ABSTRACT
The last half of the 1980s witnessed a growth in a new kind of literature in International Relations theory, a literature variously labelled as ‘post-modernist’, ‘deconstructivist’, or ‘poststructuralist’, and associated especially with authors like Richard Ashley, James Der Derian, Michael Shapiro and R.B.J.Walker (see also Chapter 13 on Der Derian in this book). Even though ‘the establishment’ might have harboured considerable suspicion towards these attacks on the traditional conceptions of International Relations (IR), poststructuralism is now often seen as an alternative establishment of its own.1 This is not to say that poststructuralism ‘won’ against the prevailing wisdom of neo-realism or neo-liberalism (see Ashley, Cox, Keohane and Waltz in Keohane 1986), but it attracted attention, and succeeded in opening up considerable room in debates about International Relations. Evidence of acceptance is, for instance, the publishing of a special issue of International Studies Quarterly in 1990, edited by Ashley and Walker (Walker and Ashley 1990a), and the ISA presidential address by Robert Keohane in 1988. The address has become famous for Keohane’s distinction between a ‘rationalist’ and a ‘reflectivist’ approach to the study of international institutions; poststructuralism was framed as a variety of reflectivism, although not as the only perspective in that category (Keohane 1989, see also Chapter 4 on Keohane in this book; other non-
poststructuralist reflectivists dealt with in this book are Nicholas G.Onuf and Alexander Wendt).
