Constructing International Relations by Fierke K. M. Jørgensen Knud Erik

Author:Fierke, K. M.,Jørgensen, Knud Erik
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317473862
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Incorporating Issues of Productivity

Although discourse analysis is concerned with significative practices and the knowledge systems underlying them, it is insufficient to study only the way a discourse constitutes background capabilities for people to understand their social world. The theoretical commitment of discourse productivity makes it important to explain how a discourse produces this world: how it selectively constitutes some and not others as “privileged storytellers … to whom narrative authority … is granted,” how it renders logical and proper certain policies by authorities and in the implementation of those policies shapes and changes people’s modes and conditions of living, and how it comes to be dispersed beyond authorized subjects to make up common sense for many in everyday society (Campbell 1993, 7). Examining discourse productivity differentiates discourse study from other approaches that do not examine “how foundations and boundaries are drawn—how states [or other entities] are written … with particular capacities and legitimacies at particular times and places” (Weber 1995, 29). This aspect of discourse analysis also has clear political and ethical significance: in explaining discourse productivity, scholars can potentially denaturalize dominant forms of knowledge and expose to critical questioning the practices that they enable.

No individual study, even a monograph, can deal with all aspects of discursive productivity, however, and there are foci that follow from choices that scholars make about whose system of signification they will principally study. Surveying the literature in IR, three types of studies can be distinguished on this basis: foreign policy, IR theory, and international diplomacy and organization. Extending significative analyses of foreign policy elites, foreign policy studies address discursive productivity by analyzing how an elite’s regime of truth made possible certain courses of action by a state (e.g., intervening militarily in the Gulf War) while excluding other policies as unintelligible or unworkable or improper (e.g., doing nothing, seeking a diplomatic settlement) (Campbell 1993; Weldes and Saco 1996). Arguments may also be made for how a particular case or cases illuminate the more general and long term production of the state as a sovereign entity (Campbell 1992) and of international relationships and hierarchies (Shapiro 1988; Doty 1996a). IR theory studies usually extend analyses of theoretical representations via arguments that knowledge produced in the academy is fused with that of policy makers to make up a “dominant intellectual/policy perspective” (George 1994, 34). Theoretical representations (as scientific truth) are then presented as helping to legitimize particular policies taken by states and international organizations (Milliken and Sylvan 1996), as well as helping to reproduce a common sense among different populations more generally supportive of state-centrism, the Cold War, the liberal economic order, and post-Cold War reassertion of Western dominance over postcolonial states (Ashley 1989; Klein 1994). Finally, international diplomacy and organization studies extend analyses of diplomatic interchanges and organizational knowledges to the discursive production of authorities and experts and their networks (Litfin 1994). They also seek to demonstrate how the coordination of policies is made possible between different state elites and how policies that might seem a priori

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