Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Critical, poststructuralist and ‘postmodern’ 
international thought
All constructivists are, in some sense post-positivist, indeed anti-positivist in
so far as they reject the rational choice, neo-utilitarian reasoning of main-
stream IR theory, but the currently dominant trend of constructivist
thought, represented by Wendt and Ruggie, remains closely in touch with
the research agenda of the mainstream – that is, the relations of states,
specifically problems of cooperation and conflict. The writers to be consid-
ered in this final section on contemporary IR theory are much less wedded
to this conventional agenda; they take their inspiration from elsewhere, in
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Understanding International Relations

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fact from a variety of elsewheres since there is no one source of inspiration
for this ‘new learning’. We find here Frankfurt School Critical Theorists,
feminist writers, writers inspired by the French masters of thought of the
last half century–Foucault and Derrida in particular – and even, although
the word is much misused, the occasional genuine ‘postmodernist’. These
thinkers do not have a great deal in common, save for two important intel-
lectual commitments; all desire to understand International Relations not as
a free-standing discourse with its own terms of reference, but rather as one
manifestation of a much broader movement in social thought, and all hold
that theory must unsettle established categories and disconcert the reader.
On both counts, IR must be seen in the context of Enlightenment and post-
Enlightenment thought. Just how it is to be seen in this context is what is
contested, and to understand this contest a step back has to be taken, in the
direction of the Enlightenment itself.
To answer the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in a study of this scope
is not possible, but a rough-and-ready account of what it has become
customary to call the ‘Enlightenment Project’ can be given, building on
Kant’s famous answer to this question – Enlightenment is ‘humanity’s
emergence from self-imposed immaturity’ (Reiss 1970: 54). In other words,
the Enlightenment mandated the application of human reason to the project
of human emancipation. Human beings were challenged by the great
thinkers of the Enlightenment to know themselves and their world, and to
apply that knowledge to free themselves both from superstition and the
forces of ignorance, and, more directly, from political tyranny, and, perhaps,
the tyranny of material necessity. Originally, the main carrier of the project
of emancipation was ‘liberalism’ in one form or another, but one belief held
by all the writers examined here, and by most constructivists, is that con-
temporary forms of liberalism, such as the neo-utilitarianism represented by
rational choice theory and mainstream IR theory, no longer perform this
function. To use the influential formulation of Robert Cox, contemporary
liberal theory is ‘problem-solving’ theory – it accepts the prevailing defini-
tion of a particular situation and attempts to solve the problems this defini-
tion generates – while emancipatory theory must be ‘critical’, challenging
conventional understandings (Cox 1981). Thus, whereas neorealist/neoliberal
thinking accepts the ‘anarchy problematic’ as given, and seeks devices
to lessen the worst side-effects of anarchy, the new approaches wish either to
explore and elucidate the ways in which this problematic serves particular
kinds of interests, and closes down particular sorts of arguments, or to shift
the argument on to an altogether different subject.
If it is generally agreed by these authors that contemporary liberalism can
no longer be seen as an emancipatory discourse, there is no agreement as to
whether the project of emancipation itself is recoverable. Here a quite sharp
divide emerges between those who believe it is, although not on modern