Suchergebnisse

"Norms and Social Constructivism in International Relations" published on by Oxford University Press.

Introduction / Brent J. Steele, Harry D. Gould, and Oliver Kessler -- Interpreting constructivism -- Third generation constructivism : between tactics and strategy / Piki Ish-Shalom -- A tactical guide to conceptual analysis / Hannes Peltonen -- Social constructivism and actor-network theory : bridging the divide / Alexander D. Barder -- Tactics of a constructivist pedagogy / Jamie Frueh and Jeremy Youde -- Discourse, interpretation and methods -- Narrative analysis as a tactical bridge / Jelena Subotic -- Identities as tactics: exposing relational foreign policy as story / Amy Skonieczny -- Constructivism, computational social-relational methods, and multiple correspondence analysis / David M. McCourt -- Constructivism and the interpretive methods of the self -- When home is part of the field : experiencing uncanniness of home in field conversations / Xymena Kurowska -- A reflexivity that works for us : ethics beyond norms / Jack Amoreux -- Feminist curiosity as method: on (limits to) tactical uses of constructivism / Anne-Marie D'Aoust -- Researching within the instability of meaning : decolonial voices and practices / Marcos Scauso -- Constructing a scholar on the road less travelled / deRaismes Combes -- Tactics all the way down : the politics of exteriority in constructivism / Brent J. Steele -- Construction and the interpretation of history and texts -- How to do (differing) things with words : world-making and (or) meaning-making / Harry D. Gould -- Stubbornly stumbling into making history : constructivism and historical international relations / Halvard Leira and Benjamin de Carvalho.

This book complements and balances the attention given by postcolonial theory to the revitalisation and recognition of the agency of colonised peoples. It offers new conceptual scaffolding to those who have inherited the legacy of colonial privilege, and who now seek to responsibly transform this historical injustice. Simone Bignall attends to a minor tradition within Western philosophy including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, to argue that a non-imperial concept of social and political agency and a postcolonial philosophy of material transformation are embedded within aspects of poststructuralist social philosophy. Contributing to contemporary philosophical inquiry about desire, power and transformative agency, Postcolonial Agency constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. Beginning with a critical treatment of the dialectical notions that dominate much postcolonial theory, Bignall then outlines a constructive and transformative theory of practice by drawing from Foucault and Deleuze. The resulting rapprochement between poststructuralism and postcolonialism coincidentally provides a fresh perspective on the political potential of Deleuzian thought. Postcolonial Agency provides readers with a significantly new understanding of the processes of social transformation faced by many societies as they struggle with the aftermath of empire. It does so by engaging readers with respect to their affective communities and their concrete ethics of relationship, providing them with a valuable new way of conceptualising practices of postcolonial sociability. It is of interest to students in political and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, critical theory and Continental philosophy.

In this dissertation I show that constructivist liberal philosophers are confronted by a dilemma. On the one hand, the conceptions of persons that they appeal to are so thin that contradictory conclusions can be derived from those very same conceptions. Where one philosopher thinks that his or her conception excludes the capitalistic economic liberties from the list of basic rights, it is possible to show with great plausibility the opposite conclusion and vice-versa. The status of the capitalist economic liberties carries significant implications not only for the structure of the economy but also for the place and role of other normative values that more directly affect other areas of life. If it can be shown that a conception of persons leads to contradictory results when it comes to the status of the economic liberties in particular, then the general shape of society will change in significant and inevitable ways as well. In order to avoid this horn of the dilemma, some philosophers seek to thicken their conceptions of persons. In doing so, I maintain that they come to beg too many questions and subsequently undermine whatever normative conclusions they sought to derive from their conception of persons. I analyze this connection within the context of the theories of political philosophers writing from different traditions of liberal thought. To do so I first distinguish between how the concept of personhood has been employed in moral philosophy as opposed to political philosophy. The chapters then move from liberal theories more progressively oriented, such as John Rawls's theory of justice, to more moderate positions, such as John Tomasi's market democracy, to Robert Nozick's libertarianism. In the first two cases I argue that the conceptions of persons employed by Rawls and Tomasi are thin, and that it is possible to show that their conceptions lead to conclusions in conflict with their own stated positions. In the case of libertarianism, I argue that libertarians generally construe self-ownership thickly ...

How do we understand the relationship between 'national security' and a global capitalist economy? I argue in this article that liberal constructivist scholars have tended to ignore the constitutive effects of the global economy in the process of distancing themselves from 'materialist ontologies' and 'rationalist epistemologies'. I contend that an important aspect of state identities is that they are dynamic and are historically constituted in and through a relationship to global capital. Only by paying close attention to this fluctuating terrain, can one make sense of the security practices of nation-states. In the latter half of the article, I illustrate my argument with an analysis of the Indian nuclear tests of 1998.