Neo-pragmatist antifoundationalism, ethics, and normative IR theory (original) (raw)

1999, Normative Theory in International Relations

Normativity matters in international politics, but IR scholars will benefit from dereifying 'norms' as units into a relational, configurational alternative. The alternative I propose here is the 'normative confliction': an arrangement of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value-orientation, and avenues of contestation. This responds to recent constructivist scholarship, particularly from relational sociology and practice theory, that implies the need for ontological and analytical alternatives to 'norms' as central concepts responsible for establishing rules, institutions, and values in social life. I offer a way of conceptualising and analysing normativity consistent with these alternative approaches. Namely, I have brought together a pragmatist theory of action with the social theories of a number of key relational social theorists and philosophers, oriented around a reading of what norms talk actually does for social enquiry. This yields a concept I call the 'normative configuration'. I then outline a three-stage process-dereification, attributing agency, and tracing transactions-that allows scholars to study transformations in normative configurations. Finally, I discuss what this contributes to the recent turns towards practices and relations, as the latest direction in constructivist scholarship within the discipline Much mainstream constructivist research in IR frames explanations in terms of norms (McCourt 2016; Hoffmann 2010), approached as widely held rules about right action, to account for puzzling phenomena in world politics. However, what scholars call 'norms' are rarely consistent, singular social things, instead comprising entangled, often internally inconsistent arrays of practices and standards, undergoing ongoing revision and contestation by the people enacting them. To talk of norms may thus be problematic, or at least analytically unhelpful, when those arrays of practices and principles are unsettled, in unusual internal tension, or undergoing rapid evolution as a result of internal or external pressures. Put differently, if rules, values, and institutions are changing fast, and it is not clear why, an explanation may