World-Making: Experts and Professionals in the New Constructivism

Chapter Four discusses the importance of reflexivity to the New Constructivism. It shows how a key distinction between the Old Constructivism and the New is that the New Constructivism is self-consciously reflexive, fully cognizant of the way in which social actors—including the IR theorists—are not merely produced by social construction but engaged in the process of social construction. Many of the problematic intellectual binaries left over from the Old Constructivism are overcome by careful analysis of the role of specific agents like experts and elites in international political outcomes. Theoretically, the impetus to focus on world-makers comes from a rejection—central to a practice-relational sensibility—of accounts of political action focused on norms, cultures, and identities understood in monolithic terms. One of the fundamental insights of this line of thinking is that it is not enough to account for political outcomes by citing the influence of norms, culture, and identities as ready-made artefacts, since their origins, trajectories, and differential effects must be accounted for. Careful tracing of the impact of agents of different kinds, in other words, solves the agency-structure dilemma, which I illustrate with reference both to the explosion of work on experts and professionals in IR.