Rules, Law, and Language in the New Constructivism

This chapter explores the continuing centrality of rules, law, and language to the New Constructivism, each of which were downplayed as constructivism developed in IR. Rules, law, and language are long-standing constructivist concerns, but they were pushed to one side as norms, culture, and identity emerged as the central concepts of the Old Constructivism. The effect was, in many caricatures of constructivism, to see the approach as one fundamentally about the power of ideas in world politics—a concern held over from the late-1980s/early 1990s debate in political science more broadly about the role of ideas in policy-making. By comparison to “harder” approaches based on interests and more tangible manifestations of power—like military might—it is unsurprising that Constructivism became viewed as a “soft” approach, useful for explaining outlying developments in world politics. The practice-relational sensitivity underpinning the New Constructivism, however, rejects such a characterization, placing power relations—effected through rules, law and language—central to its accounts of world politics. In the case of law, for example, scholars have chronicled the immense power of legal rules to shape state interests, amounting to a form of liberal rule through law.