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?States Aren?t People Too?: State Agency, State Theory and the Making of ?Ethical? Foreign Policy
Unformatted Document Text:  States aren’t people too: state theory as IR Marjo Koivisto Department of International Relations London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE UK Email: M.A.## email not listed ## Draft, work in progress. Comments most welcome, but please do not cite without the permission of the author. Introduction “State theory reminds us that the access to political power associated with a landslide electoral triumph does not necessarily bring with it the institutional and/or strategic capacity to translate such a mandate into lasting social, political and economic change.” (Hay and Lister, 2005: 11) This paper analyses the relevance of the recent arguments in the discipline about state personhood, with a specific focus on the ontological claims about the state in the recent realist 1 approaches in IR. Arguably, there is a need to further specify the role and relevance of that the ‘states as persons’ claims play in International Relations (IR). This need arises when our research is ontologically focused: moreover, when we ask ‘what in our existing social world make(s) things happen one way not the other?’, ‘what and whom are involved in the production of the presence and experience of state power?’. The recent realist interventions have found the traditional levels-of-analysis approach to IR unsatisfactory in trying to answer these questions, and have developed some alternative solutions to theorise the grounds for state capacity in IR. This paper focuses on examining the explanatory strength of these new theories. In an attempt to advance 1 Realism, at its very core, is the thesis that the world exists independently of our thinking of it. This is the realism referred to in this paper, not political realism in IR. Additionally, perhaps the most flexible description of scientific realism is that the aim of science is to provide a true description of the world. Disagreeing on the extent the principle of naturalism applies to the social world (from ‘not at all’ to positivism), philosophical realists adopt different positions on ontological realism. I will introduce additional qualifications to particular realist positions as the argument moves along. 1

Authors: Koivisto, Marjo.
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States aren’t people too: state theory as IR
Marjo Koivisto
Department of International Relations
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London
WC2A 2AE
UK
Email:


Draft, work in progress. Comments most welcome, but please do not cite without the
permission of the author.



Introduction

“State theory reminds us that the access to political power associated with a landslide
electoral triumph does not necessarily bring with it the institutional and/or strategic
capacity to translate such a mandate into lasting social, political and economic
change.” (Hay and Lister, 2005: 11)

This paper analyses the relevance of the recent arguments in the discipline about state
personhood, with a specific focus on the ontological claims about the state in the recent
realist
approaches in IR. Arguably, there is a need to further specify the role and
relevance of that the ‘states as persons’ claims play in International Relations (IR). This
need arises when our research is ontologically focused: moreover, when we ask ‘what in
our existing social world make(s) things happen one way not the other?’, ‘what and
whom are involved in the production of the presence and experience of state power?’.
The recent realist interventions have found the traditional levels-of-analysis approach to
IR unsatisfactory in trying to answer these questions, and have developed some
alternative solutions to theorise the grounds for state capacity in IR. This paper focuses
on examining the explanatory strength of these new theories. In an attempt to advance
1
Realism, at its very core, is the thesis that the world exists independently of our thinking of it. This is the
realism referred to in this paper, not political realism in IR. Additionally, perhaps the most flexible
description of scientific realism is that the aim of science is to provide a true description of the world.
Disagreeing on the extent the principle of naturalism applies to the social world (from ‘not at all’ to
positivism), philosophical realists adopt different positions on ontological realism. I will introduce
additional qualifications to particular realist positions as the argument moves along.
1


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