Practice And Structural Changes In International Politics

This Dissertation aims at making a systematic critique on Wendt’sConstructivism Theory. The author argues that, since Wendt’s Structuralizationinclination, his famous assumption “Anarchy is what states make of it” cannot befully explained. On the basis of making an overall review and critique on Wendt’stheory, the author tries to find a new path to reasonably explain that how the anarchyis constructed.The author tends to believe that the Gidden’s Structuration Model used by Wendtcannot convincingly integrate the macro-level Durkheim’s theory and the micro-levelMead’s Symbolic Interationism theory. Under this circumstance, the structure put astrong constraint on agents, which eventually makes the Wendt’s theory too muchstructuralized. By exploring the complexity of social structures and social processes,the author unveils the independence of social processes, as well as the agency ofsocial agents, which, the author believes, are manifested in the practices of socialagents. A full-scale “Practical Turn” is needed if we mean to completely free thesocial agents and overcome the long-existing dichotomy in social science including IRtheory.This dissertation can be divided into two parts. The former part does the job of“Theoretical Deconstruction” by a thorough exploration on the influence of Wendt’stheory in IR and it’s sociological background. And then a systematic analysis andcritique is followed. The latter part aims at the “Theoretical Construction”. Holding aPractical ontological perspective, the author attempts to build a constructivisttheoretical model, different from Wendt’s Co-construction model, to effectivelysolved the problem of how the anarchy is made of. The concept of practice iscategorized, by the author, into two parts, which are “Social relations practice” and“Productive practice”. The author tends to believe that the Social relations practice inIR can’t persuasively explain the emergence and transformation of the Internationalmacro-level structure since it’s relatively weaker agency. By combining the Productive practice theory of Marx and the Existentialism philosophy, the author inthe end provides with a new theoretical explaining framework.