This book should not have needed to be written. As I explore further in this concluding chapter, the seeds of the practice and relational turns, the New Constructivism’s reflexivity, and its advancement of a phronetic social science, are written all over Constructivism’s DNA. Many of the early constructivist theoretical treatises placed heavy emphasis on practices and relations – in some cases, more than norms, identity, and culture – as well as reflexivity and history.

For Wendt, for example, what was ‘so striking about neorealism was its total neglect of the explanatory role of state practice’.¹Noting how ‘social structures are not carried around in people’s heads but in their practice’, he stressed that international anarchy was not sufficient to lead to a self-help world.²If IR displayed self-help characteristics, this was due to process.³For Wendt: ‘Security dilemmas are not acts of God; they are effects of practice.’⁴For Onuf, similarly, constructivism at base was an approach that studied how people in practice create the rules by which they live. As a consequence, ‘Constructivism begins with deeds. Deeds done, acts taken, words spoken. These are all the facts there are.’⁵While Onuf’s interest lay with language and the construction of rules, he noted approvingly Michael Oakeshott’s reminder that ‘most human behavior can adequately be described in terms of the notion of habit or custom and that neither the notion of rule or that of reflectiveness is essential to it’.⁶Finally, Kratochwil has also consistently placed political practice at the forefront of his constructivist theorizing as social norms, rules, and conventions emerge and have their effects in the specific practical context of individual reasoning and decision-making.

I should pause right there. We are accustomed to defining things in academic discourse and everyday life using the definer-in-chief – ‘is’. The exercise comes automatically, unreflexively. When we want to bring the nature of a phenomenon to the surface, we begin with a definition – however provisional – so we can all begin from the same place. The habit is rooted in the structure of language itself, after all. Ordinary language tells us the world is made up of things, discrete ‘its’ that do things.¹Why should it be any different with IR Constructivism?

While ‘defining one’s terms’ is drilled into us early in our education, in the case of Constructivism, the practice represents a problematic starting point. Even sophisticated constructivists can fall into the trap – for one, for example, ‘Constructivism is about the social embeddedness of human consciousness and its role in international life.’²This definition is not incorrect so much as only one of many possible definitions of ‘it’. (What is ‘consciousness’, after all?) The problem comes because Constructivism resists such substantialization or essentialization: casting Constructivism as a stable thing the nature of which words can straightforwardly capture. Indeed, Constructivism resists substantialization or essentialization in not one but two ways: Constructivism is neither a single thing in IR, be it a theory, approach, perspective, or whatever, nor is it a theory or approach that studies things in world politics. To ask what Constructivism is, therefore, is to pose a crucial question in the wrong way for the object at hand.

The previous chapter left off on a rather dispiriting note, with sociologist Andrew Abbott’s cynical-sounding conclusion that, when Constructivism reappears in the social sciences – as it does for him, on a roughly generational cycle – there are ‘different wrinkles … and of course there is a new terminology … [but] there is no real progress, no fundamentally new concept. We simply keep recalling a good idea’.¹In this chapter, I show that such a characterization of Constructionism beyond IR both fits with the experience of the New Constructivism in IR theory to some degree only, falling a little wide of the mark. It all depends on what we mean by progress and fundamentally new ideas.

Abbott is correct to the extent that the New Constructivism ultimately makes the same point as the Old: that international politics – like all human life – is a collective accomplishment. The social world, including the main categories and concepts we use to understand it – truth, science, knowledge, cosmologies – are constructed in and through practice. There is nothing natural about them. If progress and fundamentally new ideas are taken to mean something more than this, then no, the New Constructivism is not fundamentally distinct from the Old, and little progress has been made. But if progress is unmoored from the grip of prevailing understandings of the word ‘science’, understandings rooted in ‘solving’ problems we all agree on once and for all, the New Constructivism represents precisely the type of progress IR scholars should aim for.

‘Political understanding … teaches us that the political order is articulated through its history; the past weighs on the present, shaping alternatives and pressing with a force of its own.’ Sheldon Wolin¹

‘It is one thing to perfect an instrument; it is another to ensure that it is put to use in just, virtuous, or even rationally discriminating ways.’ Stephen Toulmin²

‘The underlying issue is not, as it is usually professed to be, the status of truth and objectivity in first order activities such as politics … but rather the cognitive, and practical, authority, of metapractical claims.’ John Gunnell³

In this book’s Introduction, I emphasized historical sensitivity as a core feature of the New Constructivism. But what is history in IR? Why does the New Constructivism have to be historical?

Beginning in around 2000, a historical ‘turn’⁴witnessed a proliferation of reflections on the relationship between IR and history, including assessment of IR’s historical consciousness,⁵advocation for a dialogue with international historians,⁶lobbying against interpretive closure of historical events,⁷rediscovery of the historical orientation of the English School,⁸identification of narrative as an inherent feature of explanation,⁹reconsideration of the assumptions about temporality embedded in different IR theories,¹⁰examination of IR’s historiography,¹¹and outlining of the potential of historical sociology,¹²to name just a few contributions. Most of the debate’s participants supported a historical turn. As Duncan Bell observes, ‘History, in its various manifestations, plays an essential, constitutive, role in shaping the present’; in mainstream IR, he goes on, ‘this has often been disregarded’.

What methodological commitments does the New Constructivism entail? What methods can Constructivists deploy, and which ones must they eschew? The aim of this chapter is to debunk two popular myths about constructivist methods and Constructivism’s methodological implications – a useful distinction introduced by Patrick Jackson: first, that Constructivism is an interpretive approach only focused on the reconstruction of intersubjective meanings; and second, that analysis of texts – speeches, strategy documents, newspaper articles, memoirs, and so on – is therefore the singular way of ‘doing’ Constructivism.¹Counter to this common wisdom, I make the case that, instead, as a form of classic social analysis, constructivists are much freer in terms of the methods they can and, indeed, should use to substantiate their claims than is captured by the focus on interpreting texts. I illustrate using a computational approach – MCA – which would typically be seen as ‘quantitative’ and therefore beyond the constructivist pale.

I first reflect on my own adoption of a constructivist approach, which, while unique, might read as familiar to others or prompt a useful reflexive thought process for the reader. I then further explore the concept of classic social analysis, particularly its implications for method. In short, I urge constructivists to adopt whatever methods allows them to best answer their research question, rather than assume certain methods are off-limits. I subsequently illustrate with the case of MCA – a computational method the logic of which is fully in accordance with the practice-relational sensitivity of the New Constructivism. After briefly exploring practical questions raised by adopting the approach, a short conclusion considers the potential pay-off for constructivists willing to take the risk.

The premise of this book would seem to suggest that the Old Constructivism should be discarded. Not so. In this chapter, I show that the Old Constructivism still has many virtues. Many of its core contributions are as relevant as when first made over two decades ago, and as necessary to grapple with for newcomers to the field. Those fresh to Constructivism – in IR and political science in general – should revisit the foundational texts of Constructivism discussed here for themselves. While doing so, however, they should bear in mind two related points.

First, newcomers should recall what the authors of the early constructivist texts were arguing against, and why their arguments seemed exciting and refreshing to so many at the time, even dangerous to some of their critics.¹Second, they should keep in mind the dynamics of IR as a field, dynamics that prioritize scholarship that looks beyond its borders for new insights over revisiting insights from within the field. Together, these caveats reinforce the conclusion that to acknowledge the evolution from the Old Constructivism to a new version of the same does not entail throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater. The virtues of the Old Constructivism remain.

Scholars at the forefront of mainstream American IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s had converged on a remarkably narrow set of core issues by the standards of today’s variegated international studies profession. The so-called Neo-Neo debate revolved around the sources of state’s interests within an international system understood to be anarchical – without a power above the sovereign state able to prevent or at least regulate inter-state conflict.

The following two chapters address two lingering questions from this book’s exploration into the New Constructivism in IR theory. First, what is the New Constructivism’s politics or ethics? Put differently, should Constructivism operate in a political, normative, or ethical register? If so how? If not, why not? Second, and relatedly, the chapter asks what form of knowledge Constructivism offers. Suspended between the positivist mainstream and various modes of critical and post-positivist theory, what type of knowledge – exactly – does the New Constructivism represent? How can the knowledge the New Constructivism offers be justified as comparable or even superior to alternatives, both mainstream and critical?

Scholars like Jason Ralph, Martin Weber, Silviya Lechner, and Mervyn Frost have recently posited the question of Constructivism’s stance vis-à-vis politics and ethics. Together, these scholars, and others, have argued that practice-relationalism, and the pragmatist dispositions much of it builds upon not only assist the New Constructivism in offering thicker accounts of the social construction of world politics vis-à-vis Old Constructivism, but also allow constructivists to interrogate the ethical content of norms and culture in ways previously downplayed.¹Armed with pragmatism and practice-relationalism, it is suggested, the New Constructivism can bridge the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ in world politics.

In this chapter, I assess their arguments, and others who seek to place ethics and Constructivism into dialogue. I argue that the New Constructivism struggles – without different degrees of success – to move beyond a core tension from the Old Constructivism when it comes to the issue of ethics and normativity.

In this chapter, I re-centre language, rules, and law in the New Constructivism. Rules, law, and language lay at the core of the early theoretical Constructivist treatises, especially Nicholas Onuf’s World of Our Making and Friedrich Kratochwil’s Rules, Norms, and Decisions.¹Each placed rule- and norm-governed reasoning as fundamental to political life, in the international no less than the domestic sphere. But as Constructivism gained ground in the discipline, especially in the empirical Old Constructivism that cemented its place in American political science, language, rules, and law, were sidelined.²Norms, identity, and culture became the conceptual touchstones of this new line of thought within an academic debate dominated by realist themes: the balance of power, national interests, and the search for security among independent sovereign states. More surprisingly, the New Constructivism also downplays language, law, and rules, in favour of practice, relationality, and the reality and post-humanism of the new materialism.³Old Constructivism and the practice-relational turn thus reflects and furthers two divisions that have rented Constructivism from language, rules, and law: first, between international law and legal theory and international politics and security such that the two barely speak;⁴and second between Constructivism and post-structuralism, where discourse seemed to render the project of social science itself in question. My aim in this chapter, consequently, is to show that these divisions were contingent, social processes, constructions we might say; retracing their separation can go some way towards knitting language, rules, and law, and Constructivism back together.

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.¹Inseparable 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.²Many 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.