If methods are tactics employed to achieve a purpose such as knowledge or theory promotion, we need to be explicit about the purposes of our approaches. One such purpose for those IR scholars who identify, in some form or another, as constructivists is to be responsive to our social and political context. This is evident in recent discussions of a constructivist ethics (Erskine 2012; Price 2008a, 2008b, 2012; Rengger 2012; Reus-Smit 2008; Sikkink 2008; Sjoberg and Barkin 2019) and Constructivism’s ethical implications and concerns (Alker 1996; Crawford 2002; McCourt 2017; Steele 2007, 2016). Constructivists differ, however, in how they imagine this task. This chapter critically examines articulations of a specifically constructivist ethics, but it does so in the context of this scholar’s own trajectory through the terrain of Constructivism, the discipline of IR and world politics.
In this volume and elsewhere, several of the contributors have situated their experiences as having a generational dynamic. This strikes me as important, especially as I reflect on my own experience in the field of International Relations and US academia. Only in retrospect – after the first couple of years of being in a graduate program, leaving that program for another, and then experiencing the War on Terror in more personal/political terms – did it occur to me just how strange it was to be sitting in Schaeffer Hall in Iowa City working on math equations while watching the events and media commentary of September 11, 2001 unfold. I did not come into a graduate program where Constructivism was a particularly viable course of study. Much of my initial reading of Constructivism and then international political theory was something I did ‘on the side’ as I studied comparative politics and worked on ‘large-n’ research papers, but I soon found constructivist theorizing fascinating and the connections between theory and ethics obvious and appealing.
While Alexander Wendt’s book may have served as Constructivism’s sacred text, I spent a lot of time marking up Mervyn Frost’s concise but dense proposal for a constitutive theory of international ethics in Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory, Neta Crawford’s nearly 500-page book Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention that theorizes how ethical arguments change beliefs but also prescriptively offers a practice of ethical argument in the concluding chapter, and various constructivist and English School scholarship on human rights, security, foreign policy and international society (Finnemore 1996; Risse et al. 1999; Wheeler 2000). It appeared to me that these scholarly projects were bound up with political projects that questioned the exclusivity of the state and sought to loosen world politics from the grip of great powers and their biographers who were writing about material power and high politics. Implied was that if ideas mattered world politics could be transformed. This insight was on the rise, but I felt unable to pursue the ways in which it inspired me in my graduate program, along with other work by Rodney Hall, Iver Neumann, Toni Erskine and various political theorists and philosophers. In fact, that environment became rather toxic as I witnessed several fellow graduate students fearfully seeking to exit with their degrees and jobs as quickly as possible to escape intradepartmental strife and discipline.
The program I subsequently entered was certainly not free of disciplinary narratives. It seems to me that there is no program perfectly supportive of graduate students’ range of developing interests by collegial faculty and university administration that only have in mind the best interests of students and the unhindered pursuit of ideas and knowledge. I encountered faculty at both institutions who felt it necessary to police the boundaries of the field by questioning in the presence of graduate students whether their colleagues were really ‘political scientists’. Despite this awkward and unbecoming behavior that can be found almost anywhere in academia, there was no doubt that in moving programs I arrived at a place where I felt considerably greater freedom to be a fully expressive graduate student and where it seemed much less likely that faculty would involve me in their intradepartmental skirmishes. Furthermore, in leaving a program I already made a decision to reject/ignore those disciplinary narratives. Once I arrived in a department with a more permissive if imperfect environment I tried as much as possible to take on a willful naïveté to departmental politics, preferring more interdisciplinary spaces as I could find them.
I also found that not just departments and universities fail our idealizations of academia and the study of world politics. In 2004 as I attended the annual conference of the International Studies Association in Hawaii, my brother was en route to Iraq, his tank mechanic battalion in the Marine Reserves called up and retrained as military police that would provide security to convoys traveling all across the country. Leading up to his deployment my brother and I tried to console one another with conversations about how he might try to stay out of trouble and be a decent person given some of the challenges he might face. As I arrived in Hawaii for ISA my brother was leaving and, really, neither of us knew what he should expect in Iraq despite our efforts to pretend otherwise. I didn’t know when or whether I would speak to him next. What I then encountered in Hawaii was a field of scholars who appeared to me as distant as they could be from the horrors and trauma of the War on Terror, seemingly unable to acknowledge its presence until it was a data point or historical case study.
At that point, I felt that the field of International Relations that had so intrigued me was not critically engaged in the world, and largely sought to preserve the status quo and a value-free science that I found increasingly suspect. This included the ascendancy of Constructivism, which was hinged to their vision of a post-Cold War world that had achieved some moral progress with a steep rise in UN peacekeeping activity and democracy on the march. In the face of the US-led War on Terror, many constructivists then hunkered down (and some even doubled down by stretching the bounds of humanitarian intervention or acquiescing to it), hoping to maintain a core set of liberal values and scientific arguments that pointed to the importance of ideas. It was on this basis that further progress could (eventually) be built.
It was around this time that I began to take a much more skeptical view of some of the constructivist scholarship I had consumed in favor of more critical Constructivism(s) that were often in alliance with feminist, poststructural and, at times, postcolonial approaches. Constructivist approaches to ethics, in my view, were often too conservative, neglected power relations and the need for tactics to challenge oppression, and failed to bring into view the complexities and difficulties of world politics and thus the need for judgment. More broadly, much of Constructivism had made a strategic choice to focus on structure over agency and in the process rendered all but a select few actors – those who successfully promoted international/global norms – passive and silent.
If we are to theorize ethics, then, we need sustained attention to the purposes of theory and we should ask whether those purposes have changed and might change. In this chapter, I question the desirability of a constructivist ethics that arose out of a constructivist strategy for achieving parity with IR’s reigning schools of thought and their positivist consensus. In developing this strategy constructivists opted for the tactic of showcasing how they could compete with the ‘neo-neo synthesis’ (Wӕver 1996) on the terrain of structure. Some of the disadvantages and silences of a norms-based ethics illustrate the limits of this previous choice, as explored in this chapter. Understanding the strategic moves of constructivists helps to illuminate how ethics (and agency) were downplayed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by many, but also how a familiar constructivist concept – reflexivity – can be re-tooled and re-deployed in the face of too much emphasis on norms and rules. The move I propose in favor of agency instead encourages and equips actors to contextualize norms and rules as contestible and contested, and allows room for thinking, judgment and different ontological and epistemological perceptions.
I seek to deemphasize strategy, but not entirely so. I care less about whether my team is winning in the field of IR and whether I am even a member of a team. In my work, I have often violated the disciplinary and theoretical boundaries our field has erected and I hope to do it some more. I will learn from and cite anyone who I find useful or challenging in answering and formulating pressing scholarly and political questions. I want nothing to do with the battles of IR that, while curious, also destroy careers with their absorbing drama. Yet, I am not opposed to thinking critically about the purposes of our work and having some provisional guideposts. Much of my work, after all, has reacted to how I have read the state of the field. Thus, I have followed an interest in practices of ethics for world politics that foregrounds its complexity, contingency and difference. This entails a scholarly willingness to learn from others and to hear their interpretations. Perhaps it also involves a reconceptualization of multiple, smaller and more immediate worlds, and giving up on the idea that we can redesign all that is out there and bend it to our will. I have also tried to pay attention to the tactics various actors in world politics employ as they politically engage the world, starting from the simple premise that others have agency that can be expressed as belonging to practices of ethics, and not mindlessly so. For me, this task has entailed exploring and deploying methods of reflexivity as judgment in and of our worlds – thinking about reflexivity’s possible dispositions, attitudes, tactics and forms of concern for the self in its relational context. I have, in other words, tried to take seriously the reflexivity of all agents in world politics, a task I saw lacking despite Stefano Guzzini’s (2000) constructivist take on reflexivity as occurring at two levels of interpretation.
More broadly, it is worth considering how a move toward agency with the purposes of a ‘critical Constructivism’ in mind can reorient constructivists’ ethical imaginations. These purposes include facilitating responsible and responsive transformation in the relationships of world politics that feature a variety of historical narratives and self-understandings. This chapter proposes reflexivity as a method to achieve this particular purpose. This move can also be described as tactical in the way it investigates agency to promote the strategy of orienting IR to responsible scholarship. This goal for IR – responsible scholarship – might be considered rather modest and more humble relative to the goal of competing with realism and liberalism in knowledge production. Thus, reflexivity can be a method that is available for investigating and transforming the various IR selves in their practices of scholarship and politics. While this is a central aim of critical Constructivism, it is also one in alliance with some of the purposes of feminist, queer, poststructural and postcolonial approaches to world politics. This Constructivism is perhaps more sensibility than it is theory (McCourt 2017).
Constructivism is not a stranger to ethics. Several constructivists have contextualized their work with ethical purposes, sought to fashion ethical practices of research and theorizing and – more controversially – offered the proposition that Constructivism has its own distinctive ethics for world politics. It is this last concern with practices of ethics that constructivists appear most anxious about. Indeed, many have taken an agnostic position on social transformation, focusing their efforts on theorizing and investigating the relationship between agency and structure. Norms, rules and practices are posited to be co-constitutive with social action, which includes discourse, images and symbols. Thus, constructivists have often remarked that their concern is with process rather than outcomes.
In contrast, feminists, postcolonialists and poststructuralists have explicitly criticized that which contextualizes agency, whether conceptualized as structure, power relations, or socio-historical context, and they have more readily taken positions on agency endowed with ethical purpose. Postcolonialists, for example, underscore the importance of the agency of the subaltern as contributing to broader structures, institutions and practices, including those of colonialism. Their critique is that even while the subaltern’s inferior position has been rendered necessary for Western identity and authority, Western scholars and academic fields have also robbed others of agency by portraying world politics as exclusively the purview of the materially and militarily powerful and as a single, dominant world rather than ‘multiple worlds’ (Agathangelou and Ling 2009; Hobson 2012). Postcolonialists, then, have been self-consciously concerned with both documenting subaltern agency and the multiplicity of structure, and working to challenge and transform the subaltern’s inferior position.
Perhaps seeking to confront this anxiety, some empirically focused constructivists have recently turned to the question of a constructivist ethics for politics, not just scholarship. While there are more indirect proposals in constructivist engagements with pragmatism (Haas and Haas 2002; Widmaier 2004) and communicative ethics (Risse 2000), this effort promotes a distinctively constructivist ethics primarily in a collection of chapters edited by Richard Price (2008). Scholarship dubious of such a proposition has followed, including in a special issue of the journal International Organization (Barkin and Sjoberg 2011; Erskine 2012; Hoffmann 2009; Rengger 2012). I will argue in this section that the work of Mervyn Frost, who is identified more with international political theory but cited positively in the aforementioned constructivist writing, is also exemplary of a norms-based constructivist ethics. Discussing Frost provides a fuller account of the basis for a constructivist ethics and its implications.
Constructivist accounts more generally feature the claim that everyday behavior in world politics has an ethical dimension. Norms, rules and roles are, by definition, normative positions (Onuf 1998a, 1998b). World politics is saturated by ethical considerations because political actors strive to be in good standing by being actors of a certain kind such as democratic states, civilized states or global citizens (Finnemore 1996; Frost 2001; Klotz 1995). Rules regulate the behavior of actors but also constitute actors as agents in world politics, and these agents act most of the time without reflecting on the deeply ethical dimension of their behavior (Onuf 1998a, 1998b; Frost 2001).
The key move made by Richard Price and his colleagues is to explore the implications of this ‘what is’ proposition for the question of ‘what ought’. Price, for example, promotes Constructivism’s potential for identifying practical possibilities for ethics in world politics via its empirical and theoretical insights. Like critical theory, Constructivism posits the possibility of change, but Price (2008a, 199, 217) views Constructivism as uniquely positioned to pursue possibilities that are empirically attainable, a position that is reformist rather than revolutionary since its aspirations are chastened by empirical evidence.
These constructivists have also celebrated moral success, pointing to humanitarian progress even amidst the presence of power, hypocrisy and othering in politics. Price (2008a, 192–3) highlights certain norms, such as human rights, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian warfare, and an end to slavery and apartheid, as a testament to the possibility of ‘progressive moral change’. This is not to say that constructivists unreflectively exalt these norms, but critical assessment pertains more to norms’ implementation and the complications that may arise. Kathryn Sikkink (2008), for example, declares her commitment to human rights norms but advocates observing how they can come into conflict in practice and have consequences that theorists and practitioners should take into account. Moral value inheres in the norm itself (as capturing rights) and in what it has achieved (minimizing violence and aiding the vulnerable).
Another constructivist claim speaks to norms as strategy. As ‘social facts’, norms are instrumental for ‘critical interventions in world politics’ (Price 2008a, 215). The moral power of norms lies in their effects but works through their social power as normative and even normal, securing acquiescence through ‘socialization, shaming, boycotts, sanctions, and the like’ (ibid., 215). Price (ibid., 207) explains that these tactics promote and leverage the existing social structure of international politics such as ‘just war norms’ to achieve further moral progress, as evidenced by the landmines ban. They are justified by their status as politically viable relative to alternative but ineffectual approaches (Price 2008a, 210, 214). Even if unpalatable and offensive to other values such as consent and autonomy, among others, these tactics might be tolerated in favor of avoiding more (or the most) unsavory political outcomes.
What is clear from this discussion is that many constructivists have situated international norms as that which forms the foundation of a constructivist ethics. One noteworthy problem is found in Toni Erksine’s (2012) observation that the contributors to the Price volume do not themselves provide an account of ethics, drawing instead on philosophers and political theorists in piecemeal fashion for normative infrastructure. It is apparent, for example, that accounts of constructivist effects are concerned with weighing effects along the lines of a consequentialist approach, but it may also be instructive and more defensible to consider explicitly constitutive theories of ethics from international political theory. Thus, I turn to a discussion of Mervyn Frost’s constitutive theory of ethics, which is positively appraised in several norms-based accounts of ethics.1
Frost, for one, makes theoretical and empirical claims that resonate with many constructivists. For Frost (2001), social life can be understood as so many practices such as diplomacy and war. Actions (or deeds) are ‘moves’ within a practice that are acceptable and made meaningful through norms, rules, principles and conventions that tell us who we are and what we should or can do (Frost 2001, 35–6). Furthermore, by making these moves, ‘the actors in them uphold and endorse the ethics embodied in the practices in question’ (ibid., 36). Frost (2009, 132) has declared that, ‘all social relations are ethical achievements’, a statement best understood when we see normative infrastructure as having inherent, or at least social, value. This value is paradoxically only apparent to us when it becomes unclear what the ethical course of action might be or when actors violate prevalent standards of conduct. Under these circumstances, ethical questions become prominent (Frost 2001, 37).
These ‘hard cases’ can come about for a variety of reasons including new technologies, unexpected events, or contradictory expectations that develop from different practices (Frost 2001, 39). A social ontology for ethics, Frost makes clear, entails an approach to ethics of finding a common basis from which to reach agreement among disputants. That agreement must be ‘created’ or ‘made’ (ibid., 50–1), and Frost proposes a specific method for tacking difficult ethical issues. Drawing on Ronald Dworkin’s method of settling ‘hard cases’ in law, Frost (1996) derives a procedure for settling the ‘hard cases’ in world politics through four steps: (1) generate a list of settled norms, (2) formulate a background justification for these settled norms, (3) apply the ‘procedure of reflective equilibrium’, and (4) employing the background theory, generate answers to the hard questions. This method deploys existing norms of international society, global civil society and globalization as a baseline from which to make ethical judgments about action (Frost 1996, 1999, 2001).
A key step occurs at the start when agents examine the practice at hand ‘in the round’ to draw out its values and link them together. This normative narrative is all the more legitimate if its values line up with the values of several practices in which disputants are participants (Frost 2001, 40–1). Once the background theory is established, it is certain that it will not entirely comport with all extant norms and rules. Just as legal reasoning can throw pieces of law into doubt because they no longer fit with the whole, reasoning from a value-story about ethics will throw some norms and rules into doubt. Indebted to John Rawls for the procedure of ‘reflective equilibrium’, Frost (1996, 99–100) argues that coherence can be attained by moving back and forth between the value-based background theory and the norms and rules until they are reconciled through amendment. Ethical questions can then be answered from this point of reconciliation.
Through this constitutive process, Frost claims to reconcile tension between the priority of the state and the priority of the individual, exemplified in IR by the pluralist and solidarist possibilities for international society discussed by Hedley Bull (1977) and Nicholas Wheeler (2000). Just as Bull concluded that if an international society is to have any value it must ultimately promote the welfare of the individual, Frost provides an account that rests on the individual’s moral priority. Drawing on Hegel, Frost argues that the state is important for recognizing our individuality because it is in the state that ‘citizens come to self-conscious appreciation of the way in which they constitute the whole and are constituted by it’ (Frost 1996, 149). Furthermore, the individual’s citizenship in a state is not fully ‘actualized’ unless other states recognize the autonomy of the individual’s state. Thus, the individuality of the citizen and the state are in reciprocal relation (ibid.,151). From this background justification, we see how sovereignty and a system of sovereign states could be valued, even when the individual is the referent of moral regard. Sovereignty and its associated norms are thus vital settled norms of international politics (including those of international law, diplomacy and modernization), and the practice of a society of states is reconciled with a practice of global society because states make individuality meaningful and prioritize the wellbeing of their own citizens. Rather than a norm that conflicts with sovereignty, humanitarian intervention, in Frost’s (2001, 51) account, ‘protects an area of freedom’ for individuals.
Even from this brief treatment of Frost’s writing, we can see how Erskine’s (2012) objection is apt. A constructivist ethics needs to dig deeper to support its assumption that the question of ‘what ought’ can be derived from ‘what is’ where the ontology of ‘what is’ is largely social structure as practices and norms but also a particular history that prizes individuality and its social recognition through a statist framework. Why this history and this social ontology? We may also wonder whether a desirable practice of ethics ought to be stable, internally consistent and value-hierarchical. We may ask what other histories may be told about norms. Adjudicating among norms by celebrating the progress that Price and others refer to works to uphold a particular set of norms with supporting values that can be woven together without contradiction, as Frost outlines. Similarly, Jason Ralph (2018, 175) builds on this constructivist discussion about ethics by proposing a pragmatic Constructivism that evaluates ‘the usefulness of meanings as they relate to the hypothesis at the norm’s core’. Whether resolving narrative inconsistencies or assessing usefulness, values that are empirically frequent/prevalent, or are perceived as such by certain theorists and practitioners, prevail. Not just norms but particular norms become privileged. Challenges are at risk of being ruled out at the outset as they fail to survive tests of consistency and universality. What seems to be the most recently inducted norm, Responsibility to Protect, is an effort to address some difficulties with accomplishing the already accepted norm of humanitarian intervention. Thus, the accounts of constructivist ethics discussed here form a fairly conservative position wherein dominant thought is universalized and largely held constant.2 The domain of ethics is rendered tractable and subject to ordering, and progress is operationalized as action, policies, treaties and institutions that further these norms, even when their meanings are maintained as flexible (Ralph 2018, 186).
It seems to me that what motivated some constructivists to entertain the notion of a constructivist ethics also motivates the editors of the present volume to focus on ‘tactical Constructivism’ – to promote and protect a theory and its purposes (Steele et al., this volume). In this vein, one may prod the purposes claimed and advanced by constructivists who support a norms-based ethics for world politics. To celebrate and protect ‘moral progress’ is a purpose with which other constructivists may not identify. After all, any social practice or political order has certain achievements that can be pointed out but we may still reject this practice or order because of its undesirable and questionable features. Furthermore, this aim seems more passive than active. In wanting to achieve that which is possible, constructivists may have narrowed ‘the possible’ to a certain episteme rather than an opening up of the immanent. A ‘critical Constructivism’ may identify with the goal of responsible scholarship and agree that its pursuit involves attention to ethics in world politics. Yet, a more critical approach to scholarship would also probe the politics of scholarship and the practices of knowledge. What is accepted as knowledge? Who produces knowledge? Likewise, how have practices of ethics been historically produced? Who do they recognize and how? Answering these questions entails a concern for both the self and relationships, responsively pursuing their transformation. The advantages of a more critical Constructivism include being more ambitious and open to surprise, looking to our relationships as resources for interrogating dominant practices and their concepts. More specifically, I argue, reflexivity can be a method for ethics.
A discussion of theoretical purposes that turns back on a collective IR and the scholar’s role is in itself a form of reflexivity familiar to many constructivists.3 Still, although Constructivism has a reputation as a reflexive theory because the actors of world politics are themselves capable of self-interpretation, on the whole Constructivism has been less attentive to the range and heterogeneity of this level of interpretation, one of two noted by Stefano Guzzini (2000). This political reflexivity (in addition to a scholarly reflexivity) tends to drop out of a norms-based constructivist research agenda beyond the role of the ‘norm entrepreneur’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999). In this variety of Constructivism, one either creates or consumes norms. This is a failure to fully theorize agency and engage its potential for a practice of ethics, further reflected in the efforts of Price, Sikkink, Frost and others to articulate a constructivist ethics.
There is now a considerable literature that takes a norms-based world politics to task in ways that cast doubt on Constructivism’s turn to these very norms as representing moral progress and having the potential to further it even more. A politics of norms does not excel, for example, in addressing the history and power relations of its normative infrastructure. This is problematic for many of the reasons discussed by Makau Matua (2001), Garrit Gong (1984) and Naem Inayatullah and David Blaney (2004). As articulated, constructivist ethics bias against the possibility of alternative norms, a heterogeneous distribution of spatio-temporal normative contexts, and agencies that engage normative and ethical questions therein. There is also a distinct lack of curiosity that might arise out of a position of humility about knowledge, that perhaps those who articulate, interpret and implement norms, as well as those who observe this politics, only have what Naeem Inayatullah (2013) refers to as ‘partial knowledge’.
Ultimately, Constructivism needs a better account of agency and a self-reflexive approach to history and relationships if it is to inform a practice of ethics.4 It will need to open itself to critique, beginning with greater receptiveness to hearing others including postcolonial, feminist and queer perspectives, rather than dismissing them as relativists and nihilists. From a social constructivist stance, accounts of ontology and epistemology can carry us to positions on ethics that are more radical than a process of decision-making modeled on legal positivism (Frost 1996) or a pragmatism of norms’ usefulness (Ralph 2018). Neta Crawford (2002, 399–435) moves toward this more radical direction, I think, in an amendment of discourse ethics for world politics with feminist care ethics that exhibits greater concern with relationality, power and agency, especially in terms of speaking and listening.
One of the issues at stake is the legitimacy of international and global infrastructure, an issue that (international) political theorists often address through accounts that refer to consent, representation, participation, shared culture, or substantive criteria such as justice. Such accounts may have both procedural and substantive components (Clark 1999; Crawford 2002, 410–11, 421–2; Lang et al. 2006, 284–5). Accounts of legitimacy can justify or call into doubt the infrastructure of an international society. It is this question of legitimacy that is being addressed when Sikkink (2004) points to a moment in history in which major human rights documents were negotiated by an internationally diverse group of individuals, implying a procedural standard of participatory consent. Frost could be described as turning to recognition as a source of legitimacy since rights are grounded in practice. We socially recognize one another as having rights rather than assigning them (philosophically) the status of pre-social or objectively true. At first blush, Frost’s account might seem more satisfactory because this form of legitimacy is more continuous. It depends on participants continuing the practice. A problem arises, however, when another practice Frost proposes – that of ethics – advocates that we refer to extant and dominant socio-political practices as that which will resolve questions and dilemmas that arise. Unless we refer to something external, this problem of internal references cannot be avoided, but it need not be resolved in this way.
For one, drawing these norms from the social scale of international/global and privileging consistency makes only some ethical resources available, excluding and even delegitimizing the resources of minority narratives and communities. Not only that, an important alternative source of legitimacy and practice of ethics is elided – that of judgment. Furthermore, freezing normative content contradicts the constructivist premise that actors’ interpretive capacities and social performances are politically and ethically significant.
Sikkink’s argument is largely directed against the accusation that today’s international society is merely a global extension of a European society (Gong 1984). Makau Matua provides another interpretation by illustrating how a practice of norms has been a powerful indictment of human rights discourse, but Matua’s critique is framed more as a warning to human rights activists to think strategically than a dismissal of the goodness of their intentions. Matua argues, for example, not only that human rights norms are largely Western human rights in practice, but also that the global promotion of these rights does not respect the agency of Third World actors and is often interpreted as simply another form of racist colonialism by those who are labeled ‘victims’ or ‘savages’ but never interlocutors, a point also noted by Crawford (2002). This lack of recognition has elicited resentment and resistance. ‘Victims’ are represented in media text and images as well as official foreign policy discourse as passive and not speaking for themselves; instead, narratives of identity and desire are imposed onto them. Human rights norms deny recognition, contrary to Frost, because it is not behavior, but rather culture that has been made the object of reform (Matua 2001). Of course, this international culture relies for its legitimacy on intersubjectivity, and yet is theorized as socializing those who do not share it. The accomplishment of this process has been defined as ‘progress’. In a practice of humanitarian intervention, only those who are capable of intervening and who have recognized themselves and select others as stewards of the ‘standards of civilization’ (‘saviors’) pronounce certain situations as ripe for action.5 Thus, this is also an argument about agency – those who are recognized as able to speak and decide.
This lack of agency is compounded by the costs that are incurred by populations from intervention. To put it crudely, the individual freedom that Frost sees as being advanced by intervention is not a possibility for those who die because of the intervention. Addressing the emergent norm of ‘responsibility to protect’, Dan Bulley (2010, 452) argues that to only speak of the ‘responsibility to protect humans’ is to ignore that it is also a ‘responsibility to attack them’. Given the life-and-death stakes, the agency of ethics is acutely relevant for which norms will be acted upon and how.
This is not to say that the worries of some constructivists about progress are not understandable. When some leaders threaten to pull out of the International Criminal Court because they believe it to be racist and this accusation coincides with the ICC’s willingness to prosecute these same leaders (Leishman 2016), the concerns of those who see the ICC as an important force for greater respect for human rights are poignant. Yet these same constructivists might also recognize the political and cultural salience of such an accusation in light of a history of colonialism and imperialism that may be, in several senses, a living history. The discourse of international/global politics, for example, continues to feature several actors that represent their knowledge as ‘exclusive knowledge’ in that it is the only knowledge relevant to the situation, rather than ‘partial knowledge’ that begins by admitting one’s lack and thus opens to the possibility of a process of ‘mutual enrichment’ (Inayatullah 2013). In constructivist accounts of ethics, discussions of the ‘who’ that surveys ‘empirical evidence’ and takes stock of the usefulness or good brought by norms is too often absent. At the same time that we can recognize norms such as human rights as a revolutionary force for many kinds of activists past and present, we can also recognize the ambivalence and resentment around human rights practice and the limits of a language of rights. When revolutions seal themselves off from further challenge and the possibility of new political projects and seek to protect its gains, they abandon the ‘revolutionary spirit’ that made their claims so powerful in the first place (Arendt 1990).
In the remainder of this chapter, I will briefly present some directions in which Constructivism can develop practices of ethics that locate reflexivity’s agency as central. This line of thought offers an alternative to norms-based ethics and represents a tactical choice to shift the focus away from structure, offering distinct benefits that appeal more to Constructivism’s critical sensibility. Taking agency seriously puts us in a position to move toward an ethics of judgment rather than having to rely exclusively on norms,6 avoiding some of the problems presented in the previous section and offering a spatial and temporal reorientation toward the everyday and a horizon of ‘natality’.
There is much work to be done on theorizing agency that retains the basic feature of open-endedness that we tend to associate with it (Barkin 2010; Epstein 2012). I propose that re-thinking agency for ethics in a way that benefits from and is consistent with constructivist insights might begin with the Constructivism of Nicholas Onuf. Doing so illustrates how there is room in Constructivism for an account of agency that is a better fit for a praxis of judgment. Inattention to agency extends to much of the work of international political theorists, adding further impetus to the overall project of this chapter – to elaborate practices of ethics that empower political actors and scholars to grapple with difficult ethical questions. I accept the point of Erskine (2012) and Barkin and Sjoberg (2011, 2019) that Constructivism on its own cannot generate an ethics, but constructivists have nevertheless articulated normative implications and visions in their writing (e.g., thin cosmopolitanism, liberal institutionalism, pragmatism). In the previous section, I rejected the visions that constructivist scholars such as Price and Frost have offered on the grounds that they neglect complexity, difference and history, as well as the importance of agency for producing and responding to these conditions.
Turning to Onuf offers a picture of the agencies that other Constructivisms often miss – the everyday agencies of the ‘smaller worlds’ in which we reside as we confront specific ethical questions and dilemmas, making choices in light of rules but not entirely constrained or determined by them. Putting Onuf in conversation with Aristotle, Arendt and the work of postcolonial IR scholars working with a constructivist ontology like L.H.M. Ling further underscores the desirability of emphasizing agency and particulars rather than rules for ethics.7 Rules, an example of what Aristotle referred to as ‘universals’ (principles, beliefs, values, etc.), can be treated as ethical resources and as contingent on our experience with them.
At first glance, Onuf’s Constructivism may appear to be not that much different from abstract, norm-based accounts of Constructivism previously discussed. Onuf acknowledges norms but prefers to discuss norms as rules. Rules ‘set standards and prescribe conduct meeting those standards’ (Onuf 1998b, 670). When we act, then, our action refers to standards: ‘Ethical conduct reflects what we feel we should or must do, given available standards’ (ibid., 669). When we don’t know the relevant standards we might look to others around us to ‘read’ the standards they are using. Like Frost, Onuf (2001) views rules as prescriptive when associated with particular practices and identities, and connects rule-following to ethics even when self-awareness of the ethical dimension of one’s behavior is unnecessary, giving ethics an everyday quality. Is there room in Onuf’s vision for an active, thinking agent, for others’ agencies and for a historicized self – other narrative that provides helpful context to a practice of ethics?
To respond to this question affirmatively, one can first point out that Onuf is clear that agents make choices about whether or not to follow rules, and rules cannot be reconciled such that they demonstrate internal, logical consistency as a cohesive set of rules. They may contradict one another or they may ‘specify alternative standards of conduct for exceptional circumstances’ (Onuf 1998b, 684). Whereas Frost seeks to weave together a ‘background theory’ in which norms have their proper place in a more comprehensive and consistent story about values, Onuf refers to norms and rules as incompatible on their own terms. Thinking, acting agents in the everyday of politics formulate goals and ‘make choices in light of those goals’, even as they draw on social resources and others’ examples in doing so (ibid., 670).
Second, Onuf refers to the socio-structural basis of our actions, but this is found in a more local and immediate space than what IR scholars commonly imagine. Onuf underscores the ‘smallness’ of International Relations. In the ‘everyday’ of IR, individuals respond to the concerns and demands of daily life which are ethical (Onuf 1998b, 693), and the rules assigned the highest legitimacy are local. Invoking the example of human rights, Onuf (ibid., p. 688) explains:
We see here a different spatial scale than that found in much of Constructivism in terms of how agents recognize, interpret and act on rules. Structure can be disaggregated into multiple structures or worlds that are the context for agencies, a point that Ling (2014) also makes from a postcolonial and social constructivist perspective that underscores the difference of ‘Multiple Worlds’, ‘Westphalia World’ and the fluidity of their interpenetration and interaction. Another way to think about this is that mutual construction of agency and structure has multiplicity and heterogeneity. This mutual construction is much more complex, immediate and dynamic than often theorized in constructivist (and mainstream) IR. For ethics, this means that the social to which choices refer is quite variable.
We can also locate in Onuf’s Constructivism how agency can be conceptualized in several ways. As empirical and historical, agency can be a differentiated social process to be studied and described. Onuf presents this version when he designates liberal and republican notions of agency that have historically waxed and waned in tension with one another. The liberal conception of agency is that of individuated persons who have moral priority as rights-holders and act rationally on behalf of individual beliefs and interests (Onuf 1998c, 139). The republican notion of agency is that of communities pursuing a common good through collective and public action. Political actors reference the idea of the public good (and thus society as prior to the individual) to orient and justify their political action.
In contrast to this historico-empirical form of agency, we might address agency theoretically and analytically by treating it as a concept that serves social scientific inquiry. When Onuf does this he thinks about agency in the context of a constructivist theorization of the relationship between agency and structure, one that is co-constitutive. Onuf argues that neither agency nor structure are privileged analytically in this constructivist formulation (in contrast to liberal and republican formulations). The mechanism of this co-constitution is found in ‘deeds’ which are actions or choices formulated and represented by language (Onuf 1998c, 142). In his larger body of theoretical work Onuf offers up this performative theorization of agency and structure, but in his study of republican thought Onuf also characterizes this understanding of agency as a ‘third’ historical perspective on agency that is ‘late-modern’. Onuf also treats agency methodologically, noting that to proceed with inquiry we can give ‘provisional priority’ to either agency or structure (ibid., 142). I suspect, then, that Onuf would reject the commonplace assumption that Constructivism cannot theorize agency as neglecting to distinguish between theoretical, historical and methodological approaches to agency.
Whichever way we begin with agency we need to deal with its open-endedness, unpredictability, variability and reflexivity (Amoureux 2016; Barkin 2010; Epstein 2012). At the very least, we can say that agency can take different forms, and that if actors recognize themselves as having agentic status they also may see themselves as having and exercising meaningful choice.8 For ethics to proceed we can normatively and analytically prioritize agency. On the one hand, thinking about ethics might elicit constructivist analyses of ethics as practiced (as found in the world). This is what is happening when constructivists study ethics as norms (Thomas 2001) and, in doing so, theorize agency as having a social rationality – that reasons for acting are located in social formations such as the socializing power of norms and rules and the desire to affirm one’s identity or to belong. It is this logic of agency that constructivists analytically stress when they assert that ethics is commonplace but not usually recognized by agents. In contrast, we might propose and even empirically locate a practice of ethics in which agency features a logic of critical rationality as illustrated by theorists like Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. A practice of ethics can be concerned with amplifying the reflexivity of agents – their ability to reflect back on the self, its formation and its relationships, and engage in self-transformation and political action. Elsewhere (Amoureux 2016), I have elaborated a practice of ethics as a practice of reflexivity that, at minimum, features a dialectic approach to thought and action wherein the agent self-consciously and critically engages each in view of the other, drawing on affective, rational and dispositional resources. Thus, a reflexive practice of ethics has a distinct and critical logic.
Agency as reflexivity is more active and imaginative than an agency of rule-following because rules themselves become objects of interpretation, modification, transformation or elimination. Not only that, reflexive agents view rules and thought more generally as always contingent on particulars and our judgment of them. Agency is not purely voluntarist as agents work with social stuff like languages and texts, but a practice of reflexivity takes this social stuff as objects to be re-fashioned and creatively rendered. Self-practices, as Foucault (1997) illustrates with ‘self-writing’, that draw upon and work with disparate elements can incorporate them to produce a new whole, as illustrated by the metaphors of digestion and a chorus. Similarly, Arendt’s reflexive exercise of ‘thinking’ as a dialectical and critical dialogue within the ‘two-in-one’ of the self (1978, 185), has the creative potential of what Arendt terms ‘natality’ because one has ‘enough origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality’ (Arendt 1953, 391). Thus, one can strike out into the world to initiate a new series of action in time.
Perhaps more satisfying to the constructivist mindset, Aristotle (1984, 1104a, 1140a) reminds us that in judging we take into account and prioritize the ‘particulars’ of each situation over the available ‘universals’, selecting and integrating universals from this on-the-ground orientation (Abizedah 2002, 269; Kraut 2009). As a practical activity, ethics concerns action and is thus most likely to be an activity marked by excellence when performed by those (phronimos) practiced in discerning and reacting well to different situations, a task that nevertheless remains difficult as agents select from, interpret and critically rearticulate universals and particulars. Referring to norms, rules, or ‘universals’ alone is not only indeterminate for both Aristotle and Arendt, intersubjectivity can also be tyrannical. It is a deferral of responsibility, a failure to think, and neglectful of the fullest capacities of being human. The style of their writings often models this reflexivity. Aristotle (1984), for example, invites his interlocutors to a critical discussion of what might be said to be held in common, whether it promotes and embodies the good or the highest good, and whether the good is even that at which we should aim.
The final point of this chapter is that the agency of a practice of ethics more in line with the aims of a critical Constructivism might interest itself in elaborating how – both conceptually and empirically – the critical rationality of agency and the affects of relationality can be located and magnified in politics.9 Both Aristotle and Arendt were concerned with how the agents of ethics could accumulate the experience, attitudes and practice that would dispose them to critical assessment of thought and action and the recognition of agency, what Arendt (1972, 30) referred to as ‘habits of mind’ and the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 1966). While reflexivity is a capacity of agents even in social contexts, it may also be a desirable approach to the need for ethical judgment. Reflexivity’s incidence can be leveraged beyond the limits we have imagined for it. Thus, even the more immediate and local contexts theorized by Onuf as the ‘everyday’ can be made more contingent, malleable, and flexible from a practice of ethics as reflexivity.
While several scholars have sought to apply constructivist knowledge – as theory and empirical evidence – to the task of formulating an international or global ethics, these efforts have suffered from Constructivism’s focus on structure over agency.10 As a sociological theory, Constructivism’s strength has been theorizing and investigating structure in its expanse and depth, but this focus does not serve a practice of ethics well. Norms and rules are of only partial and contingent use to ethics and we see why when we look to Aristotle and Arendt who instead point us to the priority of particulars, the reflexivity of an internal dialogue that critically and dialectically engages thought and action, and politics as the struggle to reflexively critique and create ways of everyday living that we might describe as micro-political.
A practice of ethics as ‘ethical reflexivity’ is based on a different understanding of international/global ethics than is found in Constructivism or Normative IR. Onuf alerts us to the various historical understandings of agency, and agency as reflexivity may have its own historical basis, as Foucault evinces in his reformulation of the Enlightenment (1984). Thus, reflexivity as a practice of ethics is not universally valid per se. We might describe ethical reflexivity as an already incipient practice to be taken up and leveraged by those attracted to its disposition and process, to be tried out by any of a variety of actors in politics unsatisfied with a norms-based international politics, and subject to others’ critiques.
Reflexivity can inform a constructivist ethics that can develop and promote a logic of critical rationality as a response both to social ontology and epistemological uncertainty, in contrast to constructivist ethics formulated thus far that refer to structural (and extant) norms as reliable moral guideposts. If intersubjectivity sets the context for politics, it is important for agents to manage social structures and to assume a more active agency in spite of them. De-emphasizing stability and reworking reflexivity as a more thorough-going critical engagement of thought and action can extend the insights of this literature and locate the critical rationality of reflexivity in which agents are able to assess thought and action in political contexts. Rules are important moral resources, but they are not the only moral resources and they remain to be interpreted, reconciled, transformed, rejected or affirmed by active, thinking subjects in their everyday worlds, relationships and encounters.
Finally, reflexivity – as process and attitude – is a viable component of a practice of ethics that can be more attuned to difference in world politics. Reflexivity is premised on the idea that all agents have capacities for reflecting on and evaluating their social contexts. Discourses that elide or distribute agential recognition unevenly are suspect. We do not have to reach consensus or shared values and norms to notice and seek out how others have reacted to our agencies and how, dialectically considering thought and action as part of ethical judgment, we might re-craft our worlds in ways that are more respectful of the worlds of others. This process is complex and political. It relies on ethical judgment without pretense that a place of justice to all ‘others’ will ever be reached. There is a certain risk, resonating with anxieties in the recent discussion of constructivist ethics, that an agent-centric practice of ethics will result in changes and new courses of action that strike out into the world with effects that will be unsatisfying and perhaps even disastrous. Yet, such a practice of ethics is one in which agents are also capable of judging these effects and modifying thought and action in light of them.
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