ABSTRACT
Explanatory International Relations (IR) scholars have come to genuinely believe the social world to be state-centric and groupist as a result of state-centric and groupist intellectual nurture. Treating ethnic groups in groupist terms and ontologically equating them with nations and consequently with proto-states is the defining criterion of explanatory IR's conceptualization of ethnic groups. This chapter argues that the analytical equation of ethnic group with nation with state is what allows explanatory IR to continue applying the same rationalist positivist concepts, methods and frameworks as applied in the analysis of states to ethnic groups. Robert Cox traces how certain assumptions of explanatory IR take part in the creation of the order it sets out to describe, how explanatory IR enacts the international system of sovereign nation states through the knowledge it produces about it, participates in constructing this system and bringing it into being through its very own discourse.
