4 - Constitutive power relations

Summary

Neorealism “fetishizes” material capabilities in the sense that it embues them with meanings and powers that can only correctly be attributable to human beings.

Alexander Wendt

Constitutive relations cannot be reduced to the attributes, actions, or interactions of pregiven actors. Power, accordingly, is irreducibly social. In other words, constitutive arguments examine how particular social relations are responsible for producing particular kinds of actors.

Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall

The study of power relations lies at the heart of the modern academic discipline of political science. Yet power relations have been oddly understudied in the literature on international political economy and particularly in the literature arising in the North American academy. In large measure this has been because of the manner in which international political economy has developed in attempting to extricate itself from the state-centric North American “canonical” texts in international relations as they have emerged from structural realism and neoliberal institutionalism. In the North American debates scholars were required to struggle to develop the power of market actors and the forces they bring to bear on outcomes in the international economic realm as autonomous actors in international politics.

A large measure of the reasons why the study of power relations in international political economy has not heretofore come to develop a sustained discussion of the forms of power relations with which the present work is concerned stems from the focus of the literature in international relations on the direct power effects resulting from the interaction of autonomous actors in an “anarchic” international system.