Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
International System ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
International Systems ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
Rule Making

Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics identifies a class of social practices of rule-making, interpretation, and application, demonstrating the causal importance of these practices (and the procedural rules that constitute and govern them) in explaining outcomes in world politics. The book utilizes rule-oriented and practice-turn constructivist approaches to argue that procedural rules about rule-making, or secondary rules, shape the way that actors present and evaluate proposals for change in the rules and institutions that structure international systems. The book examines four important international security cases: the social construction of great power management after the Napoleonic Wars; the creation of a rule against the use of force, except in cases of self-defense and collective security, enshrined in the Kellogg-Briand Pact; contestation of the international system by al-Qaeda in the period immediately following the 9/11 attacks; and United Nations efforts to establish norms for state conduct in the cyber domain. The book makes several contributions to International Relations theory. It provides insight into how actors know how and when to engage in specific forms of social construction. It extends the application of practice-turn constructivism to processes of making and interpreting rules. It improves upon existing tools to explain change in the rules and institutions of the international system. Finally, it demonstrates the utility of the book’s approach for the study of global governance, the international system, and for emerging efforts to identify forms and sites of authority and hierarchy in world politics.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-250
Author(s):  
Mark Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
International Systems ◽  
Rule Making

The concluding chapter summarizes the main argument of the book concerning the nature and operation of social practices of rule-making and reviews the main findings from the four empirical cases. It then discusses the book’s significance. It sheds light on how to resolve comparability issues and investigate scope conditions among various proposed mechanisms for creating shared knowledge such as rules and institutions. It extends the range of applications of the practice-turn to the practice of rule-making, and identifies synergies between rule and practice constructivisms. It also demonstrates that the study of social practices of rule-making improves existing explanations of change in international systems. In doing so, it highlights the importance of these practices to contemporary global governance, as well as the overlooked importance of global governance for the study of international systems and world orders. Finally, it demonstrates the book’s utility for studying hierarchy and authority in world politics.

The Social Construction of Great Power Management, 1815–1822

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-82
Author(s):  
Mark Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Power Management ◽  
International System ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rule Making ◽  
Concert Of Europe

This chapter shows that secondary rules help to explain the emergence of active practices of great power management of the international system after the Napoleonic Wars. Actors were aware of themselves as joint participants in a practice of rule-making and interpretation. They presented proposals according to the rules of that practice, both criticizing and justifying proposals on procedural grounds. The chapter covers the initial creation of great power management in the Congress of Vienna, and its development in the initial conferences of the Concert of Europe at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Laibach, and Verona. Actors who more skillfully employed secondary rules were more successful in obtaining their goals. Talleyrand secured France’s readmission to the ranks of the great powers, and Metternich and Castlereagh consistently employed procedural rules to achieve their objectives. Procedural rules also help explain the failure of the Tsar’s proposed Holy Alliance in contrast to the substantively similar Quadruple Alliance.

Social Practices of Rule-Making

2019 ◽  
pp. 8-43
Author(s):  
Mark Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
International System ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Know How ◽  
Rule Making ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins by outlining the conceptions of rules, institutions, and social practices employed throughout the book. It demonstrates that attention to procedural rules for rule-making and interpretation, or secondary rules, sheds light on the puzzle of how actors know how and when to engage in particular forms of social construction and therefore on why we observe patterned practices of global rule-making. Secondary rules shape the way actors present and evaluate proposals for making, changing, and interpreting rules. As such, they are a key overlooked cause of the form, process, and timing of change in the rules and institutions of the international system. They also help explain the success or failure of particular attempts to create such change, since proposals presented according to relevant secondary rules are more likely to be accepted. Finally, the chapter outlines the book’s significance and contributions, and discusses issues of method and evidence.

Environmental Rationality

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Enrique Leff
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Ecological Balance ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Economic Paradigm ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Culture And Development

Renovating our thinking as humankind (rethinking nature, culture and development) is an imperative to approach the challenges of environmental crisis and to orient the social construction of a sustainable world. If environmental crisis is a predicament of knowledge, beyond the task of reinventing science, innovating technology and managing information, we must face the challenge of inventing new ways of thinking, organizing and acting in the world; of reorienting our ethical principles, modes of production and social practices for the construction of a sustainable civilization. Innovation for sustainability is drawn by alternative rationalities. I will argue that rationality of modernity has limited capacities to reestablish the ecological balance of the planet, while environmental rationality opens new perspectives to sustainability: the construction of a new economic paradigm based on neguentropic productivity, a politics of difference and an ethic of otherness. Paramount to this purpose is the contribution of Latin American Environmental Thinking.

Towards an International Political Ergonomics

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 979-1006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Luke Austin
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Violence Prevention ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Practice Turn

This article introduces International Political Ergonomics. International Political Ergonomics is a novel research programme focused on achieving political change through the ergonomic (re)design of world politics. The approach is grounded on a shift across International Relations which recognizes that its epistemic (i.e. knowledge-producing) core is often inadequate to achieve change. Insights from the practice turn and behaviouralist International Relations, as well as from philosophy, sociology and neuroscience, demonstrate that much international behaviour is driven by the ‘unconscious’ or ‘non-reflexive’ re-articulation of repertoires of actions even where the pathologies of this process are known. This implies that knowledge production and dissemination (i.e. to policymakers, global publics) is often unable to effect influence over social practices. What is thus required is a non-epistemic means of producing world political change. International Political Ergonomics is a research programme that takes up this task. It does so by describing how small material interventions into world politics can radically shift individual behaviours by encouraging greater rationality, reflexivity and deliberation. After laying out the theoretical basis for this claim, the article demonstrates it by detailing the application of International Political Ergonomics to violence-prevention efforts. The article concludes by reflecting on the radical implications that International Political Ergonomics has for the vocation of International Relations.

The Social Construction of Human Kinds

Hypatia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 716-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Metaphysical Claim ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Response Dependence ◽  
Human Kind

Social construction theorists face a certain challenge to the effect that they confuse the epistemic and the metaphysical: surely our conceptions of something are influenced by social practices, but that doesn't show that the nature of the thing in question is so influenced. In this paper I take up this challenge and offer a general framework to support the claim that a human kind is socially constructed, when this is understood as a metaphysical claim and as a part of a social constructionist debunking project. I give reasons for thinking that a conferralist framework is better equipped to capture the social constructionist intuition than rival accounts of social properties, such as a constitution account and a response‐dependence account, and that this framework helps to diagnose what is at stake in the debate between the social constructionists and their opponents. The conferralist framework offered here should be welcomed by social constructionists looking for firm foundations for their claims, and for anyone else interested in the debate over the social construction of human kinds.

Communism, fascism and counter-revolution in world politics

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-686
Author(s):  
Michael Mann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effects Of War

This is a rich, impressive and timely book. At a time when American and neoliberal triumphalism deny the significance of any revolution later than 1776, and when almost no-one in the social sciences is still studying either revolution or class, Fred Halliday has demonstrated that we have been living in a revolutionary age, dominated by the conjoined effects of war and class revolution. In case you find his sub-title mysterious, Karl Marx noted that the Europe of his time was dominated by five Great Powers, but Revolution, ‘the sixth Great Power’, would soon overcome them all. Halliday would suggest that Marx was only half-right. Revolution did not overcome all five Powers, but it did transform them all—and their successors. Hannah Arendt and Martin Wight also emphasized that couplings of war and revolution have dominated much of modernity. But Halliday adds that these are not to be seen as ‘disruptions’ of International Relations, they are International Relations, since they have set the overall parameters of the modern international system. They did so, he says, in three distinct revolutionary phases from the sixteenth century to the present-day: sixteenth-seventeenth century religious wars/revolutions, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlanticist wars/revolutions, and twentieth century wars/revolutions which became increasingly dominated by communism.

scholarly journals Youth and Gender in a Mayan Town in Yucatán

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Maya Lorena Pérez Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
School Students ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

In this article I propose to analyze the social construction of youth among the population of Yaxcabá, Yucatán, Mexico, using ethno-history, linguistics and anthropology. I demonstrate the continuity and differences of what it means to be young in Mayan culture, paying attention to the differences and inequalities between men and women, shown by Mayan language and certain social practices and beliefs. I finally analyze what high school students think about what it means to be Maya, to be young and whether or not they conceive themselves as Mayans.

Constructivist Analyses of Foreign Policy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Houghton
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theory Of Human Nature ◽  
Constructivist Approaches

Most constructivist work in IR has attempted to account for very general outcomes in the international system, most notably the well-known research of Alexander Wendt. Whether we live in a “Kantian,” “Lockean,” or “Hobbesian” world, for instance, is in a sense a socially constructed thing rather than flowing from some inevitable structure or theory of human nature. Nevertheless, some important constructivist work has focused on more specific foreign policy outcomes, research that is examined here in depth. Constructivist analyses tend to focus on “how possible” questions rather than attempting to “explain” particular decisions, and this offers a useful addition or corrective to more traditional analyses of foreign policy. They also attempt to understand the general foreign policy orientations of states, often relying on notions of culture, role, and identity. But such approaches have not yet fully matured into comprehensive approaches to foreign policy, in at least two senses. First of all, current constructivist approaches are somewhat limited by a focus on the social dimensions of foreign policy rather than individual ones, being sociological rather than psychological in nature. This is sometimes not an issue, but it becomes a problem when variation between decision makers with the same social identity is the object of interest or where norms are in conflict with one another. Secondly, there have been relatively few attempts to turn constructivism into a normative theory. Arguably, in order to become a fully rounded theory (as opposed to a loose framework), constructivism needs a mechanism by which it can influence actual decision makers, very few of whom currently describe themselves in opinion polls as being constructivists, as opposed to realists or liberals. And yet both of these problems can potentially be remedied. Firstly, constructivist approaches may be combined with psychological approaches that supplement their sociological focus. Both constructivism and the psychological approach to decision making are ideational in nature rather than material; in other words, they share the belief that what people think is “out there” is often more important than what actually is. Indeed, the psychological approach to foreign policy provided a major source of inspiration for the early constructivists. Secondly, constructivist approaches can offer policy makers prescriptive advice as to how they should or ought to behave. After reviewing the literature on understanding foreign policy outcomes, this article suggests the outlines of an applied constructivism that decision makers in government would find positively useful. There is a Realpolitik and an Idealpolitik, but can there be a “Konstruktpolitik”? At least six principles might guide the development of normative constructivism. Chief among these is the axiom, “if you can’t change the physical, change the social.” Other principles include the effort to initiate “norm cascades,” the encouragement (or discouragement) of self-fulfilling beliefs and self-negating beliefs, acceptance of the role of agency, and the conscious use of argument and language as tools of persuasion.

Social Practices of Rule-Making and the Global War on Terror

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-202
Author(s):  
Mark Raymond
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Global War ◽  
Rule Making ◽  
Invasion Of Iraq

This chapter examines public dialogue between al-Qaeda and the United States from 1996 until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Both sides spoke clearly and consistently about actual and preferred rules for the international system, and the way they should be applied; and both sides engaged in procedural criticism and justification. Both sides knew that conflict was overdetermined, and that they had deep disagreements about relevant social practices of rule-making. So why engage in futile dialogue? Attempts to reach like-minded audiences clearly matter, but esoteric appeals about legitimate rule-making procedures are typically not expected to move political audiences. The chapter argues that participants on both sides had internalized ideas about legitimate rule-making practices, and tied these understandings to conceptions of the appropriate nature and ends of political community. The case demonstrates the emotional power of secondary rules, and the difficulty of resolving conflict in the absence of common rule-making practices.

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