International relations' last synthesis?: decoupling constructivist and critical approaches
In: Oxford scholarship online
In: Political Science
Many scholars, intentionally or unintentionally, have entangled constructivisms and critical theories in problematic ways, either by assigning a critical-theoretical politics to constructivisms or by assuming the appropriateness of constructivist epistemology and methods for critical theorizing. This text makes the argument that these connections mirror the grand theoretical syntheses of International Relations (IR) in the 1980s and 1990s, and have similar constraining effects on the possibilities of International Relations theory.