The Construction of Difference in International Affairs

Abstract

What about the two other approaches that have framed the development of international studies in recent years — constructivism and post-Marxism? How well do they sum up the character of international politics in the non-Western world? After all, the status of these more recent approaches is different from that of those that have been considered so far in this part of the book. They are meant, precisely, to capture what is specific and unique to the different contexts of space, time, and historical and social circumstances in which international life manifests itself. Both perspectives, as was shown earlier, were developed to counter the universalism of realism and liberalism. Their key goal is to show that international politics can only be understood through a logic of the particular, which underscores how contingent international politics always remains. Do these approaches give us, then, the tools necessary to understand the specificity of international politics in the non Western world? And, if they fail to do this, what follows from that situation? To what extent can we find, in international studies, a language of the particular that will allow us to address the specificity of international politics in the non-Western world?