Introduction

In this chapter, I re-centre language, rules, and law in the New Constructivism. Rules, law, and language lay at the core of the early theoretical Constructivist treatises, especially Nicholas Onuf 's World of Our Making and Friedrich Kratochwil's Rules, Norms, and Decisions. Each placed rule-and normgoverned reasoning as fundamental to political life, in the international no less than the domestic sphere. But as Constructivism gained ground in the discipline, especially in the empirical Old Constructivism that cemented its place in American political science, language, rules, and law, were sidelined. Norms, identity, and culture became the conceptual touchstones of this new line of thought within an academic debate dominated by realist themes: the balance of power, national interests, and the search for security among independent sovereign states. More surprisingly, the New Constructivism also downplays language, law, and rules, in favour of practice, relationality, and the reality and post-humanism of the new materialism. Old Constructivism and the practice-relational turn thus reflects and furthers two divisions that have rented Constructivism from language, rules, and law: first, between international law and legal theory and international politics and security such that the two barely speak; and second between Constructivism and post-structuralism, where discourse seemed to render the project of social science itself in question. My aim in this chapter, consequently, is to show that these divisions were contingent, social processes, constructions we might say; retracing their separation can go some way towards knitting language, rules, and law, and Constructivism back together.

In short, although sensitive to practice(s), the inherent relationality – rather than fixity – of social life, and the body, emotions, and affect, the New Constructivism as a perspective or sensibility in IR should still revolve around language and discourse.Language and discourse are not all there is to social life to be sure; I do not here assert a return to a thoughtless nominalism. However, language remains the unavoidable medium between us and our world – providing understandings about how to ‘go on’ in social situations, and, crucially, political and legal reasoning and decision-making situations – with emotions and affect a key part of how such reasoning occurs – and hence the indispensable vehicle for its interpretation. Discourse is here understood as both material – thing-like – and ideational, or about expectations, hence the interest in language and rules, written and orally transmitted, and hence law.