underlie both realism and liberalism, and that these assumptions are historically specific in that they stem from particular historical and intellectual developments. The logic of power, human identity, rationality, and suchlike, which the realists and the liberals build on all these starting premises, are thus themselves historically contingent. What they present as universal elements of international politics on the basis of that logic remains, in that sense, nothing more than the effect of particular circumstances and conditions.
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Notes
The best introduction in English to Foucault is Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Also see, from the works of Foucault himself, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970).
The best introduction in English to Derrida’s work might be Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Translated by Alan Bass) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Also see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
See, as an example: Richard K. Ashley, “Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique,” Millennium 17, 2 (1988), 227–262.
See for instance David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
On this theme, see for instance Jürgen Habermas, “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Translated by Frederick Lawrence) (Boston: MIT Press, 1987).
Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1990).
Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 38.
Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity, and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
See, amongst others, Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander, eds, Constructivism and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2006).
Another important study on the place of constructivism in the evolution of international studies is K. M. Fierke and Knud Erik Jrargensen, Constructing International Relations — The Next Generation (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001).
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Ibid, 202. Wendt quotes from Roger Benjamin and Raymond Duvall, “The Capitalist State in Context,” in Roger Benjamin, ed., The Democratic State (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1985), 25–26.
Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Constmction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, 2 (1992), 391–425.
See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
The most elaborate expression of Wallertein’s views is found in the different volumes of The Modern World-System. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Centuty; Vol. 2: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750; The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy (San Diego: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989).
The clearest expression of the dependency theory is perhaps found in Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Translated by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
Also see Andres Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
On these themes of space and time in Wallerstein’s work, see for instance Stephen Hobden and Richard Wyn Jones, “Marxist Theories of International Relations,” in John Baylis and Steve Smith, eds, The Globalization of World Politics. An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 206–210.
Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, eds, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 409. Emphasis in the original.
Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in D. McLennan, ed., Karl Marx. Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 224–225.
This quotation taken from Andrew Linklater, “Marxism,” in Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater, eds, with Richard Devetak, Matthew Paterson, and Jacquie True, Theories of International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 123.
See, for example: Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
See, amongst others, Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
or, more recently, Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
On the Gramscian approach, see Alison J. Ayers, Gramsci, Political Economy, and International Relations Theory. Modern Princes and Naked Emperors (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order. Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia Press, 1987).
Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith) (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
See Timothy J. Sinclair’s comments on the concepts in his “Beyond International Relations Theory: Robert W. Cox and Approaches to World Order,” in Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, eds, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11. For Cox’s use of the phrase, see Robert Cox, “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium 10, 2 (Summer 1981).
Cox, “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” The text quoted here is published in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and/its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 207. Emphasis in the original.
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© 2011 Pierre P. Lizée
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Lizée, P.P. (2011). Situating the Particular: After Constructivism. In: A Whole New World. Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316843_4
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