Rethinking agency in International Relations: performativity, performances and actor-networks

Abstract

Abstract:The academic discipline of International Relations (IR) has long pondered the questions of what it means to act in international politics and who can do so. However, the particular way in which IR has approached the problem of agency has somewhat masked important dynamics in international politics. By approaching the question of agency as an analytical problem that needs to be resolved before engaging with empirical material, IR has failed to see that who can act is often uncertain and contested. This special issue examines the emergence of international agency as an empirical phenomenon. Rather than analysing what given agents do, the contributions study how practices, performances and networks create and transform agency. In this introductory article, we prepare the ground for this distinct approach to studying international politics. We review how IR has addressed the problem of agency, and we discuss three social-theoretical traditions that see agency as an emergent phenomenon: poststructuralism, performance studies and actor-network theory. Finally, we highlight four insights that emerge from the contributions and challenge how IR has traditionally imagined agency.

Working on relationalism

“…Work in this quadrant can also incorporate the self-understandings of the actors themselves. Braun, Schindler, and Wille (2019, 800) argue that in order to explain outcomes we have to take into account how those who “do” international politics theorize their own doing.…”

Understanding soft power discourse in the National Library of Australia

“…Second, the NLA is positioned as a soft power actor with agency. Agency is understood to be relational where an actor, an entity that can hold agency, has the capacity to influence another actor's actions or agenda (Braun et al. , 2019, p. 788).…”

The diplomacy of post-Soviet de facto states: ontological security under stigma

“…11 And if one conceives of recognition not as an act, but rather as a process, and if one finds that 'constitutive events are many and small', 12 each of which implicitly acknowledges the other's actorness and thus poses 'recognition in the weak sense', 13 then one can spot in the diplomacy of the de facto states mundane practices with transformative power: Their ongoing process of regular petty interactions gradually accrues legitimacy by demanding to be noticed in social entanglements, by evoking a right to due reaction from others, thereby implicitly requesting admission to the international society through recognized actorness. 14 This article not only highlights the role of diplomatic practices in transforming the setup of the international society, 15 but also links this proposition to the theoretical frameworks of ontological security 16 and stigma management 17 in international relations. It argues that the diplomatic bonds which routinely tie the post-Soviet de facto states to entities beyond Russia (and partly Armenia) are crucial for the achievement of ontological security.…”