Introduction

The following two chapters address two lingering questions from this book's exploration into the New Constructivism in IR theory. First, what is the New Constructivism's politics or ethics? Put differently, should Constructivism operate in a political, normative, or ethical register? If so how? If not, why not? Second, and relatedly, the chapter asks what form of knowledge Constructivism offers. Suspended between the positivist mainstream and various modes of critical and post-positivist theory, what type of knowledge – exactly – does the New Constructivism represent? How can the knowledge the New Constructivism offers be justified as comparable or even superior to alternatives, both mainstream and critical?

Scholars like Jason Ralph, Martin Weber, Silviya Lechner, and Mervyn Frost have recently posited the question of Constructivism's stance vis-a-vis politics and ethics. Together, these scholars, and others, have argued that practice-relationalism, and the pragmatist dispositions much of it builds upon not only assist the New Constructivism in offering thicker accounts of the social construction of world politics vis-a-vis Old Constructivism, but also allow constructivists to interrogate the ethical content of norms and culture in ways previously downplayed. Armed with pragmatism and practice-relationalism, it is suggested, the New Constructivism can bridge the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ in world politics.

In this chapter, I assess their arguments, and others who seek to place ethics and Constructivism into dialogue. I argue that the New Constructivism struggles – without different degrees of success – to move beyond a core tension from the Old Constructivism when it comes to the issue of ethics and normativity. In many ways, a problem with Old Constructivism was not the lack of norms and normativity, but an over-abundance, which led many realists and rationalists to characterize Constructivism as a ‘soft’approach based on norms and taboos, rather than the ‘hard’ matter of power and interests. The Old Constructivism was normative by definition, and scholarly disposition. But at the same time, a critical engagement with ethics and politics was absent, as Old Constructivists sought to keep the approach within the modernist project of a social science of IR, remaining true to Max Weber's plea for a fact-value distinction in theorizing. Can the New Constructivism generate a real via media, and should it?