ABSTRACT
“World” was something meaningful, what Heidegger might have called an “equipmental totality,” although less inherently seamless than it might appear at first. Most famously, perhaps, Nick’s theoretical vehicle for this grand revisioning of the study of social life, and of world politics in particular, is Speech Act Theory. The balance in a given situation between, and the interactions of, speech acts falling into these three categories produces an explanation of the social world and how it works. In global international studies, there is space for a plurality of voices and visions, and a robust debate about important theoretical and methodological issues such as the nature of scientific explanation, the fundamental structure of the world system, and the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. An identification of Constructivism as an IR theory has to begin with the formulation of the term by Onuf in his 1989 classic.
