Reflectivity,reflexivity,reflexivism: IR’s ‘reflexive turn’

Abstract

The notion of ‘reflexivity’ has been so intimately tied to the critique of positivism and empiricism in International Relations (IR) that the emergence of post-positivism has naturally produced the anticipation of a ‘reflexive turn’ in IR theory. Three decades after the launch of the post-positivist critique, however, reflexive IR has failed to impose itself as either a clear or serious contender to mainstream scholarship. Reasons for this failure include: the proliferation of different understandings of ‘reflexivity’ in IR theory that entail significantly different projects and concerns for IR scholarship; the equation of ‘reflexive theory’ with ‘critical’ and ‘emancipatory theory’ and the consequent confusion of ethical/normative issues with strictly epistemic/theoretical ones; and the refusal to consider reflexive IR as a ‘research programme’ concerned with empirical knowledge, not just meta-explanation. The development of reflexivity in IR theory as a sustainable cognitive and praxeological effort is nonetheless possible — and still needed. This article suggests what taking the ‘reflexive turn’ would really entail for IR.

Keywords

constructivism critical theory epistemology interdisciplinarity reflexivism reflexivity values

Introduction

In his 1989 article on the ‘Third Debate’ in International Relations (IR), Yosef Lapid (1989: 249–250) noted, after Mervyn Frost (1986: 11), that ‘[f]or many years the international relations discipline ha[d] had the dubious honour of being among the least self-reflexive of the Western social sciences’. This diagnosis was shared by many scholars who thought it necessary to start reflecting on the epistemic and theoretical premises subtending the discipline’s predominant narratives on world politics. The critique of positivist (American) IR scholarship has therefore naturally produced the anticipation of a ‘reflexive turn’ in IR, and in the early 1990s the view was that ‘the prospects for the development of theoretically reflexive international relations theory [were] real and significant, while the need for such theory [was] urgent’ (Neufeld, 1991: 2).

With the emergence and development of a sustained, coherent meta-theoretical critique of positivist IR, ‘reflexivity’ has indeed gained a substantive visibility in IR debates and literature (Cox, 1996 [1981], 1996 [1985]; Hoffman, 1987; Jackson, 2011; Keohane, 1988; Lapid, 1989; Linklater, 1992; Neufeld, 1993, 1995) and developed into a more or less explicit core theme of post- or anti-positivist IR (Agnew, 2007; Fierke, 2002; Guillaume, 2002; Hendershot, 2004; Smith, 2002, 2004), specifically within critical (Cox, 1996 [1981], 1996 [1985]; Cutler, 1999; Linklater, 1992), constructivist (Drulàk, 2006; Guzzini, 2000, 2005; Hopf, 1998; Lezaun, 2002; Lynch, 2008; Pouliot, 2007; Steele, 2007c; Wendt, 1999), feminist (Ackerly and True, 2008; Carver et al., 2003; Tickner, 2005, 2006) and pragmatist (Widmaier, 2004) approaches. Although reflexivity has been mainly addressed from a theoretical, meta-theoretical and epistemic-normative perspective, recent ‘reflexive scholarship’ has also been increasingly concerned with the importance and practical meaning of ‘reflexivity’ for empirical IR (Ackerly and True, 2008; Guzzini, 2005; Hamati-Ataya, 2011; Lynch, 2008), which suggests that there is some belief among post-positivist IR scholars that reflexivity can lead to an alternative research programme capable of producing a different knowledge of world politics, and also of generating cognitive growth in the traditional sense of the term.

While a review of the literature points to the significance the notion of reflexivity has acquired in contemporary (non-mainstream) IR scholarship, it also reveals that the ‘reflexive turn’ has failed to translate into a clear, appealing alternative to positivism, and therefore remains located at the margins of the margins of the discipline. Not only does ‘reflexive scholarship’ seem to be incapable of moving beyond the explication of what the ‘turn’ entails, it also seems to have lost the momentum and impetus of the ‘turn’ itself, with the proliferation of different perspectives on reflexivity that only appear to converge into a common epistemic, normative or empirical project. As a result, reflexivity finds itself diffused into a general dissident literature that has failed to make a decisive impact on the discipline, thereby giving the impression that the ‘turn’ is either still ongoing, or not really worth taking at all. This current state of affairs only serves to reinforce the old scepticism about the relevance of post-positivist IR to empirical research (Keohane, 1988).

The paradox, then, is that reflexivity, on the one hand, has undeniably been developing in the work of specific IR scholars, for whom the notion still makes sense as a serious epistemic stance and as a long-term academic project, but, on the other, has failed to produce the kind of cognitive impact that is expected or hoped for by its main proponents. The effort to assess the output of the ‘reflexive turn’ in IR is therefore worth making at this particular point in the history of the discipline. This article attempts to identify some of the problems and obstacles that have prevented it from developing into a sustained research programme or ‘paradigm’ in the general disciplinary sense of the term.¹ Before doing so, it is important to contextualize the meaning of IR’s ‘reflexive turn’ by identifying the general pattern of reflexive scholarship across the social sciences.

Apart from the specific context that characterizes IR as a socio-historically defined field of cognitive production, there is nothing unique about the intellectual emergence of ‘reflexivity’ in its literature. As was the case in other social sciences, ‘reflexivity’ appeared when positivism’s epistemic premises were challenged by historicist analyses of knowledge. The main targets of the ‘reflexive critique’ are positivism’s adherence to ‘truth as correspondence’, its understanding of knowledge as ‘representation’ and its separation of subject and object, and of facts and values. Against these core positivist epistemic stances, the ‘reflexive turn’ was meant to signify IR’s awareness of the historicity of knowledge, and of the inherently normative or ideological nature of IR’s underlying theoretical premises, modes of theorizing and scholarly ethos. Converging with critical theory’s commitment to adopt a ‘perspective on perspectives’ (Cox, 1996 [1981]), reflexive IR scholarship naturally endeavoured to reassess the foundations of theory and therefore delved into meta-theory as a higher order of discourse that was necessary for problematizing and deconstructing the choices made at the theoretical level of inquiry (Neufeld, 1993, 1995). Converging with constructivism’s commitment to reveal the connections between representations of social reality and the social production of knowledge, it naturally delved into the sociology of knowledge as a way of making explicit and understanding the social conditions for the production of validity and meaning within IR (Guzzini, 2000, 2005).

Reflexivity similarly imposed itself in other social sciences that produced similar critiques of positivism, such as sociology (Bourdieu, 1990, 2004; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Giddens, 1984; Gouldner, 1970, 1973) and anthropology/ethnography (Belmonte, 1979; Briggs, 1970; Garfinkel, 1967; Sangren, 1992 [1988], 2007; Scholte, 1974). It was also the subject of an important debate in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), itself the product of a ‘constructionist turn’ in the sociology of science (Ashmore, 1989; Barnes, 1977; Bloor, 1976; Gruenberg, 1978; Woolgar, 1988a, 1988b, 1993 [1988]). In fact, IR has a lot to learn from the discussions on reflexivity that preoccupied SSKers in the 1980s, and from SSK’s own ‘reflexive turn’, which led to the development of creative modes of writing informed by critical ethnography and discourse analysis (Ashmore, 1989; Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; Mulkay, 1984, 1986; Woolgar, 1988b), but which eventually led to the abandonment of the problématique of reflexivity in favour of the more pressing challenges of empirical knowledge.

A review of IR reflexive literature points to the likelihood of seeing IR reproduce just this pattern: after a somewhat sustained, albeit disciplinarily marginal, concern for and dedication to reflexivity, IR scholars might end up relegating reflexive scholarship to the abstract realm of meta-theory, with no real translation of this fundamentally different way of theorizing into the realm of empirical knowledge. This article therefore attempts to identify the obstacles that prevent reflexive IR from efficiently producing the kind of reflexive project that establishes reflexivity as a sustainable alternative in the study of world politics, thereby also highlighting IR’s potential in leading the revival and development of reflexivity in other social sciences where the debate has ended inconclusively. The ‘reflexive turn’, then, is here assessed according to an optimal, rather than minimal, definition of what an academic ‘turn’ is expected to achieve, namely, not merely ‘some sort of cognitive interruption within a research tradition’, or a mere ‘turn away’ from its alternatives (Nolin, 2007) — positivism in this case — but a real move towards a properly new, stand-alone tradition defining an independent epistemic-praxical commitment for IR scholarship.

‘Reflexivity’, what?

A reader unfamiliar with post-positivist IR theory or with the intellectual and praxical concerns of scholars evolving at its margins will find it difficult to make sense of the IR literature dealing with the oft-used but tricky concept of ‘reflexivity’. Even a scholar who has spent some time working on this concept will have some trouble navigating within this literature, a review of which is likely to identify at least five important reasons why ‘reflexivity’ is so widely diffused in post-positivist IR, but so confusing to both the initiated and the uninitiated.

The first problem that faces a reader of ‘reflexive’ scholarship is terminological ambiguity, as a quick review of the literature is likely to stumble upon a substantially large range of variations on the terms ‘(self-)reflection’ and ‘(self-)reflexion’.² An obscure combination of these may even be found in one single text, such as in Ackerly and True (2008), who refer to ‘reflexivity’, ‘self-reflexivity’ and ‘self-reflection’ all at once, without explaining the differences among these terms. It seems, in fact, that these are so obviously inscribed in everyday, ordinary language that their various authors rarely feel the need to define them, even when ‘reflexivity’ constitutes a central theme of their inquiry and argument. One may therefore argue — in a somewhat positivist, Durkheimian or Baconian way — that the lack of distance from ordinary language contributes to the large palette of terminological uses, which is itself explained by the dual meaning the term ‘reflect’ has in the English language, since it defines both the passive act of manifesting something or bouncing something off a surface and the active act of thinking about — reflecting on — something. This, in turn, explains why ‘reflective’ and ‘reflexive’ appear to refer at times to operations that are independent of the subject of knowledge, but at others to operations that are performed by the subject herself. It also explains why some scholars feel no need to add the prefix ‘self-’ to signify the self-referential nature of reflexivity, which they view as embedded in the notion itself.

These differences are also reflected in the fact that the terms ‘reflective’ or ‘reflexive’ are used to qualify a wide variety of ‘things’, which adds a confusion as to what a ‘reflexive ontology’ is supposed to look like or what distinguishes the ontological concerns of ‘reflexive scholarship’ from those of other academic traditions.³ That the term ‘reflexive/reflective’ can refer to subjects as much as to products of knowledge, and to mechanisms as much as to subjects of actions, makes it more difficult to identify the empirical realm of reflexivity. Sometimes, a significant disjunction between ‘reflexive’ and ‘reflexivity’, as in Fierke (2002), where ‘reflexivity’ seems to refer to scholarship, whereas ‘reflexive’ refers to actors, illustrates the fact that these terms are often used with no unified, or consciously chosen, underlying epistemic/ontological frame of reference.

More important perhaps is the fact that ‘reflexivity’ itself is subject to interesting variations that locate it within different, and often separated, realms of inquiry. Reflexivity is thus often used to characterize an ontological dimension of social practice — as in the ‘reflexivity of the self and society’ (Hopf, 1998) — but one is equally likely to read about ‘epistemological reflexivity’ (Widmaier, 2004), ‘theoretical reflexivity’ (Hendershot, 2004; Neufeld, 1991) and ‘ethical reflexivity’ (Lynch, 2008). One should not, in principle, be surprised that reflexivity can be a characteristic of epistemic, ontological, theoretical and deontological standards and frames of reference for IR scholarship. In fact, one of the arguments of this article is that the ‘reflexive turn’ indeed should simultaneously impact all these levels/dimensions of scholarly inquiry, for it otherwise would not lead to a coherent and independent tradition as positivism clearly is. But the problem is that the relationship among these different dimensions has not yet been clearly identified or spelled out.

Related to this point is the fact that ‘reflexive scholarship’ in IR is inspired by a substantial variety of disciplinary and intellectual traditions in philosophy and the social sciences. While Frankfurt School scholarship will likely inform the accounts of critical IR theorists (Hoffman, 1987; Linklater, 1992; Neufeld, 1993), feminists, constructivists and other post-positivist IR scholars freely refer to Frankfurt-style hermeneutics (Lynch, 2008; Tickner, 2005), or to the works of Pierre Bourdieu (Eagleton-Pierce, 2009; Hamati-Ataya, 2010; Leander, 2002; Pouliot, 2007), Anthony Giddens (Steele, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c), Ulrich Beck (Rasmussen, 2001) or Roy Bhaskar (Patomäki and Wight, 2000). And one can also find combinations of two or more of these traditions within the same IR texts dealing with reflexivity (e.g. Guzzini, 2000, 2005). Given that authors like Bourdieu or Bhaskar are themselves interpreted differently by IR scholars, the reference to a common theoretical genealogy for the concept of reflexivity does not guarantee better understanding or communicability across these interpretations.⁴

Finally, it is necessary to point to a more general problem that might explain all of the above-mentioned observations. What seems to underlie the great variety of uses of the term/conception of reflexivity in IR scholarship is the fact that reflexivity is either generically and minimally construed as a form of self-awareness of one’s own scholarly ‘perspective’, or conceptualized in a more maximalist way as a methodological self-critique operating through an epistemic or theoretical ‘bending back’ of one’s thought.⁵ These differences are visible in recent autoethnographic works in IR (Brigg and Bleiker, 2010; Dauphinee, 2007, 2010; Doty, 2004, 2010; Inayatullah, 2011b; Löwenheim, 2010). These appear to be a uniform manifestation of ‘reflexive scholarship’, but in fact differ significantly from one another, depending on whether they are informed by post-colonial, feminist or constructivist IR, and the extent to which they engage the ‘critical ethnographic’ turn that is at the origin of a very diverse range of scholarship within autoethnography itself (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). Not only does autoethnography mean different things for the IR scholars who have started developing it,⁶ some types of autoethnographic reflexivity are significantly different from what a Bourdieusian, Giddensian or critical-theoretical reflexivity entails in epistemic and ontological terms (see Neumann, 2010). Proponents of reflexivity in IR should therefore seriously reflect on these differences, for the simple fact that taken in its minimalist form, reflexivity as self-awareness is insufficient to establish a solid post-positivist alternative in the discipline. One should indeed remember that behaviouralism itself was, in this minimalist sense, the result of a properly critical and ‘reflexive’ attitude vis-a-vis ‘bias’ in research, but one that led to a greater commitment to positivism rather than to reflexivity as understood by its contemporary proponents.⁷

These observations, individually and jointly, give a sense not only of the variety of conceptions of reflexivity one can find today in IR, but perhaps also of the reasons why the ‘reflexive turn’ seems so familiar as a ‘turn away from’ but simultaneously so difficult to identify as a clear ‘move towards’. Having alerted the reader to this situation, I now turn to a meta-theoretical exercise that focuses, for analytical purposes, on the body of literature wherein reflexivity is more explicitly and consciously conceptualized as a feature of IR theory and research, namely, critical and constructivist IR. The purpose of the following sections, then, is to explore a ‘maximalist’ rather than a ‘minimalist’ conceptualization and praxis of reflexivity, by reflecting on how epistemic, ontological, theoretical and deontological reflexivity should be developed to move the discipline beyond the ‘turn away’ from positivism and ‘towards’ a reflexivist tradition.

The Hegelian thread

Although reflexivity becomes an explicit concept of Western social science in the last three decades of the 20th century, it finds its roots in 19th-century European (Continental) epistemology, more specifically in the philosophy of Georg W.F. Hegel (1977 [1807]). Against the Anglo-Saxon, foundationalist epistemology of the Cartesian–Lockean–Kantian theory of knowledge, which rests on the theory of correspondence and representation, Hegelian thought asserts the historicity of knowledge, truth and reason. Deprived of the epistemic certainty associated with the notions of objectivity, representation and truth, post-Hegelian European social thought started moving away from normative discussions of epistemology (i.e. away from the three central ‘problems’ of classical epistemology, namely, ‘What are the nature, sources and limits of human knowledge?’) towards historical and sociological analyses of the conditions of the production of knowledge (in terms of both validity and meaning), thereby problematizing the relationship between the nature of the social world as we observe it, and the socio-historical conditions that make it appear as an objectively given order.

It may be argued that most post-positivist schools of thought that currently populate the social sciences, including IR, have branched out from Hegelian thought, attempting different interpretations and resolutions of the main problématiques that Hegel identified with respect to the nature, meaning and validity of historical knowledge. Most accounts of reflexivity can therefore be traced back to these Hegelian roots (for a detailed analysis of the reflexive component of different post-positivist theories, see Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000). But the different epistemic, ontological and normative premises proposed by different reflexive post-positivist approaches translate into significantly different projects for IR. I will focus here on critical theory and constructivism to highlight these important differences, and then show the limits of the ‘reflexive turn’ in both schools of thought.

The critical-theoretical view

An obvious development of the Hegelian theme of historical knowledge is found in Marx and Engels’ historical materialism, which, despite its inherently positivistic appraisal of social reality and history, produced a central concept that is at the origin of the problématique of reflexivity in contemporary Marxist-inspired thought, namely, the concept of ideology. Through this concept, Marx and Engels articulated the link between extant representations of reality and the conditions that make reality appear as a given objective order. The notion of ideology has, however, created an important epistemic and theoretical problem for Marxist scholars: that of defining the relationship between ideology — understood as a distorted form of consciousness — and historical materialism — understood as a superior explanation of historical development. If all forms of knowledge are ideological manifestations of materialist (socio-economic) structures and relations of conflict and domination, then historical materialism itself should be subjected to a historical materialist or other type of socio-historical analysis (Mannheim, 1936). If, on the other hand, historical materialism represents a superior — that is, ‘true’ — analysis of historical development, then its superiority should be based on some third-order frame of analysis that is external to it.

The concept of ideology therefore creates a reflexive problem for Marxist thought — it begs the question of self-referentiality. This problem was more explicitly addressed in Frankfurt School critical theory, which retained the centrality of ideology while emancipating it from its underlying positivist theory of knowledge. From a critical-theoretical viewpoint, the solution lies in embracing reflexivity as a core epistemic stance of critical theory, which distinguishes itself from ‘traditional theory’ precisely by its acknowledgement of the historicity of knowledge and of the inscription of knowledge in social interests (Habermas, 1972; Horkheimer, 1976 [1937]). These two components lead to two important consequences for critical theorists. The first is that critical theory necessarily entails a self-referential discourse or, as Robert Cox put it, an account of its own existence: it is both inside and outside of itself, both subject and object of knowledge. This explains why reflexivity is first identified as a meta-theoretical requirement of social analysis (Neufeld, 1993). The second consequence is that critical theory is necessarily engaged in a discourse on values, since it acknowledges the inscription of knowledge in social interests:

[Critical theory] seeks to understand society by taking a position outside of society while at the same time recognising that it is itself the product of society.… it involves a change in the criteria of theory, the function of theory and its relationship to society.… It is both an intellectual and a social act. (Hoffman, 1987: 23)

Reflexivity, then, is manifested as a cognitive solution, rather than a cognitive problem. However, the move from meta-theory to theory might explain the adequacy and coherence of critical theory, but it does not explain the need for its existence. Within positivism, truth-as-correspondence both validates and justifies theory, thereby also grounding its social value. There is no need to go beyond the world of facts as long as one believes in the value of facts in themselves. Outside of this positivist circle, the need to justify the existence of knowledge in the absence of a referential framework of correspondence and representation becomes necessary and problematic — it involves a validation that is external to knowledge itself.

Critical theory finds this validation in the realm of values and interests, by asserting that meaningful knowledge is that which serves human emancipation. Critical theory therefore moves from the meta-theoretical to the theoretical to the axiological/normative by setting human emancipation as the objective and underlying legitimacy of theory proper. This was already suggested by Marx’s assertion that the purpose of ‘philosophy’ was not merely to describe the world but more importantly to change it. ‘The point’, then, of critical IR theory:

is not simply to alter the way we look at the world, but to alter the world. It must offer more than mere description and an account of current affairs. It must also offer us a significant choice, and a critical analysis of the quality and direction of life. (Hoffman, 1987: 244–245)

Whether grounded in early (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) or late (Habermas) Frankfurt School thought, critical IR theory is fundamentally committed to bridging the gap between facts and values, and between sociological and philosophical analysis. Emancipation as an end therefore constitutes the link between the cognitive and praxeological aspects of reflexivity: as critical theory reveals the underlying processes that produce the world as a historically constituted order, it also reveals the unfulfilled potentialities of historical development. This entails the rejection of the value-neutral position adopted by positivism, in favour of an activist, engaged social praxis. Accordingly, ‘the question of “what is reliable knowledge?” [is] reformulated as “how should we live?”’ (Neufeld, 1993: 75).

Critical theory thereby manages to escape the danger of nihilism or perspectivism it accuses postmodernism of having succumbed to. It does so by embracing its own historicity: in his anticipation of the tu quoque argument that critical theory’s criticism of positivism could be (reflexively) turned against it, Cox (1996 [1985]: 56–57) addressed the ‘troublesome question of the ideological nature of thought’, stating that the question is:

troublesome insofar as the imputation of ideology may appear to be insulting to the positivist who draws a line between his science and another’s ideology. I should make it clear that I do not draw such a line; I accept that my own thought is grounded in a particular perspective; and I mean no offense in pointing to what appears to be a similar grounding in other people’s thought.… The troublesome part comes when some scientific enterprise claims to transcend history and to propound some universally valid form of knowledge. Positivism, by its pretentions to escape from history, runs the greater risk of falling into the trap of unconscious ideology.

The cognitive consistency of critical thought thereby seems to be preserved, on the basis of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, between thought and history: critical theory can then be viewed as a socio-intellectual process ‘confront[ing] all its statements on the subjective experience, conscious and unconscious, of human beings and human groups, with the objective factors determining their existence’ (Adorno, 1976 [1957]: 250) — and, reflexively, its own as well. As the process actualizes itself by exploring ‘historical alternatives’ to existing power structures, ‘the values attached to the alternatives do become facts when they are translated into reality by historical practice’ (Marcuse, 2002 [1964]: xlii).

At the axiological level, however, the reflexive gaze confronts critical theory to the very ideological roots and content of the notion of ‘emancipation’ it promotes. As was the case with Marx, emancipation is viewed as universal, applying not just to ‘society as a whole’ (Horkheimer), but to the whole ‘species’ (Linklater, 1990: 8). Given, however, that critical theory has been an exclusively Western intellectual construct, its call for ‘emancipation’ — and the very content and nature of its emancipatory project — can legitimately be called into question, at least from the perspective of those whom it recognizes as being ‘oppressed’ or ‘exploited’ by the material and ideational hegemony of the ‘capitalist West’. Viewed from outside the history of the Western theory of knowledge, with its enclosed narrative that navigates between Greek philosophy, European Enlightenment and the postmodern problématiques of ‘modernity’ and ‘disenchantment’, on what grounds, then, can critical theory claim to re-present and represent a universal view of human emancipation?

While its dialectical epistemology allows it to manage the reflexive gaze at the cognitive level, situating critical theory both inside and outside its subject matter, it does not provide a consistent answer to its axiological/normative stance. In critical theory’s move from epistemology to axiology, part of its reflexive perspective seems to be lost, as if the notion of emancipation were endowed with some sort of greater epistemic certainty than all other objects of (historical) human consciousness.

The constructivist view

A second, dominant account of reflexivity in IR can be traced back to Hegelian thought, but in a significantly different variation on the theme of historical knowledge. Its starting point can be identified in Karl Mannheim’s (1936) choice to operate a translation from the Marxist theory of ideology to a proper sociology of knowledge. In a sense, Mannheim’s cognitive project branches out more coherently from Hegel’s epistemology than Marx and Engels’, whose assertion that Hegel’s idealism needed to be turned on its head led to a positivist detour that only postponed the development of a historicist alternative to the positivist theory of knowledge. Mannheim confronts the historical, collective knowing subject with the dilemma of simultaneously pursuing the normative project of defining the standards of knowledge, and the historical project of identifying the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible and meaningful.

Mannheimian sociology of knowledge suffered from the rise of positivism (especially in the US) and the monopoly of Mertonian sociology of science, wherein epistemic relativism could be ignored. With the development of constructivism, the ‘social construction of reality’ became a central ontological stance of the sociology of knowledge, and naturally led to envisioning the epistemic problems associated with the self-referentiality of knowledge that were non-existent within the representational view. The first classical positivist distinction to suffer from constructivism was the subject–object dichotomy: if the world as we view it is not merely external to us but is constructed by our gaze and practice, then social reality is necessarily reflective of knowledge and vice versa — knowledge and reality become mutually constitutive epistemically, and mutually reflective ontologically. The problématique of constructivist scholarship thus starts with the acknowledgement of the ‘reification’ of social reality, namely:

the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products.… Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. (Berger and Luckmann, 1991 [1966]: 89, emphasis in original)

Constructivist IR scholars, then, are committed to reversing this reification: they ‘aim to “denaturalize” the social world, that is, to empirically discover and reveal how the institutions and practices and identities that people take as natural, given, or matter of fact, are, in fact, the produce of human agency, of social construction’; and in doing so, they inevitably ‘stress the reflexivity of the self and society, that is, the mutual constitution of actor and structure’ (Hopf, 1998: 182).

As far as reflexivity is concerned, however, ‘the mutual constitution of actor and structure’ entails different problématiques for constructivism, whether the ‘actors’ in question are merely the social agents (individually and collectively) that constitute IR’s object of study, or whether they also include IR scholars (individually and collectively) as one particular group of social agents. This changes significantly the kind of empirical research one is expected — or feels compelled — to pursue within IR.

If constructivists focus exclusively on the social constructedness of international reality minus IR scholarship, they reduce the problématique of reflexivity to a purely ontological one. A good example is found in Alexander Wendt’s (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. Wendt starts by identifying the relevance of reflexivity in relation to the ‘double hermeneutic’ that is specific to the social sciences, that is, as a problématique that concerns (scientific) knowledge-producers (1999: 76). The concept then disappears from the book and reappears again when Wendt considers ‘the possibility of collective reflexivity at the international level’ (1999: 375–376):

By highlighting the role our practices play in sustaining social kinds, therefore, constitutive theorizing enhances our collective capacity for critical self-reflection or ‘reflexivity’. This gives us perspective on our social environment and helps us to overcome any false sense of determinism. It also opens up the possibility of thinking self-consciously about what direction to go in. … At the individual level to varying degrees we all think reflexively, and as the example of Soviet New Thinking suggests even states are capable of doing so. The question is this: can the states system achieve reflexivity? (Emphasis in original)

As illustrated here, reflexivity is coherently defined as ‘self-reflection’, whether it concerns the observer of social reality or the social agents she observes. The two levels remain, however, separated, and reflexivity is here understood as operating at a single level of action/interpretation. This seems to neutralize the problematization of reflexivity as resulting from the ‘double hermeneutic’ — the coexistence and convergence of two levels of interpretation (Giddens, 1984). Within this perspective, constructivism’s concern with reflexivity can be restricted to the realm of IR’s object of study without ever touching upon the epistemic question of the ‘social construction of knowledge’. In this sense, constructivists need not be concerned with their own knowledge-production, if the ontological realm can be divided in such a way that different constructivists can study different aspects of reality, which may or may not include IR scholars themselves. In the latter case, reflexivity itself becomes an ontological problem of constructivism, rather than an epistemic principle of constructivist research. Constructivism’s concern for reflexivity is, then, actualized by developing empirical research that focuses on the constructed nature of international ‘facts’, such as anarchy or power, and translates practically into the investigation of such fields of international action as diplomacy.

The inclusion of (scientific) knowledge as a level of action that can be objectivated by constructivism significantly changes the meaning and status of reflexivity within it. Ted Hopf (1998) noted that there are two different kinds of constructivisms in IR — a ‘conventional’ and a ‘critical’ type, the latter being so called for its close affiliation with the theoretical and practical concerns of critical theory:

critical theorists self-consciously recognize their own participation in the reproduction, constitution, and fixing of the social entities they observe. They realize that the actor and observer can never be separated. Conventional constructivists ignore this injunction, while largely adopting interpretivist understandings of the connectivity of subjects with other subjects in a web of intersubjective meaning. The observer never becomes a subject of the same self-reflective critical inquiry. (Hopf, 1998: 184, 185)

Stefano Guzzini provides a good illustration of ‘critical’ constructivism’s view of reflexivity. For him, the fact that both knowledge and reality are constructed entails that there are two ‘levels of action’ that need to be interpreted simultaneously: the level of ‘common-sense knowledge’ and the level of ‘scientific knowledge’. Guzzini considers that ‘Constructivists must assume [both] scientific and common-sense knowledge to be socially produced’ and therefore they ‘need to take seriously that if science is just another form of human action, both theories of knowledge and theories of action have to be understood in connection’ (Guzzini, 2000: 162, emphasis added). This means that reflexivity operates not within each level of action separately, but at their junction, since conceptually and practically it is not possible to separate the processes of knowledge-construction from the constructed reality within which knowledge is produced. This entails that constructivist scholars should ask ‘how [it is] possible that subjective meanings become objective facticities’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1991 [1966]: 30, emphasis in original) within constructivism itself.

These two different understandings of what reflexivity entails for constructivism lead to another important point, which concerns IR scholarship’s ethical and deontological stance, that is, its position with regard to society and its extant systems of values. The concerns of ‘critical’ constructivism naturally converge with those of critical theory, albeit in a different fashion. As Hopf (1998: 184) noted:

critical theory aims at exploding the myths associated with identity formation, whereas conventional constructivists wish to treat those identities as possible causes for action. Critical theory thus claims an interest in change, and a capacity to foster change, that no conventional constructivist could make.

On the one hand, some constructivists have made their position clear with respect to constructivism’s own engagement in social reality. Emanuel Adler (1997: 333–334), for example, stated that ‘[a] constructivist “mediative” epistemology⁸ … is interested neither in emancipation per se, nor exclusively in uncovering the power structures that affect the marginalized in history, but in providing better explanations of social reality’. While he asserts that ‘constructivist theory can be both “critical” and “problem-solving”, in Robert Cox’s sense’ (Adler, 1997: 334), its ‘critical aspect’ is restricted to its ability to historicize knowledge rather than to also politicize it by producing an account of itself that could turn it into a reflexive agent of change. On the other hand, those constructivists who seem, like Wendt, to assert the centrality of social change for constructivism do not feel compelled to include IR in their ontological appraisal of the ‘construction of’ international politics. Constructivism can therefore perfectly continue to exist without ever entailing a discussion of how it contributes to producing a new status quo or of affecting society and human practices — including (institutionalized) knowledge.

The two limits of the reflexive turn

Taking critical theory and critical constructivism as the two most epistemically coherent accounts of reflexivity in contemporary IR,⁹ a discussion of the limits of reflexivity and the challenges it currently faces becomes more interesting and useful. Two specific points will be addressed here, and I will argue that a resolution of each separately and both together entails the development of an interdisciplinary research programme that rests on a different attitude vis-a-vis epistemology.

From meta-theory to theory to empiry

The first problem concerns the translation of reflexivity as an epistemic position into the realm of empirical research, and is particularly acute in the case of critical reflexive IR, whose position is best exemplified by Mark Neufeld (1991, 1993, 1995), its most articulate proponent. Neufeld writes that:

[reflexivity] can be understood to entail three core elements: (i) self-awareness regarding underlying premises, (ii) the recognition of the inherently politico-normative dimension of paradigms and the normal science tradition they sustain, and (iii) the affirmation that reasoned judgements about the merits of contending paradigms are possible in the absence of a neutral observation language. (Neufeld, 1993: 54–55, emphasis added)

More explicitly:

[r]eflexivity is not a ‘research programme’ designed to provide cumulative knowledge about the world of empirical facts or about the world of theory.… [It] is a meta-theoretical stance involving (i) a recognition of the interrelationship of the conception of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ on the one hand, and a community-specific social and political agenda on the other, and (ii) an openness to engage in reasoned dialogue to assess the merits of contending paradigms. (Neufeld, 1993: 60–61, emphasis added)

It is important to first refer Neufeld’s stance to the general intellectual context in which reflexivity appears in IR, and more specifically, from a critical-theoretical viewpoint, to its importance in addressing the epistemic problem of relativism in IR’s post-positivist era (especially in light of the development of postmodernism). Neufeld’s stress on ‘the merits of contending paradigms’ and the possibility of producing ‘reasoned judgments’ despite the absence of a ‘neutral observation language’ should be understood within the context of the discussion of the incommensurability of different IR paradigms and theories. Reflexivity is then viewed as a positive solution to the problem of the social and philosophical value of knowledge — and truth — against the ‘anything goes’ attitude that threatened to replace the flawed certainty of positivism with the nihilist perspective of epistemic relativism.

Nonetheless, reflexivity remains, for Neufeld, a ‘meta-theoretical stance’, but not a ‘research programme’. However, if there is any usefulness to reflexivity qua meta-theoretical stance, surely it is in its ability to produce a ‘research programme’ of some sort that takes reflexivity as a starting point for the development of empirical knowledge. This is even more necessary given that critical theory is concerned with emancipation, that is, with social change and development. First, then, reflexivity cannot be restricted to, or stop at, the mere ‘recognition’ of the ‘interrelationship of the conceptions of “facts” and “values’’ and ‘community-specific social and political agenda[s]’. It cannot be simply about becoming ‘self-aware’ of the ‘politico-normative’ (Neufeld) or ‘ideological’ (Cox) elements that subtend and promote systems of knowledge. It has to also inform a ‘theory’ of the social/international, and therefore lead to the production of a significantly different type of empirical knowledge. Second, what, apart from empirical knowledge itself, could produce or justify such ‘self-awareness’, ‘recognition’ or ‘affirmation’? Surely, reflexivity itself must result from an empirical assessment of whether/how knowledge is subtended by ‘politico-normative’ or ‘ideological’ principles. Reflexivity is therefore necessarily produced by and productive of empirical knowledge.

It appears, then, necessary for critical theory to develop a more consistent understanding of reflexivity that ties its meta-theoretical ‘reflexive’ stance to its theoretical and empirical project. One way of doing so is to translate reflexivity into a methodology for empirical social science. If, for instance, reflexivity entails ‘a recognition of the interrelationship of the conception of “facts” and “values” on the one hand, and a community-specific social and political agenda on the other’, this means that this interrelationship should be studied in order to produce theoretical frameworks that can objectivate, in a reflexive way, cognitive discourses in IR in relation to social and political agendas, and these theoretical frameworks can in turn be used to produce a better understanding of how knowledge is constituted at the international level (see Hamati-Ataya, 2011). Reflexivity, then, cannot be viewed as simply an axiomatic point of departure from positivism, since the nature of the statements produced by our reflexive ‘recognition’ of such and such social realities must themselves be based on an empirical assessment of how they appear to us, how they are produced and how they evolve. Therefore, from an internal, critical-theoretical perspective, as long as reflexivity remains trapped in the realm of meta-theory, it can neither produce the type of alternative theory that critical scholars hope to replace positivism with, nor dynamically inform our historical knowledge of the world and of IR in it. The move from meta-theory to theory to empiry is therefore logically and praxically necessary for critical IR.

From knowledge to emancipation

Another important problem of reflexive scholarship concerns the inscription of reflexivity in the realm of ethics. This is manifested in the notions of ‘ethical reflexivity’ (Lynch, 2008) and ‘emancipatory theory’ (Neufeld, 1995). In both cases, the problem is to provide not only a conceptual link between reflexivity as an epistemic stance and the adherence to certain moral values or norms, but also a standard or basis (whether normative or empirical) for developing a specifically axiological/normative reflexive discourse.

The problem of ‘emancipation’ has already been addressed in the case of critical theory. It is also central for critical constructivism, which is concerned with social change and views reflexivity as a means to produce not merely a better social science but also a more moral/responsible one — hence the importance of ‘power’ for critical constructivism (Guzzini, 2000, 2005). Within this view, reflexivity entails the adherence to an axiological/normative standard of emancipation. For if reflexivity does not extend to the realm of values, then emancipatory theory falls back into a reversed positivism which denies the social construction of values while asserting the social construction of facts. Critical constructivism should therefore produce a consistent definition of facts-and-values that allows for a coherent objectivation of both simultaneously. Insofar as reflexivity is related not merely to a more sound (historicist) understanding of reality and of its relation to knowledge, but also to a morally meaningful understanding of how knowledge-producers are located in, affected by and productive of international structures and relations of power, the ethical and deontological meaning of reflexivity cannot be ignored.

The problem is obvious for critical theory because it is justified existentially and philosophically by the objective of promoting human emancipation — whatever it means, but it should mean something specific. For constructivism, the problem may be approached differently whether, as mentioned earlier, IR constructivists are interested in including themselves as objects of study, or simply restrict reflexivity to the construction of knowledge/reality from the perspective of international agents. In the latter case, insofar as constructivism is concerned with the processes whereby values become shared by a group of agents and start to efficiently define their perceptions of the world and their practice in it, it necessarily has to engage in an investigation of how values are formed, how they affect knowledge and praxis, and the conditions and processes that govern their evolution. Whether consciously formulated in terms of ‘reflexive scholarship’ or not, this approach constitutes the bulk of constructivism’s (and feminist constructivism’s) contribution to contemporary empirical research in IR.

It is, then, the first case that needs to be analytically and empirically developed within constructivism. For those constructivists who include themselves as social constructs, and for whom reflexivity therefore necessarily entails self-referentiality, the first requirement is to clearly define constructivism’s social role. The differences observed among constructivist IR scholars with respect to their degree of social and moral engagement are common to all forms of constructivism, which, unlike critical theory, is not originally defined qua engaged knowledge/praxis. Ian Hacking (1999) questions the extent to which constructivism is in fact an emancipatory approach to social reality, by noting that although ‘the idea of social construction has been wonderfully liberating’ because of its demonstration of the non-inevitability of social phenomena, ‘unfortunately social construction analyses do not always liberate’ (1999: 2). It is therefore important not to just ‘ask for the meaning’ of constructivism, but to also ‘ask what’s the point’ of it (Hacking, 1999: 5).

Hacking proposes to summarize the constructivist viewpoint through the following series of statements, where X represents that portion of reality that is said to be ‘(socially) constructed’:

(0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable. (1999: 12)

(1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.

(2) X is quite bad as it is.

(3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed. (1999: 6)

Statement (0) states ‘a precondition for a social constructionist thesis about X. Without (0) there is no inclination (aside from bandwagon jumping) to talk about the social construction of X’ (1999: 12). Once this precondition is set, all constructivists engage in a type (1) thesis about a specific X. Such theses in IR are at the origin of the emergence of constructivism, with Wendt asserting that ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ and Onuf that the world is ‘a world of our making’. Stopping at this stage would correspond to a ‘conventional’ constructivism that aims, as Adler put it, for a better kind of social explanation — a social theory that understands the socio-historical processes that make the world appear as a given. However, as Hacking notes, ‘many social construction theses at once advance to (2) and (3)’, although ‘they need not do so’:

One may realize that something, which seems inevitable in the present state of things, was not inevitable, and yet is not thereby a bad thing. But most people who use the social construction idea enthusiastically want to criticize, change, or destroy some X that they dislike in the established order of things. (Hacking, 1999: 6–7)

Depending on how they answer the question ‘what’s the point’ of constructivism, constructivist IR scholars will define their relation to society differently. A move beyond statement (0) will therefore produce different ‘grades of commitment’. Hacking identifies six possible attitudes for constructivists (1999: 19–20):

the ‘Historical’ — X is a historical construct;

the ‘Ironic’ — X is a historical construct, it’s bad, but there’s not much we can do about it;

the ‘Reformist’ — X is a historical construct, it’s bad, but we can try to make it less so;

the ‘Unmasking’ — by showing that X is a historical construct, we make it lose its ‘authority or false appeal’;

the ‘Rebellious’ — X is a historical construct, it’s bad, and we would be much better off without it;

the ‘Revolutionary’ — X is a historical construct, it’s bad, and we need to change the world in respect of X.

Constructivist IR scholars are often only implicit about their degree of commitment or the social value and purpose of constructivism. Adler’s position may clearly be translated as a ‘historical’ type of commitment, while Wendt’s may be located between a ‘reformist’ or ‘unmasking’ type. The more constructivists focus on ‘power’, the more they are likely to move beyond type (1) theses towards a ‘rebellious’ or ‘revolutionary’ commitment. Feminist constructivism is a clear example of such a move beyond thesis (1) and beyond ‘ironic’ or ‘unmasking’ commitments.

With respect to reflexivity, however, this needs to be combined with another important element of constructivist ontology: the type of X constructivists study. Hacking (1999: 21–22) identifies three important classes of X: ‘objects’ (people, states/conditions, practices, actions, classes, behaviour), ‘ideas’ (conceptions, beliefs, theories) and ‘elevator words’ (facts, truth, reality and knowledge). Depending, then, on the type of X constructivists focus on, the type of social commitment they espouse will take on a different meaning and have different consequences on the type of reflexivity they uphold. But reflexivity seems to entail that X is always about both ‘elevator words’ and something else in international reality. Constructivists have therefore to make clear what exactly they want to change, and what reflexivity entails in terms of social and moral commitment. Whatever it entails, moving beyond type (1) theses requires a definition of what ‘bad’ is, and therefore the reference to a specific axiological or normative standard of assessment.

These questions are not easy to answer. One of the problems of ‘reflexive scholarship’ in IR is that it has from the beginning mixed the epistemic/meta-theoretical understanding of reflexivity with its ethical dimension. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that reflexivity appeared more strongly in the writings of critical theorists, for whom ‘emancipation’ is a built-in requirement of post-positivist IR. The connection is made clear by Neufeld (1995), who asserts that reflexive theory is emancipatory. Within constructivism, this link is less explicit, and therefore the confusion between the two dimensions of reflexivity is made greater — especially when reflexivity is used to address ‘objects’ that are already politicized, such as gender or identity. It is, then, not surprising that feminist IR scholars are particularly explicit about reflexively interrogating their own ‘viewpoint’ on the world, but they also have to show what methodology (Jackson, 2011: 185–186) and axiology they (have) use(d) to do so.

A ‘maximalist’ commitment to reflexivity requires that the epistemic and ethical/deontological levels be coherently articulated. The combination of epistemic and ethical reflexivity therefore entails the development of a more systematic and explicit understanding (theoretically and empirically) of the relation between the realm of facts and the realm of values (Hamati-Ataya, 2011). As mentioned earlier, one cannot move to the ‘social construction of facts’ while assuming a universal understanding of values. Reflexivity therefore entails being capable of producing a consistent account of values, an account that can serve as a basis for justifying the social value, meaning and objective of scholarly engagement. Only under such conditions can reflexivity also prevent scholarship from falling into a non-critical practice of social engagement — the values of reflexive scholarship need to be assessed just as much as those of the agents IR scholars study.

Interdisciplinarity from a reflexivist perspective

Both the move from meta-theory to theory to empiry and the move from epistemic to ethical concerns entail a significant reorganization of the relationship between IR and the broader realm of knowledge. I will not attempt to provide a comprehensive map of the interconnections between IR as we know it today and all the existing sciences, but will rather focus on some specific disciplines that are important to open up to within the problématique of reflexivity.

IR and the Social Sciences

The first obvious field of inquiry that reflexive scholars should become engaged in is the sociology of knowledge and science in general, and the sociology of IR in particular. Insofar as reflexivity entails becoming aware of the social processes that subtend the production of knowledge and how this knowledge in turn is reflected in the practices, beliefs and commitments of social agents (including IR scholars), nothing can be said from within IR’s own doxa. A truly reflexive research programme and curriculum should begin with asserting the organic importance of these disciplines for IR. Just as the ‘behavioural turn’ relied on the philosophy of knowledge/science to counter its classical realist predecessor, so is the ‘reflexive turn’ naturally reliant on the corpus of the sociology of knowledge/science to counter positivism. The point is to develop a significant research programme that produces knowledge about IR knowledge, and not merely imports findings from other disciplines — this is necessary if one is to move beyond the ‘reflexive turn’ as a ‘turn’ and into a ‘reflexive era’ proper.

The sociology of IR has significantly developed in the past two decades, especially in relation to the discipline’s ‘American’ or ‘Western’ identity, which has made it particularly relevant to feminist, constructivist and post-colonial IR scholars (see Tickner and Waever, 2009). The IR literature now includes studies of the patterns of disciplinary reproduction, through IR scholars’ research and teaching practices and dispositions, which constitute an important contribution to their own self-understanding. However, one should also mention that some sociologies of IR are more akin to the reflexivist project (in its ‘maximalist’ form) than others. ‘For example, it makes a great difference whether one studies the discipline within a strictly ‘sociology of science’ approach, within a ‘sociology of intellectuals’ à la Randall Collins, within a broader Mannheimian ‘sociology of knowledge’ or through a Bourdieusian, general ‘theory of practice’ Debating the foundations of the sociology of IR should therefore become an important concern for reflexive scholarship.

A second obvious field of inquiry for reflexive scholars is the sociology of values and norms. This does not simply entail a study of how these are produced in the international realm, how they affect international relations and state behaviour, or how they could be changed. It also entails understanding the values and norms that govern IR research itself (its ethos and deontology), so as to translate reflexivity into an empirically grounded account of how reflexive scholars are located and involved in the production of meaning about international politics, and how their own accounts are subtended by the specific position they occupy in the domestic, cultural, socio-economic and international settings from which they operate.¹⁰

Reflexivity also entails reversing the separation between the political and the international, which has been successfully imposed by mainstream (neorealist) IR. To objectivate the social processes that subtend the production of knowledge, IR scholars need to understand that the way they look at the world and the way they produce science (and the normative system of meanings and standards that legitimate it or make it possible) are dependent on their inscription in specific social settings, whether national, sub-national or transnational, wherein institutional, ideational, socio-economic and ideological factors operate in a complex way. If the history and sociology of science can provide us with the means to objectivate the way these factors have affected the emergence of specific concepts, modes of theorizing and methodologies throughout history, as well as their extant social value and meaning, then one cannot remain oblivious to how these same factors shape our current knowledge/praxis. Without a return to social and political theory beyond the current rigid disciplinary boundaries of ‘IR’, reflexivity remains an empty claim that can neither be translated into concrete, self-referential statements about the knowledge we produce, nor be validated by external observers or future generations of scholars.

These three fields of inquiry are of course interrelated, and reflexivism ought to see them as delineating IR’s realm of ‘intra-disciplinarity’ (Hamati-Ataya, 2011), grounded in a new philosophy/theory of knowledge.

A return to the Natural Sciences?

IR has had a fluctuating relationship with epistemology as the inquiry into the nature and standards of knowledge and truth. In the behavioural era, epistemology and the philosophy of science replaced political philosophy as the central corpus of IR theory, in an attempt to establish the foundations for ‘scientific’ theorizing. The post-positivist critique of mainstream IR was also concerned with epistemology, but found its cues in the ‘death-of-epistemology’ movement as manifested in works such as Richard Rorty’s (1979) critique of the correspondence-theory-of-truth. This partial divorce from the normative concerns of classical epistemology could not avoid the problem of epistemic and theoretical incommensurability, which became an important concern for non-postmodernist versions of post-positivism (Lapid, 1989: 249). It explains why reflexivity often includes some rejection of the ‘anything goes’ attitude of epistemic relativism (e.g. Neufeld, 1993, 1995). If the value of truth is to be preserved, and if truth indeed still means anything at all outside of a positivist frame of reference, then reflexivity itself can only be meaningful if there is a value in looking back at one’s modes of theorizing, and of comparing them to others. It also means that claims to ‘truth’ — whatever that means in a post-positivist perspective — can be validated somehow, especially claims made by different post-positivisms.

But epistemic discussions have led IR to a certain dead-end (Kratochwil, 2007), thereby weakening post-positivism’s position against the flawed, but nonetheless more consistent, framework of meaning and validation offered by positivism. Trapped between the need to ‘solve’ the problem of incommensurability as a normative, residual legacy of classical epistemology, and the desire to move to a real anti-foundationalist perspective that does not entail epistemic nihilism, post-positivism has not yet delineated the nature and role of epistemology in a post-positivist era. I would like to argue that a reflexivist alternative to positivist epistemology does not lie in the abandonment of epistemology tout court, but in a radical move away from the a priori normative foundations of classical epistemology, informed not only by the sociology of knowledge, but also by social and naturalized epistemology.

Social epistemology is a normative study of the social dimensions of knowledge whose central question is ‘whether, and to what extent, the conditions of knowledge include social conditions’ (Schmitt, 1999: 354). While its object of study sets it apart from the empirical investigations of the sociology of knowledge, it is a useful complement to the latter, for it can provide reflexivist scholarship with the means to identify the boundaries between a priori and empirical foundations of knowledge and truth.

More central for reflexivist IR is naturalized epistemology (Quine, 1969), which considers that epistemology’s objective should be to understand how human beings actually arrive at beliefs about the real world, rather than to determine the normative standards of knowledge. Naturalized epistemology is interesting for the social sciences because it shifts the classical problems of epistemology from philosophy understood in the Kantian sense of the ‘tribunal of pure reason’ (Rorty, 1979), to the empirical, experimental problems of cognitive psychology. It therefore provides a real complement to the sociology of knowledge. Insofar as reflexivity entails an understanding of how one’s own knowledge is produced, reflexive scholarship should be interested in grounding its epistemic frame of analysis in an understanding of the socio-psychological and socio-physiological processes that make knowledge possible and that produce (individual, as well as shared) beliefs.

The problem, however, is that post-positivist IR scholarship has characteristically avoided an engagement with the natural sciences — a more or less conscious attempt to reverse the ‘worshipful relationship’ positivism had established with them (Lapid, 1989: 246). It is therefore worth asking whether reflexivity, which is a properly post- or anti-positivist stance, necessarily entails such a divorce with the natural sciences. After all, even the most radical constructivists deny ‘universal constructionism’ — that it is ‘ideas all the way down’. Sociologists of science have already successfully demonstrated the social embeddedness of the natural sciences, and cognitive scientists the part natural (physiological) and social (cultural) factors play in the development of human cognition, which cannot reasonably be said to be irrelevant to reflexive scholarship. The point should now be to understand the meaning of the interconnectedness of the social and natural realms for a post-positivist theory of knowledge. It might therefore be time to acknowledge that a denial of positivism’s epistemic stance does not entail divorcing the ‘hermeneutic’ sciences from all other forms of knowledge. Such a divorce is grounded in an odd intellectual position that would jeopardize reflexivism’s ability to generate new knowledge and sustain itself in the long term as a dynamic research programme capable of cognitive growth.

Conclusion: Reflexivity after the reflexive turn

It may be useful to end this article as it started, with Lapid’s reflexion on IR’s ‘third debate’, and his early assessment of the dangers that faced post-positivist IR in the long run. One of his concerns was that ‘the post-positivist “liberation of theory from data” could … lead us “into the dead end of metatheory”’ (Lapid, 1989: 249). One of the arguments of this article is that the ‘reflexive turn’ has indeed suffered from this entrapment of reflexivity within the realm of meta-theory, and that it is now necessary to translate reflexivity into a tradition that can produce an empirical, albeit non-positivist, knowledge of world politics.

Once we get past the terminological diversity and confusion surrounding the literature of ‘reflexive scholarship’, the ‘reflexive turn’ indeed should materialize into a clear research programme, founded on a consistent and coherent cognitive system, wherein epistemic/ontological, theoretical, methodological, empirical and also ethical and deontological stances derive from a common, reflexivist approach to knowledge and social reality. The advantage of using the term ‘reflexivism’ to label such a programme is that it refers, more clearly than does the generic term ‘post-positivism’, to the epistemic and ontological parameters that result from the adoption of reflexivity as a specific cognitive doctrine. Within this reflexivist approach, which is capable of responding point by point to positivism (Hamati-Ataya, 2011), a great variety of theories can be envisaged. It is up to each of them individually to define their specific objects of study, their position vis-a-vis human values and political agendas, and their inclusion or not of an emancipatory project. The point is that within reflexivism, these choices should be consistent with reflexivity as an underlying premise.

It is, then, possible to take the ‘reflexive turn’ seriously and to ‘take’ it tout court, but this entails moving to the realm of both facts and values, and doing so from a reflexivist theory of knowledge that can produce empirical accounts of how IR scholars are inside and outside of their object, what it means for reflexive IR to produce a discourse on world politics, and why reflexivity itself is worth discussing and undertaking in both cognitive and moral terms.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is the revised version of a paper entitled ‘Reflexivity in International Relations Theory: Prospects for an Interdisciplinary Research Programme’, presented at the 52nd Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in Montréal, Canada (17 March 2011). I would like to thank EJIR’s reviewers and editors for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

Notes

Author biography

Inanna Hamati-Ataya is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her published and forthcoming work focuses on epistemic and axiological problems of IR theory, including reflexivity, values and value-freedom, objectivity, political engagement, and post-foundationalism.

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Reflectivity,reflexivity,reflexivism: IR’s ‘reflexive turn’ — and beyond

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

‘Reflexivity’, what?

The Hegelian thread

The critical-theoretical view

The constructivist view

The two limits of the reflexive turn

From meta-theory to theory to empiry

From knowledge to emancipation

Interdisciplinarity from a reflexivist perspective

IR and the Social Sciences

A return to the Natural Sciences?

Conclusion: Reflexivity after the reflexive turn

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Notes

Author biography

References