ABSTRACT
Few scholars like to be called mainstream. Nicholas Onuf is not, however, in any strong danger of being classified in such a way-on the contrary. He can, in at least two respects, be positioned safely on the margins of the contemporary International Relations field. First, although a political scientist and IR scholar by training, Onuf has during his studies and in most of his professional career been preoccupied with international law, and legal and social theory. A short glance at his list of publications gives the impression that the person with whom we are dealing in this chapter cannot be characterized as a classical IR scholar. Thus, it
was not until the publication in 1989 of his book World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (hereafter referred to as WOOM) that his name started appearing in contemporary writings on IR theory —at least among so-called ‘reflectivists’.2 Another important reason for placing Onuf on the margins of the IR field is perhaps more controversial but, it seems to me, also more interest ing. It has to do with his refusal to grant the study of relations between states (IR) any disciplinary independence. This is not meant to imply that we should stop studying world politics. Rather, that we should cease to regard IR as a selfcontained enterprise different from other social practices (Onuf 1989b: 14; Goodman 1978:6 ff.). What makes it worth paying an extended visit to Onuf is thus first that he, as opposed to many contemporary IR scholars, in almost all of his academic work stresses the IR discipline’s link to its historical roots: international law and legal theory. Second, that he, with the point of departure in the most recent social theory in his book World of Our Making from 1989, has launched a cross-disciplinary and agent-structure-integrated approach to the study of world politics. He labels this approach or theory ‘constructivism’— drawing heavily on Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration (Giddens 1979; 1984). At its most basic (and radical) level a constructivist position holds that there is no such thing as a pre-social anarchical order. In order for social agents to act meaningfully-whether within or outside the state border-they have to draw on practice-based rules of the game including past experience, habits and more or less mechanical routines. Any action-no matter how calculated or how trivial-will be fundamentally and thereby ontologically dependent on these. In promoting such a position Onuf clearly joins those poststructural and critical IR scholars of the 1980s who have refused to buy into the vision of interstate relations as intrinsically ruleless. As opposed to other critical theorists, however, Onuf is not satisfied with a mere deconstruction of the IR discipline’s basic building blocks. As will become clearer in the following, rather than a deconstruction Onuf s constructivism represents an ambitious attempt to reconstruct not only IR, but the entire social sciences.
