Introduction

What methodological commitments does the New Constructivism entail? What methods can Constructivists deploy, and which ones must they eschew? The aim of this chapter is to debunk two popular myths about constructivist methods and Constructivism's methodological implications– a useful distinction introduced by Patrick Jackson: first, that Constructivism is an interpretive approach only focused on the reconstruction of intersubjective meanings; and second, that analysis of texts – speeches, strategy documents, newspaper articles, memoirs, and so on – is therefore the singular way of ‘doing’ Constructivism. Counter to this common wisdom, I make the case that, instead, as a form of classic social analysis, constructivists are much freer in terms of the methods they can and, indeed, should use to substantiate their claims than is captured by the focus on interpreting texts. I illustrate using a computational approach – MCA – which would typically be seen as ‘quantitative’ and therefore beyond the constructivist pale.

I first reflect on my own adoption of a constructivist approach, which, while unique, might read as familiar to others or prompt a useful reflexive thought process for the reader. I then further explore the concept of classic social analysis, particularly its implications for method. In short, I urge constructivists to adopt whatever methods allows them to best answer their research question, rather than assume certain methods are off-limits. I subsequently illustrate with the case of MCA – a computational method the logic of which is fully in accordance with the practice-relational sensitivity of the New Constructivism. After briefly exploring practical questions raised by adopting the approach, a short conclusion considers the potential pay-off for constructivists willing to take the risk.

Becoming a Constructivism user

Unlike sociologist Howard Becker, who famously became a marijuana user for the purposes of research, I was a constructivist from my IR ‘birth’. My doctoral supervisor was an early constructivist, Friedrich Kratochwil, so I was unlikely to become a realist or rationalist. Other constructivists likely feel similarly – either because they are on the constructivist ‘family tree’ – or because Constructivism had become by the early 2000s an attractive theoretical approach to adopt.

Being born a constructivist came with rather opaque instructions when it came to methods, however, – about how to do Constructivism. Methods training varies widely and generalizing is difficult.

Introduction

In this chapter, I re-centre language, rules, and law in the New Constructivism. Rules, law, and language lay at the core of the early theoretical Constructivist treatises, especially Nicholas Onuf 's World of Our Making and Friedrich Kratochwil's Rules, Norms, and Decisions. Each placed rule-and normgoverned reasoning as fundamental to political life, in the international no less than the domestic sphere. But as Constructivism gained ground in the discipline, especially in the empirical Old Constructivism that cemented its place in American political science, language, rules, and law, were sidelined. Norms, identity, and culture became the conceptual touchstones of this new line of thought within an academic debate dominated by realist themes: the balance of power, national interests, and the search for security among independent sovereign states. More surprisingly, the New Constructivism also downplays language, law, and rules, in favour of practice, relationality, and the reality and post-humanism of the new materialism. Old Constructivism and the practice-relational turn thus reflects and furthers two divisions that have rented Constructivism from language, rules, and law: first, between international law and legal theory and international politics and security such that the two barely speak; and second between Constructivism and post-structuralism, where discourse seemed to render the project of social science itself in question. My aim in this chapter, consequently, is to show that these divisions were contingent, social processes, constructions we might say; retracing their separation can go some way towards knitting language, rules, and law, and Constructivism back together.

In short, although sensitive to practice(s), the inherent relationality – rather than fixity – of social life, and the body, emotions, and affect, the New Constructivism as a perspective or sensibility in IR should still revolve around language and discourse.Language and discourse are not all there is to social life to be sure; I do not here assert a return to a thoughtless nominalism. However, language remains the unavoidable medium between us and our world – providing understandings about how to ‘go on’ in social situations, and, crucially, political and legal reasoning and decision-making situations – with emotions and affect a key part of how such reasoning occurs – and hence the indispensable vehicle for its interpretation. Discourse is here understood as both material – thing-like – and ideational, or about expectations, hence the interest in language and rules, written and orally transmitted, and hence law.

Introduction

In the process of bringing to the surface the continuing centrality of law, rules, and language to the New Constructivism, the previous chapter repeatedly emphasized the pivotal role of experts and professionals in the making of contemporary global politics, notably in the legal field but in others besides. Seemingly natural, the prominence of professions and experts is – in fact – a historically contingent feature of today's international affairs and domestic life. A range of scholars – Michel Foucault only the most prominent – have traced the rise of the professions and the academic disciplines as core features of modernity, emerging alongside capitalism yet representing a distinct driver of the shift to the modern world. Inseparable from the New Constructivism's interest in the problematic of rule in world politics is thus an interest in the individuals and groups – and the changing labels we use for them, from ‘intellectuals’ to ‘experts’ – that are the throughputs for rule's modalities and technologies.

This chapter seeks to flush out world-making in the New Constructivism, exploring a key distinction between the Old Constructivism and the New – the New Constructivism's thoroughgoing reflexivity. The Old Constructivism cemented the approach's place in the field on the back of careful empirical studies proving the impact of norms, culture, and identity in world politics. Yet those social factors were, with some exceptions, already constituted – the constructing was less salient than documenting the effects of the social constructions. Many of the problematic intellectual binaries left over from the Old Constructivism are thus overcome by careful analysis of the role of specific agents like experts and elites in international political outcomes. Theoretically, the impetus to focus on world-makers comes from a rejection – central to a practice-relational sensibility – of accounts of political action focused on norms, cultures, and identities understood in monolithic terms. One of the fundamental insights of this line of thinking is that it is not enough to account for political outcomes by citing the influence of norms, culture, and identities as ready-made artefacts, since their origins, trajectories, and differential effects must be accounted for – once again, foregrounding power in the process. Careful tracing of the impact of agents of different kinds, in other words, solves the agency-structure dilemma, not theoretically so much as practically.

Constructivism in International Relations theory is …

I should pause right there. We are accustomed to defining things in academic discourse and everyday life using the definer-in-chief – ‘is’. The exercise comes automatically, unreflexively. When we want to bring the nature of a phenomenon to the surface, we begin with a definition – however provisional – so we can all begin from the same place. The habit is rooted in the structure of language itself, after all. Ordinary language tells us the world is made up of things, discrete ‘its’ that do things. Why should it be any different with IR Constructivism?

While ‘defining one's terms’ is drilled into us early in our education, in the case of Constructivism, the practice represents a problematic starting point. Even sophisticated constructivists can fall into the trap – for one, for example, ‘Constructivism is about the social embeddedness of human consciousness and its role in international life.’ This definition is not incorrect so much as only one of many possible definitions of ‘it’. (What is ‘consciousness’, after all?) The problem comes because Constructivism resists such substantializationor essentialization: casting Constructivism as a stable thing the nature of which words can straightforwardly capture. Indeed, Constructivism resists substantialization or essentialization in not one but two ways: Constructivism is neither a single thing in IR, be it a theory, approach, perspective, or whatever, nor is it a theory or approach that studies things in world politics. To ask what Constructivism is, therefore, is to pose a crucial question in the wrong way for the object at hand.

Let me try again, then. In this book, I will defend a view of Constructivism less as an essence than a particular kind of space within the professionalized study of international political life – be it political science departments in the United States, or departments of Politics, Government, or International Studies, as elsewhere in the world. The main characteristic of Constructivism as a space is that it is where a certain process obtains: the process of looking at how international political life – its main actors, institutions, rules, language, norms, cultural meanings, identities, roles – are constituted, made, or, simply, constructed.

To end a book is to perform a paradoxical act. There is always a follow-up to the conclusion, a post-history to the post-history of the end. It is impossible to trace a definite point in time, to say, “This is where it all culminates. Before, there were only dispersed chapters, now there is conclusion, closure and full stop.” And yet, just like “books and other narratives … really do begin,” they really come to an end. To end is to cut off, to make an incision in time. No matter what will follow, from now on what came before is to be seen as a lead-up to this point. As Chekov famously (and allegedly) instructed: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.” This instruction can also be turned around: it is the going off at last that gives the rifle’s introduction a purpose. In hindsight, the end is implicated in the beginning; it is this end that leads us back to that beginning. Just like “the beginning of a story … will … also have to be the story of a beginning,” the end of a story will also have to be the story of an end.

Chapter two deals with the impossibility to account for the rise of a rule of customary law. I was once more confronted with this problem when I read the ILC Report on the identification of rules of customary law. The report contains a courageous attempt to develop a methodology to identify such rules in an objective way. However, along the way, many of the age-old problems regarding the existence and rise of rules of customary law reappear. The impossibility of grounding a method for customary law, I argue, has to do with the repetitive nature of this body of law. Rules of customary law only exist in and through restatements that present them as already valid. To get a better grasp of the kind of repetitive logic that drives customary law, I compare it to the logic of repetition at work in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In both cases, what is essential is and must remain absent; it is nevertheless made operative through acts of repetition and representations. Yet, customary law is also radically different as it employs what Kierkegaard called "repetition forward," a form of repetition that comes with change and transformation over time.

Chapter four discusses the Tallinn Manual as a "restatement" of international law. The restatements in the Tallinn Manual were deemed necessary because specific positive law was lacking. Yet, they were also presented as neutral reproductions of rules already in existence. This led me into the recurring topic of this book: the dialectical relation between repetition and something that is absent, unattainable or unspeakable. However, in this chapter, I add another dimension to the analysis of repetition in international law. After all, the restatements occur in a very specific format, the manual. Through a comparison between the Tallinn Manual, consumer manuals and manuals of etiquette, I try to get a better grip on the inherent tensions that come with restatements of international law in the form of a "manual."

Chapter six grew out of my curiosity about a term that appears in the preamble of the ICC Statute: unimaginable atrocities. If the court is indeed called to fight "unimaginable atrocities," how is it possible that considerable parts of the same statute are devoted to spell out and, in great detail, how these crimes should be defined? The chapter combines my curiosity about the ICC Statute with my questions about the use of film in legal education. Following Shoshana Felman, I argue that the ICC Statute should be read as pointing to the limits of what can be articulated in legal language. The unimaginable or unspeakable cannot, by definition, be captured in legal categories. However, it is possible to suggest what it means for something to be unimaginable. This is where art, including film, can play a role. The biggest part of the chapter is devoted to films that use reenactments to show what it means not to be able to fully articulate and understand historical trauma. The films, I argue, function as a reminder of the importance of the term used in the ICC preamble: the unimaginable atrocities that point to the limits of what law can articulate and achieve.

Chapter five is the most programmatic of all. It grew out of uneasiness about my role as coach of teams participating in international moot court competitions. These competitions claim to bring litigation practice into legal education. However, although I see the value of mooting, I increasingly felt that these competitions were neither reflecting practice nor what academic training should be about. The chapter is an attempt to articulate my uneasiness as well as to come up with an alternative. It contains a critique on international moot court competitions, based on a comparison between two traditions of rehearsing in European theatre. The first understands rehearsing as mimicking an ideal model as closely as possible. Most existing international moot court competitions, I argue, fit this tradition. The second is the Brechtian tradition, which understands rehearsing as experimenting an echo of Kierkegaard’s notion of "repetition forward." In the last part of the chapter, I rethink international moot court competitions along Brechtian lines. Instead of training students to outperform others according to pre-fixed criteria, I seek to develop a moot noncompetition, which brings students and staff together in a common experimental environment where the boundaries of litigation are probed.

Chapter three starts from the surprise I felt when I first read a Security Council resolution. What does it mean to begin a resolution by recalling, reiterating, reconfirming or recognizing previous resolutions? In order to make sense of such beginnings, I compare preambles of Security Council resolutions to prologues in theatre plays as well as to preambles in Babylonian codes. Acts of recalling, I argue, are radically different from the decision that follows. The decision constitutes a cutoff in time, a break with the past and a pointer to the future. Decisions, in other words, present a new beginning, a lack of continuity. To recall, reiterate, recognize or reaffirm is to do the opposite: to indicate that resolutions have begun well before they were adopted. In that sense, acts of recalling seek to fill the gap that is created by a beginning, not unlike prologues do. However, preambles to Security Council resolutions cannot escape the dialectics of repetition. They do not innocently present the past as it is, but rather retake it in light of what is to follow. This means they come with their own breaks and gaps, which are filled by yet further acts of repetition.

Chapter one starts from my embarrassment when teaching sources of international law. Following conventional wisdom, I inform students that international law is grounded on a limited set of sources. However, at some point, I also have to explain that it is possible for new sources of international law to emerge. How is this possible, given that international law is grounded on a limited set of sources? I try to deal with this uneasiness by comparing discourses on sources to rituals that prevail in what I call "cyclical societies," organized around the belief in the eternal return of transcendental ideas, acts or events. To apply sources, I argue, is to perform a double act of repetition. First, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pregiven and repeatable categories. Second, sources are used as placeholders for something that will always escape positive international law: the foundational categories that underlie the sources of law. These foundational categories, I argue, work somewhat like celestial Gods in cyclical societies: Most of the time they stay dormant and aloof, but they can always be called upon in exceptional times.

To begin a book is to perform a paradoxical act. There is always a lead-up to the beginning, a history before the history of the start. This book, for example, grew out of my experiences with problems and puzzles in international law over the past few years – or longer. It began when I first looked up the text of a Security Council resolution. I expected to find decisions and recommendations, in line with the formal powers and mandate of the Council. And indeed, I found all of these things. However, I was most of all struck by something else: the lengthy preamble of the resolution, which extensively recalled, reiterated, reaffirmed and recognized previous resolutions. What was going on here? What does it mean to begin a resolution by calling upon the past, by reaffirming and recognizing your own previous work? This book began when I was coach of a team of students for an international moot court competition. I had been coaching and supervising moot court teams for a couple of years and, while I truly enjoyed the experience, there was also always a yawning uneasiness about it. During the competition there was little to no room for the critical and reflexive attitude that I try to foster in the rest of my teaching. Instead, I largely followed the format of the competition during the preparatory sessions, mostly focusing on the strategic use of international law in order to win a case. Increasingly, I started to wonder whether there might be different, more reflexive and experimental ways to rehearse international law. This book began when I first saw Rithy Panh’s documentary films on the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. I was especially moved by the reenactments of traumatic experiences that were shown on screen. Watching these reenactments gave me a different sense of one of the core concepts of the Statute of the International Criminal Court: “unimaginable atrocities.” Panh’s films made me wonder whether the pictured reenactments might have something important to say about that which the International Criminal Court labels as “unimaginable” and others as “unspeakable.”