In recent years, the concept of identity has become central to International Relations theory. Opposing rational actor assumptions, constructivist and post-structuralist identity scholarship has argued that preferences and interests are tied to actors' identities, which, in turn, explain action. While we welcome the attempt to move beyond rationalist and materialist accounts of state action, we argue that identity scholarship conceptualizes identity in methodologically individualist and causal terms. However, understanding identity in this way hinders us from grasping how actors are situated and continually develop within complex networks of social interdependencies. We suggest an approach that draws on processual-relational thinking and figurational sociology, and that shifts analysis from searching for identity to analysing identification processes. Contrary to the notion that identities inform action, we argue that specific sets of identifications are temporarily and incompletely stabilized in decision-making, and do not precede or inform action. To this end, we develop a model for empirical research that makes agency in identification processes visible and apply it to Swiss foreign policy decision-making. We suggest that non-foundationalist research revisit and discuss how identity is conceptualized and used in research, lest it reproduce the pitfalls of rationalist and materialist approaches.
Norm diffusion theorists have advanced our understanding of how 'norms emerge, spread and become internalized.' Although this literature and especially the norm life cycle model is based on a constructivist ontology that gives equal weight to agency and structure, one can make out 'a tendency in this literature to erase' agency from norm diffusion narratives. This article suggests that the 'invisibilization' of agency stems from two mutually reinforcing scholarly practices. For one, insufficient attention is paid to the metaphors describing norm propagation (diffusion, cascade, life cycle, etc.). These metaphors are frequently employed in ways that point to mechanistic and automatized processes of 'norm diffusion.' Secondly, norms are often placed in the subject position in sentences. Although uncontroversial in terms of syntax, this mode of writing leads to narrative structures in which norms function as agents. Rather than identifying actual actors, the norm diffusion literature suggests that norms emerge, norms diffuse, and norms cascade. These semantics create an 'illusion of agency' without accounting for the actual processes through which norms are articulated, propagated, contested, adapted, adopted, or rejected. Norm diffusion research subsequently comes to be closely associated with self-actionist modes of thinking, which focuses research on intrinsic qualities of norms, rather than on socially embedded agency and power relations central to processes of diffusing norms. Being more attentive to metaphors and syntax will be instrumental in moving the literature from a misplaced focus on norm diffusion to a focus on the underlying power relations of agential norm politics.
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