While scholars of International Relations and comparative politics have usually treated rhetoric as epiphenomenal, one strand of constructivism has recently returned rhetoric to the heart of political analysis, especially through the mechanism of persuasion. We too maintain that rhetoric is central to political processes and outcomes, but we argue that persuasion is theoretically and methodologically problematic. We aver that rhetoric's role may be more usefully conceptualized in the context of coercion, and we advance a stylized model that illustrates how rhetorical coercion operates, explains why it works, and identifies key scope conditions. We subsequently illustrate our model's relevance through a detailed examination of a 'hard' case. This article's agenda is twofold. First, it advises scholars in these fields to avoid focusing on unanswerable questions about actors' motives and to examine instead what actors say, in what contexts, and to what audiences. Second, it lays the groundwork for a 'coercive constructivism', complementing the liberal version so prevalent today.KEY WORDS ♦ coercion ♦ constructivism ♦ discourse ♦ Habermas ♦ Israel ♦ military service ♦ persuasion ♦ rhetoric Talk is often thought to belong to the realm of diplomacy, war to the realm of action. Yet, during the 2003 Iraq War, the Bush administration was nearly as preoccupied with how the combat was portrayed as with the combat itself. Its foreign policy team invariably spoke of coalition forces rather than American forces, the war to liberate Iraq rather than the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's death squads rather than Saddam's fedayeen. Rhetoric is central to politics, even when politics takes the form of war.Yet rhetoric is curiously not central to much scholarship in comparative politics and International Relations. Politics is typically marked by rhetorical competition, but our theoretical frameworks are generally hard-pressed to make sense of its dynamics and outcomes. Whereas the dominant materialist tradition treats rhetoric as epiphenomenal, we argue, following recent constructivist work, that the rhetorical interplay itself provides leverage in explaining outcomes. We are less comfortable, however, with the argument advanced by some constructivists that political actors deploy resonant rhetorical forms and thereby persuade their interlocutors of the correctness of their preferred course of action. Although persuasion undoubtedly does occur in the political arena, it is also rare. Moreover, such mechanisms rest on a strong specification of the subjective motivations of individuals and thus are methodologically intractable. Recent mainstream constructivist research has prompted a refreshing debate on and advanced our understanding of political deliberation and argumentation. By focusing on internalized norms as the driving forces of behavior and policy, however, such research has ultimately diverted attention from the dynamics of rhetoric.Persuasion does not exhaust the ways through which rhetoric might shape political contest. In par...
In recent years, paradigmatic debates in International Relations (IR) have focused on questions of epistemology and methodology. While important in their own right, these differences have obscured the basic divide in the discipline between substantialism, which takes entities as primitives, and relationalism, which takes processes of social transaction as the basic building blocks of theory. We argue that while both approaches can be fruitful, theories of processes and relations are better suited to address certain questions, most notably those involving change in global politics. Drawing on work in International Relations, sociology and philosophy, we examine what such theories entail and discuss areas of research for which they are especially suited.
Concerns about the end of International Relations theory pivot around at least three different issues: the fading of the ‘paradigm wars’ associated with the 1990s and early 2000s; the general lack of any sort of ‘great debate’ sufficient to occupy the attention of large portions of the field; and claims about the vibrancy of middle-range theorizing. None of these are terribly helpful when it comes to assessing the health of International Relations theory. We argue that international theory involves scientific ontologies of world politics: topographies of entities, processes, mechanisms, and how they relate to one another. Understood this way, the state of International Relations theory looks strong: there is arguably more out there than ever before. Ironically, this cornucopia helps explain concerns regarding the end of International Relations theory. In the absence of a ‘great debate,’ let alone ways of organizing contemporary International Relations theory, this diversity descends into cacophony. We submit that three major clusters of international theory are emerging: choice-theoretic, experience-near, and social-relational. These clusters map onto two major axes of contention: (1) the degree that actors should be treated as autonomous from their environment; and (2) the importance of thickly contextual analysis. These disputes are both field-wide and high-stakes, even if we do not always recognize them as such.
While the recent proliferation in philosophical discussions in International Relations indicates a welcome increase in the discipline’s conceptual sophistication, a central issue has gone relatively unremarked: the question of how to understand the relationship between scholarly observers and their observed objects. This classical philosophical problem has a number of implications for the conduct of inquiry in the discipline, and raises particular challenges for the status of knowledge-claims advanced by constructivists. I clarify these issues and challenges by distinguishing between ‘dualist’ and ‘monist’ ontological standpoints, in the hope of provoking a more focused philosophical discussion.
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