The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Organization. Two theories, neorealism and world-system theory, strongly influence contemporary academic discourse about international relations. Both claim to provide "structural" explanations of how states behave in the international system. Despite their common commitment to structural analysis, however, their understanding of system "structure," and therefore of structural explanation , is quite different. Neorealists define international system structures in terms of the observable attributes of their member states (the "distribu-tion of capabilities"), and as a result, they understand the explanatory role of those structures in individualist terms as constraining the choices of pre-existing state actors. World-system theorists, on the other hand, define international system structures in terms of the fundamental organizing principles of the capitalist world economy which underlie and constitute states, and thus they understand the explanatory role of structures in structuralist terms as generating state actors themselves. These differences, and their implications , have yet to be explicated in the international relations literature.1 In and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts. 1. There are a number of discussions of the meanings and uses of "structural theory" in neorealism and world-system theory, but as far as I know, none explicitly compares or differentiates the neorealist and world-system approaches to structure and structural analysis. The critique of world-system theory that comes closest to my concerns in this article is probably Theda Skocpol's "Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and 336 International Organization this article, I want to begin to clarify and contrast the nature of structural analysis in each of these two traditions. My primary interest, however, is to critique the conceptions of structural theory found in each of them, and to use this critique to motivate the development of a new approach to structural theorizing about international relations adapted from the work of "structura-tion theorists" in sociology.2 This approach and the research agenda it implies , in turn, require a foundation in realist philosophy of science (or "scientific realism"3), arguably the "new orthodoxy" in the philosophy of natural science, but as …