ABSTRACT
Critical practice is, of course, amenable to a great variety of interpretations, transcending disciplinary boundaries and paradigmatic homogeneity.7 In our discipline of reference – International Relations – it ameliorates ‘constructivism’,8
the ‘English school’,9 the ‘world-polity approach’,10 post-modernism and poststructuralism,11 and feminist theories.12 Despite disparate objects of analysis and different nuances of method and methodology, critical IR theories agree on the ontological premise that international realities are invented or socially manufactured rather than inert facts of nature. Although I risk oversimplification, it is probably correct to say that this is the smallest common denominator of contemporary critical IR theories.
