Abstract
This article argues that constructivism has not engaged with the concept of contingency sufficiently. While such noted constructivists as Onuf, Kratochwil, and Wendt often refer to ‘double contingency’, it is the concept of ‘norms’ rather than ‘contingency’ that is used to characterise constructivist theorising in International Relations (IR). In this article, I outline how moderate and radical constructivists differ in their take on norms and thereby establish how the problem of contingency is actually at the core of constructivist theorising. The discussion then shows how Kratochwil, Onuf, and Wendt have made use of double contingency while moderate constructivists have re-introduced the single actor to show how norms ‘cause’ action. The third part moves beyond the double contingency framework. By differentiating ‘the social’ from ‘society’, this section shows that a ‘third’ position can be identified. The concept of ‘triple contingency’ then could be a way ahead for the theoretical discussion on constructivism itself.
Introduction
Constructivism is a strange animal in International Relations (IR). 1 On the one hand, it is considered to be one of the most important theoretical movements whose study of norms, intersubjectivity, and ‘the social’ has changed the conceptual apparatus of IR profoundly. 2 On the other hand, as a field of study, it is characterised by its fragmentation and internal diversity. 3 Ted Hopf, for example, distinguishes between conventional and critical constructivism; 4 Karin Fierke separates consistent (critical) from in-consistent (conventional) constructivism; 5 Stefano Guzzini and Knud Erik Joergensen both identify an ‘epistemological’ and an ‘ontological’ approach; 6 while others refer to ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ modes of constructivist theorising. 7 It seems that norms, intersubjectivity, and ‘the social’ can mean utterly different ‘things’ and so it is far from clear what constructivism stands for. Its success seems to be based on an increasingly ‘ambiguous’ conceptual apparatus, and hence it is no surprise that the core of constructivism is now difficult to characterise. 8 Of course, there appears to be a broad consensus that the moderate-conventional constructivism is associated with both Alexander Wendt’s rump materialism and the liberal norms-based analyses by Audie Klotz, Martha Finnemore, Kathryn Sikkink and Thomas Risse, 9 while the radical-critical-epistemological stream takes the work of Friedrich Kratochwil 10 and Nicholas Onuf 11 as its vantage point. However, I think there is something relevant to Onuf’s concern over the danger of constructivism becoming a ‘fad’, and to Stefano Guzzini’s identification of the rather ambiguous relation between rational and constructivist approaches when the latter is conceived as ‘the middle ground’. 12
I am certainly not interested in rehearsing these differences and the narratives around them as we might have heard them too often already. Yet, I do think that some of these confusions are due to the constructivists’ rather casual use of their core concepts of norms, the social, and intersubjectivity. Constructivists too often use these terms without specifying what they actually mean and how these concepts are supposed to work. How often is the term ‘social construction’ (or the fancier version of ‘the discursive construction’) referenced without any discussion of what this social is and how it works? How often do theoretical discussions stop by simply pointing to ‘norms’ and intersubjectivity as if these concepts were self-explanatory? And how often do we read of ‘society’ without any specification of whether a national, international, or world society is intended?
To step beyond these confines, I do not want to propose better ‘definitions’, but a change of perspective. In contrast to the common ‘entry’ through ‘norms’, I suggest to approach constructivism through the concept of contingency. While contingency is often referred to, it is not treated as a theoretical category in its own right. 13 Still, contingency can help us to move beyond the simple use of ‘the social’, ‘intersubjectivity’, or ‘norms’ by providing a way through which it becomes possible to distinguish different uses of these terms alongside diverse ‘forms’ of contingency.
By forms of contingency I mean the differentiation into forms of single, double, and triple contingency, 14 which describe the number of available discursive positions one assumes: single contingency refers to the classic subject-object distinction; double contingency is widely used in sociological theory and is often referred to as ‘inter-subjectivity’ or ‘interaction’ between ego and alter; triple contingency takes into account the position of ‘the third’ who observes ego and alter. I certainly do not claim that these forms are my invention and I recognise that instantly, several approaches could at this point legitimately point out that they already have taken ‘contingency’ in its forms and guises into account. 15 Yet while we may legitimately say that various approaches make use of different discursive positions already, constructivists may not have explored them fully. The objective of this article is thus rather modest: to clarify the different uses for core concepts among different ‘constructivists’ along these three forms of contingency. In this vein, this article hopes to stimulate a debate on the uses of these forms, the conceptualisations of the social, and the consequences for understanding politics. 16
By putting contingency upfront, I want to advance the discussion in three areas: first, I want to show that the reference to norms is – in itself – not the defining move for constructivism. Instead, norms are a solution to the problem of contingency and they work rather differently in the contexts of single, double, and triple contingency. The sentence ‘constructivism is the study of norms’ in itself is thus either highly problematic or meaningless. Second, I want to point out that the distinction of moderate and radical constructivism is parallel to single and double contingency: moderate constructivists consider only one side of the double contingency problematique with the consequence that the ‘intersubjective’ and ‘social’ is not located in the continuous re-processing of the two self/other complexes, but is inscribed into the concept of norms itself. Norms are said to be ‘intersubjectively’ made and formed, even though they then manifest themselves in a quasi-objective fashion in front of single actors. Third, I propose to differentiate ‘the social’ and ‘society’ along the lines of double and triple contingency. Too often have constructivists interchangeably used the concepts of ‘social’, ‘intersubjective’, and ‘society’ without much reflection. Here, I propose that the ‘social’ raises the question of how ‘inter-subjectivity’ can actually be established while ‘society’ needs to take the third into account. This latter point raises new issues such as the institutionalisation of norms and the way they are discursively stabilised. That said, I think it is time to acknowledge that ‘the social’ or ‘the social construction of xyz’ has done its work. It is time to examine what the ‘social’ actually is and what it does.
This article is structured in three steps. The first step outlines the difference between single and double contingency and traces some of their uses in constructivism. The second section elaborates on this point and shows how moderate constructivists substitute double for single contingency situations with the consequence that positivist criteria of science are re-introduced. The third step then elaborates on the distinction of double and triple contingency and proposes to use ‘the social’ and ‘society’ as concepts parallel to them, rather than sublimated within them.
Double Contingency: the Problem of Inter-subjectivity and Norms
Constructivism is commonly understood through the concepts of ‘norms’ and ‘intersubjectivity’. Yet the attempt to link any theoretical approach to a single concept is bound to fail, since every concept may be analysed from a variety of angles or perspectives. Thus there is no single theoretical ‘core’ or ‘identity’ that implies a concept presupposes a specific approach. Therefore, something other than just ‘norms’ or ‘intersubjectivity’ needs to ground constructivism. This section proposes instead to approach constructivism through the concept of contingency. To be more specific: I want to show that constructivists take as their vantage point not norms per se, but the problem of double contingency.
To begin, this discussion requires a clarification of what single and double contingency actually mean. Single contingency is familiar to anyone acquainted with the notion of ‘rational choice’. It refers to the way in which one actor has to make an informed decision in the face of a contingent reality. 17 For example, the microeconomic literature on decisions under uncertainty has convincingly shown – with basic standards of rationality in place – that there are ‘equilibria’ and ‘best practices’. What is more important at this point, is that the framework of single contingency is based on what Benjamin Herborth has called ‘the quest for certainty’ with the objective to find adequate and ‘right’ representations to aid decision making. Single contingency frameworks emphasise therefore ‘methods’ and ‘research design’ that control and guide the space between the individual and its (purportedly) objectively given reality. 18
In contrast, the concept of double contingency describes a situation where ego and alter, as two ‘actors’, experience and realise their mutual contingency in relation to one another: not only is the behaviour of alter contingent to ego, but ego realises that its own behaviour is contingent on ego’s expectations about alter.
19
In other words, both recognise that they are each equally cognisant of their behaviour as being contingent upon one another.
20
Double contingency does not only take into account that ego and alter are two ‘actors’, but that there are two subject-other ‘complexes’ with the consequence that both ego and alter become aware of the contingency of their own position. As Talcott Parsons has summarised this problem:
In interaction ego and alter are each objects of orientation for the other. The basic differences from orientations to nonsocial objects are two. First, since the outcome of ego’s action (e.g. success in the attainment of a goal) is contingent on alter’s reaction to what ego does, ego becomes oriented not only to alter’s probable overt behavior but also to what ego interprets to be alter’s expectations relative to ego’s behavior, since ego expects that alter’s expectations will influence alter’s behavior. Second, in an integrated system, this orientation to the expectations of the other is reciprocal or complementary.
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This double contingency creates a productive indeterminancy of action and raises further problems of how these expectations are to be coordinated, how expectations are formed, and how they are performed. This problem of double contingency became important in ‘constructivist’ social theory: for example, both Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, as two key sources of constructivism in IR, have made extensive use of the theorem of double contingency and used their critique on Talcott Parsons as a stepping stone to develop their own particular conceptual toolkit. Whether it is in the form of ‘factual consequences of counter-factual validity claims’ in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, 22 or the ‘temporalization’ of communication argument found in Luhmann’s Social Systems, double contingency plays a major role in conceptualising how actors may relate to one another. 23 I mention this to highlight not only that much more work needs to be done to understand how different conceptualisations of double contingency relate to questions of normativity, the social, and critique, 24 but also to point out that with George Herbert Mead (through Parsons), Habermas and Luhmann, key theorists for constructivists in IR are already in place: in the work of Onuf and Kratochwil, Habermas and Luhmann are key reference points and the importance of Mead for Wendt is also well documented. The point is not to argue that one version of double contingency is better than the other or which theorist is right or wrong, but to emphasise that the concept of contingency is indeed at the core of constructivism. Let us now consider three instances where this double contingency is discussed within constructivism.
Double Contingency in Constructivism
Friedrich Kratochwil in his Rules, Norms, and Decisions assumes that action is a rule-governed activity and that our social world escapes the world of observational facts (i.e. single contingency). 25 To reduce explanations to brute facts assumes that we can explain action on the basis of propositions alone. Yet our social world requires us to analyse illocution and perlocution and hence double contingency: for a successful speech act, we need the actor who utters the words, the actor who understands, and the shared conventions that guide that interaction. 26
The same emphasis on double contingency is present in Nick Onuf’s conceptual framework of rules and rule. 27 Contingency is used as a counter-concept to positivism insofar as he emphasises the contingent co-constitution of human beings and societies: people make societies and societies make people. For Onuf, the concept of rules intermediates between the two sides and allows us to trace the constructions of social relations, in particular through the performative power of language. Through the concept of rules, Onuf traces certain functions a social order has to fulfil: in this context, rules have to coordinate (1) naming and relating; (2) enabling and disabling; (3) having and using. Rules that structure the first function we call norms, rules that structure the second function we call commands, and the third function we call rights. These concepts are further developed through speech act theory. Building on Searle, Onuf shows how commissive, assertives and expressive speech acts relate to norms, commands, and rights respectively. How these speech acts are institutionalised then also determines rules and hence the kind of political society we live in. 28
Likewise, Alexander Wendt refers to the problem of double contingency when he discusses the ‘original position’: for example when Montezuma and the Spanish meet for the first time, it is only through their interaction that identities are formed and ‘cultures’ emerge.
29
Even though, Wendt argues, that in situation of double contingency:
Ego and Alter are not blank slates, and what they bring to their interaction will affect its evolution. They bring two kinds of baggage, material in the form of bodies and associated needs, and representational in the form of some a priori ideas about who they are.
30
At this point, we can also see some differences: Kratochwil is interested in how intersubjective meaning is created and how the structure of the exchange of reason(ing) is formed; Onuf is interested in the interplay of rules and rule; Alexander Wendt links the problem of double contingency to his rump materialism as the possibility ‘to err’ still points to causal powers of nature as Wendt explains: ‘Had Montezuma adopted this alternative representation of what the Spanish were, he might have prevented this outcome because that representation would have corresponded more to reality […] The external world to which we ostensibly lack access, in other words, often frustrates or penalises representations’. 31
Double Contingency and the Study of Norms
This brings us to the first ‘area’ to which this article aims to contribute: norms are not the starting point of constructivism, but a specific solution to the problem of contingency. To illustrate this point, Friedrich Kratochwil’s Rules, Norms and Decisions is a good place to begin. Right from the outset, he makes clear
that our conventional understanding of social action and of the norms governing them is defective because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of language in social interaction, and because of the a positivist epistemology that treats norms as “causes”. Communication is therefore reduced to issues of describing “facts” properly, i.e. to match of concepts and objects, and to the ascertainment of nomological regularities. Important aspects of social action such as advising, demanding, apologizing, asserting, promising, etc., cannot be adequately understood thereby.
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The abandonment of the mirror image of language and its consequences for understanding social action provides the rationale for the later chapters. Here, we can also see that Kratochwil is not interested in the validity of norms per se, rather he uses norms to touch upon questions of communication and language. 33 With this link of norms to language and the ‘theory of action’, Kratochwil differentiates himself from behavioural and positivist approaches and thereby creates the space for constructivism. 34 As he points out, normative statements that contain words such as ‘ought’ and ‘must’ can neither match the outer world, nor can they be reduced to the psychology of the speaker. Hence, neither the world of intention (understanding), nor the world of facts (explanation) is of any help. 35 Instead we have to resort to the world of ‘institutional facts’ that only exist in and through the use of language.
Therefore, for Kratochwil, we have to analyse the discursive structure and the exchange of reasons that ‘create’ meaning inter-subjectively. Here, it is the contingent connectivity of sentences that allow us to understand why and how certain opinions become authoritative, as well as how reasons are formed and supported. This contingency is reconstructed through specific styles or modes of reasoning. 36 This subtle emphasis on contingency also has methodological repercussions as practical reasoning, styles, and the connectivity of sentences never follow the ideal of necessity. Hence, any hope placed on induction or deduction as scientific ideals miss the point as both presuppose a hierarchical relationship between sentences (which is contrary to the exchange of reasons) and in the end aspire to produce necessary knowledge. Instead, contingency needs to be aligned with our methods and methodology, 37 which has led Kratochwil to embrace ideas of conceptual history 38 and pragmatism. 39 Similarly, Onuf is not primarily interested in whether a specific norm is valid or not, but how norms, commands, and rules relate to specific speech acts and through their institutionalisation create ‘rule’. 40
Neither Kratochwil nor Onuf are primarily interested in ‘norms’ in themselves, rather they use norms to open IR up for social and political theory. Hence, their aim is not to test the validity of norms empirically, but to ask how – through a critical engagement with speech act theory – norms relate to contingency and thus to rule. 41 The concept of norm (or rights for that matter) 42 is never used for its own sake, but as a critique on the level of action theory through which IR is separated from political theory, history, and social theory. 43
The Loss of Double Contingency and the Question of the Social
The last section outlined how constructivists share an interest in double contingency. It also showed that the common reference to norms per se as defining rationale of constructivism is more part of the problem than part of the solution. In this section, I want to explore the second ‘area’, i.e. that moderate constructivists have replaced double contingency with ‘single’ contingency considerations. Here, two moves are particularly relevant: the agent structure debate and the empirical applications of norms. 44
The Agent-Structure Debate
Let us first look briefly at the agent-structure debate as it unfolded between Alexander Wendt on the one side and Martin Hollis and Steve Smith on the other. Alexander Wendt famously opened this debate by accusing classical approaches in IR as taking either the individual or the structure as ontologically primary. For him, constructivism takes as its vantage point the co-constitution of actors and structures. In particular Hollis and Smith have taken Wendt to task for treating this as a predominantly ontological problem – and I do think they are right. Yet when Hollis and Smith proposed ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’ as two general ways of considering philosophies of science and IR theories, in order to show that epistemology is prior to Wendt’s ontology, they unintentionally opened the gateway to remove double contingency from consideration: both explaining and understanding are less interested in the formation of symbols, or of an inter-subjective meaning system on the basis of which ego and alter can bridge the space between them, than whether explaining and understanding are co-extensive with causal and constitutive questions, respectively. In other words, the fluidity of social relations and the contingency inherent within them, disappears. Wendt characteristically refers to the problem when he argues that ‘Norms are causal insofar as they regulate behavior. Reasons are causes to the extent that they provide motivation and energy for action. And so on. All of these phenomena involve rules and self-understandings (“ideas”), but this does not preclude their having causal effects’. 45
In this quote, symptomatically, the key reference point is not inter-subjectivity, but behaviour by individual actors. In the end, this ‘whether reasons can be causes?’ debate was translated to IR from the analytic philosophy of mind. The reasons and causes considered are those of an individual actor and the question is whether ‘reason’ (understanding) can be considered as a cause. In this sense, that Wendt’s famous ‘cultures of anarchy’ are formulated along different legal theories that equally focus on individual reasons/causes to obey a norm might be a case in point: power (Hobbes), interests (Locke), or legitimacy (Kant), are each subtly grounded upon individual decision making. Although this change of terms was eventually legitimised by the attribution of explaining with third person and understanding with first person perspectives, what holds the third and the first person together remains the individual subject. The difference between first and third person then is only whether we explain behaviour from the outside or from the inside, yet the ‘object of analysis’, i.e. the individual act, is shared. What got lost on the way is the ‘you’. In the end, it is the agent (!) – structure problem.
Norms in Constructivist Research
As a second move, the ‘norms literature’ is illuminating at this point. In particular, prominent scholars such as Martha Finnemore, Audie Klotz, Kathryn Sikkink, and Thomas Risse have advanced the ‘constructivist’ agenda on norms and have certainly had some impact on many of these discussions. Constitutive for their analyses is their attempt to ‘build bridges’ and to ‘produce a research programme’ that stands firm to Keohane’s early critique on what he called ‘reflectivism’. 46 This literature – above all – sought to establish constructivism vis-à-vis realism and liberalism: whereas the other approaches would point to interests and power, constructivists could point to the force of norms. Whereas the former focus on states, constructivists can highlight the importance of non-state actors and so-called ‘transnational advocacy networks’ that facilitate the diffusion and implementation of norms in different issue-areas. 47 These networks attempt to ‘tie’ different actors (civil societies, states, international organisations) together at various levels (domestic, international transnational) 48 and thereby help to explain why states comply with norms. 49
Even though the literature evidently showed that ‘norms’ matter, it also changed the analytical framework of research in three respects: first, the literature is ultimately interested in why states comply. With this focus on compliance, this literature departs from the double contingency problematique. Characteristically, the two models that flourish within ‘constructivism’, that is, the norm life-cylce model
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and the spiral model,
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both emphasise the socialisation of individual actors through which (individual) interests and identities are changed. In the end, the decision to obey or to deviate remains with the individual state. In this sense, it is interesting to note that in this literature Habermas’s interest into the general rationality of action is transformed into individual rationalities of action, such as the logic of consequence and the logic of appropriateness. Both remain, however, firmly rooted within the confines of individual choice. Characteristically for this literature, Ian Hurd has also defined an apparent inter-subjective concept like legitimacy as
the normative belief by an actor that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed. It is a subjective quality, relational between actor and institution, and defined by the actor’s perception of the institution. The actor’s perception may come from the substance of the rule or from the procedure or source by which it was constituted. Such a perception affects behavior because it is internalized by the actor and helps to define how the actor sees its interests.
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This quote nicely shows that ‘the social’ enters the conceptual framework only through ‘endogenous preferences’. At the same time, the ‘mechanisms’ of the social works differently now. Remember that in the context of double contingency, norms allow ego and alter to position themselves vis-à-vis each other and to ‘cross’ the space between them. Norms are produced through the continuous interaction (or communication) between these actors – and thereby also define who the actors are and what rights and obligations certain ‘moves’ in the language game entail. Yet within the liberal norms literature, norms enter through the formation and change of individual preferences and identities. This leads, as Sterling-Folker has perceptively pointed out, to functionalist histories implying that individual norms are valid because they are now conformed to. Meanwhile, however, norms present themselves as a quasi-objective force in front of states, thereby forcing them to make a decision of some sort. 53
Third, and true to the single contingency framework, the literature embraces once again the ‘quest for certainty’ with its focus on ‘method’ and ‘research design’. The objective of these analyses (and increasingly so) is to produce necessary and scientific knowledge, i.e. to provide criteria and to identify mechanisms that are subject to falsifiable hypothesis tests. For example, Audie Klotz is convinced that the ‘first’ generation of constructivists like Kratochwil and Onuf ‘did not offer a specific theory to test’. 54 Also Ted Hopf follows the scientific path with ‘falsifiable’ hypotheses and ‘variables that vary’. 55 The transformation of norms into an empirically driven research programme embraces a positivist concept of science through which analyses are evaluated and judged. The methodological consequences that Kratochwil and Onuf drew from contingency, i.e. that contingency has to be mirrored and taken seriously even at the level of methodology – are abandoned in the process. 56
In summary, moderate constructivists have, on the level of methodology, replaced contingency by necessity, and instead engaged in a quest to produce necessary knowledge. As a consequence, interest in the special kind of contingency that norms give rise to is not continued. This also has repercussions for the concept of politics and authority. For radical constructivists, politics and authority are linked to ways of world making, as Onuf’s famous title highlights: 57 the production and fixation of signs through which reasons can be given, political projects formulated and inter-subjectivity ‘fixed’. Here, norms opened the gate to embracing a different form of social theory in IR where the international could be conceptualised in ‘social’ terms, thereby bridging IR with social and political theory. To make visible how our world was made, (radical) constructivism unearthed the natural and the given, problematised its apparent reality, and then made visible again what was previously made invisible. For moderate constructivists, in contrast, politics is co-extensive with the validity of norms, which is automatically linked to compliance and thus to state behaviour. It tests individual norms empirically and captures them in terms of hypotheses, linear causality, trigger points, and ‘sufficient conditions’ – all of which presume the generality and de-contextuality of scientific research.
From the Social to Society: the Problem of Triple Contingency
Thus far, it has been argued that the problem of double contingency is central for constructivism. Double contingency points to the pragmatic use of language where, as Kratochwil elaborates, ‘[c]ommon understandings can be arrived at through the stabilization and evocation of certain generally shared expectations in a specific situation’. 58 On the one hand, this raises the question of how claims to the validity of norms (and not the objective force of norms per se as moderate constructivists claim) is what actually guides the reasoning process between ego and alter. 59
At the same time, this quote by Kratochwil raises another conceptual issue that, to my mind, constructivists have not yet taken up: For instance, Kratochwil speaks of a ‘given’ situation.
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Apart from the reasoning processes involved, something else plays a role here – the ‘being’ in a situation. Later, Kratochwil links practical reasoning with ‘topoi’ from the rhetorical tradition. Topoi are the ‘commonplaces for practical reasoning,
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the ‘seats’ that not only determine the starting point of argumentation, but which are also decisive for attaining assent to choices. Yet, when Kratochwil points to topoi, I think he actually steps beyond the confines of ‘just’ double contingency, into something else. As he later elaborates,
This topos expresses some shared interpretation of actions on the basis of certain practical experiences. Such a topos is therefore a shared judgement in a society that enables the respective actors to back their choices by means of accepted beliefs, rules of preference, or general classification schemes [….]
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Two issues are remarkable here: first, Kratochwil speaks about society. Leaving aside that it is not clear which kind of society we are talking about here, the use of ‘society’ instead of ‘the social’ (as in social action) highlights another issue here at stake, other than mere ‘intersubjectivity’. 63 Secondly, the quote mentions shared judgment and accepted beliefs. In the following pages, Kratochwil then discusses how ‘judgement’ also relates to argumentative starting points, the structure of argumentation, the assembling of evidence, and the arranging of the material. Here, law serves as one example, but not as the ‘grounds’ for his argument.
I think the question of ‘situation’, general beliefs, shared understandings etc. presupposes institutionalisation – without which it is simply not possible to move from ego and alter to the judge, the court, the defendant, and any other ‘position’. Indicatively, in his recent book, The Status of International Law in World Society, Kratochwil again points out that institutional trust cannot be derived from the interaction between ‘actors’. There is a general, institutional expectation that differs from the expectation vis-à-vis ‘the other’, as he confirms:
If it is true that “law” differs from expectations emerging out of interactions, and that it differs even from expectations about expectations – since differences among these secondary expectations must be adjudicated by a court – it is also true that courts are again bound by (much looser) expectations of how such conflicts are to be settled. Clearly, the development of such tertiary expectations, which are supposed to set the tide of forum shopping or endless litigation, certain rules of regulating jurisdictional competences and discretion have to exist.
64
Similarly, when Onuf asks ‘how institutionalization is possible’ or when he argues that norms need to be institutionalised in order to become ‘legal’, there is also another story involved: in order to become institutionalised, norms need to appear as stable, meaning that ego and alter cannot do as they please and substitute one norm for another. There is a distinction to be made here between expectations on institutions or institutional trust and the stabilisation of ‘mere’ interactions. This raises the question of ‘the third’ that the next section introduces.
The Third and Social Imaginaries
Even though I cannot provide a full account of institutionalisation at this point, it is hopefully sufficient to see that this question of expectation and interaction points to the necessity of a third position or the acknowledgement of the need for a triple contingency: that ego and alter are observed by a third person. The question that now arises is, how do the processes of structure formation differ when ego and alter realise that they are being observed by ‘the third’? The interaction of ego and alter does not take place in a void, but already in a situation defined by the third. From this perspective, the third position becomes relevant as soon as we move from the social (i.e. the two actors mutually taking each other into account, including questions of recognition and alterity) to institutionalisation and thus the creation of social orders or societal structures. The social and society thus point to different sets of problems where the social can be associated with the processes of double contingency as outlined above. Here, interactions are ‘social’ facts indeed. However, something else takes place when we talk about society, international society, or world society, and hence there is a change from social interactions to the question of societal order-formation and/or institutionalisation through which specific situations, ‘roles’, and ‘positions’ emerge.
Unfortunately, it is also beyond the scope of this article to provide a full historical account on ‘the third’ as a theoretical category. It is only surprising that the history of the third is characterised by its absence: for example, Habermas mentions the importance of the third as ‘the neuter’, 65 or one can read about the excluded third in Luhmann. Yet, never do these scholars develop these positions fully. However, an avenue to explore the third has been provided by Georg Simmel. It is Simmel who early on claimed that dyadic concepts of society fall short of explaining many phenomena, such as coalition building, authority, representation, intrigue etc. The position of the third allows Simmel to develop a concept of society that emphasises ‘continuous processes of becoming-social’ or ‘societation’. Forms of societation and relations are differentiated by the presence of specific ‘thirds’, as for example the mediator, the judge, the laughing third, etc. This is the avenue that most commentators have taken, for example, when they focus on different types of thirds or how triads bring about specific societal dynamics. It is also an avenue explored by post-structuralists when they examined other figurations such as the Parasite, Hermes, or ‘Ödipus’. 66
Even though much more can be said on this point, I want to propose a slightly different avenue where ‘the third’ is treated not in individualistic terms, but in terms of ‘imaginaries’. In his Sociology, Simmel also showed how through continuous interactions ‘collective imaginations’ are created, ‘the formation of perceivable and unperceivable realities along spaces, rhythms, and tones, along meaning and organisation derives from practical necessities’. Yet as soon as these forms become their own ‘standing entities’ (Selbstzwecke), they have power and become efficacious in themselves. 67
Simmel explores the specific dynamics of these ‘imaginaries’ by taking ‘art’ or ‘law’ as an example. ‘Art’, he argues, has ‘separated from life and takes from life only what it needs and through which it is reproduced’. 68 Once created, these mental imaginaries step out of the ‘life-world’ and acquire a distinct life-on-their-own, becoming a distinct rationality unto themselves. Moreover, they take from life what they need to ‘reproduce’ themselves.
Charles Taylor has recently explored a similar avenue by looking at what he called ‘social imaginaries’ which he associates with ‘the law’, the ‘individual’, and ‘the market’. Through a reconstruction of these imaginaries, Taylor traces the changes of the ‘morality’ of society with the advent of modernity. In particular, he shows how these imaginaries are linked to the way we perceive ourselves as pre-social and free individuals and what that means for the moral order we live in. What is interesting for our purposes is that Taylor locates these imaginaries as prior to individual norms. Imaginaries make sense of norms in the first place as they ‘incorporate[] a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life’. 69 Taylor thereby argues that ‘interactions’ are never pre-social events, which then somehow produce the social, but are always already social.
There are two caveats, however, when referring to imaginaries as ‘thirds’. First, it can be argued that imaginaries cannot ‘observe’ like persons. In principle, this is true. However, in everyday language, these imaginaries are addressed as if they were ‘living subjects’. For example, we say that ‘the public has a right to know’, or ‘that the market wants, demands, or knows’. In their performative consequences, they are quite similar to ‘individual’ thirds. At the same time, their mode of existence differs: they cannot be ‘seen’ and ‘touched’, but they are ascribed to events or phenomena to make sense of what is happening and hence they exist only through their ‘performativity’. It is perhaps one of the sad features of modernity that our everyday language is structured in such a way that we easily jump from ‘empirical’ observations to ‘imaginaries’ without realising the changing contexts underlying this leap.
Second, it could be argued that this ‘third’ is exactly what Bourdieu tries to get at with ‘fields’, where Latour takes us with inter-objectivity, what Habermas mentions with the lifeworld, and where Luhmann’s observing systems can be found. Aren’t these ‘thirds’? Not quite. Even though I do think that Bourdieu, Habermas, Latour, and Luhmann-inspired constructivists could find ‘the third’ if they search for it, Simmel allows us to step beyond the manifestation of individual systems, fields, networks, or discourses. The point is not that one third exists at a time or that ‘institutions’ and ‘rationalities’ exist. Instead, the move is towards processes of institutionalisation: several imaginaries co-exist, and each have their own way of knowing and doing, each have their own set of identities, roles, and legitimate gestures. Yet society also implies a continuous reshaping and renegotiation of their boundaries: where does the individual start and end? Where does the authority of the public meet the authority of the market? These are already social questions that carry heavy normative baggage.
Introducing the idea of triple contingency then highlights that ‘norms’ are not per se ‘the same’ everywhere: what kind of ‘norms’ develop, how arguments are being exchanged, how competence is shown, how evidence is assembled, and the reasoning process structured, very much depends on which ‘thirds’ these norms refer to: norms in the context of the market are different from legal norms. The move from the theory of action to that of law is a missed opportunity to differentiate and politicise the clash of the imaginaries that co-exist today. Take the market as an example: the ‘market’ appears to be the ‘natural’ imaginary when it comes to the current economic crisis. As soon as the market is ‘activated’ and ‘situated’ as imaginary, then certain norms can be created that follow the logic ‘of the market’. We thus hear that the market demands, requires, observes, and ‘functions’ according to its own ‘regularities’. With the market as ‘imaginary’, the structure formation processes between ego and alter take on different shapes. For instance, just think of the rescue packages or the austerity measures that were introduced. They only make sense with reference to ‘the market’. A change of perspective from ‘the market’ to ‘the public’ or ‘justice’ as two other imaginaries would have shed a different light on these programmes. Instantly other norms, visions, standards, proofs, and arguments become readily available.
Imaginaries and Constructivism
If we consider ‘the market’, ‘the public’, and ‘law’ as three imaginaries that are continuously performed, then the position of the third gives us three tasks ahead for constructivism: first, even in the classics by Kratochwil and Onuf, the forms of contingencies are not differentiated. This is of course fine, but it ‘covers up’ or obfuscates the changing ‘problematique’ when the discussion moves from their specific theory of action to their analyses of legal processes, legal norms, and the concept of law. Often, and in particular through the concept of rule-governed activity, the move from ‘social action’ to the analysis of legal norms, questions of judgments, and the practice of ‘claiming’ illustrate this type of shift. For the kind of arguments they wanted to put forward, this was perfectly fine. Yet it is time to expand their argument and take other imaginaries than just ‘law’ into account when dealing with ‘norms’, interactions, and ‘rules and rule’. Norms and interactions differ significantly in economic, legal, and public ‘contexts’.
Second, the basic problem of norms changes from double to triple contingency. In the setting of double contingency, the primary interest in how ego and alter manage to establish a signalling or symbolic order which allows them to communicate and to position themselves vis-a-vis the other. In the setting of triple contingency, the question of origin gives way to the question of stability and change: norms need to be made stable in order to be able to ‘guide’ action and produce ‘positions’. Stability is gained by making the origin disappear, by (making) evanescence rule. In the end, the imaginaries of the market, law, and the public need to be represented as being impartial. The question here then is how this absence and presence of the third is actually institutionalised –and how institutionalisation produces presence and absence in turn.
While we have heard much about the death of the author and the absence of the audience already, it is interesting to note that these imaginaries are also both present and absent at the same time. They are present insofar as we read about them in our everyday experiences; yet they are also absent as they can never be ‘found’ or ‘empirically’ seen. We find markets, price movements, and ‘tickers’, but not ‘the’ market itself. The ‘market’ is an imaginary that we use to make sense of both the changing numbers and the technologies that bring those numbers about. Also, we may find legal proceedings and assume they ‘bring somebody to justice’, or we may aim at doing justice, but we never actually find justice in the abstract. We see sites of public engagement and discussion, and we may witness talks, street fights, demonstrations, and newspaper commentaries, but we never see the public itself: as the literature on ‘crowds’ has shown, the question of the public is not an empirical one, but ‘the public’ is an ascription. Once we attempt to find those imaginaries, other processes and actors come to mind that are used in their stead. IR’s recent practice turn with its fetishisation of the observation of empirical regularities misses exactly this point – and in the end it loses the normative dimension of norms.
Third, as ‘imaginaries’ are not physical entities, their power is always performative. 70 These imaginaries are only naturalised through their continuous enactment with the consequence that there is a natural tendency to ‘allocate’ problems and events to social imaginaries. An economic crisis breaks out, and one sees economists as omnipresent in academic writing, newspapers and television. Yet there is no central ‘agency’ that allocated these problems and experts to these ‘imaginaries’. Rather, there is a natural tendency or ‘directedness’ in defining financial markets in economic terms which then re-installs economics as the key epistemic infrastructure surrounding them. 71 At the same time, institutions like rating agencies, the IMF, and financial expert groups (especially in the Financial Stability Forum) enjoy the capacity to speak in the name of ‘the market’. Instantly, there is an allocation of authority to this economic way of knowing about the economy. Other voices and forms of knowing such as anthropology, economic-sociology are marginalised. There are power relations here, therefore, that determine what an imaginary actually ‘means’. In other words, the use of one imaginary demands legitimacy through which certain actors are put in positions of authority to speak for and in the name of this imaginary. In the case of the market, in particular economists with their models, vocabulary, and set of arguments are considered to be able to tell us how to fix markets. With questions of justice and law, international lawyers are put in the position to argue what is legitimate and what is beyond the law.
Conclusion
Constructivism is commonly defined as the study of norms. Yet to marry an approach with an empirical object or material object is bound to fail. Every object can be analysed from utterly different ‘epistemologies’ and there is nothing within an object that presupposes and determines a specific approach. 72 If this is true, then something other than the mere reference to norms in itself has to inform the constructivist ‘field’. In this article, I have proposed a change of perspective for constructivism in IR, based on the notion of ‘contingency’ where three forms of contingency were identified: single contingency was associated with the classic subject-object distinction with its focus on adequate representation, method and research design. Double contingency was used for what is commonly described as inter-subjectivity where the focus is on structure formation process between ego and alter on the basis of which inter-subjective meaning becomes possible. Triple contingency takes into account a third position which observes ego and alter and through the act of observation changes the mutual observation.
By highlighting these forms of contingency in constructivism, this article has made three contributions: first, it showed that norms are not the primary vantage point, but are a possible solution to the problem of double contingency. It was shown that in particular Kratochwil and Onuf were not interested in norms per se, but rather used norms to redefine the theory of action on the basis of speech act theory and beyond. Second, I showed that the distinction between single and double contingency is useful to separate the different strands of constructivism. The dialogical social theory (as inter-subjectivity and speech act theory imply) is often substituted by a monological concept of science which then leads moderate constructivists to search for testable hypothesis, indicators, or empirically relevant indicators to establish the validity of norms. Even though various analyses exist already, the debates on constitution or causality, or on ontology and epistemology, missed the prior move that was made. Therefore, constructivists often compared apples with oranges as if constitution, causality, ontology, or epistemology, would actually have some kind of transcendental meaning. Third, this article used the distinction of double and triple contingency to separate the problem of ‘the social’ from ‘society’. Here, I emphasised three particular differences: 1) How the problem of norms changes from ‘inter-subjectivity’ to institutionalisation, i.e. the co-existence of presence and absence; 2) How ‘society’ always implies co-existence of several imaginaries with the consequence that there are always several sets of norms, identities, and ‘double contingencies’ in circulation. Instead of moving from the social to society (and back) unproblematically, this article pointed to the need to problematise the boundaries of these imaginaries or social rationalities; and thus to 3) problematise how problems and events are ‘allocated’ to imaginaries and thus to specific ways of knowing.
In this conclusion, I want to highlight two implications for a contingency based constructivism: first, politics refers to the way in which our world is made, as Nicholas Onuf has aptly called it. ‘World-making’ or ‘society making’ is indeed where politics takes place as this relates to the power of imaginaries, the ways of knowing about the world, and the authority and power to determine what something means. Yet, there is a plurality of co-existent worlds with their own specific set of authorities, actors and knowledge claims. The point cannot be to look just ‘inside’ one field or discourse and trace it historically, rather it must be to understand how political processes are fabricated into the construction and the continuous stabilisation of worlds through which we make sense of events, problems, and crises. The relationship between imaginaries and ways of world-making is far from clear. 73
At the same time, these imaginaries have a history. It is a history of forces, of struggles and of power. I presume that these histories are very Eurocentric and also linked to colonial and imperial rule. This is something that is currently explored outside the constructivist terrain – but about which constructivists cannot and should not remain silent. In fact, when it comes to feminist and post-colonial critiques in IR, these imaginaries are important. At the same time, they still do have global reach and, crucially, the power to interpret, to fix signs, and determine their meaning is still within the West. Therefore, and in closing, it is time that constructivists engage more with post-structuralist and post-colonial critiques, in order to dissect and de-naturalise the contingent meanings laying dormant within our dominant social imaginaries.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article was long in the making and I owe many friends and colleagues without whom this article would not have been written. First, I want to thank Benjamin Herborth and Martin Weber for pushing me towards ‘triple contingency’ in the first place. I thank the participants of the ‘third generation of constructivism’ workshop that took place in January 2014 in Weimar. The article also profited from the participants of NUPI’s research seminar. My thanks to Nina Graeger, Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, Iver Neumann, and Ole-Jacob Sending. I also thank the ‘Team Erfurt’ Karoline Färber, Lena Metko, Alice Ratajczak, Matthieu Hughes, Filipe dos Reis, Timo Walter, and Benjamin Wilhelm for many useful comments and suggestions. I also thank the editors Ilaria, Ida and Evelyn for their patience and great support. My gratitude goes also to two anonymous reviewers for their time and invaluable critique. Finally, I want to thank Friedrich Kratochwil and Nicholas Onuf for their friendship and their continuing support.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
1.
I use ‘strange’ in the same way as Nicholas Onuf, ‘Worlds of Our Making: the Strange Career of Constructivism in International Relations’, in Visions of International Relations: Assessing an Academic Field, ed. Donald J. Puchala (Columbia: University of South Caroline Press, 2002), 119–41.
2.
For constructivism and norms see Karin M. Fierke, ‘Constructivism’, in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, eds. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 177–94. Joshua Goldstein and Jon Pevehouse, International Relations (Boston: Pearson, 2011). See also Cynthia Weber, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2009), 77.
3.
The only exception is Jeffrey Checkel in ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory’, World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 324–48.
4.
See also Ted Hopf, ‘The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory’, International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171–200.
5.
K. M. Fierke‚ ‘Constructivism’, in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, eds. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 187.
6.
Knud Erik Jørgensen, International Relations Theory: A New Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 163. Stefano Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism’, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 2 (2000): 156 .
7.
See Oliver Kessler, ‘World Society and the Problem of Practices,’ Millennium – Journal of International Studies 44, no. 2 (2016): 269–77.
8.
This ambiguity might be due to the fact that differences refer to different inter-disciplinary projects and are never confined to IR’s boundaries like in Realism and Liberalism – where differences can be dealt with ‘internally’. I thank Timo Walter for insisting on this point.
9.
See for example Emanuel Adler, ‘Constructivism and International Relations’, in Handbook of International Relations, eds. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth A. Simmons (London: SAGE Publications, 2002), 95–118; Jeffrey Checkel, ‘Norms, Institutions, and National Identity in Contemporary Europe’, International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1987): 83–114; Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization 52, no. 4: 887–917; Alexander Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization 41, no. 3 (1987): 335–70; Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
10.
See in particular Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘How Do Norms Matter?’, in The Role of Law in International Politics: Essays in International Relations and in International Law, ed. Michael Byers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35–68.
11.
Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1989).
12.
See Nicholas Onuf, Theory Talk: Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making. Available at: 
. Last accessed May 20, 2016; Stefano Guzzini, ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 2 (2000): 149.
13.
For recent moves towards that direction see Ty Solomon, The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Andrew A.G. Ross, Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Brent Steele, Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence (London: Routledge, 2012). I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out these allies. Due to space constraints, a discussion of these brilliant contributions must wait for another occasion.
14.
I do think that contingency and not norms should have become the key reference ‘term’ by which constructivists are differentiated from ‘positive’ approaches. Instead, we even had to witness how the ‘study of norms’ was transformed into an empirical research programme framed in the vocabulary of variables, hypothesis testing, and necessary conditions. Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years 1945–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27. For a discussion on this point, see also Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 188–212.
15.
One anonymous reviewer rightfully pointed this out. Also post-structuralist approaches could legitimately point to their use of ‘thirds’. One could think of the excluded third in Derrida or the Parasite in Serres. This only points to the need for the long overdue debate between constructivism and post-structuralist approaches, in particular Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, Butler’s schemes of intelligibility and Spivak’s notion of hegemony. I thank the editors for pointing this out to me.
16.
Even though this is a rather abstract formulation, I hope that I can specify this point below.
17.
This holds true for the classic decision under uncertainty literature as defined by expected utility theory. For game theory, see below.
18.
Benjamin Herborth, ‘Theorising Theorising: Critical Realism and the Quest for Certainty’, Review of International Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 235–51. See also Oliver Kessler, ‘The Failure of Failure: On Constructivism, the Limits of Critique, and the Socio-Political Economy of Economics,’ Millennium – Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016): 348.
19.
For a good discussion see also: Raf Vanderstraeten, ‘Talcott Parsons Luhmann and the Theorem of Double Contingency’, Journal of Classical Sociology 2, no. 2 (2002): 77–92. Even though Parsons did coin this term, it was Max Weber who used the ‘mutual taking into account of expectations’ to separate social from other forms of action and hence ‘invented’ this concept of the social.
20.
In the following, I will concentrate on how the concept of double contingency became influential for constructivism through Parsons, Habermas and Luhmann. Of course, it would be equally legitimate to discuss it through Wittgenstein’s concept of rule following, language games and the public language argument which equally presuppose the second actor. This would also show how speech act theory was developed as a response to Wittgenstein. In addition, it could also strengthen the link between double contingency and ‘necessity’ and contingency where logic is related to rule following and language.
21.
Talcott Parsons and Niels Shils, Towards a General Theory of Social Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 105, quoted also in Vanderstraten, ‘Parsons, Luhmann, and the Theorem of Double Contingency’, 80.
22.
Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), in particular Part VII.
23.
Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 156.
24.
Parsons, Habermas and Luhmann entertain rather different ideas of how the social relate to normativity and critique. See for example Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), 1130. Here, double contingency has the properties of an autocatalytic factor: without itself being ‘consumed’, it enables the construction of structures on a new level of ordering, which is regulated by that perspective on perspectives. Thereby – and this is why one can speak of ‘auto’ –catalysis – the problem of double contingency is itself a component of the system that it forms. Thereby, Luhmann criticises the emphasis of the normative dimension for the understanding social order.
25.
See in particular Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 95–129.
26.
Ibid., 32. As discussed above, Nicholas Onuf also refers to speech act theory to explain the contemporary social order. As the concept of double contingency is inscribed in speech act theory (illocution and perlocution), I do not discuss Onuf at this point in further detail.
27.
The concept of contingency features prominently in his ‘“Tainted by Contingency”: Retelling the Story of International Law’, in International Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements 1966–2006, ed. Nicholas Onuf (London: Routledge, 2008), 359–80. I will nevertheless concentrate on his general writings on constructivism instead of reiterating this essay.
28.
Onuf, World of Our Making, 196–227. Through the recourse to speech act theory, the contingency Onuf observes is not that between people and society, but how rules fulfil certain functions in the interaction between speaker and hearer or ego and alter.
29.
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 90.
30.
Ibid., 89.
31.
Ibid., 89.
32.
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 5–6.
33.
See also Kratochwil, ‘How Do Norms Matter?’, 45; Karin M. Fierke, ‘Links Across the Abyss: Language and Logic in International Relations’, in International Studies Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2002): 332.
34.
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 30.
35.
As I will elaborate in the next section is it interesting to note that Kratochwil distances himself from both explaining and understanding – as both fall back to the individual actor and exclude intersubjectivity.
36.
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 34, 36.
37.
See also Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie, ‘State of the Art on the Art of the State’, International Organization 40, no. 4 (1986): 764.
38.
Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Sovereignty as “Dominium”; Is there a Right of Humanitarian Intervention?’, in Beyond Westphalia? National Sovereignty and International Intervention, eds. Michael Mastanduno and Gene Lyons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 21–42. See also Stefano Guzzini, ‘The Concept of Power: A Constructivist Analysis’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 495–521. In particular Guzzini emphasises that power implies a ‘could have been otherwise’ which is merely a different formula for contingency.
39.
Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Of False Promises and Safe Bets: A Plea for a Pragmatic Perspective in Theory Building’, in Journal of International Relations and Development 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–15.
40.
Onuf, World of Our Making, 405.
41.
Yet it is also here where Onuf and Kratochwil differ: Kratochwil focused on the discursive structures in the pragmatic use of speech acts and tries to move beyond speech act theory itself through an emphasis on their perlocutionary effect. Onuf built on John Searle’s discussion on different types of rules to show how they perform certain functions in a social order. How this different take on speech act theory gives rise to different understandings of practice, norms and rights is still a question IR has not yet taken up, even though the books were published over 20 years ago.
42.
See Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 212–48. Also Kratochwil, The Status of Law in World Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 200–60.
43.
I have not dealt with Alexander Wendt in great detail here. However, I do think that through his interest in the cultures of anarchy, he shares the interest in the contingency of norms as even the Hobbesian culture of anarchy is first of all – a culture based on a set of norms.
44.
Hence, I would not argue that Wendt misread the literature or that he did not take this double contingency seriously. I think the opposite is true. Yet I think that Wendt simply argued his case when faced with criticism. The subsequent departure appears to me to result from the dynamics of the debate itself.
45.
Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics.
46.
Robert Keohane, ‘International Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1988): 379–96. See also Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Taking Stock: the Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 391–416.
47.
See Filipe dos Reis and Oliver Kessler, ‘Constructivism and the Politics of International Law’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, eds. Florian Hoffmann and Anne Orford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 344–61 for a longer.discussion of these models. Here, authors such as Martha Finnemore, Margaret Keck, Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, Kathryn Sikkink and others have done valuable research.
48.
Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Border. Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). See also Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Social Movements, Protest, and Contention) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
49.
Martha Finnemore and Kathrin Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’; Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights. International Norms and Domestic Change, Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
50.
Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, 887–917.
51.
Risse, Ropp and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights.
52.
Ian Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 8.
53.
Jennifer Sterlin-Folker, ‘Competing Paradigms or Birds of a Feather? Constructivism and Neoliberal Institutionalism Compared’, International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2000): 97–119.
54.
Audie Klotz, ‘Case Selection’, in Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, eds. Audie Klotz and Deepra Prakash (London: Palgrave, 2008), 51.
55.
Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War.
56.
On this point see also Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations.
57.
Onuf, World of Our Making.
58.
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 31.
59.
Ibid., 31.
60.
Situation is also an often used reference in Kratochwil, Status of Law in World Society. It seems to me that this is an undertheorized category.
61.
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions, 38.
62.
Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, 218.
63.
Unfortunately, this holds also for Wendt’s and Onuf’s common conviction that ‘man makes society and society makes man’.
64.
Kratochwil, Status of Law in World Society, 95.
65.
For a discussion on Habermas, see in particular Piet Strydom, ‘The Problem of Triple Contingency in Habermas’, Sociological Theory 19, no. 2(2001): 165.
66.
See for example – one out of many possibilities: Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 182.
67.
Georg Simmel, Soziologie (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, 1908), 50.
68.
Ibid.
69.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 24.
70.
At this point, a further discussion of various notions of performativity would be required. In particular in relation to Butler’s work.
71.
For a reconstruction on how the economic crisis has led to a crisis of economics that in the end re-installed ‘positive’ approaches in the guise of behavioural economics, see Oliver Kessler, ‘The Failure of Failure: On Constructivism, the Limits of Critique, and the Socio-political economy of Economics’, Millennium 44, no 3 (2016): 360.
72.
This does not mean that some avenue is more convincing than others or that ‘anything goes’. See Kratochwil and Ruggie, ‘State of the Art on the Art of the State’.
73.
To take seriously the concept of contingency for constructivism then has methodological consequences as this raises the question of how contingency can be observed and ‘captured’: an approach that aspires to establish necessary, time-invariant ‘truth(s)’ sits uneasy with contingency. Contingency means always that things can change and thereby that ‘truths’ only come with a time-index: what today can be ‘true’ might not be tomorrow – and today’s truth only exists through the exclusion of other, previously similarly likely alternatives. Consequently, a constructivist approach needs to be reflexive in the sense that it has to change with its ‘empirical’ observations.