International Engagements: The Politics of North American International Relations Theory

Political Theory

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 432-448

  Campbell, David ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997895865     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591701029003007     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed., rev. (New York: Knopf, 1978).
2. Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas Part-Way Down,” Review of International Studies 26 (January 2000): 129.
3. Steve Smith, “Wendt's World,” Review of International Studies 26 (January 2000): 163.
4. Some of the work in social anthropology offers a radically different argument to positions like Wendt's—especially on questions such as technology—without conceding that a questioning of the natural means an abandonment of the material. See, especially, Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986)
5. Ingold, “Situating Action VI: A Comment on the Distinction between the Material and the Social,” Ecological Psychology 8, no. 2 (1996): 183–87.
6. See Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed, 1989), for an argument about development that sees forests as something other than a conglomeration of trees
7. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), for a rethinking of the naturalness of geography
8. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991)
9. In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics and the Environment, ed. Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), for a reworking of “nature.”
10. William E. Connolly, “The Irony of Interpretation,” in The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery (New York, 1992).
11. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), 108.
12. See, for example, the fascinating accounts of the political symbolization of bodily remains in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after 1989 in Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
13. This will require developing arguments based on evidence. In that sense, Wendt is partially right to argue that there is something like “tacit realism” in “postmodernist/radical constructivist” arguments (p. 67). However, Wendt assumes that a tacit realism must be proof of adherence to a particular set of metatheoretical commitments associated with a wholly externalized reality, hypothesis construction, and theory testing. In contrast, “amassing data” and “developing the best narrative” (his term, rightly showing how theory construction is not the issue) need to be seen as part of exploring the discursive conditions of emergence of the events and issues under investigation and the effects of the discursive formation that materializes. In no way does using empirical evidence mean one is beholden to empiricism or positivism. In framing the possibilities for argumentation only in terms of social scientific protocols, Wendt sounds suspiciously like Keohane and others when they demand that all work conform to particular research traditions. See the remarks in Alexander Wendt, “On the Via Media: A Response to Critics,” Review of International Studies 26 (January 2000): 173.
14. Alexander Wendt, “‘What Is IR For?’: Notes toward a Post-Critical View,” in Critical Theory and International Relations, ed. Richard Wyn Jones and Roger Tooze (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, forthcoming). I am grateful to Alex Wendt for sending me a copy to consider for this review.
15. David Campbell, “Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics, and the Anarchical World,” in Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, ed. Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward Alker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 24.