Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: What Is Constructivism?
- 1 The Old Constructivism
- 2 The New Constructivism
- 3 Rules, Law, and Language in the New Constructivism
- 4 World-Making: Experts and Professionals in the New Constructivism
- 5 New Constructivist Methodology and Methods
- 6 Politics, Ethics, and Knowledge in the New Constructivism
- 7 The New Constructivism as a Phronetic Social Science
- Conclusion: The Space of Constructivism
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - World-Making: Experts and Professionals in the New Constructivism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: What Is Constructivism?
- 1 The Old Constructivism
- 2 The New Constructivism
- 3 Rules, Law, and Language in the New Constructivism
- 4 World-Making: Experts and Professionals in the New Constructivism
- 5 New Constructivist Methodology and Methods
- 6 Politics, Ethics, and Knowledge in the New Constructivism
- 7 The New Constructivism as a Phronetic Social Science
- Conclusion: The Space of Constructivism
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory , pp. 75 - 96Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022