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In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social structures (Wendt, 1999). I then revisit the origins of poststructuralism via the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to bring its founding moves to bear directly on International Relations constructivism. Engaging with constructivism’s founding fathers, Nicholas Onuf, Alexander Wendt and Friedrich Kratochwil, I show that the search for unconstructed universals, grounded in an innate ‘human nature’, persistently haunts International Relations constructivism, even when it foregrounds language as the medium of social construction, and notably when it engages the question of gender. Just as language provided the original site for orchestrating the ‘moving beyond’ (the ‘post’ of poststructuralism) fixed, naturalized structures, I argue that a return to language holds the promise of renewal, and of constructivism’s being able to fulfil its founding promise to theorize constitutivity and the constructed-ness of International Relations’ world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Epstein, Charlotte. (2012) Stop Telling Us How to Behave: Socialization or Infantilization? International Studies Perspectives, doi: 10.1111/j.1528-3585.2012.00458.x © 2012 International Studies Association In this paper, I use a phenomenon of resistance to a global norm as a catalyst to critically re-examine the cognitive frames underpinning the use of the concept of socialization in international relations. My critique, which adds to the now growing critique of constructivism's neglect of the role of power in the international system, is threefold. First, socialization tends to be apprehended as a bettering of the socializee, because of an implicit teleological assumption of change as progress. Second, the concept tends to frame out the perspective of the socializee. Third and relatedly, it infantilizes the socializee. I use the international politics of whaling to illustrate the practical and conceptual effects of this infantilization of the socializee and specifically the ways it curtails both policymaking and scholarly research. The purpose of my efforts here are not to discount the usefulness of 'socialization' in understanding norm dynamics but to caution against these three particular forms of silencing effected by the epistemological apparatus that has taken shape around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically borrowed from psychology. Jacques Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’ offers instead a non-essentialist basis for theorizing about identity that has been largely overlooked. To tailor these insights to concerns specific to the discipline I then flesh out the distinction between subject-positions and subjectivities. This crucial distinction is what enables the discourse approach to travel the different levels of analyses, from the individual to the state, in a way that steers clear of the field’s fallacy of composition, which has been perpetuated by the assumption that what applies to individuals applies to states as well. Discourse thus offers a way of studying state identities without presuming that the state has a self. I illustrate this empirically with regards to the international politics of whaling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]