Jelena Subotic
In this short chapter, I reflect on my use of constructivist method by focusing on three issues. First, I provide a short semi auto-ethnographic discussion that situates my training as an International Relations (IR) constructivist and my consequent positioning as a constructivist scholar on the long spectrum of today’s “Constructivism”. Second, I briefly outline my interest in narrative analysis and discuss how it can move Constructivism forward. I also discuss whether narrative can be bridge-building in the current methodological environment in US political science which attempts to discipline interpretive work. In the final section, I offer thoughts on ethical responsibility of constructivist scholars to the method itself (methodological consistency), to the scholarly profession (representation and advancement of alternative methodological approaches), and to our students (transparent guidance). I conclude by discussing possible tactical alliances with other approaches in pursuit of greater methodological diversity and respect.
I was trained at a major public university in the United States in the early-to-mid 2000s by a prominent representative of the so-called “2nd generation” Constructivism. In that institutional framework, Wendtian Constructivism was already quite radical and relatively new, and so my generation’s primary exposure to “Constructivism” was basic Wendtian architecture of mutual constitution (Wendt 1992), then followed by empirical applications in the rapidly developing norms scholarship (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Checkel 1999; Finnemore 1993; Klotz 1995 and beyond). In the mid 2000s, Constructivism in the US academy was in its “young adult” stage and went through similar teenage stages of rebellion and self-affirmation, trying to find a balance between being new and different, and also not so much different that it could not belong. The way in which second generation constructivists resolved this identity tension was to broadly accept Wendt’s notion (Wendt 1999) that we do not live in Onuf’s and Kratochwil’s (Onuf 1989; Kratochwil 1989) world of “ideas all the way down” (for some genealogies of this fissure with constructivist originalism, see, e.g. Smith 2000; Barder and Levine 2012; Kessler 2016; McCourt 2016), but instead in a world that can be empirically observed and analyzed, while maintaining a theoretical commitment to socially constructed meaning that this analysis generates.
The early 2000s, it probably needs reminding today, was a time of great promise for constructivist scholars. The second generation scholars became visible in the profession, even respected, and a general sense was that Constructivism was here to stay. As Stephen Walt so famously declared in 1998, Constructivism has become a “pillar of IR theory” (Walt 1998), and major rationalist scholars felt some interest in engaging epistemologically (Fearon and Wendt 2002). What also needs reminding, especially to non-US audiences, is how cool and non-conforming being a constructivist felt at that time. There was a sense that it was possible to be taken seriously by going about it the non-traditional way, and by challenging the stuffy conventional rationalist approaches. It certainly attracted the rebels (as well as the more sanctimonious and pretentious) among us.
It is no coincidence that this was also the time of the Perestroika movement and its (short-lived) promise of a new methodological order (now with less regressions) (Monroe 2005). There was a sense that revolution can happen and that, in a way, it will pay off in the long run to be on the winning side of the fight. A lot of us thought that big departments would only naturally need to hire a constructivist, this being “a pillar of IR theory” and all.
All this led to, in retrospect shockingly naïve, feeling of confidence in this chosen path. By the mid 2000s, however, as the defeat of the Perestroika movement became more clear, it also became clear that constructivists were not, in fact, considered necessary additions to major departments, which have continued to pursue behavioral political science as they always had. By that point, it was certainly too late to change course, and more important, my intellectual approach was so firmly rooted in constructivist assumptions that I couldn’t have changed, even if I wanted to.
The irony of this, of course, is that the type of Constructivism I was trained in and applied in my doctoral dissertation, is what many today’s critics would call a very diluted, or perhaps even a sell-out Constructivism (for a particularly strong critique along these grounds, see Barder and Levine 2012). Much–but not all – of it had to do with international norms and their diffusion (or, in the case of my dissertation which became my first book, the actual absence of expected normative diffusion, see Subotić 2009). Today, norms scholarship has stalled and it is probably reaching some conceivable end point. To critical constructivists, the death of norms cannot come quickly enough (Kessler 2016).
I mention in some detail all this background to situate my position within Constructivism as being somewhere, as Mark Blyth put it, “in between two lovers” (Blyth 2009). I have come to find much of norms-based scholarship exhausted and not innovative, but some of the second generation work on identity and culture still engaging and useful (e.g. Katzenstein 1996; Neumann 1996; Hopf 2002 in IR and especially work on “world culture” in sociological institutionalism, e.g. Boli and Thomas 1999; March and Olsen 1998; DiMaggio and Powell 1983). I am, however, temperamentally and intellectually not quite in the critical constructivist camp, which I often find needlessly impenetrable and too often tendentious in its critique.
This positioning is important because it places me somewhere on the spectrum of Constructivism, without immediately identifiable allies. This is fundamentally an issue of tactics because I find myself fighting different kinds of fights than either the tired norms-based or the agitated critical kind. Unlike the norms-based crowd, I don’t feel the need to speak the language of rationalists or solve similar problems but with a different framework. I am comfortable with the notion that we work in different epistemologies and that there is incommensurability in our worldviews that no elaboration of research design can bridge. Unlike the critical crowd, however, I don’t see sell-out constructivists as the main enemy that needs to be taken down, and find these fights for purity immensely unhelpful.
The methodological fight I’m fighting, then, is one of respect for difference, not ideological single-mindedness. In this, at least, I am not a Bolshevik. I am much less concerned about whether people are allowed to call themselves “constructivists” if they are not ideologically committed to constructivist originalism, than I am with the complete absence of any kind of Constructivism from major political science departments in the United States, and the consequences of this absence for the future of our approach (for a full elaboration of this problem, see Subotic 2017). I have therefore focused my battles on improving the professional experience of being a constructivist in US academia, and using that to improve epistemological, methodological and theoretical diversity of departments and less on the type of Constructivism that is practiced. Like in most things, where you stand is where you sit, and from a seat in the US political science academy, I have to prioritize my targets. This is an issue of tactics and ethics that I return to in the final section of this essay.
Constructivism was initially seductive because it offered alternatives to the primitive rationalism and methodological individualism of mainstream IR. But as my research interests matured, the Constructivism I was trained to use also created a methodological framework that allowed for some, and not other, questions to be asked. This was at times an uneasy fit for the kinds of questions I was interested in: how does group political memory develop; how does political memory change; how does it influence political action. Should we think of political memory as a structure that shapes political action across time, or can we also think of it as an agent itself, forcing/influencing certain political action through various mechanisms of transmission and control? As my research interests veered toward the questions of international ethics, the issues of structure and agency became even more pronounced. It was not immediately clear how Wendtian “via media” was going to help me explore these questions. Is there an observable “ethics” out there I can see? How do I empirically observe if states act out of (or despite their) moral concerns? What kind of evidence for these claims would be appropriate, or adequate? How do I reconceptualize the state as having ethics, emotions, memories or traumas? Where does this take me?
To answer these questions, I have increasingly turned toward narrative analysis. Thinking of state action as a story, I focused mostly on three elements of a narrative: its causal coherence – whether the story can describe how one event led to, or produced, the other; its thematic coherence – whether the story has elements that recur throughout and glue its separate pieces together; and its emotional coherence – whether the story resonates with the actors’ sense of their own biography and sense of self identity.
Narratives are of obvious concern for constructivists. They are critical for political life. It is through narrative that we make sense of the world and create our own identities (Somers 1994), which is one of the core constructivist questions.1 Narratives influence how we observe political reality, and make us act differently in response (Patterson and Monroe 1998). Narrative analysis, as a method, involves the analysis of language and discourse, another sphere of central concern to Constructivism. It always starts from an understanding of language as constitutive of political action, a position that Constructivism has staked out decades ago (Milliken 1999; Fierke 2002). Narrative analysis, however, moves Constructivism forward by demonstrating ways in which political actors strategically manipulate shared narrative frames for their own political ends (Payne 2001). The fact that narratives are used for political purposes does not make them any less significant. In fact, it makes them critical to our understanding of what motivates political action in the first place.
My narrative approach, then, understands social construction as being strategic, and in that concedes that political actors make rational political calculations, but they do so within a dense normative social environment that constitutes their preferences and choices. In order to explain political action more completely, the type of narrative analysis I employ can demonstrate how political actors may pursue consequentalist political behavior, but it is always conditional on broad acceptance of shared narrative frames. Further, the political action these actors undertake then further constructs and maintains the social environment in which they are embedded, creating new narrative frames in the process.
Narrative analysis is also useful in scaling up individual biographies to the level of states, a core concern of ontological security theory (e.g. Mitzen 2006; Steele 2008; Kinnvall 2004; Berenskoetter 2014). Focusing on how an autobiography is constructed, what is included, what is forgotten, what provides a sense of who someone is “as a person” and what event could have shaped that identity, is helpful in attempting to construct state autobiographies, critical junctures and “what if” moments.
In fact, this use of narrative analysis by ontological security scholarship is a good example of the direction Constructivism tactically went to without necessarily calling itself Constructivism. Providing a richly texture narrative of political events, or biographical narrative of political actors, greatly helped layer the empirical background that made ontological security accounts more persuasive, or at least more palatable for the mainstream IR audience, which may be skeptical of overly abstract ontological security arguments (e.g. Steele 2008).
Narrative analysis I employ, therefore, enriches Constructivism by looking at the political use of stories, their construction, domination in discourse, and eventual de-activation. Narrative analysis adds a mobilizational element to stories, conceptualizing them as political resources (Hart 1992). Finally, this understanding of narrative sees them as fundamentally normative in nature, with a desire for a particular social order and a particular set of social practices and policies. This is why we cannot understand state action if we do not understand what is the normative narrative underpinning of the policy choices actors make. This provides constructivist accounts of state action with a certain dynamism, moving away from discussing what narratives are to what they actually do in political life.
Focusing on narratives to explain international phenomena has been gaining traction in IR (Roberts 2006; Miskimmon; O’Loughlin and Roselle 2017; Krebs 2015; Ross 2013) and it may be worthwhile to ponder to what extent this “narrative turn” has been a tactical move by constructivists trying to use it as a bridge to mainstream IR that remains hostile to major constructivist claims. Narrative analysis can provide a certain comfort, even readability, to broader IR audiences, including, if that is what we think is desirable, the audiences of policymakers. It focuses on a tangible element of everyone’s experience – a story – and then ties it to state behavior in a way that intuitively makes sense. It combines “consistent” Constructivism’s focus on language, discourse, and text, with the “second generation” Constructivism’s interest in empirical observations and explanatory findings.
It is, therefore, plausible to suggest that the narrative turn is part of a larger movement to rethink methodological wars (Barkin and Sjoberg 2015), or connect IR more directly with established interpretive methods such as, for example, ethnography (MacKay and Levin 2015), and find a way to overcome methodological rigidity in pursuit of greater analytical payoff. However, some recent developments in US political science strike me as movements in the opposite direction, away from bridge building and toward further marginalization of constructivist, and within them, narrative approaches. This is where the focus on tactics becomes critical.
The most recent attempt to discipline interpretive research in political science is the so-called DA-RT (Data Access – Research Transparency) initiative,2 which began in 2010 as an American Political Science Association (APSA) ad-hoc committee to “increase transparency in social science”.3
The specific DA-RT requirements that caused most concern among interpretive scholars include requests to hand over all field notes, archival notes and interview transcripts as part of a manuscript submission process. Constructivists, interpretivists, ethnographers and critical scholars from all subfields of political science had much to say about DA-RT’s poor understanding of interpretive work, the role of positionality, intersubjectivity and constitutive explanations – all of which do not lend themselves to the type of replicability DA-RT requires.4 The new requirements would be especially onerous for someone who wants to conduct a comprehensive narrative analysis, which does not advertise itself as being replicable and by definition relies on the author’s interpretation of massive amounts of written and spoken material.
So what is the DA-RT initiative really about? What problem is it trying to fix? The initiative’s advocates have so far presented two strategic reasons. The first had to do with the eroding public trust and low perceived value of higher education and scholarly enterprise, especially in the United States, which they argued a clear focus on research transparency would go a long way to getting back. The second focused on the perceived “softness” of qualitative (especially interpretive) research, with DA-RT providing an opportunity for qualitative scholars to show that they too work on rigorous data collection and evidence on a par with that of their quantitative scholars.
While I don’t doubt the genuine nature of this effort, both lines of reasoning strike me as fundamentally flawed and very incomplete. The devaluation of academic research in the US has almost nothing to do with the inherent validity of our work, and much more with the broader political environment of corporatization of universities, pulling back of public funding, and public fostering of an anti-intellectual atmosphere at all levels of public discourse.5
The second reason – to increase the “seriousness” of qualitative research – also manages to profoundly misunderstand the nature of much of qualitative research, especially work in the constructivist and broadly interpretivist traditions, that does not purport to make causal claims and predictive statements about the empirical world, nor is it interested in replicability, but instead aims to better understand political and social phenomena. All that DA-RT will accomplish is to create further obstacles and barriers for qualitative researchers to publish in top journals – an issue that has been visible for decades6 – because the burdens of DA-RT compliance for qualitative researchers will be insurmountable in terms of time, cost, scholarly integrity and ethical commitments.
All of which brings me back to my original take on the DA-RT wars: that this time around feels very much like the last time around. An effort to discipline our discipline, provide boundaries for one kind of acceptable knowledge and foreclose the opportunities for a different kind of political science. It almost seems like every ten years, political science engages in a self-assessment exercise that promises to open the discipline to more diverse voices and methodological approaches, and ends, inevitably, with the status quo victory for positivism and scientism and further retrenchment of the alternative. I don’t think the DA-RT story will end much differently.
So, in the light of this methodological disciplinary environment, what is the available space for Constructivism and, within it, for narrative analysis? Even more important to me is the question of the ethical responsibility of constructivists. What is our responsibility to our students? What can narrative analysis, if anything, do to help?
The ethical stakes here are high. They involve our ethical obligation to the profession, to the discipline, to the integrity of our scholarship, but also to our students who we train in a constructivist approach that is becoming further marginalized by hegemonic disciplinary practices. The ethical dilemma here is not a trivial one. Which loyalties come first? To the purity of the approach or to the wellbeing of our students we have seduced into becoming constructivists only to kick them out of the house onto the cold street to fend for themselves in an academic world we have failed to improve? And it is precisely because the stakes are so high that I find intra-constructivist fratricide battles so unhelpful and distracting from a much bigger problem of constructivist professional marginalization. As I see it, we stand a much better chance of changing the IR field, carving out more space for our own professional recognition and the professional success of our students if we spend our energy on a united effort to recapture IR’s epistemological and methodological diversity than on endless policing of who is a “real constructivist” and who is one in name only. Seriously – who cares? Because the nature of constructivist inquiry is the focus on the social and the normative, we should in fact be uniquely receptive to repurposing our work for larger ethical and vocational goals.
The issue here truly is one of tactics. Is the better option to engage with the methodological opponents by, for example, doubling down on efforts to elevate the presence of Constructivism in departments’ graduate programs? As a conclusion to a survey of the status of Constructivism in US International Relations academy (Subotic 2017),7 I suggested focusing efforts on revamping departmental graduate curriculum and graduate examination procedures – by making sure that all comprehensive exams include a serious test of basic premises of Constructivism. A step before that is to offer constructivist IR courses, or insist that a general IR theory course includes much more constructivist content. This also requires challenging rationalist methodologies and assumptions in graduate education – arguing for a balance between the reification of quantitative methods courses (Schwartz-Shea 2003) and substantive theoretical courses, including specialized courses in Constructivism. This means advising more PhD students.
This effort, however, is likely to run against the current self-fulfilling prophecy of the US IR academic profession: the US market is such that a constructivist student has even less of a chance of getting a job than a rationalist/quantitative student, an assumption the data I collected supported. There is an issue of professional ethics here that we rarely, if ever discuss. What should we advise our students to do, with a clear conscience, even while we try to change the institutional culture and preferences? Should dissertation advisors candidly present the employment prospects of a student with a deep qualitative, interpretive dissertation vs. prospects of a student with a much more risk-averse positivist work that would at least get her a shot at an interview? Should we warn students that pursuing this kind of research would most likely make them unmarketable for top US jobs, but possibly quite desirable in other parts of the world? But would this strategy in the end also be self-defeating and lead to further self-marginalization in the discipline?
I think our best course is to be both candid to students and continue to focus our efforts on changing the status quo, by joining similar existing attempts to diversify the academy in various ways. There is no doubt that academic and paradigmatic pluralism is good for everybody. New research shows that diverse (identity-wise and paradigmatically-wise) academic departments are more productive overall (Bosquet and Combes 2017). There are increasing calls for closing the gender gap in citations (Maliniak, Powers and Walter 2013), journal editorial positions (Stegmaier, Palmer and van Assendelft 2011), and in syllabi (Colgan 2015), as well as dealing with the persistent problem of lack of diversity among faculty (Moody 2004).
The other option, of course, is disengagement from the methodological wars and pursuit of and further development of methodologically friendly networks (such as the ISA-NE, or further engagement with non-US colleagues who do not seem to have to endure this methodological Groundhog Day). But disengagement does not come without its downside. There is a real danger of isolation and further marginalization. At the end of the day, we all work in the academic profession, which means we have to engage our professional networks, share resources and responsibilities with a wide array of colleagues, many of whom are epistemologically opposed to Constructivism. I don’t think it serves us any good to pretend that we can live professional lives in a different universe. I also don’t think it serves us any good to stop trying to persuade, because this effectively means giving in to the dominant epistemological position, and that would certainly mean abandoning our students and withholding the support they need.
So can narrative analysis serve as a “tactical bridge” of sorts at a time of conflict? It is interesting to note that this new revamping of the methodological wars (in the latest DA-RT iteration) has come roughly at the same time as the increasingly anguished calls from very mainstream realists that IR theory is dying, and is being replaced by mostly low-theoretic or atheoretic incremental hypothesis-testing, almost all done in a quantitative manner (Mearsheimer and Walt 2013; Oren 2016; Colgan 2016). It seems to me that these disgruntled realists and grand theory nostalgists should be our natural allies. And some scholars working on narrative have already figured this out and are writing in a way to make narrative appear more centrally relevant for IR theory (Krebs 2015; Wehner and Thies 2014), bypassing small step “minimum publishable unit” database cannibalism. As constructivists, I think we should welcome this overture, and not reject it out of purist concerns (“our side” can be just as dogmatic as the positivists, to equally detrimental results).
Scholars of foreign policy, for example, are increasingly showing interest and openness to narrative analysis, and this includes many scholars who do not necessarily work exclusively within the constructivist tradition (Roselle, Miskimmon and O’Loughlin 2014; Holland 2013; Manners and Murray 2016; Cha 2015). This seems to me to be the logical point of mutual interest that can forge alliances and serve as a bridge. If the despair among many IR theorists about the poor state of theory in American IR continues, constructivists have much to offer to the debate. Narrative analysis as a method is then uniquely suited to be a tactical bridge that could propel constructivist work into scholarly spaces traditionally kept under strict disciplinary keys. We should capitalize on that now.
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