Towards an Analysis of "Habitus-Structure Conflicts" in World Society.

In this paper, we do not enter the internal IR debates, e.g. by indulging in Realism-bashing, rehashing the "neo-neo debate" on absolute vs. relative gains (Keohane 1986) or by commenting on the contest between "middle-ground" and "radical" constructivism (Adler 1997). Instead, we intend to use the disciplinary space created by these debates by trying to tap the potential of genuinely sociological approaches. In the following, we use Pierre Bourdieu's work to elaborate a conflict typology, which we term "habitus-structure conflicts." We argue that this analytical framework is capable of yielding second and third order obser-vations (on this distinction, see Luhmann 1984). For example, it can be used to analyze con-flicts in world society as well as IR approaches to these conflicts with a view to uncovering their inherent symbolic violence and ideological implications. This analytical heuristic aims at overcoming conventional epistemological dichotomies - such as structure and agency, micro and macro, or structure and culture - and reconnecting analyses of social inequality and manifest conflict. Our framework assumes a connection between, on the one hand, power asymmetries in world society and the camouflage of these discrepancies, and, on the other hand, manifest conflicts, which we term "habitus-structure conflicts." Habitus-structure con-flicts are clashes between cultural patterns, which actors have internalized (habitus) and their environment, broadly defined as social constructs of all types, including social hierarchies, institutions, or the habitus of other actors. We proceed in three steps: we first provide some background to our typology of habi-tus-structure conflicts by introducing relevant parts of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, in-cluding its epistemological base, methodological implications and terminology. We then elaborate the analytical heuristic of symbolic violence and habitus-structure conflicts. The concluding part attempts to present some tentative thoughts on how this heuristic can be applied to conflict constellations in contemporary world society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]