(Re)Constructing Constructivist International Relations Research

Center for International Studies University of Southern California October 2001

On October 6, 2001 the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern
California held a workshop entitled (Re)Constructing Constructivist International Relations Research. This workshop joins a series held by CIS on cutting edge research in international relations. Participants were sent a statement composed by Hayward Alker and a copy of Nicholas Onufs paper and asked to bring written comments based on these two documents.

I am grateful to Hayward Alker and Nicholas Onuf for their important role in conceptualizing and providing the original stimulus. Thanks also to Melissa Ince (Program Coordinator) who worked tirelessly in all aspects of organizing, including compiling this working paper. Ann Tickner Director Center for International Studies University of Southern California

(Re)Constructing Constructivist International Relations Research Center for International Studies, USC Saturday October 6, 2001

Panel One:

Hayward Alker, School of International Relations, USC (Moderator) Legal-Historical Rule-Based Approaches to Constructivist IR Research Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University Wayne Sandholtz, UC Irvine Robert English, School of International Relations, USC (Moderator) Social Historical Constructivism Cecelia Lynch, UC Irvine Daniel Lynch, USC J. Ann Tickner, Director Center for International Studies & Professor School of International Relations, USC (Moderator) Social Historical Constructivism II Raymond Duvall, University of Minnesota Colin Wight, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Saori Katada, School of International Relations, USC(Moderator) Computationally Oriented Approaches Steven Majeski, University of Washington Hayward Alker, USC

Panel Two:

Panel Three:

Panel Four:

Workshop Participants: Hayward Alker is the John A. McCone Professor of International Relations with the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He has just completed a project on the development of information resources for anticipating, preventing, managing violent inter-group conflict and interstate conflicts around the world. He is now working on a project reviewing major debates about world order in the 20th century. He is the author of Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies Cambridge University Press and an edited volume entitled Journeys Through Conflict: Narratives and Lessons Rowman and Littlefield (2001) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Raymond Duvall is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science, the Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change of which the Mac Arthur Inter-Disciplinary Program on Peace and International Cooperation at the University of Minnesota is a part. He was a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. He is the co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger University of Minnesota Press (1999). He has published numerous articles in journals such as American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly and Journal of Conflict Resolution. Cecelia Lynch is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her experience is in international relations theory, social movements, political philosophy, ethics, and international organization. She is the author of Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics Cornell University Press (1999), and co-editor, with Michael Loriaux, of Law and Moral Action in World Politics University of Minnesota Press (2000). She is currently working on two books: one, co-authored with Audie Klotz, on constructivist methods, and the other, for which she was awarded an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, on religion in world politics.

Daniel Lynch is an Assistant Professor with the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Lynchs most recent work focuses on the international origins of democratization. He is contrasting the experiences of Taiwan and Thailand with those of China and Burma. He is also researching Chinese concepts of comprehensive security and how they relate to identity formation. Publications include After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and Thought Work in Reformed China Stanford University Press (1999). Stephen Majeski is Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and has research interests in international conflict and foreign policy making. He has published numerous articles concerning these areas in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. He is currently finishing a project on how high level U.S. officials make policy with respect to Vietnam from 1961-65. He is also doing experimental work assessing how groups make choices in situations of conflict and cooperation and using evolutionary theory to simulate how agents interact in complex environments. Nicholas Onuf is a Professor of International Relations at Florida International University, where he and Vendulka Kubalkova of the University of Miami organized the Miami International Relations Group focusing on constructivist scholarship. Dr. Onuf is widely credited for introducing the term constructivism to the field in 1989 and he has a continuing interest in the many conceptual issues that this way of thinking has brought to the fore. In recent years he has also studied the conceptual underpinnings of modernity. While on Sabbatical at the Center for International Studies at USC (2001-02), is working on a book with his brother Peter Onuf, and another historian, linking the crisis of the U.S. federal union in the early 19th century to the rise of the liberal world. He also wants to assemble materials he has written in the last five years into a book on the conceptual foundations of constructivist social theory. Wayne Sandholtz is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. His current research includes projects on the evolution of international norms, the comparative study of corruption, and the development of supranational governance in the European Union. His past work has focused on the politics of European integration, including work on integration theory, high-technology cooperation, telecommunications, and monetary union. He has had articles published in International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, and World Politics, and co-edited European Integration and Supranational Governance Oxford University Press (1998). Colin Wight is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He gained a first class honours degree from the University of Wales and completed his PhD on the Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory in 1998. Before going to Aberystwyth he worked as a journalist. Among Dr. Wights research interests are International Relations theory, social theory, the philosophy of science and social science and political philosophy. His publications include Political Thought and German Reunification: The New German Ideology? Macmillan, (1999), a co-edited piece, They Shoot Dead Horses Dont They? Locating Agency in the Agent-Structure Problematique in the European Journal of International Relations, (1999) and Incommensurability and Cross Paradigm Communication in International Relations Theory: Whats the Frequency Kenneth? Millennium, Journal of International Studies (1996). Workshop Moderators Robert English is an Assistant Professor with the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Professor English's courses cover Russia, the former USSR, and Eastern Europe, with a focus that ranges from general issues of regional relations to specific questions of ethnicity, identity, and nationalism. He is presently working on a book-length study entitled Our Serbian Brethren: History, Myth, and the Politics of Russian National Identity. Saori Katada is an Assistant Professor with the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. She teaches courses on Japanese foreign policy, international political economy, development and Pacific Rim issues. Publications include Banking on Stability: Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of the International Financial Crisis Management University of Michigan Press (2001).

J. Ann Tickner is a Professor with the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and the Director of the Center for International Studies. Professor Tickners major current research interest is in feminist perspectives on international relations theory with a particular focus on ways of reconceptualizing security. Her latest book Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era was published by Columbia University Press (2001).

Contacting Participants: From the School of International Relations, USC Hayward Alker: alker@usc.edu Daniel Lynch: dlynch@usc.edu University of Southern California School of International Relations 3518 Trousdale Parkway VKC 330, University Park Campus Los Angeles, CA 90089-0043 From the Department of Political Science UC, Irvine Cecelia Lynch: clynch@uci.edu Wayne Sandholtz: wsandhol@uci.edu University of California, Irvine Department of Political Science 3151 Social Science Plaza Irvine, CA 92697-5100 Raymond Duvall: RDUVALL@polisci.umn.edu University of Minnesota Department of Political Science 1414 Social Sciences Building 267 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, Minn. 55455 Stephen Majeski: majeski@u.washington.edu University of Washington Department of Political Science Box 353530 Seattle, WA 98195 Colin Wight: Colin.Wight@aber.ac.uk University of Wales, Aberystwyth Department of International Politics Ceredigion, Wales UK SY23 3DA

The Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations NICHOLAS ONUF ___________________________________________________________________________ This paper is forthcoming as Worlds of Our Making: The Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations, in Donald J. Puchala, ed., Visions of International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, January 2002). I have shortened the text and made a few changes for presentation at the Workshop on (Re)Constructing Constructivist IR Research, Center of International Studies, University of Southern California, October 6, 2001 ___________________________________________________________________________

The Many Worlds of International Relations The world that we live in is a place, both physical and social. We are physical beings capable of living in, and acting on, the world only as social beings. Agency is a social condition. The world that we make for ourselves consists of social relations that make sense, and use, of our physical circumstances. For any of us as agents, the world is, as I said, the whole of our experience. As Aristotle might have said, it is sufficient in itself. Were it not sufficient for our needs, we would make it so or we would cease to be. As agents, we may participate in making our world what it is, and have it make sense to us, without recognizing ourselves as agents, somehow apart from that world and acting on it. Conversely, we are quite capable of detaching ourselves from our world and observing it, our places in it and the consequences of our acts upon it. Once we stand back and become observers, the world ceases to be the seamless place that we take for granted. We see social relations to which we have little or no connection. We make them into worlds in which we do not see ourselves as agents. While each of us lives in a whole world that is uniquely our own, we share worlds by speaking about them to each other. Worlds that we speak of can only be partial and highly selective representations of what we see. We make these representations more or less compatible by telling each other not just what we (want them to) see but what we want them to do, and why they should do it. Speaking about worlds is always normative. By speaking, we narrow down the number of worlds that we are collectively able to identify. To the extent that some number of observers commonly represent some set of social relations as a world (whether they belong to it or not), then they have made a world for themselves collectively, but not necessarily for the agents whose world (they say) it is. Moreover, they have made it normative (whether consciously or not). They hold themselves to this representation of the world, and they would have other observers adopt it. Indeed they would have those agents whose relations (they say) make up this world stand back as observers, accept the world as represented to them and act accordingly. By becoming agents in any world, observers make boundaries even harder to discern. Such is the case with a world for which the familiar name is international relations. The world of international relations has many observers. They include ordinary people who are quite sure that they have little effect on whatever they see. They also include a relatively small number of us who make the study of International Relations a vocation. We know full well that what we see, and say about, the world of international relations has an occasionally significant and cumulatively substantial effect on it. For ordinary people, what they observe are eventswars, world leaders holding summits, the rise and fall of stock markets, extradition hearings. Behind these events are social relations largely taken for granted. While some few of these relations are highly conventionalized and always in view, others are shrouded in secrecy. Most

are invisible to ordinary observers because they are so far removed from daily experience. This world has no discernible boundaries. Even for scholarly observers, the world of international relations does not have obvious boundaries. If we look deep into its historywhich is to say, deep into the history of the Western worldwe see a remarkably small world of set practices. The main agents in this world act on behalf of political societies that we only gradually came to call states. Centuries ago these agents were rulers whose realms were indistinguishable from their selves and whose relations were simultaneously highly stylized and intensely personal. As political societies dissociated from royal personae and agents came to represent states as abstractions, relations among agentsheads of state, their ministers, diplomatsremained much as they had always been. In this still small world, agents are preoccupied with the many signs of standing, both personally and with respect to their states. They attach great significance to ceremony. Most of their ceremonies involve the reciprocities of respect and the acknowledgment of relative position. Agents remember slights and they are quick to take offense. They are always ready to commit societal resources on a massive scale for vindication, and they are prone to believe in organized violence, not just as a last resort, but as an edifying spectacle. Rules matter, for these agents live by an unwritten code of honor, some version of which is to be found in every small world that is left to itself. The world that I just sketchedfor lack of a better name, the world of standing and statecraftsurvives more or less intact despite great changes in the world of events because of its relation to yet another worldthe world of states. Paradoxically, this world is a large world spatially but much smaller socially. Membership in it is restricted to states, which are large worlds in their own right but few in number. On the one hand, states are the product of long histories of arduous social construction. On the other hand, they exist only in formal relation to each other, and the ways in which they conduct their relations are also formally limited. Consider how the defining properties of statehood impose formal limits. To be states, other states must recognize them as such. Sovereign in principle, their rights and duties make them equal and apart. Furthermore, states are subject to general, formal rules, conventionally known as international law. These rules classify relations of states in categories as confining as they are familiar (starting with peace and war), and they give rise to a large number of voluntarily incurred obligations (treaties) and institutions (international organizations), all in the same general form. States formally deal with each other through agents for whom the conditions of agency are also formally determined. So too are the venues for the conduct of their relations. Because the formalities of statehood so severely limit the number of state agents and the exercise of agency, the grandly formal world of states supports a small world of state agents whose relations are at once stylized and intensemuch as they were before states took form. Neither world could continue to exist without the other. State agents take the formalities of their relations exceedingly seriously. They are always careful to justify their conduct by claiming to act on behalf, and in the interest, of their states. By doing so, they make the preoccupations of their small world weighty and impersonal. They have access to resources not otherwise available in any world. Their importance is unequaled, in their own eyes and in the eyes of many others. Every deed confirms them as indispensable, and the world of states as overwhelmingly, immediately realperilous perhaps but irreplaceable. The world of states has a remarkable capacity, through its agents and through its effect on observers, to reproduce itself in a form that has changed very little over the last two centuries. Form is the key, once we grant this world its formality and thus its limits. Bounded out are all sorts of social relations that have direct and lasting effects on a global or near-global scale. Conversely, a world that would encompass most such relations would have to relegate states to the background. A variety of other institutions would come to the fore, and the number of agents whose world it is would increase dramatically.

For centuries, institutionalized practices of the Western world have had global effectsand not just incidental effects, as many scholars find it convenient to think. Nevertheless, designing global institutions and insulating them from the pattern of relations characteristic of the mutually constituted worlds of states and state agents only began in earnest with the rise of industrial capitalism. With industrial capitalism, there also arose an interest in issues of technical facilitation and responsiveness to human needs. In what amounted to a design principle, state agents approached these issues one at a time, each time creating a specialized organization to complement rapid bureaucratic growth and differentiation within their states. In these developments, observers saw a world in which states and their claims on agents mattered far less than the efficient performance of technical tasks. These observers supposed that technical successes would cause the new world to grow as state agents surrendered ever more responsibility to specialized organizations. The world of states would shrink, and the small world of statecraft and standing would become increasingly irrelevant. Eventually, a single, benign and encompassing world of technical services would supercede all those worlds that seemed to impede human progress. While the passing years proved this functionalist prophecy to be wildly mistaken, the growth of technical organizations with global missions proceeded unabated. So too did technical task expansion within states. The long-term result is a vast, intricately organized world of services that depends on the formal relations of the world of states even as formers many successes indirectly support the latter. Meanwhile, the prodigious scale and complexity of the world of services defy most observers efforts to find its boundaries and put the whole of it in clear view. Indeed, much of the current rhetoric of globalization suggests a still inchoate sense of what that world has finally become (also see Onuf, 1998a:263-73; Onuf, 2001). Observers of international relations who see beyond the world of events impose boundaries and emphasize some sorts of social relations over others in order to make sense of what they see. By consensus, the world of international relations is a world of worldsby definition, a world of states. Considerations of physical and social scale yield three plausible versions of this world. As opposed to the world of events, which matters to a great many people in a variety of ways, the world of standing and statecraft is a world whose few agents matter a great deal to each other. The world of states also matters to the agents of states because it perpetuates their own lived-in world. The world of services would matter to a great many people if they knew very much about it. As an observer, I could no doubt propose any number of possible worlds of international relations by introducing additional considerations to the limit of my imaginative and linguistic resources. Nor will any other observer see the four worlds enumerated here quite as I do. As observers, we never stand in the same place, and we never see matters from the same angle. As agents, we can only experience our world from the inside. Lived-in worlds have an immediacy and normative density that no observer can fully appreciate. Observers see that world from a distance and render it in drastically simplified terms, but they also live in other worlds. For those who make observing international relations a vocation, one of these worlds consists of observers like themselves. That lived-in world (which is my world) constitutes yet another world of international relations. Its agents collectively make the world of states into an important and distinctive subject of study commonly called International Relations. In doing so, they respond to normative demands that are too close, too immediate, for them to recognize. The world of scholarship exerts a normative pull over the world of statespulling it away from both the world of standing and statecraft and the world of services, all the while pushing and pulling with the world of events. Unsettled Times The worlds that we make for ourselves as observers look the way that they do because of the ways that we go about the business of seeing. Gaze fixed on some world or another, scholars figure out ways of seeing it better. We could just as well sayand often do saythat we draw maps and blueprints, devise tools and procedures, build models and frameworks, all of which make that world what we see it to be. Different worlds call for, and depend on, different ways of world-making.

Scholars have always raised questions about accepted ways of seeing. Beginning in the 1970s, their numbers increased, in the 1980s dramatically. Some critics came to the radical conclusion that we know not what we see, and delude ourselves into thinking that we do. A few others began to see worlds as never-ending construction projects involving even themselves as agents, and realized that they needed new and different toolstools for making worlds and not just for seeing them. Let me put these developments in more conventional, less obviously metaphorical terms. The 1980s were unsettled times in the social sciences. The positivist quest for reliable, cumulative knowledge about the world came under assault, along with the positivist assumption that, deep down, nature and society have the same nature. Critics held positivist science, whether applied to nature or society, to be a central feature of what they called the Enlightenment project or, indeed, modernity. Looking back, we can see that this assault did not come out of the blue. Ennui had beset positivist social science, and so had a measure of smugness. Critics decried positivist science as an emblem of modernity, understood as the rationalizing, aggrandizing path that the Western world has taken over a period of several centuries and especially since the Enlightenment. Their critique did not proceed over matters of methodover the ways that we might acquire reliable, commensurable knowledge of the world. Positivists were always prepared to discuss such matters and likely to prevail on their own termsterms that emphasize the measurable properties of things (positivities) and their relations. Instead the assault began over prior matters: how are we capable of knowing anything at all about the world or able to convey what we think we know to anyone else? Suddenly the term epistemology displaced the term methodology as the signal that controversial matters were under discussion. So did the neologism post-modern, and the term modern itself took on an unaccustomed resonance. Epistemological radicals doubted that we can know anything for sure. Language deceives us. No matter what how much, or well, we think we are communicating with each other, no language, natural or formal, is capable of representing the world as it is. Instead, what we think we know is the product of provisional agreement only relatively fixed in time and place, and these radical critics mocked the vain Enlightenment quest for firm foundations or an objective vantage point. Obviously I mean vain in both senses of the word. Positivists saw this assault as willfully destructive, even nihilistic, and not at all the liberating, playful, celebratory occasion that its advocates took it to be. Not only were these unsettled times. No one held out any hope for settlement, if only because post-modern critics interpreted any effort to settle matters as a symptom of the Enlightenments rationalist pathology. The world of scholarship, long ordered into worlds (disciplines, fields) ostensibly corresponding to the diverse worlds of ordinary experience, found itself, and quite a number of its constituent worlds, torn in two. As a field of study, International Relations was hardly exempt from these unsettling developments. Here Richard Ashley warrants particular mention (and note that Ashley had been a student of Hayward Alkers). In a series of highly visible essays spanning the 1980s, each more slashing than the one before, Ashley left his audience gaspingwhether in dismay or delight (Ashley, 1981; 1984; 1987; 1988; 1989). Others followed suit. As the decade turned, dissidents joined in celebration (Ashley and Walker, 1990). Retrospectively, these developments seem far less surprising than they did at the time. Already in the 1970s, positivists showed signs of fatigue brought on by the demands of normal science. Fatigue made it all the more difficult to cope with dwindling resources as the Vietnam War came to an end, and fatigue did nothing to dull the disappointments due to the meager results that normal science had posted. By the end of the 1970s, realists had begun to reassert themselves, International Political Economy consolidated its position at the fields center, theory returned to prominence, formal analytic skills earned instant prestige. It soon became clear that publication of Kenneth Waltzs Theory of International Politics (1979) was a defining moment for the field. By the end of the next decade, International Relations was deeply dividedmore deeply than Kal Holsti had imagined when he called it the dividing discipline (1985). One response was to domesticate these disturbing developments. This was Robert Keohanes clear intention when he edited Neorealism and Its Critics (1986). No

less was it Yosef Lapids when he sought to bring these developments into focus as an intelligible debate (Lapid, 1989:238)the third great debate to punctuate the fields brief history. A second response was my own. I announced it in World of Our Making (1989), and I named it constructivism. (I had first used this term in Onuf, 1987an article few scholars in my world had occasion to see.) The term betrays its origins in the 1980s and the influence of social theory at that time. Anthony Giddens (1984) and Jrgen Habermas (1984) were particular sources of inspiration. By building a bridge across the divide (Onuf, 1989:55-61), I aimed to provide for myself and other scholars a way between positivist social science and assaults on modernity then rampant (pp. 36-43). This third way holds that ontology is the key to escaping the impasse between positivist complacency over epistemological matters and the wholesale post-modern dismissal of methodical pursuits. Ontological discussions refer to the worldany worldas if we could take its existence for granted, but not its properties. Constructivism, as I presented it in 1989, grants ontological parity to things and their relations. Conceptually speaking, neither agents as members of society, nor society as the totality of agents and their relations, come first. On ontological grounds, constructivism challenges the positivist view that language serves only to represent the world as it is. Language also serves a constitutive function. By speaking, we make the world what it is. Nevertheless, in making the world, we do not just make it up. Constructivism takes the linguistic turn but only so far (Onuf, 1989:78-94; Shapiro, 1981, was particularly helpful as my guide into the turn). Nevertheless, constructivism as presented is not post-modern because it does not challenge the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of meaningful knowledge about the world we live in. Constructivism treats such knowledge as if it were independent of the language that we use to represent the world, but only provisionally so. As for method, constructivism is eclectic. Ontological openness warrants methodological diversity. The constructivist is a bricoleurone who makes what is needed out of available materials (Lvi-Strauss, 1966:16-22 inspired my use of this term). All such materials are necessarily social, the result of continuous bricolage: worldmaking is bricolage. Three premises structure my systematic rendition of constructivism in World of Our Making. a) Society is what it does. Any coherent set of social relations (including international relations) is also, and always, a process in which agents and their worlds constitute each other. Co-constitution accounts for pervasive change and the appearance of constancy in social relations. b) Speech and its derivatives (rules, policies) are the media of social construction. People become agents by living in a world of language. They depend on language to express their wishes, to translate their wishes into goals, and finally to act on their goals. Performative speech is the basis of, and template for, normative conduct. Social construction is always normative. c) As media, rules transform available materials into resources, eventuating in asymmetric opportunities for control and the asymmetric distribution of benefits. This is rule, and rule is to be found in every societyincluding international society. Not coincidentally, 1989 is the same year that Friedrich Kratochwils important book on Rules, Norms and Decisions appeared. Though widely cited as constructivisms foundational texts, neither his book nor mine has had a great deal of substantive impact. Indeed neither has had the impact of two papers (Wendt, 1987, Dessler, 1989) that also deserve to considered foundational. In an account of what I hope to show has been a strange career for constructivism, it is entirely relevant to ask why this should have been so. Both Kratochwils book and mine are technically demanding as I have acknowledged in my own case; see Kublkov et al., 1998:20). As for whether they are needlessly so, let me point out first that both books take most readers into unfamiliar worlds. Adjusting to the unfamiliar always takes work. Both of us engage in a great deal of conceptual clarification, thereby calling on readers to do their share, so to speak, by reading closely. World

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of Our Making adds to the cost of careful reading, though very little in my opinion, by asking readers to supply some of the relevant connections to the worlds of international relations. After all, these are familiar worlds for most readers, and connections will come readily to mind. Close, often critical reading of diverse texts is the method that I used in the first place to propound my version of constructivism. This method yielded a large number of assertions whose source readers will recognize even after I reformulated and assembled them systematically. Pedigrees matter, especially to scholars. For other, less demanding readers, I recently outlined constructivisms essential propositions with no reference whatsoever to anyone elses work (Onuf, 1998b). Unlike World of Our Making, this unadorned but systematic exposition is, I believe, easy to read. Whether its systematic arrangement discourages just the sort of bricolage that I engaged in myself, and that social construction always involves, remains to be seen. Here I might note that Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplans Power and Society (1950) provided me with an explicit model for all of my systematizing efforts. However much I continue to find this magnificent book suitable for selective appropriation, others seem not to, for it is long out of print and rarely cited. There are (at least) two other reasons why World of Our Making failed to have a greater impact than it did. In the first place, its emphasis on the connection between rules and rule disturbs liberals. I define rule as a condition in which some people use rules, which are never neutral in content, to control the conduct of others. The condition of rule always confers advantages on those who exercise it. International relations has rules, as any liberal would agree. Few liberals would further agree with me that these rules can only be understood as resulting in a condition of rule, whether or not we choose to call it this. Instead, liberals imagine that rules need do no more than establish the conditions of agency. Anarchyrule by no-oneis the presumptive result. If anarchy confers advantages on particular agents, it does not do so with the consistency that the concept of rule suggests. Most students of international relations, including realists, hold this view, which makes them liberals by my reckoning. It also makes them wrong. Insofar as these same students think that international relations are endemically anarchic, and distinctively so, then they are doubly wrong. Second, World of Our Making starts with the claim that International Relations is a field lacking a distinctive subject. Rather more implicitly, Kratochwil made the same claim. Any such claim is deeply threatening to those who have made their careers on the premise of distinctiveness. This quest for distinctivenessan elusive quest for a general theory of international relations (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1988)is indeed one way to write the fields history. As a field, International Relations is no less a world because it lacks a distinctive subject to validate its claim to autonomy. This world exists because we, who are its agents, say it does, and because observers by and large defer to what we say about ourselves. Changing Worlds Long centered in the United States, the field of International Relations has experienced a number of changes necessarily related to changes in the world of events, not to mention other worlds of scholarship. I have already commented on the declining vitality of positivist social science. By the 1980s, rationalist theory, not positivist science, dominated the field. This tendency toward formalization culminated in the twinning of neorealism and neoliberalism (Baldwin, 1993). If the twins stood astride the field, around the margins there had assembled a ragtag crowd of dissidents. As the Cold War ended, the twins had almost nothing to say about the scale of change (see Kegley and Raymond, 1994; Lebow and Risse-Kappen, 1995, for useful discussions). National identity emerged as a large issue of interest. However loosely conceived, social construction offered an explanation for the formation of identities. It is in this context that Alexander Wendt (1992) popularized the term constructivism. Suggesting that the basic sociological issue of identity- and interest-formation gives constructivism its identity, he deliberately

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dissociated himself from recent epistemological debates (p. 393). With dissidents sent to the sidelines, many young scholars saw the way open for contextually enriched, normatively aware scholarship. Though described as constructivist, much of this work is reminiscent of the liberal institutionalist scholarship that had fallen out of favor decades before. Wendts turn away from philosophical issues turned out to be a mixed blessing. As the field gained from an expanded agenda, constructivism lost what should have been its most distinctive features. Any concern with language was left to the dissidents; as a derivative of performative speech, rules ceased to matter; without rules as media of social construction, the co-constitution of agents and structures became an airy abstraction, needlessly subject to just the sort of debate that Wendt seems to have had enough of. Ironically, Wendt holds some of the responsibility for making the agent-structure debate so confused and pointless that most scholars (I among them) will have nothing to do with the subject (see Gould, 1998, for the whole, ugly story). In due course well-established scholars began to identify themselves as constructivists. Peter Katzenstein became a leading figure as editor of The Culture of National Security (1996). Soon thereafter John Ruggie (1997:11-3) announced that he had been a constructivist all along. Although Ruggie is something of an exception, most of the late-joiners had no interest in the social-theoretical and philosophical backdrop of constructivism as I had presented it in World of Our Making. In keeping with Wendts sociological inclinations (1992:393), the new constructivists drew on the new institutionalism in sociology for inspiration (see Finnemore, 1996a for an overview). Routinely positivist and conceptually anemic (see for example Scott, Meyer and associates, 1994:1-112), this literature served mostly to reinforce a deplorable tendency to talk about culture in the vaguest terms imaginable. Constructivism today is still construed as a third way, or middle ground, between positivism and postmodern epistemological radicalism (Adler, 1997:321-3; Checkel, 1998:327). In practice, however, many scholars increasingly treat it as the main alternative to the neo-twins, which, after all, have very little separating them (Ruggie, 1997:9-11 aptly called them both neo-utilitarian). Post-modern scholars must be surprised to find themselves thrown together with constructivists (see Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein, 1996:46, Ruggie, 1997:35, for examples of this practice). If indeed the third debate that Lapid announced in 1989 can now begin (Adler, 1997:348), it is only because so many scholars believe that there are only two ways to proceed. If they are not rational choice theorists, then they must be constructivists. Either way, empirical research will suffice to settle differences. Indicatively, two recent surveys bear the exact same section title: A Constructivist Research Agenda (Adler, 1997:341-7, Hopf, 1998:186-92). The end of the cold war induced another significant change in the scholarly world of international relations. As Marxists declined in influence, many European scholars joined this world, but not without reservations. They resented the longstanding dominance of scholars in the United States, whose predilection for a narrow construction of international relations as a world of states they did not share. Constructivism offered an attractive alternative. While taking off in a number of directions (see for example Fierke and Jrgensen, 2001), European constructivists are generally more sensitive than their counterparts in the United States to the links between language, rules and rule. In this respect, Maja Zehfusss discussion of constructivism (2001) is far better than other surveys and review essays recently published in English (Adler, 1997; Checkel, 1998; Hopf, 1998). As the field globalizes, constructivism is everywhere, perhaps in danger of becoming all things to all scholars, finally suffering the fate of all fads. Symptomatically, talk of constructivism has seeped across the always leaky boundary between International Relations and International Law as a field of study (Slaughter, Tulumello and Wood, 1998). No less symptomatic are the flurry of essays sizing up constructivism (cited in the preceding paragraph), not to mention acknowledgment in general surveys (Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, 1996:162-3; Knutsen, 1997:279-82) and journals of opinion (Walt, 1998:38, 40-1). Perhaps the greatest measure of constructivisms iconic value is the juxtaposition of rationalist approaches and constructivist approaches to organize the monumental special issue of International Organization sizing up its fifty years of publication (Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner, 1998). Yet another major event was the appearance, several months after I was done with this essay, of Wendts long-awaited, ambitious, demanding and undeniably important book (Wendt 1999). My engagement below with some of Wendts recent claims does not take this book into accountthe terms of engagement would not have changed very much had I done so.

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There are signs that constructivism can survive all this attention without slipping into blandness. Feminist and post-colonial studies have managed to do so. Furthermore, there are significant opportunities for reinforcement among the survivors, all of which share a concern for rules in relation to language on the one hand and rule on the other. Indicatively, Elisabeth Prgl (2000) draws on feminist theory, and Lily Ling (forthcoming) on post-colonial theory to do just this. Constructivisms Enduring Strengths In the decade since I introduced the term constructivism, it has come to be used in ways that I had not foreseen and, more to the point, in ways that vitiate what I meant to convey by the term. Notwithstanding constructivisms strange career, I see no need to revise the premises that guided me initially, nor even to change very many of the systematically related features of the text that appeared over a decade ago. If I had been a better salesman, I would have spent the years since extolling constructivism as I continue to understand it. Belatedly, let me offer five reasons why any scholar should seriously consider working within this framework. These are the enduring strengths of constructivism in its strong form. They derive from, and further substantiate, the basic premises of constructivism, as I presented them above. First, the strong version of constructivism fosters a sensitivity to language as doing. It fosters a disposition to use metaphors of work, as against drama (cf. Harr, 1993:148-85, on Social Action as Drama and Work [chapter title]). I do not want to suggest that the metaphorical language of play does not have its uses. Actually, I use this sort of language all the timeany bricoleur would. Nevertheless, there are two reasons why I think that we should prefer the metaphorical language of work. Realists prefer the language of play, most emphatically in reference to war. The deployment of theatrical tropes and the terminological conventions of game theory help constitute a world that realists claim merely to observe, but further claim is distinctiveindeed uniquely set apart from the mundane world of ordinary people and the way they carry on with their lives (also see Fierke, 1998:31-43). Just as theater creates a world of elemental simplicity to which an audience responds with heightened awareness, so too does the realist rhetoric of struggle, violence and fear. I have already indicated why I think that the quest for distinctiveness is a mistake. I would add here that success in this respect has the effect of making the world of international relations distinctively terrifying but, paradoxically, a further step removed from the immediate world of experience that we routinely call reality. I might also note that the post-modern penchant for play, spectacle and narcissismfor theatrical posturingbetrays a deep connection to realism. More precisely, both betray a common heritage in the Romantic impulse of the 19th c. It is just this impulse that neo-realism would banish through the disciplining effects of formal language nevertheless dependent of the metaphors of work. The term structure, which is so conspicuously central to Waltzs refurbishment of realism (1979), illustrates the point (here again see Fierke, 1998:47-50). The language of work and the language of play do have one feature in common. Both convey a sense that human activity is intentional. The language of play emphasizes the role of language (notice the metaphor) in representing the worldin mimicking it. In a complementary way, the language of work, of doing, underestimates the importance of speaking as a tool (again, notice the metaphor) for getting on with the tasks that we set for ourselves. Once we grant that speech is the most powerful tool available to us, then metaphors of work tell us how pervasive social construction is, even in the absence of immediate intention and conscious design. Let me turn to a second strength of constructivism in its strong form. It suggests due attention to process, and thus to social construction as an element in any social process. In turn, social construction points to the work that rules do. By presenting agents with choices, rules affect conduct. Conversely, the pattern of choices affect rules, strengthening those that agents choose to follow and weakening those that they do not. In aggregate, rules perform regulative and constitutive functions because each and every rule simultaneously produces both kinds of effects. This is so whether rules are informalso informal that many scholars call them norms and conventionsor

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highly formalso obviously set apart from other rules that, by convention, we call them law and divide them by function. In the context of international relations, constructivists soon discover that informal rules are ubiquitous but that their properties and effects are infuriatingly difficult to pin down. The constructivist emphasis on rules also validates scholarly attention to the formal rules making up international law and international organizations (cf. Adler, 1997:335, but note Martha Finnemores unconsidered complaint, 1996b:139, that constructivists give international law insufficient attention). Whether regulative or constitutive in intent, these rules affect agents in a variety of ways and through them a variety of rules, formal and informal. As Harvey Starr has reminded me, it is hard to study international law and not become an intuitive constructivist. Furthermore, the constructivist emphasis on rules leads to a consideration of the ways that agents justify their choices and thus to the place of ethics in international relations (Onuf, 1998c). Constructivism in its strong form has a third strength that few self-styled constructivists will recognize as such. Constructivism undermines the liberal tendency to ignore rule (asymmetries of control and privilege) as a constant feature of social relations. If, as Michael Smith suggested to me, constructivism is little more than hardheaded liberalism, then few liberals manage to be hard-headed in the systematic way that constructivism encourages them to be. While I have more to say about the limitations of liberalism below, here I want to make my point about constructivism more affirmatively. Constructivism fosters appreciation of rules that turn raw materials into resources and make rule possible. In the first instance, rules constitute resources by making material conditions generally intelligible. Linking material conditions to human needs and goals is an integral part of this process. Rules also constitute resources by defining the terms of agency. They tell us which agents, under what circumstances, have access to materials that other rules have assigned uses to. Among agents whose goals and circumstances inevitably differ, differential access confers advantages unevenly. For that matter, so does the analytically prior process by which rules make material conditions intelligible, though perhaps more subtly. It is important not to be misled by the fact that rules always give agents choices, along with some indication of the benefit that they may expect to gain from following the rules and the cost that should expect to incur from not doing so. Whatever choices agents make, rules cannot distribute consequences neutrally because of their content, and not because of the way that they work. Finally, rules constitute resources by giving some agents the opportunity to use the materials to which the rules give them access to make and support still other rules that benefit them. For example, agents can use materials at their disposal to influence the choices that other agents make with respect to following rules. Enforcement and deterrence describe this process, which characterizes a familiar form of rule. If resources make rule possible, rules make resources what they are. They also make rule in some form an unavoidable feature of social relations. As a fourth, somewhat related point, constructivism in its strong form holds that material conditions always matter, but they never matter all by themselves. On the one hand, constructivism abjures the vulgar materialism that realists are allegedly prone to. Wendt, for example (1995:73), charged neorealists with a desocialized view of material capabilities. The charge is unfair. In responding to Wendts many charges, John Mearsheimer (1995) simply ignored this one. Ever since Harold and Margaret Sprout (1965) vetted the relevant issues with exceptional thoroughness, few realists construe capabilities in the brute, physical sense that Wendt supposed them to. On the other hand, constructivism is not philosophically idealist. As for Wendts claim that constructivism has an idealist (or idea-ist) view of structure (Wendt, 1995: 73), I concur with this view only because I believe that structures are nothing more than observers descriptions of the stable patterns that rules and practices exhibit in any world (Onuf, 1998b:61-2). As soon as agents act on these descriptions (which may indeed stem from their own observations), structures enter the world, so to speakthey enter into the process of social construction. The process itself has the effect of institutionalizing structures, including the terms of agency. Any world, and every institution, is always and necessarily dependent on socially mediated material conditions.

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Wendt (1995:73) has affirmed that material conditions are necessarily social, but not the converse. As a consequence, capabilities interest him less than structures of shared knowledge (p. 73). Such a view ends up reducing the social world to mental states, and social construction to the diffusion of ideas. Identity becomes the main preoccupation of agents, as if they had nothing else to do. Norms are everywhere, but they seem to do very little besides granting agents their identity. This sort of idealism is a perennial tendency for progressive liberals. It is also a particularly striking feature of the limp constructivism of recent fashion (Katzenstein, 1996, is chocked with examples.) No term illustrates this tendency more graphically than norm (also see Onuf, 1998c). Taken as more or less synonymous with shared expectations, norms exist outside of minds only incidentally. That norms cannot be shared without taking the form of linguistic statements brings them into the world of artifacts. As such, they are rules, if not directly linked to material circumstances, then linked to other rules that are. Agents use rules in their social relations for a variety of purposes, most, if not all, of them with material implications. In strong form, constructivisms last strength is its methodological openness. Consider Hayward Alkers mastery of diverse methods to advance his wide-ranging concerns, many of which center on the uses of language (Alker, 1996). Constructivism is perfectly consistent with rational choice theorizing, high positivist quantitative analysis, thick description and whatever else most of us actually do in the name of scholarship. Constructivism cannot be reconciled with claims that any particular set of scholarly activities are the only ones accurately representing what happens in the world (any world). Nor can constructivism be reconciled with claims that facts (by which I mean the represented properties of worlds) are homogeneous, knowledge is cumulative, and worlds themselves stand in some sort of Leibnizian or Comtean order. By contrast, bricolage makes do with heterogenous working materials. All such claims mark the divide between positivism and its critics. Stationed on one side or the other, most self-styled constructivists fail to see any way to reach across the divide (cf. Hopf, 1998:181-5 on critical vs. conventional constructivists). The reason, I suspect, is the widely shared belief that ones position on the factvalue distinction compels a choice between incompatible methodological allegiances. Either one accepts the conventional positivist position that facts and values are always separable in principle and that being neutral on matters of value is an important scholarly value. Or one takes the position that facts are always laden with values and that one can never been neutral on matters of value. Constructivism acknowledges the fact-value distinction. From an observers point of view, values are facts. As such, they are identifiable in what agents do (and saying is doing). Once identified, values as facts are capable of being separated from other kinds of facts, at least in principle. Indeed, moral reflection depends on just such an operation. Constructivism also holds that, in practice, values pervade social relations. For any agent, speaking is, as I said above, always normative. Speaking is inextricably related to the achievement of the speakers goals, and thus it is always laden with value. As soon as the observer (or perhaps I should say auditor) talks about, or otherwise acts on, the facts, however ascertained, then that observer becomes an agent, and those facts take on value. While observers and agents may occupy separate worlds (this is a positivist ideal), observers usually participate, as agents, in a world that they stand apart from only provisionally. As a consequence, any distinction that they make between facts and values (as facts of a different kind) is also provisional. It is no less useful for the fact of being provisional. As with people in general, constructivists have it both ways: they have no particular difficulty dealing with values, as facts, when they stand aside to do so, and they know what happens to these facts when they proceed to act upon them. Worlds Apart? Throughout this essay, I have argued that worlds have porous boundaries, that all of us belong to many worlds and constantly traffic among them, and that a world of worlds is subject to constant social construction. It is possible to overstate these claims. Some worlds baffle observers from other worlds. To the extent that they succeed

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in making sense of what they see, what they say makes little or no sense to the agents whose world it is. In turn, observers acquire only the most limited agency for themselves. On occasion, we hear talk of paradigms as if they were incommensurable worlds. If this were so, then most other talk about paradigms misses the point: there is nothing that we as outsiders can say about worlds so utterly different from our own. We might better say that paradigms resemble distant worlds that have little need for each other. They coexist in mutual disregard, their agents caught up in concerns too different to attract each others attention. We might also ask if constructivism (which is to say, my construction of constructivism) is a paradigm in this more limited but still quite general sense. My answer to this questiona negative answercalls for a fuller consideration of the term paradigm. If constructivism is not a paradigm in any general sense of the term, then what indeed is it? I conclude the essay with a partial, and perhaps not very satisfactory answer to this second question. World of Our Making identifies three senses of the term paradigm. One is relevant to the books central premises, another to its systematic properties. Neither draws inspiration from Thomas Kuhns familiar use of the term (Kuhn, 1970; see generally Onuf, 1989: 12-27), which I called puzzle paradigm and which, I believe, is the one in general use. If International Relations could indeed be said to have built a paradigm around a central theoretical puzzlefor example, how is anarchy tenable over any period of time?then indeed we might want to concede the disciplinary claim of distinctiveness. The price of doing so, I might add, is a field of such modest proportions and limited prospects that few among us would be content to work within its confines. Borrowing from Sheldon Wolin (1980), I prefaced paradigm with the modifier operative to capture the sense of the term as it relates to constructivisms central premises. An operative paradigm is an ensemble of rules and practices, which agents speak of in world-defining terms and respond to as normatively compelling. Liberalism and the liberal world are aspects of a single operative paradigm. Liberalism as a way of talking about social relations makes the liberal world a coherent whole. At the same time, the evident coherence of the liberal world confirms the normative force of liberalism. Seen from the outside, the liberal world lacks the coherence that liberals take for granted. Liberals prefer to think that rules in the form of rights minimize the need for rule. I would say instead that an ensemble of rights and duties constitutes an enduring form of rule, often styled the rule of law. Thanks to the rules, some agents benefit beyond their duethey rule without the vestments of rule. Liberal societies exhibit this form of rule to a degree unmatched in other societies. Yet they combine this form of rule with others in complex arrangements that hardly make sense if liberalism is the only way of talking about social relations. For the observer, there is more to the liberal world than its operative paradigm can ever convey. As I remarked earlier, liberals describe the world of international relations in the terms that they know bestliberal termsbecause their liberal beliefs prevent them from seeing the way that rule works. The world of international relations is a world of rules and rule, even if no-one ever claims to rule. No world is ruled by no-one: the very idea of anarchy is a contradiction in terms. Insofar as this world consists of states bound together by rights and duties, it is a liberal society ruled to the benefit of some states over others, despite the apparent absence of rule. Yet the world of international relations is more complex than this. Insofar as it displays features that I identified with functional institutions (the world of services) and status-conscious agents of state (the world of standing and statecraft, other forms of rule coexist, as do other operative paradigms. Agents rule the world of international relations as they rule in every world. They rule with rules that other agents must take into account in their conduct. The paradigm that I see operating wherever there is rule I called political society. Within this paradigm is a place for the operative paradigm that liberals take for granted, not to mention places for other operative paradigms that liberals take little interest in. The world of international relations is a political society in the first instance. Thanks to the operative paradigm that makes it so, it works pretty much as any political society does.

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Most worlds do have porous boundaries, forms of rule blend together, operative paradigms overlap. As observers make some things clearer, they must impose order on what they claim to know. If constructivism is to do its job, it has to be systematic in a way that worlds made by many and diverse agents can never be. Drawing on Robert Merton (1968:64-72)and Talcott Parsons (1978:352-3), I used the modifier codificatory to capture the sense of the term paradigm as it relates to the systematic features of World of Our Making. A codificatory paradigm is a fully worked out system of categories, a world made whole. As a tool, it helps any observer bring order to messy worlds. Comtean positivism, with its ontological levels of irreducible causal relations (Onuf 1998a: ch. 8), offers another such paradigmone that constructivists might see as inhibiting opportunistic bricolage. It was surely a mistake to adopt the term codificatory paradigm, and not just because it sounds pretentiouswhich it does. Dealing with three discrete senses of the term paradigm, two of them unfamiliar, undoubtedly taxed readers ability to keep all the relevant distinctions in mind. My systematic intentions might just as well have been served without invoking the term paradigm in the third sense, and possibly in any sense. This is not to say that I have second thought about the writing a book that does function as a codificatory paradigm, if only for myself and a few other like-minded souls. Constructivism is not a paradigm in the general sense of the term, even if it draws attention to meshed worlds as operative paradigms. Instead, constructivism is a way of studying any world of social relations (Onuf, 1998b:58). My labeling it this way is deliberate, but perhaps unduly vague. Better to call it a framework, as I did earlier in this essay (also see Kublkov et al., 1998:19, and note the subtitle of Lasswell and Kaplan, 1950: A Framework for Political Inquiry). Indeed constructivism offers an inclusive framework for the study of social relations. Notice that this claim suits my metaphorical inclinations, and it tells us broadly what constructivism is in functional termswhat we can use it for. As a framework, constructivism makes it possible for observers to propose any number of theories, or general explanations, for what happens in any world, and it allows observers to fit theories together. Constructivism is not a theory itself (Onuf, 1998a:188-9), although I confess that I may have confused the issue recently by calling it a theoretical stance (Onuf, 1997:7). Few self-proclaimed constructivists seem to be confused; they do not seem to treat constructivism as a theory even if, as bricoleurs, they talk the language of theory. Wendt is an exception. More precisely, Wendt has become an exception in his recent work. Constructivism is a structural theory of international politics: intersubjective structures explain much of what happens in a world of states (Wendt, 1994:385, 1996:48). Early on (1987), Wendt emphasized the co-constitution of agents and structures, not as an explanation, but as a description of how any world works. By the mid-1990s, we find him having abandoned this position (expressly in Wendt, 1996:48-9), evidently on the mistaken belief that this description denies the possibility of explaining anything in general terms. Because co-constitution is a comprehensive description, and constructivism a capacious framework, there is plenty of room for Wendts structural theory. There is room too for any number of other theoriestheories that start with social relations and end up with agents, theories that run in the other direction, theories that start with rules as the media of social construction and run both ways. Wendts commitment to building theory is commendable. If, by calling World of Our Making metatheory (Wendt, 1991), he meant to criticize me for not developing a theory, structural or otherwise, then this sort of criticism misses the mark. Frameworks come first. I put together a large and sturdy framework from the diverse theoretical materials of many disciplines because I thought that International Relations needed one. Insofar as the term meta-theory has become a epithet for self-indulgent epistemological posturing, I am even less inclined to accept it. Let me shift metaphors. Constructivism finds a way between epistemology and methodology by taking the ontological turna turn that opens up the road to theory. References: Adler, Emmanuel (1997) Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics, European Journal of International Relations 3:319-63.

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Alker, Hayward R. (1996) Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashley, Richard K. (1981) Political Realism and Human Interest, International Studies Quarterly 25:204-36. ______ (1984) The Poverty of Neorealism, International Organization 38:225-86. ______ (1987) The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Towards a Critical Theory of International Politics, Alternatives 12:403-34. _______ (1988) Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17:227-62. _______ (1989) Living on Borderlines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War, pp. 259-321. In International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, edited by James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro. Lexington MA: Lexington Books. Ashley, Richard K., and R. B. J. Walker (1990) Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Relations, special issue of International Studies Quarterly 34 (3). Baldwin, David A., ed. (1993) Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Columbia University Press. Checkel, Jeffrey T. (1998) The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory, World Politics 50:324-48. Dessler, David (1989) Whats at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate? International Organization 43:441-474. Dougherty, James E., and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr. (1996) Contending Theories of International Relations: A Comprehensive Survey, 4th ed. New York: Longman. Ferguson, Yale H., and Richard W. Mansbach (1988) The Elusive Quest: Theory and International Politics. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press. Fierke, K. M. (1998) Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigations in Security. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ______ and Knud Erik Jrgensen, eds. (2001) Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation. Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe. Finnemore, Martha (1996a) Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociologys Institutionalism, International Organization 50:325-48. ______ (1996b) National Interests in International Society. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gould, Harry D. (1998) What Is at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate? pp. 79-98. In International Relations in a Constructed World, edited by Vendulka Kublkov, Nicholas Onuf and Paul Kowert. Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe. Habermas, Jrgen (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action,1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.

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______ (1994) Collective Identity Formation and the International State, American Political Science Review 88:384-96. ______ (1995) Constructing International Politics, International Security 20:71-81. ______ (1996) Identity and Structural Change in International Politics, pp. 47-64. In The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, edited by Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner. Wolin, Sheldon (1980) Paradigms and Political Theories, pp. 160-91. In Paradigms and Revolutions, edited by Gary Gutting. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Zehfuss, Maja (2001) Constructivisms in International Relations: Wendt, Onuf, and Kratochwil, pp. 54-75. In Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation, edited by Karin M. Fierke and Knud Erik Jrgensen. Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe.

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Construction Sites
Wayne Sandholtz University of California, Irvine Is there a constructivist research program and, if so, what are its chances for future progress? Hayward Alkers note prodded us to reflect on these and other questions. I have been hoping against hope that someone would come up with convincing, positive answers, because I have not been able to. If a research program is a collective enterprise built around common questions, holding shared standards of progress and generating cumulative knowledge, we do not have one, nor are we likely to any time soon. Does this conclusion mean that constructivism is a fad that will leave no enduring traces in the world of international relations scholarship? Paradoxically, perhaps, the answer is, No. If constructivism has not established a genuine research program, it is not because the concerns, or the practitioners, are fundamentally misguided. On the contrary: constructivism probes questions that will always be at the heart of social inquiry, and its adherents have produced creative, insightful research that expands the pool of human knowledge. The problem lies in the broader field of international relations, and it is (not surprisingly) one of social norms and expectations. Our institutions reward theoretical precociousness. Every IR scholar must (or feels that s/he must) make a theoretical contribution. As a result, the dominant incentives are to expose the flaws in existing theories and to propose something better. Collaborative research is difficult enough (the herding cats problem), but building a research program involving more than a handful of scholars seems out of the question (see Holsti 1985; Ferguson and Mansbach 1988). So, we have many flavors of constructivism, with diverse questions, concepts, and methods. A growing number of researchers find persuasive the fundamental constructivist insight, that our worlds are at least as much social as they are material. And clearly, scholars are deploying various constructivist ideas and tools to ask fruitful questions about the world and find illuminating answers. Perhaps, then, we should be more conscious of the virtues of pragmatism: scholars use the tools that help them to solve the intellectual problems at hand. Constructivism will generate progress in this more diffuse, though pragmatic, sense because it zeroes in on what has always been the core of social science, namely, the ways in which people act in a collective world of which they are both the creature and the creator. Unlike other broad perspectives, constructivism recognizes that our capacity to navigate, and act upon, the physical and social worlds emerges out of collectively held understandings and rules. In this sense, constructivism addresses the questions that have been vital at least since Weber and Durkheim, if not Aristotle. Our convenors also asked that we reflect on the question of what is to be done, where constructivist work might move so as to achieve progress. Given what I have said about fragmentation and herding cats, any attempt to tell everybody else what we should be doing would be fruitless and pretentious. Instead, I will outline several areas of inquiry that I see as both fundamental to constructivism and liable to offer decent payoffs in the form of expanded understanding of our worlds. I start with the foundations laid out by Nick Onuf. I see the major task for rulecentered constructivism as converting highly abstract social theories into mid-range theories of international relations that can guide systematic empirical research. The thoughts that follow are therefore not a work plan for constructivists, but rather a sketch of the kind of work I expect to be doing over the next few years. The foundations are, briefly stated: 1. Rules are central, because they link agents and social structures. Rules both establish agency, enabling and constraining action, and define institutions they are thus the means of mutual constitution. 2. Rules are in constant flux. Most of what actors do and say has an effect on the relevant rules, whether to consolidate or erode them (Onuf 1994). 3. Rules create the condition of rule, which is another way of saying that rules and power are inextricably intertwined. Given these foundations, I explore three areas in which constructivism could build: the dynamics of rule change, the connection between rules and rationality, and the relationship of rules to power.

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Dynamics of rule change If rules are the basic building blocks of all social structures, including international relations, then explaining rule change is crucial to explaining social change. Indeed, change in international society means change in the rules that constitute actors and roles and govern their interactions. Shifts in basic rules, like sovereignty rules, imply changes in the nature of international society. IR scholars have recognized the importance of changing norms, and tracked the emergence of new norms, including norms that abolished the slave trade, promoted decolonization, sanctioned apartheid, justified humanitarian intervention, created weapons taboos, and so on. Others have described what I would call the political mechanics of international norm change, focusing on transnational activist networks, norm cascades and spirals, and domestic adaptation to transnational norms (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse and Sikkink 1999; Brysk 2000). What is still lacking is a coherent account of why rules evolve. Why do some normative claims emerge and why do they prevail over alternatives? The transnational models of norm change are really based on pluralist politics: governments respond to mobilized political pressures. Why, in the first place, do the claims of norm entrepreneurs win over followers and allies? One way to begin is to recognize that norm entrepreneurs and activist networks are participants in a broader process of normative evolution. If rules are in constant flux, why is that, and how does the process work? I suggest that there is an endogenous dynamic of rule change. That is, rule systems contain the seeds of change. Even if one could, as a thought experiment, hold power and technology constant, rule change would be constant and ubiquitous. Rule change occurs in a process that can be depicted as an endlessly repeating cycle linking rules to actions, discourses (argumentation), and change. The cycle begins with the constellation of existing rules, which provides the normative structure within which actors decide what to do and evaluate the behavior of others. Because rules cannot cover every contingency, and because conflicts among rules are inevitable (Hart 1994), actions regularly trigger disputes. The arguments are about which norm(s) apply, and what the norms require or permit. The dominant form of argumentation is by analogy: actors assert analogies between the act in question and some set of prior cases. When the analogy is persuasive, other actors will agree that the current dispute should fall under the same norms that covered the earlier (analogized) cases. But the argument does not end there, for it remains to be determined what the norms require in the present instance. Again, players argue by analogy with similar cases, in order to establish how the rules should apply to the case in question (if there are mitigating factors, if the case qualifies as an exception, and so on). The outcome of such discourses is always to change the norms under dispute. If everybody agrees that the norms apply without qualification, then the norms have been strengthened and the scope of their application clarified. If the relevant actors agree that the disputed act qualifies as a justified exception to the norms, then the scope of their application has also been clarified (the proliferation of exceptions, of course, can weaken a rule, which is also a norm change). If the participants in the discourse fail to reach consensus, then that also modifies the norms in question, leaving their status weakened or ambiguous. Disagreements over the meaning of the rules, and over the justifiability of specific acts, can continue unresolved over long periods of time. By the same token, when broad agreement exists, governments can fairly quickly formalize a rule (against slavery, or piracy, for instance) by signing and ratifying a convention. The crucial point, however, is that the cycle of normative change has completed a turn. In a given normative structure, actions trigger disputes. Argument ensues, grounded in analogies with previous experience. The outcomes of these discourses modify the rules, whether by making them stronger or weaker, clearer or more ambiguous. The cycle returns to its starting point, the normative structure, but the normative structure has changed. The altered norms establish the context for subsequent actions, disputes, and discourses. A few insights derived from this conception should resonate with various strands of constructivist research. First, arguments (or discourses) are crucial, because they produce the varying degrees of consensus and disagreement that modify the rules. We have a lot of work to do to understand the workings of analogical argumentation, and the bases of persuasion. Second, we find that historical connectedness is inescapable. The raw materials of the normative entrepreneur, or bricoleur, are the ideas, experiences, and norm discourses of the past.

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Analogical argument, the primary mode of persuasion where rules are concerned, is by definition referential to history. Rules and rationality The foregoing discussion has already raised the issue of rationality, in the assertion that the dominant mode of rationality in discourses about rules is analogical. Arguments arise at the point where (necessarily) general rules meet the particularity of experience. Though in principle some such disputes can be resolved by strict logical deduction, specific cases routinely and inevitably cross the boundary of what can be so determined: the rules are unclear, the proper classification of the facts ambiguous, and so on (MacCormick 1978). Argument by analogy takes over. The task of disputants is to persuade that the case at hand resembles (or does not) past instances in which the rules were applied in particular ways. All of us routinely engage such arguments of fit, in disputes that arise in families, sports, workplace, neighborhoods, and churches not to mention the courts. The committed rationalist will respond that all decision-making is based on a utility-based rationality, in which one calculates the consequences of alternatives and maximizes expected payoffs. People favor the application of the rules that will make them better off. Normative justifications (and thus the choice of analogies) are strictly self-serving window dressing. In order to demonstrate that the realm of normative reasoning and choice is at least partially autonomous and thus amenable to a distinct analytical approach, let us accept as a starting point the fully selfish, rational maximizer. We accept, only for the sake of argument, that the words and actions of this maximizer derive solely from calculations of advantage (subjectively defined). When confronted with a dispute over the application of rules, the maximizer will argue for the application of whichever rules justify her utilitydriven acts. At this point we note something curious. The utility maximizer, in order to avoid costs, is motivated to win the dispute. In order to win, she must offer the most persuasive arguments and analogies. But the determination of which arguments are likely to prevail has nothing to do with utility calculations, and everything to do with social standards of fit, relevance, and interpretation. At this moment, the maximizer has entered the world of normative discourse and reasoning by analogy. Naturally she wants the greatest possible payoff, but her success depends on her skill in understanding the groups historically evolved standards of similarity and precedent, and offering persuasive analogies to past cases and decisions. In short, though driven ultimately by selfish, utility-based objectives, the maximizer is compelled to operate within a normative rationality, based on shared, historically contingent standards of precedent and fit. Achieving the greatest payoff means mounting the most convincing interpretation of the rules and their past applications. And that effort is not subject to internal utility calculations, but rather to external norms and understandings. People are rational, in both the utility sense and the normative sense. I see the two modes of rationality not as mutually exclusive but rather as complementary; indeed, utility maximization requires normative rationality, or the ability to understand and manipulate arguments based on analogy and fit. I further assume that people constantly and routinely reason about both utility and norms, and that both kinds of considerations affect their choices. Though utility may trump norms in some cases, in others norms will outweigh immediate utility. Actors may even develop complex ways of balancing norms and utility. What we need is a better understanding of norm rationality, and the ways in which it interacts with utility calculations. Rules and power International actors deploy both arguments and material resources to bring others to their view. At one extreme, actors with sufficient power resources can impose their preferred solutions on other actors, though they will simultaneously offer arguments designed to show that their choices are also normatively justified. But unipolar moments are exceptionally rare, and never absolute. Britain did not dictate the terms of the 19th-century Pax Britannica, it negotiated those rules with the continental European powers (McKeown 1986). Similarly, the United States has found that its status as sole superpower in the post-Cold War era by no means allows it to impose its preferences on the rest of the world. Pluralism, not unipolar hegemony, seems to be the usual condition of

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international relations. Under pluralism, no single actor can impose a solution, hence normative arguments about what course of action is justified are crucial in establishing consensus among multiple interested parties. The regular deployment of material resources, whether as incentive or coercion, underlies the persistent image of international relations as structured fundamentally by relations of power. The neo-realist tradition denies that norms and suasion play any independent role in international politics; actors offer arguments and invoke norms, but only as decoration for what they would have done in any case. Material structures are the only ones that count. Thus the powerful do what they will and the weak accept what they must. Of course powerful actors have a disproportionate influence on international rules and outcomes. They seek to establish international rules that favor their perceived interests and maintain their advantages. Thus, in Onufs terms, rules do create rule (Onuf 1989). But even actors with the greatest material resources do not operate outside of normative structures. The dynamic of normative evolution is not simply reducible to the exercise of power. In other words, power and norms are both at work in international relations, and they interact in ways that are not determined by one or the other. Four related arguments support this assertion. First, the range of disputes that can be settled by the unilateral application of material power or coercion is restricted and probably shrinking. Indeed, military force (the ultimate currency in realist and neo-realist approaches) is simply not a factor in the vast majority of disputes. Indeed, the frequency of wars among great powers has been in secular decline, and essentially non-existent since World War II. Thus the great powers can impose armed faits accomplis in a small set of instances, and these (in practice) only vis--vis weak or collapsed states. Second, in the far more common situations where military force is not an option, the great powers operate within a set of institutions (rules) most of which they did not devise but rather inherited. They must therefore employ persuasion, and for that they must assert their claims in terms of existing normative frames. Third, to the extent that powerful actors internalize rules, their values, goals, and choices are shaped from within by normative structures that have been domesticated. When international rules alter the terms of domestic policy debates, get incorporated into domestic legislation, affect the decisions of domestic judges, and become integrated in the organizational cultures and routines of domestic bureaucracies, then international rules have been absorbed into a countrys own practices and institutions (Cortell and Davis 1996; Koh 1998; Cortell and Davis 2000). Fourth, the development of international rule structures (e.g., rights) can offer transnational actors, and a states own subjects, new possibilities for pursuing their political interests. Much of the action in modern international law concerns how international norms are noticed, absorbed, and used politically within the legal frameworks of states and supranational bodies, like the European Court of Justice. Citizens, groups, firms, NGOs, and governmental officials may then be led to alter their own cognitive schema, values, and decision-making in light of such processes - e.g., how such norms are interpreted and applied by judges and other officials operating at home, abroad, and at the international level. Finally, a real breakthrough for constructivists would be to offer empirical theories and evidence as to how rules convert raw physical materials into resources for actors. This is Onufs argument that even material power is socially constructed, to the advantage of some and not others. How do rules create resources? Control over people, money, and arms is clearly intensely rule governed. Rules define who can deploy financial and coercive resources, and under what circumstances. In some systems of governance, the constitutional rules deliberately create different kinds of power resources and allocate them to distinct groups of actors, so that they can control and check each other. Constructivists could pay much closer attention to this interplay of rules and power, showing how specific rules create specific kinds of power resources for identifiable actors. By so doing, we could take the wind out of critics who dismiss constructivism for ignoring the exercise and effects of material power. An ending The core concepts in this version of constructivism actors, rules, institutions supply the essential building blocks for developing empirical theories of international relations and testing them with evidence and data. Rule-centered constructivism offers points of entry into the problems that are, and will likely remain, at the core of social inquiry: change, rationality, and power.

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References: Brysk, Alison (2000). From Tribal Village to Global Village: International Relations and Indian Rights in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cortell, Andrew and James Davis (1996). "How Do International Institutions Matter? The Domestic Impact of International Rules and Norms." International Studies Quarterly 40: 451-78. Cortell, Andrew P. and James W. Davis, Jr. (2000). "Understanding the Domestic Impact of International Norms: A Research Agenda." International Studies Review 2(1): 65-87. Ferguson, Yale H. and Richard W. Mansbach (1988). The Elusive Quest: Theory and International Politics. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Hart, H. L. A. (1994). The Concept of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holsti, K. J. (1985). The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory. Boston: Allen & Unwin. Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink (1998). Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Koh, Harold Hongju (1998). "The 1998 Frankel Lecture: Bringing International Law Home." Houston Law Review 35(3): 623-81. MacCormick, Neil (1978). Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McKeown, Timothy J. (1986). The Limitations of Structural Theories Of Commercial Policy. International Organization 40(1): 43-64. Onuf, Nicholas (1994). "The Constitution of International Society." European Journal of International Law 5: 1-19. Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood (1989). World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Risse, Thomas and Kathryn Sikkink (1999). "The Socialization of Human Rights into Domestic Practices: Introduction." In The Power of Principles: International Human Rights Norms and Domestic Change, edited by T. Risse, S. C. Ropp and K. Sikkink. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Worlds, Quasi-Worlds, and Imposed Worlds: Problems Raised by "Social Historical Construction"
Cecelia Lynch University of California, Irvine How do we evaluate a catch-all framework that exists largely because of important questions about rule, language, and change, and that has become weedy and overgrown largely because of the discipline's need to lump together under a label what it doesn't understand or has only recently admitted into the canon of acceptable research? I am one of those who has been labelled a constructivist by anonymous reviewers at presses and journals; I have provisionally accepted the label but am wary of many attempts to circumscribe it, primarily for subversive reasons. Yet I sympathize with certain attempts to figure out just what constructivism "is," especially those of graduate students who are drawn to the basic assumption of social construction but don't know how to employ that assumption in their research. I have been asked to address "social historical construction," and wish to do so by indicating first, the points Nick Onuf makes about constructivism that are essential to my work; second, some of the major questions that arise for "social history" in terms of how we conceptualize and push the issues both Nick and Hayward raise; third, given these questions and issues, the direction in which I would prefer to see constructivism go; and fourth, the reasons why I think that neither I, nor anybody else, can force "it" to go in a single direction at this historical time in our disciplinary world. In the end, a degree of continued amorphousness is vastly preferable to a premature closure of constructivism in the interests of paradigm coherence or "progress." This is because the unsettling that has occurred in IR over the past fifteen or so years has allowed a broader array of questions to be explored in the field, and also because much interesting work is currently being done under the loose rubrique of constructivism that might otherwise be squeezed out. More immediately, we probably cannot belabor Sept. 11 or its antecedents and aftermath enough, but suffice it to say here that we are better off with than without something even loosely called "constructivism" to assess the ongoing construction of threats, the reification of identities, the ethics of manufacturing "good" versus "evil," the conflict between power and contestations of it, and the emotive outpouring of public anguish that is currently being channeled in a number of directions, or to put it differently, that is currently ripe for abetting the construction of different types of alterity, threat, and response. Central Characteristics: I wish to highlight and discuss three of Onuf's central points about constructivism. First, Onuf argues that constructivism is an ontological stance that privileges co-constitution, and that resulting questions must be analyzed through language that is mediated through rules. I agree with all of this, though in the next section of this paper I address several significant differences in substantive emphasis that can logically result. Second, constructivism focuses on the connection between rules and "rule," or the "asymmetries of control and privilege" (p. 11), which in turn undermines the liberal faith that the "right" rules can solve all of our problems. This attention to power is, I believe, essential, but often not explicit in constructivist work. Third, Onuf reminds us that all politics as well as all political analysis is normative, and that the "worlds" we observe and attempt to promote are symbiotically related to what we value. Liberalism, for example, is a paradigm because it promotes a particular world; constructivism is rather a framework that can be deployed through the lenses of a number of worlds. I prefer to employ the philosophical term "hermeneutical circle" to indicate the issues/problems that result from our inability to exit from normative worlds, and again, will briefly probe some of the issues that arise (and on which I believe Onuf ultimately treads too lightly) in the next section. Methods of Analyzing History and Society: While I agree with all of these essential features of constructivism, I argue that their practice calls into question other features that in my view are problematic for either pragmatic or philosophical reasons. Specifically, it is extremely difficult to excise particular types of practitioners out of constructivism on the grounds that they are either too weak or too postmodern. This is not to say that "empirical research will suffice to settle differences." In

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fact, substantive application of constructivist premises often muddies the differences in ways that call into question alleged boundaries. Constructivists can engage, for example, the very concept of "rule" in a number of different ways. To name two, we can study the way in which a variety of agents challenge the mode as well as the meaning of rule (Adler and Barnett 1998; Klotz 1995; Finnemore 1996; Keck and Sikkink 1998), or critique the power relations inherent in its discursive reproduction and dissemination (e.g. Grovogui 1996; Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson, and Duvall, 1999; Doty 1996). The first can easily fit under the rubrique of liberalism while the latter inevitably provides a philosophical counter to it, expanding the intellectual space occupied by constructivism and providing a basis for ethical debate. The second, however, also can lead to an underemphasis on the very forms of agency that can challenge the liberal (or any other) paradigm. Constructivists might also study the relationship between rules and rule, or the asymmetries of power, in a variety of ways. In addition to employing different methods (Alker 1996), constructivists might, for example, analyze the macrohistorical differences in rule between the medieval and modern periods (Ruggie 1986) or expose in more detail the ways in which the political economy of high medievalism might have shifted in different directions were in not for the "moral authority" of the Church (Hall 1999). We can focus on the construction of interests by the powerful (Ruggie 1983; Weldes 2000) or put our analytical energies into highlighting the contestation of dominant forms of power by the marginalized (Enloe 1990; Brysk 2000; Lynch 1999). We can also explore identity in a number of ways, focusing on relatively stable relationships between identities and interests or "worldviews" (Kier 1997; Gusterson 1996; Doty 1996) or adopt a more fluid, contingent conception of the relationship between identity and power (Campbell 1998; Neumann 1999). Here I purposely juxtapose authors of differing epistemological and methodological persuasions in order to highlight the problem of determining "who is in and who is out" of the constructivist framework. In other words, there are many ways to conceptualize constructivist premises in substantive work. One of the most pressing problems I believe all social science researchers should address but that many evade concerns the hermeneutical circle, or the fact that we cannot exit from our worlds to engage in objective analysis. Those of us engaged in historical research, for example, use documents as evidence for our narratives. Yet documents themselves are narratives. We recognize that they are repositories of bias, yet we approach them from our own biases. This raises normative and ethical questions, as Onuf points out. Any adoption of worlds or immersion into evidence thus becomes essentially an interpretive enterprise. And for me, the most persuasive forms of interpretation at least attempt to acknowledge their ethical biases. I, too, am eager to promote methodological pluralism, but if the premise of social construction incurs ethical responsibility for the observer/researcher as well as the policymaker, then with what degree of confidence can we assert that all methods are equally amenable to the constructivist enterprise? It is not a given method per se but rather its naturalization as either "science" or "truth" that is the problem here. Yet we need to recognize that because of the avoidance by many of the interpretive nature of social science research and the ethical responsibilities it involves, it becomes difficult in practice to harmonize the assertion that "constructivism is perfectly consistent with" a variety of "high positivist" methods and the argument that constructivism "cannot be reconciled with claims that facts ... are homogeneous, knowledge is cumulative, and worlds themselves stand in some sort of Leibnizian or Comtean order" (Onuf, p. 13). Where do we go from here? Where I would prefer to go differs somewhat, I think, from where we are in fact going. I would prefer that constructivists as a collectivity take more seriously than heretofore the substantive questions involved in describing and analyzing constitutive processes, unequal power relations, and ethical responsibility. And as part of this agenda, I would very much prefer that constructivists drop attempts to excise out postmodern approaches from the fold (Adler 1997; Checkel 1997) and instead acknowledge that our similarities in focus, including the very conception of the social construction of reality and the recognition of the inherent implication of the ethics of the analyst in any research program, make any boundary at best extremely fuzzy. Moreover, it has largely been those who employ postmodern sources who have brought questions of power asymmetries to the forefront of our analyses. Here we need to remind ourselves that for purposes of labelling, postmodern scholars do not need constructivism, since they already have an appellation. But constructivism, I think, does need what I consider to be much of the

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focus of postmodern analysis; i.e., the critique of dominant power relations and the constant willingness to critique any replacement as engendering its own forms of domination and oppression. I would also prefer that constructivism mesh more explicitly with gender and race analysis, and bring to the forefront their implications for power and ethics. Following the discussion held in this room last spring at a workshop on gender and international relations, we should also acknowledge more explicitly the role of feminist theory as both a precursor to and inspiration for much constructivist work (Ackerly and True 2001; Tickner 1996; Locher and Prugl 2001). Where Constructivism Is Going: I do not believe, however, that either my preferences or those of others here will exclusively prevail in the foreseeable future. This is in part because of the well-known imposition of boundaries by the world of traditional IR on others, and in part because we start from different places and appeal to different literatures (critical, postmodern, feminist), and disciplines (sociological, anthropological, linguistic, legal, historical, theological) in our research. My own work is somewhat eclectic, combining social theory, political philosophy, history, and more recently religion. My preferences for the future of constructivism are based in part on my own research agenda and in part on what I see that agenda is having lacked in the past (and hence what I think I need to do more of in the future). However, I want to see a place not only for the questions I have outlined but also many others. My own stake, then, is to make sure that good and interesting work that pushes a variety of substantive and philosophical issues gets done, appreciated, and validated and this includes some of the work that both Onuf and I would probably not call constructivist for philosophical reasons if we had our druthers. In the end, we cannot fully escape our reliance on "paradigms," either in our own individual worlds or in the world of IR. But we can engage in constant critiques of our own as well as each other's worlds. Thus, the major task of constructivists right now is to maintain openness in the face of the inexorable disciplinary drive to achieve closure.

References: Ackerly, Brooke and Jacqui True (2001). "Transnational Justice: the Contribution of Feminism to Critical International Relations Theory." Paper presented at the University of Southern California. Adler, Emanuel (1997). "Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics," European Journal of International Relations, 3 (3), September, pp. 319-63. Adler, Emanuel and Michael Barnett (1998). Security Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press. Alker, Hayward R. (196). Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brysk, Alison (2000). From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and international relations in Latin America. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Campbell, David (1998). National Deconstruction: violence, identity, and justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Checkel, Jeffry T (1997). "International Norms and Domestic Politics: Bridging the Rationalist-Constructivist Divide," European Journal of International Relations 3(4), December 473-95. Doty, Roxanne (1996). Imperial Encounters: The politics of representation in North-South relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Enloe, Cynthia (1990). Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Finnemore, Martha (1996). National Interests in International Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grovogui, Siba N'Zatioula (1996). Sovereigns, Quasi-sovereigns, and Africans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gusterson, Hugh (1996). Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Hall, Rodney Bruce (1997). "Moral Authority as a Power Resource," International Organization 51 (4), Autumn, pp. 591-622. Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink (1998). Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kier, Elizabeth (1997).Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klotz, Audie (1995). Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Klotz, Audie and Cecelia Lynch (forthcoming). Constructing World Politics: Strategies for Research. Kratochwil, Friedrich (1989). Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the conditions of practical and legal reasoning in international relations and domestic affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locher, Birgit, and Elisabeth Pr_gl (2001). "Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart or Sharing the Middle Ground?," International Studies Quarterly 45 (1). Lynch, Cecelia (1999). Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Neumann, Iver B. (1999). Uses of the Other: 'The East in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Onuf, Nicholas (2002). "The Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations," forthcoming in Donald J. Puchala, ed., Visions of International Relations. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Ruggie, John (1983). "International Regimes, Transaction Costs, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," International Organization. Ruggie, John (1986). "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (1996). "Identity in International Relations Theory: Feminist Perspectives," in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, eds. (1999). Cultures of Insecurity: states, communities, and the production of danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Perversity and Alacrity in International Affairs

Daniel C. Lynch School of International Relations University of Southern California

I write not as an international relations theorist but instead as someone inspired by constructivism to rethink traditional explanations of political change in Asia. I began my current project with a simple and, upon reflection, not very interesting question: What is the relationship among global communication, social pluralism, and democratization (in the sense of becoming politically polyarchic)? Three years and a lot of travel, reading, and thinking later, my questions have changed. Now I ask: Why are some states perverse and others alacritous in adapting to one very important norm at the deep-structure level of international society: the expectation that advanced or civilized states will democratize?1 By perverse, I mean exactly what the dictionary says: willfully determined not to do what is expected or desired; contrary. 2 Obviously the term is pejorative, but a pejorative term is appropriate given the sanctions meted out to perverse states in international society. In contrast, alacritous states are cheerfully ready, eager, and willing to embrace international norms. 3 One bedrock norm of international society today is the expectation that states will organize themselves democratically. We are living through the third wave of democratization, as we all know very well. 4 The more states (actually, state-society units, or countries) that join this wave, the greater the pressure on holdouts. The wave is not necessarily a bad thing, of coursedespite the fact that it is trendy. The wave is in many respects very good, even though democratic systems do have serious flaws (such as a bias against fundamental change). My concern is not to comment on the normative status of the wave, but rather to ask why some states ardently embrace democratization while other states furiously resist itfor reasons beyond the obvious implications for office holders power. Surely the costs of perversity are high, as are the costs of what frequently is blind exuberance. To answer these questions, I am comparing China and Burma with Taiwan and Thailand. The Chinese and Burmese states are, of course, highly authoritarian (if not always effective), while those of Taiwan and Thailand are democratic, by any reasonable assessment. More to the point, the Chinese and Burmese states actively resist democratization in the face of strong international criticism while those of Taiwan and Thailand enthusiastically embrace itdespite democracys association with corruption and other negative social phenomena. Culturally, China is in many ways similar to Taiwan while Burma is in many ways similar to Thailand. Both pairs (ChinaTaiwan, Burma-Thailand) have interlinked histories. Why, then, the divergent orientations to international societal norms?

The research is rooted in the tradition of John Meyer, as exemplified in Meyer, "The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State," in Albert Bergesen, ed., Studies of the Modern World-System (New York and London: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 109-37; and Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, in International Organization 52(4), Autumn 1998, pp. 887-917. On the other hand, it is also rooted in the tradition of Peter Katzenstein, especially as developed in Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
2

Random House Websters College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 1009. Ibid. p. 31.

The phrase was coined by none other than Samuel P. Huntington, in The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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There surely are numerous variables that could explain why China and Burma are not democratic while Taiwan and Thailand are. The cultures and histories within each pair are obviously not identical. Taiwan and Thailand are much more developed economically. Their populations enjoy much higher rates of literacy. But the question is not why two of these states are democratic and two are authoritarian. The question is why two are perverse vis--vis international norms and expectations while two are alacritous. I realize that to call China and Burma perverse and Taiwan and Thailand alacritous is to essentialize. They can only be perverse or alacritous in relation to a set of international norms that itself is not inherently any thing, let alone necessarily anything that should inherently be a point of reference. But it does not matter very much in this context. China and Burma appear perverse within international society and they know they appear perverse, yet they persist in taking actions that result in having the label perverse foisted upon them (albeit usually in different language). They might do things differently, and not have to pay the costs of perversity. Meanwhile, Taiwan and Thailand know that they are perceived as alacritous and they play their part in constructing their identities in this way even though other ways would be possible. It therefore seems reasonable to ask: why? The most straightforward answers could be derived from neorealism and neoliberalism. A neorealist might explain that Taiwan and Thailand are democratic today as a result of their long association with United States foreign policy during the Cold War. At that time, the US promoted developmental autocracy in those countries to make them bulwarks against international communism. When US foreign policy changed in the 1980s and began more vigorously to promote democracy abroad, Taiwan and Thailand changed, because they had long been accustomed to organizing their political systems in ways that served the goals of US foreign policy.5 Refusing to change would have meant reduced US support in the face of threats from China (Taiwan) and Vietnam and Burma (Thailand). Meanwhile, neoliberals might suggest that the reason Taiwan and Thailand enthusiastically embraced the norm of democratization was simply because they were much more thoroughly integrated into global trade and investment networks. Because they were economically dependent on the outside world, they naturally paid more attention to global norms and values than did relatively autarkic China and Burma. Moreover, economic dependence meant that thousands of Taiwanese and Thai students obtained degrees in the United States and other Western countries and in the process became cosmopolitan. Upon returning, they took up important political positions and naturally translated their cosmopolitan outlookwhich reflected the deep international structureinto policy. The neorealist and neoliberal explanations are certainly potentially valid. They might explain why Taiwan and Thailand are relatively alacritous concerning the norm of democratization while China and Burma are perverse. What is more, developing only these explanations would arguably constitute a contribution to the field of comparative politics, because most systematic explanations of democratization in that tradition stress internal factorsexcept insofar as episodic events are thought to play a role.6 But I would suggest here that Chinas and Burmas resistance are most potently explained by the widespread belief in those countries that accepting the norm of democratization would destroy the national essence: the core collective identity. At the same time, people in Taiwan and Thailand seem to have a much weaker sense of what the national essence is, and apparently believe that, whatever it is, it will actually be enhanced by embracing the norms of international society. In fact, it may otherwise not exist. Ironically, there is nothing essential about the national essence in China and Burma. In the case of China, the national essence in the 19th century was thought to be coterminous with Confucianism. But soon this notion was demolished. During the New Culture Movement (1915-25), Chinese intellectuals argued that
5

See William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
6

A glance through the pages of the premier Journal of Democracy makes these facts clear. The Journal is accessible online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/

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Confucianism would actually have to be destroyed to preserve the national essence. Precisely what would replace it was unclear. In the 1930s, Chiang Kai-shek tried to propagate a modernized Confucianism, but his movement failed. From 1949-76, Mao Zedong promoted a quirky variant of Marxism-Leninism, which included a new assault on Confucianism during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. But Maoism was soon discredited and replaced by a nationalistic developmentalism that remains dominant (and even more nationalistic) today. Burma, meanwhile, alternates between periods in which the national essence is regarded as serving as the font of mainland Southeast Asian Buddhism and in which it is regarded as developing a Burmese Way to Socialism. The picture is more complicated in Burma because of the fact that Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy (NLD) overwhelmingly won parliamentary elections in May 1990, suggesting the possibility of widespread support for something like a Burmese Way to Democracy, instead of authoritarianism. Still, given the failure of democracy to take root in the 1950s, it is unclear whether Suu Kyi could reconcile democracy with the Buddhist roots of the Burmese national essence, if she ever were allowed to form a government. Nor is it clear that the NLD would be remotely as popular in the absence of Suu Kyis leadership, given that her father was a martyred nationalist independence activist. Any government in Burma must also deal with the problem of ethnic insurgencies all along the countrys perimeter, challenging the national essence bloodily on a daily basis. Under such circumstances polyarchy might seem unthinkable. In neither Taiwan nor Thailand is there anything like the concept of a national essence in the sense of something that might impede acceptance of the global norm of democracy. The reasons are complex, but a few sentences should serve to make the point. Very few ethnically Chinese people lived on the island of Taiwan before the Dutch established a colony there in the 1620s. Following two wars, China took Taiwan and ruled it loosely from the 1680s until the 1890sat which point they ceded it at gunpoint to Japan. Very little sense of being Chinese developed among the Taiwanese people during the 1680-1890 period. Subsequently, under Japanese occupation, the Taiwanese came even less to identify with China, instead concentrating on become good citizens of the Japanese empire. After World War II, Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists sought harshly to impose their vision of Chinese identity on the Taiwanese, but with limited success. By the late 1980s, the native Taiwanese had finally begun to wrest control of their island from the Nationalist immigrantsand at the same time began democratizing the political system.7 Meanwhile, from the very beginning of their encounters with European imperialism, Thaiat that time Siamesekings pioneered the strategy of averting colonization by trying to reorganize their society internally in various ways demanded by Europeans. Most obvious was the adoption of a European-style legal code, necessary to end extraterritoriality. But defensive modernization was not an easy task. The kingsnotably Mongkut (who ruled from 1851 to 1868) and Chulalongkorn (1868-1910)had to overcome fierce opposition from countless princes and other notables in what was a decidedly feudal polity. The kings had to state-build. And they did so by borrowing from the West. In the process, they not only created the Thai nation by using tools imported from abroad, but also staked the legitimacy of the new order (and their own dynasty) in this same process of borrowing.8 Over the course of time the notion that the Thai political system must be normatively coupled with ascendant systems in the larger international context became institutionalized. It became a part of the core collective identity. As a result, Thailand was much more likely to democratize than its neighbor Burma. It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into detail about the internal identity politics of these four countries and their relationships to democratization. The source of the different attitudes toward the national essence appears to be rooted in, among other things, the degree of isolation of each countrys political center from external flows of goods and ideas prior to the period of European imperialism. Thus, the Chinese and Burmese
7

Unfortunately, there is no good English-language history of Taiwan available, but two autobiographies are illuminating: Peng Ming-min, A Taste of Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), and Lee Tenghui, The Road to Democracy: Taiwans Pursuit of Identity (Tokyo: PHP Institute, 1999).
8

Thailand today is a constitutional monarchy. See Scot Barme, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

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political centers were quite isolated while those of Taiwan (never well integrated into the Chinese empire) and Thailand were not. Subsequently, both China and Burma suffered much more negative experiences with imperialism than did Taiwan and Thailand. What precisely the sources of the different attitudes are and how they initially developed are the concerns of a book-length study. For today, I would only offer that students of international relations and comparative politics should carefully probe the question of posture towards the international normative order and its relation to core collective identity and patterns of domestic political reconstruction. If people believe that becoming democratic will damage or pollute their core collective identity, they will actively resist iteven at the cost of being labeled perverse. On the other hand, if there is no clear conception of the national essence, they may reach out to international society alacritously to construct a collective identity consistent with prevailing democratic norms.

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On the Politics and Power of Categories: Attending to the Production and Fixing of Meanings in International Relations
Raymond Duvall University of Minnesota

Cosmologies of the powerless hold the capriciousness of gods and the sheer contingency of events responsible for the disorder of their lives; this, at the very least, has the potential of freeing those who suffer from having to take personal responsibility for their fateBut in the cosmologies of the powerful, conversely, there is no place for chaos. For, if the contingent and chaotic nature of the world were acknowledged in these, it would have the potential to dismantle the structures of legitimacy through which suffering is imposed on the powerless. Clothed in the language of responsibility, the discourse of power ends up with the equation that pain is equal to punishment and that the injustice of life, testified to by suffering, can only be redeemed by further suffering. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. central concern iswith power, and consequently with a contrast between sovereign power (which needs to exhibit itself publicly) and disciplinary power (which works through the normalization of everyday behavior). Talal Asad, On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, in Social Suffering. Edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock. University of California Press, 1997.

Two distinct concerns converge in this memo. One pertains to academic identity in the field of International Relations; the other is about practices in the real world of international relations. The first has been building slowly, but progressively, as I have come increasingly to think of myself -- to know myself -- as not a constructivist. The second, while growing out of and reflecting long-standing concerns, has a more immediate and urgent character, as I have joined myriad others in spending countless hours pondering September 11 and its aftemath. The two converge in emphasizing a (re)recognition of the fundamental importance of the social production and fixing of meanings. Specifically, for me, the two concerns point jointly to a strongly felt need to concentrate my energies on the critical analysis of -- and practical challenges to -- the disciplinary power of categories and the narratives they generate in the social making of meanings. I am convinced that there is little if anything of greater importance that I can do as a scholar, teacher, and global citizen than to attempt to understand the processes through which such power is effected in the constitution of subjects, and to disrupt that power as best I am able through a denaturalizing of its effects. Whether, and in what ways, this might be understood to represent progress in the study of international relations, I cannot say. Disciplinary Subjects: Fixing the Meaning of Constructivist International Relations In International Relations currently, constructivism is in. For one thing, it is popular; a lot of work is claiming or appropriating its identifying label. Additionally, it is in in the sense that it has been authorized canonized -- as part of the mainstream of IR. A number of articles, and even special issues of major journals, have authoritatively pronounced constructivism to be one of the two or three approaches that compose the mainstream. Is it only a matter of time before we are told that we are all constructivists!? Symptomatic of the central position now occupied by constructivism is a proliferation of scholarly attention to demarcating it as a disciplinary terrain. Much intellectual energy is being expended in an effort to establish and police the boundaries -- to fix the meaning -- of constructivist IR. Some articles provide historical narratives, even if

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in a form that renders the historical processes largely unrecognizable to some of us. Others offer analytical statements of (foundational, essential?) distinguishing features. Even the conference for which this memo is written, with its principal focus on questions of progress in social constructivist studies of international relations, is part of this disciplinary process of making the meaning of -- normalizing -- the category of constructivism. That process is a matter of disciplinary power. It is constitutive of disciplined subjects, socially empowered to see and interpret worlds in particular ways, and, so, to produce IR and the worlds that it represents accordingly. The process, of course, is never fully determinative, as boundaries are stretched and transgressed. But considerable expenditures of intellectual energy to establish and police the boundaries -- to keep the gates -- are consequential. They constitute, they produce, a meaningful subject -- the constructivist scholar of International Relations. Although there are certainly multiple, and, hence, contested, constructions of this subject position, the authorization of constructivism as part of the IR mainstream has severely limited the scope of contestation. Constructivism is practiced with progressively less ambiguity; it moves as a distinctly recognizable component of the mainstream. For me this has two consequences. First, it forces recognition that I am no longer a constructivist. The kinds of questions of importance to me -- questions about disciplinary power in the fixing of meanings and the constitution of subjects, for example -- are not, by and large, at the heart of the constructivist mainstream. They are marginalized or ignored altogether in favor of questions about the causal efficacy of norms, ideas, or rules. In an article a few years ago in the New Left Review, Stuart Hall wrote about migration on discursive terrains. His autobiographical comment in that context was to the effect that all of a sudden he had become Black. To paraphrase him, I would say now that I have been discursively produced all of a sudden as not a constructivist. Second, and much more importantly, it raises questions about disciplinary power and the mainstreaming of constructivism. I wont attempt here even a gesture toward answering such questions. But I can point to issues that, to the best of my knowledge, are being systematically ignored in the now proliferating literature that is part of the process of fixing the meaning of constructivism. They involve a critical reflection on the canonization process, which involves interrogating contemporary practices of producing disciplinary, and disciplining, common sense asking how a shared, largely unquestioned, understanding of the contours of disciplinary mainstreams is made. That, in turn, calls for highlighting the importance of historical narration in those processes disciplines, like nations, are narrated. One could seek to probe the kinds of narratives that are successful, to lay bare the discourses of mainstreaming of contemporary IR. This means engaging the processes of disciplinary mainstreaming to illuminate the eddies and backwaters that, by metaphoric implication, are not flowing progressively with the mainstream, in order to illuminate the relations of social power, within both the academic discipline and broader social fields beyond the academy, that are entailed in producing it. Who is making the pronouncements about the meaning and mainstream status of constructivism, from where; and how are those pronouncements made (i.e., what, in general terms, is the rhetoric). How is the story told? What are the representations of the historical trajectory of constructivist IR? Whose history is it, and what is the alleged or implicit nature of the historical process (e.g., progress in the knowledge process as old approaches are found wanting; scholars attentive to a changing real world, a stagnation of positivism, etc.)? What permits an approach to be constituted as part of the mainstream? How, then, must constructivism be constructed (i.e., in terms of foundational assumptions, the aims of knowledge, appropriate methods [the agonizing efforts to make the difference only one of ontology, not epistemology, for example], the idealism/materialism binary)? Which constructivisms are marginalized in the process, and how is that marginalization effected (e.g., what are the othering practices, from overt revilement to ignoring)? What social science is empowered as a result? What kind of world can it see; what kind of world does it help to produce? How might the narration and discursive constitution be different? That is, how might constructivism be differently constructed? What is lost in establishing a common sense in which it fits a disciplinary mainstream, at least as the latter is currently constituted? How are the reconstructed tenets and commitments of constructivism discursively articulatedeven if only obliquely and implicitlywith social forces outside of the discipline and the academy? These are questions that, in my view, should be asked and critically engaged, because they are at the heart of disciplinary power and its constitutive effects. Disciplinary Power and the Constitution of Subjects and Objects of International Relations Let me now ask us to refocus our gaze on real worlds of international relations, in order to reinforce my claim about the fundamental importance to me of analysis ofand challenges todisciplinary power in the

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production of meanings and the constitution of subjects. Specifically, I want to invoke the tragic events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, on which many have reflected long and hard. The pain and horror experienced by people in New York and Washington must surely have obliterated language, as Elaine Scarry cogently reminds us in her important book, The Body in Pain, and, hence, for them to have erased meaning. Nevertheless, it remains true, I am convinced, that for the rest of us the events of Tuesday did not speak for themselves. And it is about the production of their meaning that I am deeply troubled. I am not speaking here about the intentions or motivations or self-understandings of the perpetrators or organizers of heinous acts. Many analysts claim to represent those intentions and self-understandings to us authoritatively. But I doubt very much that I will ever have access to those meanings in the sense of being able fully to comprehend them. Even if I were, I dont believe that such knowledge would help alleviate my concerns. This is because the meaning of such events is never simply given by the actors who carry out actions. Instead, it is produced and fixed through narration and practices of response. Thus, I am troubled by the apparently now largely unchallenged understanding, at least within this country, that is represented by the simple phrase, America attacked. On reflection, it seems clear to me that this is not the only meaning that can be given to September 11ths horrors, and, indeed, that fixing their meaning in these terms has very serious consequences. My concern revolves primarily around the construction of the object of attack, America. [I apologize for adopting the unfortunate practice of rhetorically equating the United States of America with the entire Western hemisphere. I recognize the offense, the arrogance, in doing so, and generally caution against using such language. That quite legitimate issue, however, is tangential to my concerns here.] September 11ths events might be taken to mean any of a wide variety of things. For one, they could mean that highly visible symbols of American hegemony are under attack. Alternatively, institutions of global domination (Hardt and Negris center-less Empire, to which America, per se, is not especially pertinent) could be understood to be under attack. Or, aspects of modern, Western culture, or perhaps even ordinary people, might be seen as the objects of attack. Even further, the social meaning of September 11 could be that crimes against humanity were committed, not an attack at all. Each of these, and the myriad other possibilities, constitutes a distinct understanding, and potentially calls forth a different response as that meaning is embedded in larger discursive terrains. But if, in contrast to such alternatives, those events mean that America is under attack, the American nation is inscribed as the object, and in turn the U.S. state the subject, of security. [Here and for these purposes I am taking for granted a strong articulation of the category of attack with a broader discursive terrain of security. I fully appreciate that that is not an unproblematic move.] That inscription of the object and subject of security has profound consequences, many of which trouble me greatly. [By object of security I mean that which is to be secured; by subject of security I mean the agency for securing.] America as an object of (in)security articulates easily and comfortably with a hyper-patriotic, even jingoistic, rhetoric and practice. The attack is on us; it is about us--all that we are (civilized, good, united, resolute, etc.), and all that we value (freedom, respect for life, etc.). If America is under attack, America must stand together and support our leaders in their efforts to secure our country (the last phrase is from President George W. Bushs speech of September 15). Elements of this rhetoric are certainly being challenged, and some of the jingoistic fervor has receded with the passage of time. But so long as meaning is fixed around America as the object of security, the articulation with patriotism in the form of jingoism remains all too easy. America attacked moves fluidly into America rising [and I will resist the temptation to explore implications of the gendered imagery here], and in turn America at war. If, by contrast, the object of security is not the country, the American nation, but instead, say, ordinary persons, even if restrictively those holding U.S. citizenship, the discursive articulation to a governmental policy of belligerence is much less apparent. Indeed, the nation and the state mobilized for war to secure America through such practices as the covert targeting of individuals for assassination may actually reduce the security of citizens of the U.S. Images of the brutal killing of more than 5000 people, who were not themselves involved at the time in practices of violent military engagement with an enemy (I cant quite come to use the term innocent) are horrific. But as a representation of danger they have a different meaning in relation to the personal security of ordinary U.S. citizens than in relation to the security of America. Especially striking to me in this is the extraordinary disciplinary power surrounding the category of the nation. The naturalizing of the events of September 11 as an attack on the nation, and the hailing (or interpellation

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in Althusserian language) of the national subject, has been so easy, so complete, that it creates consternation for those pressed to ask how it might be understood otherwise. In Castoriadiss terms, the register of the social imaginary has been colonized -- its range has been severely curtailed by the imaginary of the American nation. When America is the object of security -- when the country is that which is to be secured -- America (the U.S. state) readily becomes the subject of security as well. It is constituted as the site of responsible agency for providing security for the country. In general this might be taken to be the standard -- and quite reasonable -condition, although the notion of an entirely effective locus of control and hence security is always largely mythical. However, in the current context it has especially troubling implications. The U.S. state has multiple identities. In important respects it is a liberal state for an open society, an identity that is being much celebrated and much debated in the wake of September 11ths violence. But for the past half-century or more, it has also been a national security state, an identity shared with several, but certainly not all, other states, such as Israel, Turkey, and the two Koreas. As such, its internal organization and its practices in relation to the larger world are shaped significantly by national security doctrines. The meaning of its array of possible responses is largely fixed within the discursive terrain of those doctrines. In that context, for America (the subject) to secure America (the object) is to reinforce potentially extremely unattractive governmental tendencies and inclinations. I have in mind the expressed need for ever greater surveillance, the restriction of civil liberties in the name of a higher good, national security, and the profiling of people in all sorts of policing practices. These are measures taken by a state that sees the enemy potentially everywhere, including among the citizens it governs. They are actions that define the practices, allegiances, and even beliefs of some Americans as un-American. As such, these are measures that belie the existence of a homogeneous, unified America that, according to the widely circulating meanings that elicited this very response, was brought under attack on September 11th. They vitiate the securing of America. More generally, and apart from the reconstitution of the U.S. national security state, fixing the meaning of September 11 as an attack on America has articulated broadly with a discourse that might be called a statist project. This is expressed in the relocation to the state of responsibility for the health and dynamism of the national (and global?) capitalist economy. It is also expressed across countries in such actions as the unanimous adoption by the UN Security Council of an agreement that all states have an obligation to eliminate terrorism (read non-state agencies of systemic violence and mass killing). The attack on America is reinvigorating the state as structure of authority and rule. I believe fervently, then, that it is important for us, individually and collectively, to ask, Is America under attack? We must ask, What meaning is produced, what subjects constituted, in saying that it is? Are constructivists asking these questions?

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Too Much Constructivism in Too Many Wor(l)ds

Colin Wight University of Wales, Aberystwyth '...as generations of philosophers (East and West) have reminded us, we can never describe the "real" world; all we can do is record and exchange symbolic representations of it. These symbols may be verbal, numeric, pictorial, and even photographic, but they remain only representations.' (A short and highly polemical memo) What is it that is at stake in contemporary theoretical debates surrounding constructivism? If Nicholas Onuf is to be believed, our conversations concerning constructivism are not mere neutral descriptions of world(s), but are explanatory justifications of normative injunctions to accept a certain view of the world(s) and to act within it in certain ways (Onuf, 2001: 1). For Onuf, speaking about worlds is always normative (Onuf, 2001:1). Accepting the validity of this claim, although there are grounds to challenge it, conversations regarding constructivism are attempts to impose a certain World(s)view on others. Whats at stake in the debates, then, is nothing less than theoretical domination, or we might say rule; at least in the world(s) of constructivism. Once domination and rule have been established, once we have narrowed down the number of worlds that we are collectively able to identify, once appropriate rulers have been identified, the participants to that conversation can turn their attention to that most perennial of social practices, inclusion and exclusion. Identity is a condition of possibility for practices of inclusion and exclusion and unless one can meet the necessary minimum conditions for inclusion, one is in danger of being excluded. Let me immediately say that I have no principled objections to attempts to identify theoretical schools, frameworks or positions. I certainly think that it is, in principle, possible to identify theoretical positions and say who does or does not belong. I do not think that this is easy, but it is possible (whether it is interesting to do so, valid or useful, are different questions). The ability to do so, however, requires that the position under consideration has cohered enough for essential elements to be identified. And this is one of the major problems when discussing constructivism. Social objects are always products-in-process. Contemporary constructivism is simply too much process (the debate) and not enough product for a balanced assessment of its make-up and potential contribution to be made at this point in time. More than this, if the career of constructivism in IR has thus far being strange, its future is unwritten. As a world constructed by we IR academics, nothing better describes its potential future than constructivism will be what academics make of it. In general, these intellectual worlds are constructed through a process that has a positive and a negative aspect. Positively, articulations can be made about key components of the world under construction; we in this world are for this. Negatively, the world under construction can come into being through articulations of what it is not; we in this world are against this. Often these processes only occur between the participants of the world under construction. At other times, however, a world can be partially constructed by those who have no desire to be in the world under construction, but who nonetheless contribute to its construction through distancing their own world from it. In this manner, worlds are given boundaries, but importantly, also have boundaries given to them. Where the boundaries are drawn is important because intellectual worlds do not emerge ex nihilo and the space they occupy begins where other worlds end. The constructivist, as Onuf describes it, may be a bricoleur, fashioning a world out of available materials, but then so are all world-builders. As such, the bricoleurs of constructivism might be considered refugees from other worlds. Dissatisfied with what they find in other worlds they leave to construct brave new worlds; perhaps worlds of their own making. Constructivist bricoleurs are often said to be fleeing from two worlds, typically described as positivism and postmodernism. Onuf explicitly locates his bricolage as a bridge building exercise in order to escape from an impasse generated by positivist complacency over

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epistemological matters and postmodernist dismissal of methodological pursuits (Onuf, 2001: 6). Wendt likewise declares his constructivism to be a via media between positivism and postmodernism (Wendt, 1999). In constructing the constructivist world in this manner, these constructivist bricoleurs construct the intellectual space they operate within. This entails that they have some idea of the intellectual space they do not wish to occupy. The effectiveness of any escape from an impasse between two positions depends upon how one defines the two positions. Without the identification of what you are escaping from you could never know if you had escaped. A via media, bridge, middle way, or middle ground between positivism and postmodernism can only serve its function if the two positions have enough space between them that there is a middle ground to occupy and if such a middle ground can be identified. How positivism and postmodernism are defined constructs the ground upon which constructivism will stand. Misidentify either of the two positions and you may well find yourself attempting to construct a world on someone elses terrain using their materials. This can lead to the unsettled times identified by Onuf. Perhaps even war. There may be no passports in intellectual space, but there are certainly border guards. Let me be clear where I stand on this issue. I do not think that there is a middle ground between positivism and postmodernism to be occupied. This does not mean that something called constructivism is an impossible project. But it cant be a project that defines itself as a middle way between positivism and postmodernism, because the relationship between positivism is not one that presents an easy middle ground to occupy. There is intellectual ground to occupy; it is simply not middle ground. Lezek Kolakowski did not subtitle his brilliant study of positivist thought the Alienation of Reason on a whim (Kolakowski, 1969). Despite the howls of protest from both camps, positivists and postmoderns share more than either would care to admit (Zizek, 1999; Laudan, 1996). This however, is not the time or the place to attempt to unpack this particular problem. Not least because, as Rob Walker has indicated, the terrain of positivism and postpositivism, rationalisms and reflectivisms, modernism and postmodernisms constitutes an intellectual swamp into which only the most foolhardy would enter (Walker, 1999). This swamp, or what I, following Pierre Bourdieu, will call the doxa of the isms is indeed a perilous terrain (Bourdieu, 1977). In this respect, it is similar to that other problem that has figured heavily in discussions of constructivism - the agent-structure problem. Here I have some sympathy with Onufs despair at the confusion surrounding the agent-structure problem, yet any sympathy the other workshop participants feel should be directed towards me; after all, I did a PhD on the agent-structure problem. Yet, even though discussions surrounding the doxa of the isms are likely to induce not simply confusion but catalepsy, they are not something that can be avoided; nor, despite Onufs understandable wish to do, can the agent-structure problem. In the rest of this short memo, I want to suggest some areas of contention, confusion and points of dispute that I think surround the emerging world of constructivism and which derive from the doxa of the isms and the agent-structure problem. I do not intend to solve them but present them as issues for discussion. I am interested in the way the border guards are operating, and in particular, those border guards on the inside. In this respect, reactions from within constructivism to Wendts version of constructivism are illuminating in terms of how the boundaries have been constructed.

Problem 1.

How many Worlds?

I raise this issue first, because I want to admit that although I agree with many of the positions articulated by Onuf in his paper and disagree with others, my agreements and disagreements are both on shaky ground. The ground is shaky because I am not always clear what Onuf means. And I am not always sure what he means because of the way he uses the word world. Depending upon which dictionary one consults, up to 22 meanings of the word world can be found. For the sake of brevity, I will cite only 8.

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 1. world: human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man -- (all of the inhabitants of the earth; ``all the world loves a lover'' ) 2. world: universe, existence, creation, cosmos, macrocosm -- (everything that exists anywhere; ``they study the evolution of the world"; "the biggest tree in the world'' ) 3. world: subjective reality -- (all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you; ``his world was shattered"; "we live in different worlds"; "for them demons were as much a part of the world as trees were'' ) 4. world: domain -- (people in general; especially a distinctive group of people with some shared interest; ``the Western world'' ) 5. world: Earth, globe -- (the 3rd planet from the sun; the planet on which we live; "he sailed around the world'' ) 6. world: worldly concern, earthly concern, earth -- (the concerns of the world as distinguished from heaven and the afterlife; ` a world beyond this mortal life 7. world: (a part of the earth that can be considered separately; ``the outdoor world"; "the world of insects'' ) 8. world: populace, public, -- (people in general considered as a whole; ``he is a hero in the eyes of the world'' ) Often, of course, the context within which the word is used helps make the meaning clear. But one does not have to be a postmodernist to understand the potential indeterminacy of contexts and hence meaning. This means that in many cases my agreement or disagreement in relation to many of his arguments depends upon which meaning of world he intends. For example, Onufs claim that the world isthe whole of our experience is unobjectionable if sense 3 is intended, but deeply problematic for virtually all others. And to refer the discussion back to boundaries, the idea that the world isthe whole of our experience, links world (in sense2) to experience in a way that would meet general assent among most positivists. Recapture rather than escape. The issue of worlds arises again in the discussion of language. Onuf, for example, argues that constructivism challenges the positivist view that language serves only to represent the world as it is. Language also serves a constitutive function. By speaking we make the world what it is. Nevertheless, in making the world, we do not just make it up. Constructivism takes the linguistic turn but only so far (Onuf, 2001: 6). There are many issues packed within this tightly formulated section. First, did positivists actually subscribe to the view of language Onuf attributes to them? Well some did and some didnt. Rudolph Carnap, for example, argued that observations are evaluated according to certain rules and that these rules consist of a linguistic framework which has to be developed prior to observation. If someone wishes to speak in his language about new kinds of entities, he has to introduce a system of new ways of speaking, subject to new rules (Carnap, 1972: 104). It was for this reason that Paul Feyerabend argued that for the Vienna Circle science was a system of statementsdiscussing science meant discussing special systems of statements; bringing order into science meant bringing order into these systems of statements (Feyerabend, 1995: 122). The point here is not to say Onuf is completely wrong, or that his view of language is similar to Carnaps - although I think it may well be. The point is that there is an issue to be addressed. It is not enough to write of positivism as having a simple and frankly nave notion of language and to leave the issue there. Second, is it correct to say that by speaking we make the world what it is? Again, this is difficult to answer without a clearer indication of the sense in which world is employed. But Im sceptical that this statement can be sustained in any sense of the word world; not least because I do not know who the we refers to. The issue of we making the world what it is, or the world being socially constructed is a constant refrain in much social

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constructivist literature (Hacking, 1999) and is true, but trivial if understood in terms of no people, no society. After all, if people dont make society who does. Even Kenneth Waltz accepts that, States produce their situations. One of course agrees with that statement (Waltz, 1979: p. 48). This puts an interesting twist on anarchy is what states make of it, and with enough intellectual charity could allow Waltz admission to some constructivist schools. Still, since Thucydides has recently been admitted (Lebow, 2001) it would seem churlish to deny Waltz membership. Third, Onuf tells us constructivism takes the linguistic turn but only so far. The question is how far is so far? I presume what is in play here is the other boundary. Taking the linguistic turn too far would presumably be to believe that we just make it (the world - although do not ask me in which sense) up. But what precisely is the difference between making the world what it is and making it (the world 1-8) up? I can personally think of many answers, but before I sign up to strong constructivism, it would be good to know. Equally, do postmoderns actually believe that we do just make it up? Well again, some appear to do so and some dont. More often that not its impossible to tell since words such as discourse and/or text are as ill-defined as world. David Campbell, for example, argues that nothing exists outside of discourse, but argues that this claim does not deny the existence of entities independent of thought (Campbell, 2001). Perhaps, but I had always thought that discourses were nothing if not human practices: Hence ipso facto no humans, no discourse, no objects. Onuf might say no worlds, but either way, it is still a form of idealism; which is ironic given that positivism was also a form of idealism. But all of this takes us much too deep into the swamp and anyway Derrida, as he put it, never ceased to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is in fact saying the exact opposite (Derrida, 1984: 123).

Problem 2: Duelling Constructivisms and the War on Wendt?

What makes someone or some approach a constructivist? What are the conditions upon which membership depends? There is certainly a move from some within the constructivist world to distance themselves from Wendt. To suggest perhaps that Wendts constructivism is not constructivist enough. This has led to distinctions within constructivism, between strong and weak, thick and thin, or modern and postmodern versions. To my mind, these distinctions only serve to add to the confusion. By strong constructivism, Wendt means postmodern approaches, whereas Onuf labels his approach strong constructivism and does not consider postmodernism to be in the constructivist world. Kratochwil does not think that scientific realism and constructivism can be combined in the manner Wendt suggests and engages in a thinly veiled eviction process (Kratochwil, 2000). Of course, the validity, we might even say legality, of Kratochwils repatriation of Wendt to another world is dependent upon just how scientific realism and constructivism are defined by Kratochwil, and in this respect, the less said the better. Onuf too seems to have some problems with Wendt arguing that the expansion of the constructivist agenda had led to the loss of constructivisms most distinctive features. Again, of course, this all depends upon how one defines those supposed distinctive features. For Onuf, these are; a concern with language and importantly and due attention to rules, since without rules as the media of social construction the co-constitution of agents and structures became an airy abstraction (Onuf, 2001: 8). Now I have no wish to be admitted to the constructivist world, but if an outsider may offer some words of advice. Language and rules are undoubtedly important and essential elements in any social ontology, but I think it would be a grave mistake to reduce any social ontology to these elements only. And once again, the idea that the social world can be reduced to one principle or explained by one or two factors is a residue of forms of reductionism that inhabit both positivism and postmodernism. Second, the idea of agents and structures being co-constituted, or even worse mutually constituted, does not need rules to be absented for it to become an airy abstraction. It is already airy and abstract enough. To say that things are mutually constituted does nothing more (or less) than to highlight that there is a necessary relationship which requires investigation. The relationship between agents and structures, for example, may not be symmetrical and may change over time and vary from place to place. In effect, the dynamics of this relationship still require concrete investigation. To suggest otherwise seems to me to be a priori science. Equally, what we mean by

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agents and structures and how we think they are related, if at all, would seem to be important questions; questions that are hardly answered in an adequate fashion by saying that they are co-constituted. What exactly is it that is coconstituted?

Problem 3: The Bridge

Is there a better way to formulate the issues? I think there is, but it will require greater clarity, more, not less specification of terms, and a much greater attention to exactly what the bridge is being built between. I suggest that first we need to think of what we are doing over three domains that are integral to all research. These are ontology, epistemology, and methodology. A single term, such as constructivism cannot hope to encompass the range of options that are available for bridge building, even if we could accurately identify the posts and terrain over which the bridge will be built. First epistemology: This is a very problematic issue. The discipline tends to use epistemology to mean any generalised approach to study. Hence we are told that there is such a thing as a positivist epistemology, a feminist epistemology, or a postmodern epistemology. But this only serves to hide a range of hidden ontological and methodological assumptions and issues. Positivism, feminism, postmodernism and constructivism are much better considered, as Onuf does, as general frameworks around which inquiry is structured. Epistemology, should be reserved for specific questions related to the grounds upon which specific knowledge claims are made. And I see no reason why anyone should limit himself or herself to simply one epistemology. The proper epistemological stance for a scientist would seem to be that put forward by Einstein and much supported by Feyerabend, opportunism. This does not mean that anything goes, but it does mean that we cannot determine what will go and when, until it is placed in some or other ontological and methodological context. Epistemological speculation in an ontological vacuum is all good fun, and philosophers are welcome to it. Yes, IR theorists should be aware of the various strengths and weaknesses of the various positions. But there is no need to commit oneself to one epistemological position for all time; not least because different objects will require different ways of coming to know them. Moreover, much that masquerades as epistemological debate in IR is superfluous since empirical evidence is generally supplied by everyone; rational inferences are drawn by all; conventionalist supports are present in most pieces of research; and a fair element of pragmatism underpins most conclusions, which are mostly tentative anyway. All research has epistemological support, even postmodern research. The monograph that did not have epistemological support would be very short indeed; one sentence only. Much the same can be said about methodology. Which method will work best will depend in no small part on what it is you are studying. With Onuf, I advocate methodological pluralism. This does not mean that methodological discussion is less important. Discussions of methodology and considerations of which is the most appropriate method in what circumstances and of how to improve, validity, reliability and generalisability are still important issues. Nothing seems more nonsensical to me than the implied suggestion that positivists do quantitative analysis so constructivists, or even postmoderns cant; or if they did they would then be positivists. One small caveat, however; I am not that much of a pluralist. Regression analysis seems to me to have a very limited role in social inquiry. Regression analysis assumes constant conjunctions in closed systems (Lawson, 1998). I do not think that there are such things in the social world. So it seems to me that a method orientated towards something that does not exist does not have much value. But I am open to debate on this issue. Last, but not least, indeed as should be clear it is first, is ontology. Like Onuf, I think this is where the real action is. And it comes not last but first. All inquiry begins from some ontological point. However, nothing again seems as absurd as the implied suggestion that strong constructivists concern themselves with language and rules, weak constructivists with intersubjective structures, postmoderns with language, knowledge and power, and rationalists with material factors. Im quite interested in all of these things, but more than these things, Im interested in the relations between them. Unlike Onuf, I think it is the relations between the various elements of social worlds that constitute its structure, and I consider these relations, although abstract to be real, with effective causal powers.

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Admittedly, it is causal power that is only actualised through the activities of agents, but these relations are real whether observed or not. I would argue that this interest in relations, as opposed to things, makes me rather worldless in terms of the contemporary world of IR. But then I consider myself to be a refugee not in search of a home. Moreover, if strong constructivism is the name attached to those who inhabit a world of researchers primarily interested in language and rules, and if the inhabitants of that world feel the need to reserve the label constructivism for this and only this, then I see no reason to deny them. But as a refugee not in search of an ism Im not much concerned either.

Conclusion

In all of these issues, one thing constantly strikes me as extremely puzzling and to which I constantly return. For Kratochwil, Onuf and many others (Smith, Adler, Campbell, Ashley, Ruggie) there appears to be a series of internally consistent and coherent positions which go under a series of differing names. For all of the talk of strong constructivism and worlds being constructed in language, there exist these worlds called positivism, postmodernism, constructivism and so on to which we all refer. One might even be tempted to say, if the word were not so offensive, they had essences. This means that, for Onuf for example, there is something called constructivism against which Wendts constructivism, for example, can be measured. Likewise for Kratochwil, scientific realism is X and constructivism is Y and the two are not compatible. The irony here, is not that constructed worlds are any less real, but that in order for these claims to be made intelligible, some form of philosophical realism (as Wendt suggests) is a necessary condition. It is a necessary condition even as it is denied. Constructivism has not only had a strange career, but also a confusing one. One has to feel pity for the poor undergraduate student attempting to make sense of contemporary IR theory. Because of very deep and understandable pedagogical imperatives, teachers of the field construct simplified worlds that might be understandable as introductions, but are, in some senses, unreal. This world, our world, the world of IR amongst all others, is surely one we participate in constructing in a very concrete way. The dangers in constructing false worlds of false boundaries should be all too clear to people who spend their time studying the consequences of such constructed worlds. After all, as Ken Booth so often reminds me, this discipline was born to study war. References: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, David. 1998. Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity. Rev. ed .Manchester: Manchester University Press. Campbell, David. 2001. International engagements - The politics of north American international relations theory. Political Theory 29 (3):432-448. Carnap, Rudolph. 1972. Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology. In The Problem of Scientific Realism , edited by Edward A. MacKinnon, New York: Appelton Century-Crotfs. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, edited by Richard Kearney, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? London: Harvard. Kolakowski, Leszek. 1969. The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Anchor Books. Kratochwil, Friedrich V. 2000. Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt's 'Social Theory of International Politics' and the Constructivist Challenge. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29 (1):73-104. Laudan, Larry. 1996. Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method and Evidence. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

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Lebow, Ned. 2001. Thucydides the Constructivist. American Political Science Review 95 (3). Onuf, Nicholas. 2001. The Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations. Centre of International Studies, University of Southern California. (Re)Constructing Constructivist IR Research. Parascandalo, Renato, and Vittorio Hosle. 1995. Three Interviews with Paul K. Feyerabend. Telos (102):115-148. Ruggie, John Gerard. 1998. Constructing the world polity : essays on international institutionalization, The new international relations. London: Routledge. Smith, Steve. 2000. Wendt's World. Review of International Studies 26 (1):151-163. Walker, R. B. J. 2000. Alternative, Critical, Political. Paper read at International Studies Association, at Washington. Waltz, Kenneth. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.

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A Note About Modeling Theories of Constitutive Relations In International Politics Using Computational Approaches
Stephen Majeski University of Washington Introduction As someone originally trained as a formal theorist and one who employed game theory, differential equations, econometric techniques, and experimentation to explain political events and processes, I have always felt that my turn to what I would call constructivist theorizing and analysis (perhaps not all would agree) was unusual. It happened because my long time collaborator David Sylvan and I tried to develop a better theory of war initiation than what Bruce Bueno de Mesquita had to offer in The War Trap. We never ended up doing that, perhaps to the detriment of our professional careers. Instead we ended up creating a constitutive theory of U.S. foreign policymaking. Nonetheless, I still am a formal theorist albeit one who employs different formalisms and different empirical methodologies. I use formalisms (the lambda calculus and agent-based modeling instantiated in various computer languages) to model constitutive theories of foreign policymaking and the evolution of social structures generated from the interaction of heterogeneous agents in an environmentally complex world. My aim here is to suggest why and how some formalisms (not those typically employed by scholars of international relations) can be very helpful in making progress for some but by no means all of the many diverse theoretical problems and empirical issues that confront those engaged in constructivist inquiry in international relations and of other social phenomena.9 I do so as well since there seems to be, at least comparatively speaking, little use to date of formalisms to model and test constructivist theories of international relations and it is my sense that some constructivists see such efforts are either inappropriate and irrelevant or detrimental to constructivist international relations research. This note is organized in the following fashion. First, the notion of constitutive relations is introduced. This is followed by brief discussion of formalisms to model such theories. To make this all a bit more concrete, I very briefly sketch out aspects of two quite different approaches to modeling theories of constitutive relations. The first approach uses the formalism the calculus of lambda conversion that can be implemented in various computerprogramming languages such as LISP or Scheme. This formalism is very effective at representing theories where various objects (i.e., strings of words or symbols) are operated on or converted into other objects. David Sylvan and I have employed this approach to model various theories of U.S. foreign policymaking. The second approach uses an agent-based modeling perspective that can be implemented in computer programming languages such as C++ or SWARM. This approach is effective at representing constitutive theories where a large number of autonomous agents engage in numerous interactions with other agents in a complex environment and where the these various interactions among these agents generates or produces social outcomes. Constitutive Relations To motivate this discussion, let me start by sketching out how I first came to think about theories of the constitution of social phenomena. In order to build a better theory of war initiation, David Sylvan and I did what in retrospect seems quite logical and what social scientists are supposed to do. We decided to examine what foreign policymakers actually did as they engaged in the process of constructing polices that included various uses of military force and how they reached decisions about which ones to pursue. We did so by turning to set of foreign policy decisions that we knew we would have access to a large amount of primary source materials, U.S. foreign policymaking regarding the Vietnam War from 1961-1965. Two thing of relevance to the topic of discussion here came out of our many year disappearance (some say longer than the war itself) into the vast amount of archival materials available. First, the standard categories that various theories of foreign policymaking and decision-making

The general usefulness of formal modeling is well understood the way in which it forces theorists to be precise, explicit, and rigorous, not to mention the possibility of generating novel knowledge claims. The issue is determining the appropriateness of particular formalisms for theories of social constitution.

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(rational choice, bureaucratic politics, etc) provide scholars simply did not help us make sense of what we saw or interpreted what policymakers were engaged in when they were making foreign policy (here meaning to write memos, cables, briefing papers, intelligence estimates, as well as to make verbal arguments at set piece meetings). Second, no matter how hard we tried to build a causal theory (here meaning efforts to explain why some event or set of events occur and which factors conduce mostly strongly to their occurrence) of this process, we ended up building so complex a theory that it became more complicated than the process we were observing. This led us to take a different approach to theory construction and eventually to theorizing about the constitution of phenomena, i.e., how political phenomena are understood, given a particular culture, to be those phenomena rather than others. For example one might ask what a bone fide foreign policy recommendation is (one that high level U.S. foreign policymakers take seriously and argue either in support of such a recommendation or against it) and how it differs from recommendations that are simply dismissed or ignored. Questions like these are constitutive: they concern how phenomena are put together from different parts in such a way that they can be distinguished by those in a particular culture from each other as different wholes. In the foreign policy example participants see bone fide recommendations as combining goals, tools, and missions in such a way that they offer a solution to an articulated problem. Those that are not bone fide are seen by those participants as either lacking the correct components or combined in an inappropriate way so that they do not offer a solution to the problem or offer a solution to an irrelevant problem. Such issues are not causal: they do not concern the causes or consequences of foreign policy recommendations. Instead, they are what some scholars (e.g., Wendt 1998: 105) have variously called how-possible or what questions: how is it possible for certain phenomena to be jointly apprehended in a given culture as a viable foreign policy recommendation; what, in that culture, a bone fide foreign policy recommendation is. More generally, theories of the constitution of social phenomena have two component parts; the essential features or objects of the phenomena and how those features or objects are pieced together or assembled. The task of theorizing about a particular social phenomenon (e.g., foreign policy recommendations, or more generally such things as rules, social practices, and international institutions) is to establish a list of the essential features and then to specify the particular connections among those features.10 Consider the notion of essences. Human beings, natural phenomena, and social phenomena can be seen as having essences, i.e., characteristics that define them in all possible worlds.11 These essences are empirical and can be discovered. For example, the element gold has as an essence the atomic number 79; tigers have a particular DNA structure. This means that in any possible world in which either gold or tigers exist, particular chunks of gold or particular tigers will have exactly the same number of protons and electrons, or the same sequences of DNA. What is interesting about this approach is that, by identifying essences in this way, strong claims can be made about contingent (i.e., nonessential) properties of the phenomena in question. Consider the case of gold. Its essence consists in a particular connective relationship between its 79 protons and its 79 electrons: since gold atoms have weakly bound outermost electrons, the metal has a certain characteristic conductivity, luster, and ductility such that gold normally appears as yellow, shiny, and so forth. These latter properties are precisely the contingent ones in which we are now interested: they will be manifested under certain circumstances but not others. If, for instance, we stipulate that the temperature in a given possible world is less than 1000 degrees Celsius, then gold there will have the contingent property of being solid. Similarly, we can say that the essence of tigers as animals with a particular sequence of DNA implies that tigers need oxygen to live and that they lack the physiological equipment (teeth, enzymes) for digesting plants. If the environment of a given tiger is then stipulated to be composed only of plants, or to dwindle in oxygen over time, the tiger in question will not survive.

10

This approach stems from work on modal logic and metamathematics (see Sylvan and Majeski 1998 and Majeski and Sylvan 2000 for a detailed discussion.) 11 I do not mean to imply that social or for that matter biological phenomena have essences that remain unchanged across all time and space. Such a view would deny, for instance, evolution in both social and biological worlds. The claim is rather that social and natural phenomena have essences that pertain to particular spatial/temporal localizations. For a discussion of essentialism and controversies it sparks see Pinker (1997, 323-7).

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How are essential features for particular social phenomena identified? David Sylvan and I have argued elsewhere (Majeski and Sylvan, 1999) that this task requires an examination of numerous examples of the phenomenon in question so that essential features can be distinguished from nonessential or contingent ones. This process is a variant of what in sociology is known as grounded theory (see Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Charmaz, 1983): an iterative process where candidates for essential features are tested against a continual set of cases and modified or discarded until they account for the entire set of relevant cases. The process is inherently empirical. In our work on foreign policymaking, we examined a very large amount of archival materials. For other social phenomena, interviews and participant observation may be appropriate methods to generate the empirical data necessary to determine the appropriate theoretical categories and the relations among them. The connections among these essential and contingent features of a particular social phenomenon should be understood as modes of assembly. Such modes can take different forms (see Majeski and Sylvan 1999: 307 and Majeski and Sylvan, 2000: 12-14 or examples) but all can be thought of as roughly analogous to recipes and these assembling connections we have called constitutive relations. Rules, norms, and practices that often form the core concerns of constructivist international relations theorists can be well represented as constitutive relations.

The Constitutive Relations Approach The view of social activities as constituted by relations of assemblage has interesting implications for how to model theories of such relations. Objects (agents, practices, norms) can be thought of as assembled or composed from other objects. There are numerous possible modes of composition and each such mode is associated with certain operators that compose objects from other objects. These operators that compose objects from other objects are tantamount to functions that map objects into other objects. Functions can be considered as precisely specified procedures which, when executed, compute objects. This makes it is possible to specify constitutive relations as a set of functions on the objects and then, for various values of the functions arguments, to compute the values of the functions themselves. This can be done using various of the calculi of lambda-conversion; among such calculi are computer languages such as LISP and Scheme. How this is possible requires a complex and technical argument and for those interested, you can find the details in Majeski and Sylvan (2000: 14-24). The constitutive relations approach suggests that, if a given social phenomenon exists across a variety of circumstances, it is defined by dint of particular constitutive relations; these give us the phenomenons essence. Take the phenomenon of a client state in international relations. One might discover that a client state is made up of several components: 1) a regime whose 2) performance is overseen by 3) a foreign policy bureaucracy of another state. The overseeing relation might turn out to be expressed by a dichotomous if-then relation, such that if the regime was succeeding in a given task, it would be allowed to continue; but if the regime was assessed as failing in a given task, the bureaucracy would begin to worry about taking over the task from the regime.12 To give a second example, my research with David Sylvan indicates that in high-level U.S. foreign policy recommendations have a particular essence. They are made up of a series of statements, including: 1) that a situation is characterized by one or more problems; 2) that policy henceforth should be characterized by the pursuit of a new proximate goal which 3) will aim at solving the problems; and that that goal should by pursued by means of 4) particular day-to-day missions (e.g., bombing; putting forward a new negotiating position) which in turn should be executed by particular tools (e.g., the Air Force; Canadian diplomats). We have found that relation 3) has a particular linguistic form: the goal in 2) is the negation of the problem in 1).13

12 13

For a discussion of the notion of clients states and its role in U.S. foreign policy see Sylvan and Majeski (2001). Note that on the above approach, studying essences is both a theoretical and an empirical phenomenon. The essence of gold is expressed as a theoretical relation between electrons and protons; but the claim to this effect is an empirical statement that every sample of gold ever examined would have the same atomic number. This is why essences can be discovered empirically. By the same token, our claims about the constitutive relations that define foreign policy recommendations and client states are themselves fairly abstract theoretical statements; but to formulate these claims took extensive empirical work.

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A virtue of the constitutive relations approach is that it permits one to make contingent empirical claims. This is the case for social as well as natural phenomena. To continue the above examples, if one were to discover that client states have as their essence an overseeing relation under which indigenous regimes will be permitted to continue only if they succeed in certain tasks, one could then generate contingent properties of the client state by stipulating the success or failure of the regime. For example, by stipulating failures of various sorts, one might deduce that the client state would experience a military intervention by the overseer, or perhaps a coup detat to replace the regime with another one. By the same token, the constitutive relations comprising the essence of U.S. foreign policy recommendations can be used to generate contingent properties of such recommendations. For example, if a particular recommendation contains as one of its components the contingent statement that current policy toward an adversary is failing because the adversary does not consider U.S. threats to be credible, then one can deduce that the recommendation will contain as another of its components the contingent statement that the new proximate goal of policy toward the adversary should be to make U.S. threats credible. An Agent-based Modeling Approach A second way to get at constitutive relations and essences is to theorize and model social phenomena using an agent-based modeling approach. The general logic of this approach is to stipulate agents (micro-level phenomena) and their rules of interaction and then observe what macro-level social patterns or structures emerge in a simulated environment (computer simulation). All agent-based models have two constitutive components; agents and an environment or world those agents inhabit.14 Agents can represent all kinds of phenomena depending upon the artificial world being constructed.15 In abstract terms, agents are bundles of two types of rules: those that define various internal states of the agent, and those that dictate how the agent responds to various stimuli from other agents and the environment (Holland, 1995). These rules are the formal equivalent of constitutive relations discussed in the first example. Examples of internal features or states of agents might include sex, metabolic rate, movement, strategy, memory, preferences, and objectives. Examples of behavioral (interaction) rules (often represented as if-then stimulus-response production rules) include such things as mating processes, trading relations, and rules regarding negotiation, signaling, sanctioning, and conflict. The environment or world is a medium separate from the agents, on which the agents operate and with which they interact (Epstein and Axtell, 1996, 5) but the world does have certain features that impinge on the agents. Environments can be quite abstract or concrete. They may reflect a complex biological landscape, an international political system (Cederman, 1997), or be more abstract as in the modeling tradition of Axelrod (1984, 1997). An agent-based model begins with an explicit set of assumptions about the two constitutive features of an artificial world (agents and their the environment) and uses them to generate simulated data of that world (see Axelrod, 1997). The focus of this approach is on uncovering what (if any) features of agents and/or their rules of interaction with other agents or the environment are necessary for certain macro-level social features to occur. Specifically, if we run a large number of simulations of an agent-based model, and half of them have agents of a certain sort, whereas the other half do not have those kinds of agents, and if the results of concern only happen when the agents are of that sort, then we can say that the existence of those agents is necessary for those results; i.e., that the agents of a particular kind are the essence of that system. From the perspective of Epstein and Axtell (1996), the question is, given an explicit set of properties of agents and their interactions, does a structural system-wide property (e.g. cooperation) emerge. For them the question is can you grow this structural feature of the constructed artificial world. Underlying this logic is the notion that the ability to grow such structural or system-wide properties implies that the micro-level properties of agents and the rules stipulating their interactions are sufficient conditions to generate those structural properties. One can also ask a different question. Are there essential features of agents, those that define various internal states
14

Agent-based modeling has a fairly substantial history but a relatively limited one in international relations research. (For some examples with a connection to international relations see Schelling, 1978; Axelrod, 1984, 1997; Epstein and Axtell, 1996; Cederman, 1997; Majeski et al., 1999; Lustick, 2000; and Majeski, 2000) 15 For an interesting discussion regarding humans as agents, see Pinker (1997, 321-3).

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of the agent and those that define how they interact, that are necessary for the structural or system-wide property of interest to occur? If we systematically vary features of the agents or the way the agents interact and discover that the event (system-wide cooperation) or social structure (institution) occurs only when agents have certain features or interact in certain ways, then we can say that the existence of agents with those features or interactions of a certain type are necessary or essential for the system level result. Or put another way, given the features of agents and the rules specifying their interactions, what kinds of system level (social) outcomes are possible?16 Constructivists are interested in what kinds of institutions are generated by the practices of agents, who have various desires, preferences, strategies, and material capabilities, and the interactions among those agents. They are also interested in the effects that various practices of agents and the interactions among them have on the social structures that are generated. Agent-based modeling is an effective way of analyzing such relations and, while most modeling efforts tend to analyze simplified and more abstract versions of the social process of interest, the technology available now allows for quite complex and more realistic representations of the social processes than earlier simulation modeling in international relations. Conclusion Constitutive relations are of considerable importance to the study of international relations; a claim that likely very few in the constructivist camp doubts. What I have tried to suggest here is that there are various ways to model constitutive theories of international relations and other social phenomena in a rigorous and precise fashion. The value of modeling constructivist theories of course depends on the accuracy and power of the theories themselves. But employing models of those theories based upon appropriate formalisms raises the likelihood that constructivist scholars can make more powerful empirical claims and examine in a critical and more rigorous fashion relevant theoretical and empirical counterfactuals.

References: Axelrod, R. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Axelrod, R. 1997. The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-based Models of Competition and Collaboration. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cederman, L. 1997. Emergent Actors in World Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Charmaz, K. 1983. The Grounded Theory Method: An Explication and Interpretation, In R.M. Emerson (ed.) Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Glaser, B.G. and A.L. Strauss 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine. Epstein, J.M. and R. Axtell. 1996. Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Holland, J.H. 1995. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Lustick, I. 2000. Agent-based Modeling of Collective Identity: Testing Constructivist Theory, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Vol 3, No1.

16

An important difference from the constitutive relations foreign policy example noted above is that the results of interest are not the constitution of individual agents or the policies they put together but rather the aggregate relations of the agents (a system-level or social feature or what might loosely be termed an institution).

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http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/3/1/1.html. Majeski, S.J. 2000. Asymmetric Power Among Agents in Evolutionary Games, presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association Meeting. Washington, D.C. Majeski, S.J., G. Linden, C. Linden, and A. Spitzer. 1999. Agent Mobility and the Evolution of Cooperative Communities Complexity, Vol 5:1, 16-24. Majeski, S.J. and D. Sylvan, 1999. How Foreign Policy Recommendations are Put Together: A Computational Model with Empirical Applications, International Interactions, 24:4, 301-332. Majeski, S.J. and D. Sylvan. 2000. Modeling Theories of Constitutive Relations in Politics, Typescript. Majeski, S.J. and D. Sylvan 2000. An Argument for Non-causal Necessity: Two Approaches to Modeling Essences, Typescript. Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton. Schelling, T.C., 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton. Sylvan, D., and S.J. Majeski, 1998. "A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals," International Studies Quarterly, 42: 1998, 79-10. Sylvan, D. and S.J. Majeski, 2001. The Continuity of Client States and Military Intervention in United States Foreign Policy, Paper prepared for presentation at the 42nd Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Chicago, 20-25 February 2001. Wendt, Alexander. 1998. On Constitution and Causation in International Relations, Review of International Studies, 24 (special issue) 101-117.

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October Reflections of a Dialectical/Evolutionary Constructivist17

Hayward R. Alker John A. Mc Cone Professor of International Relations School of International Relations University of Southern California

Open your chest welcoming death in the path of God and utter your prayer seconds before you go to your target. Let your last words be, There is no God but God and Mohammed is His messenger. Then, God willing, you will be in heavens.18 These instructions, found in Mohamed Attas luggage destined for a flight from Boston to Los Angeles that was forcibly diverted into a suicidal attack on the World Trade Towers, provide a timely, not insignificant test for social constructivists. CIS/SIR/USC workshop participants have been asked to outline their own variant of International Relations constructivism, comparing that approach to Nicholas Onufs perspective.19 I shall try to illustrate my approach with this pressingly important example, deepened a bit by the subsequent viewing of Osama bin Ladens remarkable post-September 11th TV interview. This task is especially difficult for me. The first difficulty is that of choosing a label for my own styles of work, which are not unitary in themselves. That I have for many years tried to reconcile and differentiate logical/analytical/empirical styles of work with critical, dialectical-hermeneutic approaches to social scientific and humanistic styles of research is another way of identifying this labeling problem. In my own self-understanding, my most important early papers were on the themes of causal modeling and beyond, culminating in a series of simulational studies of the evolutionary (meaning ad hoc, unplanned) development of the UN Collective Security System inspired by IR theorists Ernst Haas and Lincoln Bloomfield, and modelers of the evolution of organizationally embedded artificial intelligence, Herbert Simon and L. Fogel.20 Rom Harr gave me my most systematic and persuasive exposure to social psychological constructivism, especially because of his quasi-Habermasian critiques of the inadequacies of causal modeling and naturalistic experimental

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Remarks revised from those distributed to participants in the School of International Relations workshop on Constructivism held at the University of Southern California October 6, 2001. Please do not quote without permission. 18 This quotation is from the Arabic language document reportedly found in the luggage of Mohamed Atta, killed on September 11, 2001 when the plane he and his collaborators had hijacked crashed into the World Trade Center. Its authorship is not yet known. Here and below I am quoting from two incomplete reports: Excerpts From Notes Found After Hijackings, New York Times, September 29, 2001, page 3 (which also has an article by Gustav Niebuhr on The Letter); Suicide Note Promised Hijackers Eternal Paradise, Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2001, page A15; the entire text was translated in the LA Times for Septemer 29, 2001. Both are partial versions of the letter/document. The LATimes version ends with There is no God but God.We are of God, and to God we return. 19 Nicholas Onuf, The Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations, distributed to Workshop attenders. 20 The most important overview article is H. R. Alker, Jr. & Christensen, C. (1972) "From Causal Modelling to Artificial Intelligence: The Evolution of a UN Peace-Making Simulation." In LaPonce & Smoker, eds., Experimentation and Simulation in Political Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972; see the citations within that article for more details. For those whose bibliographic memories dont extend back more than a decade or two, L. Fogel, A. Owens, and J. Walsh, Artificial Intelligence Through Simulated Evolution, Wiley, New York, 1966, and John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata,, Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1966, edited and completed by Arthur W. Burks, are two pioneering studies in what now would be called complex adaptive systems theory and artificial life.

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approaches to social and political inquiry21. Having relived the discovery of several visionary computationally oriented paradigms of social inquiry, including Deutschean political cybernetics, von Neumanns theory of selfreproducing automata (what Leibniz would call living machines), Simon and Newells artificial intelligence, Chomskean linguistics and Schank-Abelsons computational pragmatics,22 I am a strong believer in the historicaldialectical nature of knowledge growth, including what Thomas Kuhn would call normal science (research programs) and exemplar/paradigm/disciplinary revolutions. In Stephen C. Peppers review of metaphysical/ontological systems, evolutionary theory and my own understanding of social processes have both historical-contextualist and dialectical-organicist aspects.23 In the conversationally oriented world of computational semantics and pragmatics Searle, Schank and Abelson and Lakoff and Johnson being the most important influences on my own thinking 24-- performative language use, dialogical thinking and embodied cognition both convey these biological and dialectical themes. From all these possible self-labels, I have selected dialectical/evolutionary for the title of these remarks because these two terms are probably the most familiar, relevant and synthetic, and because the most important links between our dialectically evolved, ecology-adapted, species-human capabilities and our actions are not genetic determinisms, but dialectically shaped cultures, practices, projects and decisions.25 The second reason for the difficulty of my choice of example is our (and especially my) incomplete knowledge of the socio-psychological motivations of the protagonists, the nature of these actions, and their world
21

Jurgen Habermas, Science and Technology as Ideology, in his Toward a Rational Society, Beacon Press, Boston, 1970; Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, Beacon Press, 1979; R. Harr and P. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behavior, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1972. 22 Perhaps the most autobiographically useful summaries of these are H. R. Alker, Jr., "Polimetrics: Its Descriptive Foundations." In Nelson W. Polsby & Fred I. Greenstein, eds., Handbook of Political Science, Volume 7, pp. 139210. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975; H. R. Alker, Jr., "Research Paradigms and Mathematical Politics," Social Science Yearbook for Politics 5 (1976): 13-50, Vienna: Gnter Olzog Verlag Mnchen; H. R. Alker, Jr., "From Political Cybernetics to Global Modeling." In R.L. Merritt & B.M. Russett, eds., From National Development to Global Community, pp. 353-378. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981; and H. R. Alker, Jr., "Bit Flows, Rewrites, Social Talk: Towards More Adequate Informational Ontologies," published in the proceedings of the Centennial Conference of Todai University, Information and its Functions, October 1986, Tokyo University Press, and reprinted in M. Campanella, ed., Between Rationality and Cognition, Torino: Meynier, 1988. 23 S. C. Pepper, World Hypotheses, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1970, Chapters X and XI. Pepper sees organicism or integration as largely equivalent versions of organicisms root metaphor, and every event in the world is a more or less concealed integrative/organic process. Processual and final/ideal understandings of the developmental significance of events are frequently in dialectical opposition. Seven fundamental categories of this way of thought are: (1) fragments of experience which appear with (2) nexuses or connections or implications, which spontaneously lead as a result of the aggravation of (3) contradictions, gaps, oppositions, or counteractions to resolution in (4) an organic whole, which is found to have been (5) implicit in the fragments, and to (6) transcend the previous contradictions be means of a coherent totality, which (7) economizes, saves, preserves all the original fragments of experience without any loss. (p. 283) As a strong believer in the ideal of transparent historicity, operationally modeled via lexically scoped LISP procedures/programs, and a follower of both Karl Deutsch and Jrgen Habermas, developmental theorists of social communication, I am compelled to acknowledge my organicist roots. See my Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996, especially Chapters 1-3, 5, 10 and 11 for more details. 24 See especially, J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969; R. Schank and R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, L.Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1977; G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, 1999. 25 With Onuf, I also share a deep interest in classical modes of political theorizing, socialization in Harold Lasswells social-legal model of policy analysis, a familiarity with Habermas and Harr, and many assessments of the relative contributions of recent scientifically oriented work in International Relations. I would add, however, a fourth, ecological world to the four he enumerates, and emphasize work and play equally in an Harr-inspired treatment of September 11 relevant motivations and significances. The actions of the terrorists or should I say Islamic militants? were clearly deeply embedded in dramatic/religious/ritual significances.

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historical significance. The first lacuna is closely linked to the secrecy of the hijackers actions, while the second has to do with the contending frameworks extent in the world today for making world historical sense of such actions, and the clear sense of many that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were only an especially vivid and horrible episode in an as yet uncompleted drama. Will historians of the twenty-second century of the Christian calendar be able to agree on the significance of these actions? Perhaps even their dates will differ from ours.

The Calling of the Global Islamic Militant Briefly, and for discussions sake, I shall suggest hypotheses, several lines of constructively making sense of the motivation and significance of the terrorists actions on September 11, 2001. I shall do so not as a specialist on terrorism or on Islam, but as a neoclassically oriented teacher of International Relations, and a methodologist inspired by the rigor of the analytical-empirical tradition of philosophical analysis and the communicative, pragmatic and emancipatory interests of the hermeneutic-dialectical tradition of sociopolitical inquiry.26 Because the sources of my hypotheses are largely from the Western tradition, whose globalization and transformation has until recently been the central story of modern world history, I shall conclude (HYPOTHESIS 7 below) by offering the suggestion that the suicideal acts of mass killing on September 11, 2001 took place as part of the continuing encounters of candidate world ordering practices within the emerging global civilization, and should therefore not be understood as representing a Clash of Civilizations. HYPOTHESIS I: The September acts were part of an ongoing and increasingly visible set of post-modern, global conflicts about contradictory ways of life. Perhaps we should say we are beginning World War III; Toynbee at least was called to study alternative civilizational histories and to write Civilization on Trial by the difficulties and challenges presented to Western societies by the first two world wars. Indeed, we have been told by Colin Powell, Samuel Huntington and Osama bin Laden that present and emergent conflicts are about civilization or civilizations. It seems that the violent acts we have seen are tips of icebergs, of resentments, of frustrations and anger about contended senses of what is just and good in the lives of the globes inhabitants. I would prefer to describe these conflicts as cultural, economic and political, as about contradictory ways of life. Their global character, which links centers in New York and Washington to what from there look like distant peripheries in the Near East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa and Indonesia, etc., is evident. The adjective global above also means that the conflict is not merely an inter-state conflict, and part of a civil/domestic conflict in each of the societies mentioned above, but also a transnational conflict focused on and organized around network-connected institutional agents like churches, schools, businesses, markets, news and entertainment media, financial agencies, armed resistance organizations and state apparatuses supporting these other institutions. Ours is a post-modern age of globalization. Containing many interactions of both conflict and cooperation, the world system is becoming a global society and civilization with sharpening economic, cultural and political contradictions.27 Debates are about power and justice in specific situations, and more generally. Power is an issue
26

Hereafter I shall stop acknowledging sources given at some point in my Rediscoveries and Reformulations, op. cit., especially Chapters 3 (Toynbees Jesus: Computational Hermeneutics and the Continuing Presence of Classical Mediterranean Civilization), Chapter 4 (The Humanistic Moment in International Studies: Reflections on Machiavelli and Las Casas), Chapter 5 (Can the End of Power Politics be Part of the Concepts with which its Story is Told?), Chapter 6 (Rescuing reason from the Rationalists: Reading Vico, Marx and Weber as Reflective Institutionalists), and Chapter 12 (The Return of Practical Reason to International Theory). The last of these chapters is a detailed, hopefully persuasive synthesis of ideas from Hollis and Smith, Onuf and Kratochwil. 27 In this regard, since I have not yet read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard U. Press, 2000, I cant make a highly topical, explicitly postmodern account of September events from their Deleuzian perspective. Rob Walkers One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace, Lynn Reinner, 1988, and Immanuel Wallersteins writings on counter-systemic, or anti-liberal social movements do seem prophetic, however. See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and geoculture: Essays on the Changing world-system, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 1991 and his After Liberalism, New Press, 1995.

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also in a post-modern Foucaultean sense, focused on the power-linked practices of everyday life, or in Onufs sense of the fusion of the politics of societal rules and political rule over unequal value distributions. The situation is also post-modern in Havels sense that the greatest modern attempts rationally to transform national societies into planned utopias the revolutionary Communist projects of the 19th and 20th Centuries have failed. HYPOTHESIS 2: The hegemonic remilitarization of international relations is a principal result, with both global and inter-state aspects, of the ongoing crisis. Steve Smith was right in a recent London Times to argue that a result of a new anti-terrorist top priority within the Bush Administration and the American Congress is an increase in American hegemonic power (of rules and rule, in Onufs sense) in the world. At last we Americans are really trying to act like a hegemon, enlisting dozens of multilateral organizations in the support of our new cause. But the mobilization of military budgets and programs the budget for missile defense sailed through without a debate, and a new kind of secret, dirty, guerilla war relying on increased governmental surveillance are also in the offing. The reemergence of statist boundary guarding mechanisms of message surveillance, immigration monitoring, cargo checking, financial freezing, the patrolling of skies and coasts, etc., is a resurgence of the traditional, modern, interstate order, what technically might be described as a clearly observable reactionary trend. Along the lines of contemporary Gramschian theorists like Robert Cox, Stephen Gill and Craig Murphy, one could deepen our discussions of hegemony, supremacy, truth regimes and terrorism. But I would like here, alternatively, to focus on the issue of the remilitarization of world politics that seems to be occurring. Despite little direct attention, the militarization aspect of these phenomena is world wide, and it reaches well within societies, not just between them. The irrelevance of so much of Americas military might most of our conventional forces are or were pathetically ineffective against the actions of nearly invisible, quasi-civilian terrorists hijacking American civilian airlines has only been noted in passing. Global civil wars, garrison states and totalitarian constraints on individual liberties were part of a pessimistic Lasswellian projection of one possibility of modern world development. Toynbee says somewhere of his 20 different civilizations, what he fears for the emerging global/central/world civilization, that they failed creatively to respond to their challenges, falling into self-defeating militarism. Have these issues yet been seriously raised in our time of crisis? Shouldnt they be? HYPOTHESIS 3: Islamic terrorism of the sort we have recently seen has many Machiavellian aspects, and is thus both a proto-modern, modern and post-modern happening. Modernity, according to William Connolly, is a period or order in which the insistence on taking charge of the world comes into its own. Machiavelli gave as gendered a version of this impulse as do our current terrorists, aligning masculine virtu vs. feminine fortuna, who might be taken by a mixture of force and guile. I painfully recall the proto-modern violence of a new order struggling to be born in and around Renaissance Italy at the midpoint of the last millennium. Self-sculpting individuals and states seeking power and glory were painfully being created. Recall this foundational statement of Gods voice in Renaissance Humanism: Thou [referring to 15th century man], like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou does prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes[or] grow upwards from they souls reason into the higher natures which are divine. The new rulers of the Mediterranean world were half men, half beasts, human hybrids of the divine and the brutish. I have been citing Machiavelli and Pico della Mirandola, not the ideologists of Al Qaeda attempting to motivate terrorists to make the supreme sacrifice of their lives. But the similarities, as well as the differences, of these protomodern perspectives should be noted. In the early 18th Century, Vico the first modern constructivist worthy of the name, who argued against Descartes doctrine of truth grounded by clear and distinct ideas that inner truths were grounded in the consciousness of their makers, in the convertability of the true and the made, verum and factum went further. He criticized modern intellectual achievements as evidencing a second barbarism of reflection, as a kind of senility and impotence when each man lives in his own egotistic, anxiety-ridden world, unable to communicate or

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cooperate with his fellows. Terrorists living in our midst, in a world bin Laden sees as materialistic and irreligious, probably thought something similar about their temporary sojourn in these United States. HYPOTHESIS 4: We can understand suicidal terrorism as personal callings, as identity-linked commitments, life-transcending scripts and projects, as the acts of rational fools. Recall Webers critique of modernity. The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out in monastic cells into everyday life and began [especially through the Protestant Ethic] to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic orderIn Baxters view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage [V]ictorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, sees also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in ones calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. In fairness to the United States but not necessarily its entertainment industry, with which much of the world is entranced one surely would have to include firefighters, police and safety workers as not yet devoid of a sense of calling. The statement could almost have been written by an apologist for Islamic militants who saw the global reach of the businesses symbolized by the World Trade Towers as part of their own iron cage. I quote the above not because I want to discredit Weber indeed, I wish to follow the example of one of the greatest historical, cross-cultural social scientists Europe has ever produced but because I want strongly to suggest that the issues facing our peoples today are issues and conflicts internal to European societies and their descendent, multi-ethnic hybrids like the United States, as well as to other societies and to the emerging world society. We are not internally unified as a force for good of civilization vs an external evil called terrorism. Have we never done anything deserving an equally heinous label such as genocide or the disproportionate use of force against civilian populations in the eyes of members of other societies or civilizations? Osama bin Laden cited the atomic bombing of Japans civilians in this regard in his recently released, post-September 11 video. Methodologically, as social constructivists, how should we study the personal calling of the suicidal, selfdefined Islamic militants; or, in other words, how can we describe them in ways that suggestive deeper understandings? If Americans agree in calling them terrorists, it is not good social science only to use labels that apparently are not part of the actors own self understandings. So I have suggested calling them Islamic militants and am trying to elucidate ways in which their horrible actions resulted from their personal (religious) callings or vocations. In this regard, following Harr, I argue that people create themselves and their patterns of interaction by virtue of the psychological and social theories [about themselves and others] to which they subscribe. Inspired by Webers own analysis of the Protestant Ethic, this memo is a preliminary attempt to do just that. Moreover, I agree with the critics of rational choice theories that capitalisms own forms of instrumentally oriented self-understanding in terms of utility-increasing models of individual or collective self-interest are inadequate for our present task. Following Martin Hollis inspired account (also following della Mirandola) of man as a free and sovereign artificer, I want to suggest focusing on identity-linked self-restructuring life projects,28 or self-redefining life-transcending projects of heroic sacrifice. Mohamed Atta appears to have wished for burial as an heroic, religiously inspired martyr. For Hollis, these projects are not fully blueprinted or scripted,29 to be enacted after rational deliberation. [Such a life-transcending project] is more like an [tragic?] operatic theme, which unfolds and develops as a life takes on texture and shape[with a rationality] not wholly instrumental. In Harrs terms, as quoted by Onuf, these tragedies involve both deadly work and self-monitoring role-play. But to go beyond present terrorists self-understandings, we need to be able to argue why their actions are tragic for the Islamic militants themselves as well.

28 29

See Martin Hollis, The Cunning of Reason, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 1, 77, 85. See however, my discussion of heroic, religiously inspired warrior scripts in Chapters 3 and 8 of Rediscoveries and Reformulations. Ritualized scripts, the rehearsal of memorized passages from the Koran, were an important part of Mohamed Attas rather detailed instructions and prior training. Perhaps we should distinguish the degrees of latitude associated with the callings of foot soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and higher level commanders.

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I have often argued that a special beauty of the Schank-Abelson computable formalization of human understanding in terms of scripts, plans, interpersonal themes, role-linked plans or expectations, and action-inducing goal frames is the extent to which it provides a theoretically tractable operationalization of the notion of life projects (op cit., p. 144-147). Schank and Abelson mention and describe good professor, becoming rich, anti-war protestor and Communist as such knowledge structures. One could construct such life project descriptions, something like operational codes, also for Islamic militants or Al Qaeda followers. These projects are defined with several subcomponents. First among them are theme defining/recognizing/constituting patterns, then general and specific goals, and, finally, production rules (test-action pairs that produce actions in specific situations). As a step in this direction, associated with his instructions, Mohamed Atta appears to have also provided us with a willlike document suggesting that he wished to be buried as an heroic martyr in , or facing, Mecca, without the presence of any pregnant women. Amartya Sen has similarly tried to model ethical-religious life projects as driven by rankings on rankings of possibilities, sensitive to the facts of commitment and loyalty that seem foolish to utilitarian individualists, but common sensible to ordinary human beings. Aware of such efforts, Hollis has tried further to reformulate Humean, Kantian and more recent accounts of ethical actions in terms of internal, passion-driven reasons and externally motivating public-identified good reasons. Hence in the concluding chapter of my 1996 book I argued that The actual content of identities and interests, the complex mix of passion-internal and passion-external reasons governing, and enacted in, our lives can only be discovered by concrete investigations of criticizable, intersecting and transformable chains of practical reasoning. I had life-enhancing, but not life-denying, life projects in mind. HYPOTHESIS 5: Terrorist acts are the results of ritualized practical reasoning. Part of the gains to scholarly understanding of modern scientific practices and of formally rational processes of socioeconomic activity of recent, post-modern or nonmodern accounts by Wittgenstein, Toulmin, Latour, Rabinow, and others is the argument that these practices are not fully modern, but forms of life, culturally shaped, ritualized language games beneath the mathematics, nature-society hybrids, pre- and post-modern mixtures of faith and reason and reasonableness in theory open to correction, redefinition and improvement. Consider how one might fill in the components of my revision of Douglas Waltons frame-structured conception of practical reasoning as goal-driven, knowledge-based, action-guiding argumentation on the basis of Mohamed Attas instructions. This kind of argumentation: (1) contains goals [preferentially stated as intentional claims] which it aims toward [and is committed to] realizing; (2) is a knowledge-based type of reasoning, which takes its [open to revision] premises [and historical precedents] from a [variable,] particular situation of relevant knowledge; (3) ends or concludes in actions [changed commitments,] or a practical imperative that directs a reasoner to action; (4) is a dynamic kind of [deliberative, self-critical] reasoning that can be evaluated both at a global or local level, in a sequence where a chain of goals and actions fit (or mesh) together; (5) is a useful kind of [interactive, dialectical] reasoning because it fits into various [ethical, political, economic, aesthetic, dietary or medical] contexts of dialogue [including language game rules and sociological role expectations]; (6) takes side effects of contemplated courses of action into account, insofar as these can be anticipated. So many of the pieces fit Mohamed Attas devotionally-linked instructions, from the precedentially shaped, Koranlinked historical retellings of Muslim history30, the suggestions for handling fearful doubts, to the religious and dietary rituals of purification sprinkled throughout it, to the anticipated but not totally predictable welcome in paradise, God willing. The document is practically designed, action-guiding, based on an especially acerbic this
30

I especially admire Marshall G. S. Hodgsons 3 volume The Venture of Islam, and his briefer Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and world history, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. A much degraded, and partisan version of the history of the crusades is Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes., Al Saqi Books, London, 1984.

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worldly asceticism, Islamic traditions of knowledge, to use Webers language once again. Organizing such knowledge into action-guiding frames can be a useful way of exploring its action-guiding, constitutive powers. HYPOTHESIS 6. Al Qaeda is trying to remake world history into a Reformation (within Islam) or (more broadly) a Renaissance of Islamic influence. At least bin Ladens post-September 11th video makes clear a concern with a return to the period of greatest Islamic power and glory, somewhere around the 9th to the 13th centuries. How would an historical constructivist look at such an inclination? According to Isaiah Berlins commentary, the true gift of Vicos analysis parallel in many ways with Ibn Khalduns earlier, brilliant analysis of the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations was his application of the verum/factum transcription to the realm of human history. We know this intellectual revolution best through Marxs famous aphorism to the effect that men make their own history, but not at the times and in the circumstances of their choice. In Metahistory, Hayden White has suggested a typology of 19th Century European historical emplotment, argumentation and ideological implication strategies; he also offers a brilliant retelling of the Marxian account of alienation involving commodity fetishism and alienation engendering productive-distributional processes. But historicity is no European monopoly, as any civilizational historian will tell you. The prospect of an anti-Crusader, anti-Jewish Islamic Reformation or Renaissance of power (and culture, too?) in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Near East, and beyond may well energize contemporary Islamic militants, perhaps in different ways. What bold arrogance, what a modern aspiration! How these world historical views compare with and contrast with the strange mixtures of worldliness and unwordliness of the early Christians and/or the thisworldly asceticism of the Protestant Reformation needs more historical and metahistorical constructivist investigation. HYPOTHESIS 7. The present conflict is part of the mostly peaceful, but increasingly violent encounter of world ordering practices, of weaker and stronger world orders, within a globalizing world civilization; at most we can say it is a clash of directionally shaped world orders, not a clash of civilizations. Many critics in the United States and in Asia have criticized Huntingtons overly narrow and contestational grammar of civilizational encounters. The present situation is one of contradictions, clashes and accommodations within a globalizing civilization, not mainly a clash of homogeneous exclusionary civilizations. One of the many strengths of Onufs paper is his recognition of the possible coexistence of multiple rule-constituted and regulated worlds. In my collaborative work on the dialectics of world order,31 we have also found it very advantageous to think of the development of world history as if it were a contest among overlapping and inter-penetrating world orders, a contest in which accommodations as well as violent clashes are possible.32 Returning to Mohamed Attas instructions, in the world histories written in the next century I would like to see appear rather different readings of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief that We are of God, and to God we return than those which have been so forcefully brought before our consciousness last month. Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian cosmologies can only enrich such understandings as well, as do agnosticism and atheism. Perhaps a reverent but skeptical, principled yet tolerant, context-sensitive but reasonable humanism may yet prevail.

31

See Alker, Amin, Biersteker and Inoguchi, Twelve world order debates which have made our days, in preparation. 32 Contra Samuel P. Huntington, I thus more than half agree with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who concluded his October 1st address to the UN General Assembly with the thought that Surrounded by our friends of every faith, we know this is not a clash of civilizations. Its a conflict between murderers and humanity. (New York Times, Oct.2) On the last point, I would rather describe the attackers as post-modern, Islamically self-identified, militant warriors using, as Ron Steel has argued, the terrorist weapons of the weak against the commercial and military citadels of the rich and strong. This conflict is between different world ordering practices of fully human beings, all eager at times to use higher callings and loyalties to try to transform acts of murderous barbarity into more or less legitimate acts of heroic service and sacrifice.

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POSTSCRIPT ON THE AGENT-STRUCTURE PROBLEM: AGENCY, INSTITUTIONS AND STRUCTURATION

Nicholas Onuf It might seem from my paper (The Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations) that I have lost interest in solving the infamous agent-structure problem. At least Colin Wight seems to think so (Too Much Constructivism in Too Many Wor[l]ds, p. 4). Not so. I have lost patience with the so-called agent-structure debate. Nevertheless, I do believe that any constructivist worthy of the name must deal first and foremostly with the way, or ways, in which agents and institutions constitute each other. I tried to say just this as forcefully as I could during the CIS workshop on (Re)Constructing Constructivist International Relations Research (October 6, 2001). In this postscript I suggest that the solution to the agent-structure problem depends on the way that we, as observers, conceptualize processes of social construction. The first step is to discern analytically relevant, ontologically sound (read: real) categories of social activities and artifacts. The second step is to relate these categories systematically. In taking the second step, we reconstruct actual social processes in an idealized form. Rendered real by this very process, formal solutions, like theories, are never really more than this until we, as agents, put them to use in actual social processes. By offering my solution here, I am taking a third step by (re)entering an ongoing process of social construction. Most of what follows I have adapted from my paper, Agency, Institutions and Structuration in Late Modern Civil Society, presented at the Conference on Global Civil Society, Gregynog, Wales, September 10-12, 2001, and available on request. Let me start on this idealized journey by reiterating a claim that I made during the workshop. Speech acts, statements of intention (so-called policies) and rules (general normative statements) constitute an ontological domainan ontologically privileged domainwithout which agents and institutions are denied the ontological standing that we routinely extend to them. Indeed, by constituting agents and institutions, these linguistic and therefore normative materials constitute the very conditions by which it is even possible for us, as observers, to construe agents and institutions in any kind of systematic relation. Once observed, or perhaps surmised, it is this relation that we observers conventionally refer to as structure. A second claim follows on, if not from, the first. Agency is the condition of acting on behalf of someone, including oneself, or some institution. Even if agents act unconsciously, observers can properly say that they have acted intentionally, whether to achieve someones ends, including their own, or to achieve ends that agents, including themselves, have imparted to institutions by their actions. Institutions act as agents when, and only when, someone acts on their behalf, and we think of these institutions as performing functions that satisfy agents wants and needs. Taken together, these two claims imply a third. Rules constitute the conditions of agency within limits set by the functional properties of these rules. As ensembles of rules, institutions also function within limits set by the same functional properties. Elsewhere, I show that rules in use always perform regulative and constitutive functions simultaneously, and that they do so in just three analytically distinct ways (World of Our Making, ch. 2). Because rules are always and necessarily normative statements in the form of speech acts, the functional analysis of rules parallels the functional analysis of performative speech. Speech acts fall into three, and only three, categories reflecting the effects that speaking agents would like their words to have on the world. These three functional categories are: (1) Assertive speech acts, by which speakers seek to match their words to some state of the world, whether presumed or preferred, so that other agents see the world the same way.

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(2) Directive speech acts, by which speakers seek to change the world by having other agents act on speakers words. (3) Commissive speech acts, by which speakers seek to change the world by having other agents hold speakers to the consequences indicated by their choice of words. Corresponding in form to these functional categories of speech acts are (1) instruction-rules, which tell agents what the world is like and how they fit in it; (2) directive-rules, which tell agents what to do about an indicated state of affairs; and (3) commitment-rules, which tell agents what they and other agents owe to, and may expect from, each other. Instruction-rules tell agents how they fit in the world by drawing distinctions among agents and assigning different values to these distinctions. Agents locate themselves institutionally by reference to the many statuses that such rules confer on them. Agents holding any given status form a network, construed as the sum of transactions undertaken by identical status holders. Visualized on a horizontal plane, networks are bounded by status markers and limited by transaction costs. They operate optimally in social settings affording agents direct and continuous contact. Because status, as a measure of worth, is always relational, networks are necessarily positioned on planes above or below all other status-defined networks in the same institutional setting. To the extent that the relevant instruction-rules are clear and uncontested, they produce a highly stratified ensemble of networks. Directive-rules are standing orders, or directive speech acts with lasting effects. When these rules are formally stated and directly linked to other such rules, positivist legal theory tells us that they are valid and effective, and therefore legal rules. Particular rules possess these properties (in whatever degree) because of their position in an ensemble of rules, some of which specify the form and scope of other rules, and provide for their support. Directive-rules give directive speech acts their lasting effect by setting the conditions under which such directives are to be carried out in the future. These conditions constitute offices. Agents locate themselves institutionally by reference to the statuses that instruction-rules confer on them, as we have seen, and the offices that directive-rules confer on them. While instruction-rules constitute networks, by definition consisting of a number of agents holding the same status, directive-rules constitute offices for each of which there is, again by definition, only one officer. The position of every office is determined by reference to at least one other officethe office from which orders are received, the office to which orders are sent, or both. When orders are visualized as descending from office to office in metaphorical space, we see this as a chain of command. Thus arranged, offices constitute an institution familiar to us as an organization. Under the rules, any given officer may give orders to more than one other officer, in which case the organization will have two or more chains of command. From an institutional perspective, these rules organize the activities of many agents by making offices functionally complementary. The larger an organization, the more its chains of command will branch, and the more that organization will resemble the familiar pyramid of organization charts. That directive-rules tend to be formally stated as such gives them a tangible existence on their own. By contrast, commitment-rules are typically formalized as a relation among agents. When someone makes a promise that someone else accepts, this pair of acts constitutes a relation between the two fixed by the terms of the promise and perceived by both as an obligation. Reciprocal promising produces contracts. Agents tend to fulfill them because the terms of the exchange are formal and explicit. Open-ended promising and generalized reciprocity produce formal relations with lasting effects, well known to us as the rights that agents claim for themselves and the duties that they claim others owe them in particular institutional settings. Agents draw inferences, not about the rules as such, but about the conditions of agency, or roles, that these rules assign to them. Roles give form to reciprocal commitments; reciprocity gives roles the formal property of equality. In every case, roles constitute agents as partners (rivals being partners in rivalry, and so on). The formal relation of equality imposes no limit on the number of partners for whom that relation obtains, and all such partners

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have the same rights and duties. By associating as equals, agents locate themselves institutionally as members of an association or partnership. Associations may be the product of informal, inclusive commitment-rules. In this case, agents know their rights and duties, or roles, without necessarily having a clear sense of the institution in which these rights and duties locate them. Markets are said to constitute institutions of this sort, and liberal society is presumed to favor them. Agents locate themselves in more formal associations only on terms negotiated with or generally applicable to other members of the association. There can be no agents where there are no rules of agency. There can be no agency in the absence of institutions. There can be no institutions in the absence of agents. It is pointless to ask which comes first. The rules of agency distribute statuses, offices and roles. Every agent holds an ensemble of statuses, offices and roles unique to that agent. Agents link networks, organizations and associations in an inconceivably large number of ways, the totality of which we conceptualize as society. These processes are anything but random. Particular societies acquire persistent institutional features. As I said, agents locate themselves in these complex arrangements by reference to the rules constituting them as agents. Yet this suffices neither to give any society its structure nor to give agency the stability that we generally see it as having. There are additional processes, or ongoing, rule-related practices, at work. Collectively, I view them as a close approximation of what might mean by the term structuration. In my view, all such processes fall into three primary categories corresponding to the categories of rules and institutions that I identified earlier. As the primary modes of structuration, participation, representation and recognition firm up society as an inclusive structure of functional relations by simultaneously actualizing agency and activating institutions in regular and predictable ways. Furthermore these modes of structuration substantially constitute the working categories that we, as agents and observers, habitually treat as the structural levels and functional sectors of activity characterizing our social arrangements. It is here, I think, that Colin Wight and I have our deepest disagreement. He is a philosophical realist, and I, as someone who takes Kant at his word (Critique of Pure Reason), am a philosophical constructivist. We do agree that structural levels and functional sectors are realthey are not just observers contrivances. We do not agree on the epistemological warrant for saying this. I hold that they are real because we, as agents, treat them as if they are real. Rules make this operation possible, just as this operation in turn makes theory possible (cf. Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics, pp. 16-23). As Kant said, we are all realists in practice. Levels and sectors are real features of our social arrangements because the ruled practices constituting participation, representation and recognition as modes of structuration make them real. How they do so are matters that political theorists have broached recently in discussions of civil society. As far as I know, constructivists have had little if anything to say about these matters or, for that matter, about global civil society. I myself have tried to rectify this oversight in the paper that I have relied on for this postscript. The following is an abridged version of the section on modes of structuration. The term participation peppers recent discussions of civil society. Its use is highly normative, almost always introduced to identify modernization with democratization or to make democratization more authentic by freeing it from organizational constraints. Lately the continuing exclusion of networks broadly connoted by such terms as race, class and gender from participation in democratic processes has gained a good deal of attention. The preoccupation with democracy masks those properties of participation that make it a primary mode of structuration. Rules assigning statuses tell agents which networks they are free to participate in and, by the same token, which ones are not open to them. The extent to which agents take advantage of participatory opportunities is no doubt variable. Yet in status-oriented societies, it is probably the case that being and doing are largely indistinguishable. Where passive participation is an active form of agency, transgressive participation, by which I mean an active

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defiance of status markers, will normally prompt an active response from agents in the transgressed network. Even then network participants will often feign passivity as they silence or exclude the offending agent. In this light, we can see why modernizers have always called for the dismantling of the old regime of status relations. Active passivity inhibits change; acting to change anything activates on off-setting response; deliberately changing everything is the only way to change anything, and changing everything means jettisoning the entire system of status relations, with its homeostatic tendencies and stratifying consequences. By abolishing status, modernizers open space for agents to assume offices and roles which they must then actively take up, and not just hold, for the organizations and associations thus constituted would not otherwise function. Frequently, if misleadingly, we call this active stance toward offices and roles participation. Citizenship, for example, is an office and making citizenship more inclusive a modernizing goal. Voting and other acts of citizenship are, broadly speaking, participatory, but failure to participate in this sense has the effect of removing, if only temporarily, that officer from her place in the apparatus of the state. Joining an association but then becoming inactive is, by the same token, to leave the association. Participation does enter the picture when agents collectively find status implications in their offices and roles and, by doing so, buttress organizations and associations with stratified networks. When conscientious citizens identify with and affirm the conduct other such citizens, they form a network in which they see themselves actively participating. Abolishing statuses wholesale is, at most, a temporary condition, perhaps necessary to effectuate social change on any scale. It is quite likely that agents must form organizations and associations to do so. Once they succeed, new rules assigning statuses will emerge to solidify the new regime. Nevertheless, we should remember that the new regime in question is specifically modern, because has institutional features, such as democratic procedures, intended to regularize the dynamics of social change. Proliferating networks allow agents to pick and choose among available networks and participate more actively in some than others. Perhaps this is what we should mean by the term democratization. Exercising these choices, agents swell some networks and make them more important in relation to other institutions, and they shrink others. The totality of these choices significantly add to the mechanisms of change already institutionalized in the general process of modernization. With so many changes, participation has also changed as a primary mode of structuration. Democratization suggests that participation performs a broader function than it once did. If participants in recent discussion of civil society speak of participation with too casual abandon, then the term representation is under-represented. Early modern modernizers made no such mistake. Hobbes is the key figure. His point of departure is the person. Either an actor speaking on behalf of someone else or an author speaking for herself, the person is not simply the biological isolate whom we typically describe as a human being. For Hobbes, every person is a civil person and a representative. Civil persons may be human individuals or they may be institutions, and civil society is the largest body of civil persons. Civil society must have a sovereign head and citizens as subjects, if it is not to descend into civil war. Someone (or thing) in charge, a head, represents the body by acting in its collective interests, and the body makes its interests known to the head through authorized channels. Directives move in both directions, up and down the chain of command. The relevance of institutionalized representation was obvious to early modern federal republicans. Federal arrangements call for an association of associations formally organized into levels. Institutionalized representation regulates the flow of directives by assembling and fusing them at each level on the way up, and then by disaggregating them at each level and distributing them across organizational branches on the way down. Officers form networks and associations within these levels to help in coordinating their activities, and in the process they give levels an added institutional significance. As a primary mode of structuration, representation gives lateral stability to civil society as an inclusive structure. This is a modern development. The polis could only function as an inclusive structure on a very small scale. The installation of a sovereign officer at the head of the body politic provided a solution to the size problem, but only for downward representation. With federal arrangements, the election of representatives readily solved the

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size problem for the upward direction, and gave the structure far greater stability than the vertical arrangement of offices, and downward movement of directives, could ever provide. Representation in both directions makes states into democratic republics (even if they remained nominal monarchies), and it makes them more effective organizations. If citizens cannot assemble, speak their minds, vote freely and stand for election, then they cannot represent themselves, and no other officer is likely to represent them to their satisfaction. The key to adequate representation, and thus to effective states, are procedures that make it possible for citizens to join together and decide on officers to represent them at the next level. At the citizens level, voting procedures get most attention. At higher levels, voting will recede in importance, as rules of assembly and debate shape the upward movement of directives. In recent discussions of civil society, the ways that officers represent their interests at the higher levels of association go relatively unnoticed. Thanks to pluralist and corporatist theory, we had, perhaps, a clear enough picture of these processes of interest mediation when the sovereign state occupied the highest level in the inclusive structure of civil society. In a late modern context, global and regional levels complicate this picture enormously. Institutional vehicles for representing interests at higher levels are likely to be informal consequence of bargains that officers strike out of public view. How well these bargains represent lower-level interests, and how well they work in shaping the upward flow of directives is impossible to say, at least until observers learn more about the organization of global civil society at its highest level. While late modern discussions of civil society give short shrift to representation as a mode of structuration, they make recognition a favorite theme. Typically they do so by taking Hegels brief remarks on recognition in his Phenomenology of Spirit as a point of departure. Hegel claimed that [s]elf-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness. Such an achievement requires recognition of the other, and it implies reciprocity. Hegels demonstration that selves depend on mutual recognition leads to his famous analysis of forced recognition and failed self-consciousness in the relation of master and slave. Freed from a subjectivist preoccupation with self and other, Hegels concept of recognition points to the role of mutuality in commitment, agreement, rights and duties, and association. In contemporary discussion of civil society, these themes are conspicuous. By associating with us, others obtain the same rights and duties that we have. Exercising our rights individually and collectively, we make commitments that others accept, and, when we make those commitments formal and reciprocal, we make contracts. In the absence of reciprocal commitments, we invite others to associate with us as formal equals. This is recognition. Agents can always withhold recognition, just as they can refuse to negotiate reciprocal commitments. When they do so, others are excluded from association. Voluntary associations with exclusionary rules are clubs. When clubs reinforce existing networks, often by supplying them with identifying slogans and insignia, we may commend them for the solidarity and self-esteem that they encourage, or criticize them for aggravating the sense of exclusiveness that networks produce on their own. Many, if not most, associations are clubs because they have membership rules specifying status requirements. They also impose other requirements on candidates, such as sponsorship, membership fees, oaths and probationary periods, to be sure that they recognize association goals. Admission to any club is an act of recognition, implying a reciprocal act of recognition. Agents not willing to reciprocate in this fashion are excluded by their own choice. At one of the higher, more conspicuous levels of civil society, the relations of states offer a compelling example of recognition at work. As members of a club, a rather exclusive club at that, states (meaning, of course their agents) may decline to recognize candidate members. Yet they cannot easily prevent other states from doing so, if status requirements are met and candidates evince a recognition of the clubs rather limited but singularly important goals and a willingness to live by club rules. Over time, club members have committed themselves collectively to the vertical organization of sectors of activity more or less corresponding to the usual branches of governmental organization. Not only do functional

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sectors define tasks for officers at every level, but they give associations a basis for common action. Acts of recognition in all degrees of formality normalize relations among associations at every level. Collectively they confirm and support functional differentiation along existing lines. Vertical boundaries are the product of many agreements and cumulative recognition. Without them, global civil society would barely exist and agency, as we have come to know it, would be severely curtailed. As primary mode of structuration in the late modern world, recognition has an institutional significance that few discussions of the problem of recognition seem to recognize.

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