ABSTRACT
Following Richard Ashley's (1984) and Alexander Wendt's (1987) seminal contributions, Walter Carlsnaes helped to awaken IR theory from its dogmatic slumber and redirect scholars' attention to a critical issue in the philosophy of social sciences: what is the relationship between agency and structures? In a series of papers, Carlsnaes (1992, 1993, 1994) discusses the agency–structure problematic in the context of foreign policy analysis. Carlsnaes' intent to enrich foreign policy analysis through explicating a plausible social ontology (in line with Giddens 1979 and Archer 1985), he (Carlsnaes 1993: 13) talks about the ‘interplay over time which exists between agency and structure’. He argues that decision-makers make choices and, through their actions, take part in the (re)production of structures the results of which, in turn, enable and constrain their subsequent actions. Furthermore, Carlsnaes stresses the importance of historical time for understanding foreign policy: ‘since neither structures nor actors remain constant over time, a social theory worth its salt must be able to account not only for particular changes but also for social change itself as an inherently dynamic phenomenon’ (1992: 246).
