Critical Approaches and the Problem of Social Construction: Reassessing the Legacy of the Agent/Structure Debate in IR

Conceptualizing the process of social change in IR has proved more elusive than initially thought. If the notion of agency that was proposed to capture this moment gained great saliency in the field, it has had surprisingly limited analytical effects on the discipline of IR. Hence, many can agree that social actors have agency, but very few have managed to set up an agenda that uses this notion in productive ways. Discussions about agency often remain meta-theoretical, and have had arguably little effect on the concrete studies in the field. This paper argues that debates over agency have failed to produce a satisfactory response to the question of how critical theories should approach social construction largely because they have missed what is ultimately at stake in thinking about social change and agency. Seeking in the latter an alternative form of causality that could be distinguished from structural reproduction, they created a dualism that was bound to be unproductive. Adopting a different perspective, this article revisits the structure agency debate with the aim of demonstrating that the notion of agency is fundamental to a critical perspective on social construction. It argues that introducing agency within our epistemological framework does not offer a solution for understanding social construction, but rather helps us frame the problematic of social construction itself in ways that pushes critical theory away from the reifying glance of positivism. More specifically, it uses agency as a means to problematise power as practice, arguing that, too often, critical theories take this aspect for granted. As a result they miss what exactly is being negotiated in struggles over power. Critical Approaches and the Problem of Social Construction 2