In which sense can we say that a state `exists'? According to the realist school, the state is an a priori given; according to the pluralist school, it is nothing but a collection of various sub-state actors. As I argue, however, neither solution is satisfactory. If we give the state a transcendental status, it disappears from the world; if we see it merely as a set of empirical attributes, it disappears in the world. The way out of this dilemma is to stop talking about what states really are, and start instead to talk about what things they resemble. We make sense of our collective selves in the same way as we make sense of our individual selves — with the help of metaphors that are expanded into narratives. A question of `being' is consequently always a question of `being as', and states are constructed through the stories told about them.
In a recent article Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argued that attention to ‘practices’ could help IR scholars overcome ontological gaps and provide a new basis, on which the discipline could be established. Four such dichotomies are particularly salient: between the material and the meaningful, the rational and the practical, between agencies and structures, and between the forces of stability and of change. By failing to provide a theoretical basis for a synthesis, however, this project will fail. What a ‘practice’ is, and how ontological gaps should be understood, cannot be determined outside of the context of a theory. The article reviews theoretical attempts to deal with the dichotomies Adler and Pouliot identified and investigates the role of practices in the study of international relations.
AbstractThis article provides a framework for the comparative study of international systems. By analyzing how international systems are framed, scripted, and performed, it is possible to understand how interstate relations are interpreted in different historical periods and parts of the world. But such an investigation also has general implications—inter alia for a study of the nature of power, the role of emotions in foreign policymaking, and public opinion formation. Case studies are provided by the Sino-centric, the Tokugawa, and the Westphalian systems. As this study shows, the two East Asian systems were in several respects better adapted than the Westphalian to the realities of international politics in the twenty-first century.
This book offers an original combination of cultural and narrative theory with an empirical study of identity and political action. It is at once a powerful critique of rational choice theories of action and a solution to the historiographical puzzle of why Sweden went to war in 1630. Erik Ringmar argues that people act not only for reasons of interest, but also for reasons of identity, and that the latter are, in fact, more fundamental. Deploying his alternative, non-rational theory of action in his account of the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War, he shows it to have been an attempt on behalf of the Swedish leaders to gain recognition for themselves and their country. Further to this, he demonstrates the importance of questions of identity to the study of war and of narrative theories of action to the social sciences in general.
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