Power-Knowledge and the Culture of Argument: Reading Thucydides as Postmodern IR Theory (original) (raw)

The most famous parts of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War are discursive acts: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Melian Dialogue, or the Mytilenian Debate. This narrative structure opens Thucydides up for an analysis based around the methodological tools of constructivism, focused on norms and discourse and the speech acts that constitute them. Drawing on the critiques of Barkin’s realist constructivism and using R.B.J. Walker and Cynthia Weber as two exemplary postmodern IR theorists, I will argue that the most fitting analytical frame for reading the History is one that roots realist constructivism in an enduring Foucauldian model of power: constitutive, diffuse, and discursive. Instead of using the modern sovereign state and modern IR theory as objects, I want to see if this specifically postmodern analysis can draw out intriguing conclusions about the Greek polity, the normative interaction of these polities, and their constitution as spatio-temporal objects through speech acts. More work needs to be done expanding on existing literature by moving beyond a constructivism focused just on norms, identity, and institutions, to a postmodern constructivism that can look at the constitution of spatio-temporal political units and territory and on how those discourses are defined and shaped by power relations.