ABSTRACT
Drawing on poststructuralism’s relational understanding of meaning and identity, this chapter understands foreign policy as a representational practice or discourse that constitutes and re-produces a state’s identity by demarcating the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’ and thereby delineating what the Self is and what it stands for. By explaining how discourses (re-)produce collective identities and understandings of the world, the chapter sets the stage for the analysis of the relationship between identity and world order in the discourses of foreign policy and international relations. It develops an analytical framework to capture the dynamics of foreign policy and identity change that seeks address the shortcomings in the existing poststructuralist literature and offer a more consistent conceptualization of the relationship between agency and (discursive) structures. In addition, the chapter shows that poststructuralist scholarship can go beyond constitutive theory and explain social phenomena provided that we modify the positivist mode of explanation. For this purpose, the chapter utilizes the Logics of Critical Explanation devised by Jason Glynos and David Howarth and applies it to the study of foreign policy discourses.
