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Paper prepared for ISA Hong Kong Conference,

July 2001

Draft paper.

Please do not cite without contacting us.

Nick Bisley and Jason Ackleson

International Relations Department

London School of Economics and Political Science

Houghton St., London, WC2A 2AE

Email: [email protected]

[email protected]

A NEW THEORETICAL TOOL FOR THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

I INTRODUCTION

In the study of international affairs, the most important division of the social world is deemed to

be that which differentiates the domestic and the international. The belief that there are clearly

demarcated social spheres with distinct logics of political action—what goes on between states is

dictated by a different dynamic from the social interactions which occur within states—has informed

much analysis in International Relations (IR). While such beliefs are not necessarily uniformly accepted

across the discipline, they represent something of an intellectual consensus about the nature of world

politics.

One of the key reasons behind the dominance of this view is the belief that the social world, and

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particularly that part of it we call ‘international politics’, consists of solid entities which interact with one

another. Such a view is not unreasonable and yet the ontological presupposition of solidity underplays

the more complex nature of the origins and workings of the social world generally, and international

politics more specifically. This paper seeks to make the case that IR would benefit from a view of world

politics which takes as its metaphysical starting point not the stability and solidity of social entities but

the processes and relations which create stable and influential social structures.

The problematic nature of seeing the world, not only in terms of the international-domestic

division, but of presuming the objective existence of entities, is being increasingly made clear by

globalisation and its consequent social transformations. Globalisation, as both a phenomenon and an

analytic concept, Clark writes, ‘challenges head-on the claim to structurally differentiated behaviour in

the two fields [domestic and international].’[1] While globalisation most starkly puts the lie to the myth

of socially separate fields and separate logics of action, this paper contends that things have always been

thus. The paper proposes that one way to address this reality in our studies is to think about world

politics in a way which recognises the political and social implications of this, that is, for IR to adopt a

more processual ontology and to use process relationalism (p/r) as an analytic approach so as to produce

more historically aware and analytically useful insights

The paper will proceed in the following manner. First, it will overview the basic concepts being

examined and will differentiate this approach from another process-based stance set out by Jackson and

Nexon.[2] Second, it will set out the tenets and history of a process-based approach to the study of IR.

Third, the paper will briefly sketch out how such an approach can be used with reference to two of the

most important phenomena of world politics which have, thus far, proved resistant to analysis from more

traditional IR theories: territorial borders and the state.

II PROCESS RELATIONALISM AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN IR

Process relationalism is a relatively new approach to socio-political analysis which draws from

an overarching ‘process metaphysics’, also known as ‘process philosophy’—the term used here. Process

philosophy regards the ideas surrounding activity and process as central in helping characterise and

understand developments in the social world. Not a theory, but rather a point of view, process philosophy

most generally holds that one must prioritise process over things and activities over substances. P/r, in

particular, holds promise for use in IR theory to open new and clearer lines of vision to explain

international phenomena such as transnationalism, collective identity, and globalisation. More generally

a p/r approach, we argue, forces us to consider directly the issue which is often overlooked, that is the

question of regularity and sustainability over time—why some processes, some ‘becomings’ (such as the

state system, for instance) are more dominant and lasting than others by identifying the relational

dynamics which reproduce them.

P/r adopts a framework of analysis that focuses on the continuous ‘configurations of

ties —recurrent socio-cultural interaction—between social aggregates as the basis building blocks of

social analysis’.[3] This differs quite markedly from the dominant thinking in the social sciences of

‘substantialism’, which holds that ‘things’ or ‘entities’ are ontologically primary and fundamental, e.g.,

existing before processes and relations—which, in the end, are only conceived as occurring between


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separate entities. This divide, as Mustafa Emirbayer asserts, is no less than the current ‘fundamental

dilemma’ in sociology: ‘whether to conceive of the world as consisting primarily in substances or in

processes, in static “things” or in dynamic, unfolding relations’.[4] A p/r approach may thus be a

theoretical alternative to many long-standing theories in IR which begin with the assumption that ‘static’

entities like the state come before social or political relations, a stance that can colour subsequent

explorations. This approach seeks to overcome the limits of substantialist social analysis using the

insights of p/r, yet it is leavened by a pragmatic bent which recognises that while processes and relations

create entities, these social institutions are, in specific instances, real material determinants of

international politics.

Jackson and Nexon

The potential for p/r in IR has been flagged by Jackson and Nexon.[5] They follow Emirbayer’s

manifesto and echo many of his arguments and examples. Most importantly, they point out that whatEmirbayer says about sociology is equally valid in international politics, that ‘the key question

confronting sociologists in the present day is not “material versus ideal”, “structure versus agency”…or

any of the other dualisms so often noted; rather, it is the choice between substantialism and

relationalism.’[6]. In IR, they argue, we think in substantialist terms and thus need a new ontological

reorientation based on process metaphysics. We accept their efforts to push the debate further, but take

issue with the characterisation of this debate in such stark terms of difference and warn against the danger

of thinking of everything as process. There are a number of shortcomings with their approach which bear

mentioning. First, like many students of IR theory they are obsessed with the notion of change and do notconsider the true processual implications of their own writings. That is, in social affairs, we should

concern ourselves not only with change, but with stability and inertia. In worrying so much about change

in its various guises they presume that change is distinct from stability and they do not consider that the

very processes which produce stability are worth worrying about.

The p/r approach we seek to substantiate is one which sees the question of stability as at least as

important a question a change (whether endogenous or not). Barrington Moore writes that there ‘is a

widespread assumption in modern social science that social continuity requires no explanation.

Supposedly it is not problematical. Change is what requires explanation. This assumption blinds the

investigator to certain crucial aspects of social reality.’[7] Jackson and Nexon, in their obsession with

change, suffer from what Moore calls the ‘assumption of inertia’. By looking to the processes which

produce and reproduce dominant structures, the p/r advocated here is able to consider both stability and

change. By virtue of its epistemological concern with how social structures are produced and reproduced,

this approach can consider how it is that certain entities, such as states or borders, are created as well as

the sources of change, that is, how they may fail to be successfully reproduced.

It is not just in their fetishisation of change that Jackson and Nexon’s approach fails to satisfy. By

arguing that relations are all and substances mere reifications they find themselves in something of an

intellectual cul-de-sac. While it is useful to demonstrate the limits of essentialism and the benefits of

relationalism, it is hard to consider how these entities—once produced by sets of processes—then shape

the lives of people in the form of interactions. By concerning themselves too much with production and


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not enough with the instantiation of these productions, Jackson and Nexon’s approach can only be of

limited use in IR. IR should be concerned not so much with philosophical questions—there are no

epistemological or ontological questions unique to IR—but with the application of theories to answer

questions about international life. Central to IR are precisely the relations—international, domestic and

transnational—between social entities. As such this p/r approach is concerned with both the processual

production of entities, as well as their interactions. Thus, a process relationalism approach, when armed

with a pragmatic bent, can offer insights into fundamental IR issues and we will show this with brief

considerations of: international territorial borders, and the state. To reiterate, our aim is to consider the

processual production of the social entities which shape the socio-political world, the approach here seeks

to evaluate why some ‘structures’—conglomerates of the more salient and lasting processes in the social

realm—characterise international politics at a particular historical moment and why some do not. Our

concern is first with stability and inertia and only then with the question of change.

III BASIC TENETS OF PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

Process philosophy holds that at bottom, physical existence is processual; processes rather than

entities, it maintains, best represent objects and phenomena. Reality thus is best understood not as

substance and causality, as in the Cartesian tradition, but as creativity and process. But what exactly is a

process? A process in its most general sense, as Nicholas Rescher notes, is ‘a coordinated group of

changes in the complexion of reality, an organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to

one another causally or functionally’.[8] This does not mean just a change in or of an individual item, but

can simply relate to more general conditions. Put another way, a process is a series of integrated and

unfolding developments of a particular ‘program’. These develop over time through occurrences or events; there are no instantaneous processes. Thus, as Rescher asserts, a process preserves its own

self-identity in the face of alteration through its own ‘internal complexity…a unifying conglomeration of

stages or phases’.[9] Thus, ‘even as a story’, for example, ‘can encompass foolishness without itself

being foolish, so a process can encompass changes without itself changing’.[10]

Processes occur over throughout the natural and social worlds. Under process philosophy, an

object, say a pen, should not be understood as an object per se, existing prior to any processes or

relations that brought, and continue to bring, it into being.[11] However, this comment does not purport

to explain p/r in the natural world, which would be a vast and complicated undertaking. Aside from

small anecdotal examples drawn from the natural world to help illustrate the ontological dimensions of

p/r, the discussion here is instead confined to the social realm where IR analysts operate.

Substantialism, dating from Aristotelian thought, which dwells in all of the major paradigms of

IR and most of social theory in general, however, tends to reify and continually reproduce the starting

points of such entities—they come ‘preformed’—and we draw conclusions which begin with such

assumptions. This sort of approach, as will be argued below, can obscure the wide-ranging and

continually reproduced dynamics of processes which enable facets (such as states) of the international

system in the first place. Relationalists would reject the notion that ‘one can posit discrete pre-given

units such as the individual or society as the ultimate starting points’ of analysis. [12]

Moreover, understanding process as a central part of the socio-political world lets us evaluate


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why some ‘structures’, conglomerates of the more salient and lasting processes in the social realm,

characterise international politics at a particular historical moment.

Before turning to that more IR-tailored exploration, however, a few more words on the nature of

process philosophy are necessary. Process, can be seen to be having primacy over things or priority over

things; in this worldview, ultimately the processual nature of the real is fundamental. Moreover, in

process philosophy, motion is ‘the pervasive and predominant feature of the real’ and activity is

primary.[13] This contrasts markedly with substantialism, which tends to understand the world in terms of

static object-entities.

At this point, it is important to differentiate between two wide (but compatible) components or

‘sectors’ of process philosophy: ‘conceptual/epistemic’, which is based on the idea that process and its

ramifications are the most appropriate and effective conceptual instruments for understanding the world

(conceptual reductionism) and ‘metaphysical/ontological’, which is stronger, maintaining this conceptual

basis makes sense because process is the most crucial and dominant feature of reality (ontological

reductionism). Processual relationalism, the focus of the application here, is drawn from the former, and

will be dealt with extensively later in this paper. However, as implied in this distinction, the ontological

implications of this philosophical enterprise are important to lay out as they form part of the basis from

which the analytical approach draws. This sort of analysis may, in fact, become less unusual; current

debate in the field,[14] suggests dialogue on some of the field’s fundamental issues may now

increasingly turn along an ontological axis.

A Brief History of Relational Thinking

Pre-Socratics to the 19th Century

Process philosophy has a long and rich, but diverse, history; representative thinkers span an

ideational spectrum, each with greatly differing conceptions of the nature of process philosophy. The

intellectual roots of the idea that existence can be viewed in terms of process may be traced to

pre-Socratic philosophy and Heraclitus in the 6th century BC who is widely seen as the founding father

of process philosophy in the West.[15]

Rebelling against the substance philosophy prevalent in classical thinking, Heraclitus held that the

world is a ground for the contestation of opposed forces, a world-order that is ‘an ever-living fire,

kindling in measures and going out in measures’—where not substances, but processes ‘lit’ by a

figurative fire constitute the world.[16] Ultimately, ‘all things happen by strife and necessity’ to that end

Heraclitus made his famous statement that still pervades much philosophy: ‘one cannot step twice into

the same river’.[17]

While it may seem counterintuitive to place Plato and Aristotle in the process philosophy

tradition, in several ways they contributed to its development. Plato endorsed much of Heraclitus’ work,

arguing the world that can be perceived is processual, unstable, and changing, hence the need for a

rational, ideal ‘world of forms’ which is stable and timelessly true.[18]

Two major thinkers working in the eighteenth century, Gottfried Leibniz and G.W.F. Hegel


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propelled process philosophy into modernity. Leibniz is considered the father of modern process

philosophy; for process, not substance, was central to most of his theory. He maintained that all things

are not unified substances, but rather concentrations of processes called monads (units), clusters of forces

and activity that constitute reality. All collective agents of the world, these monads, are represented as

active, processual units maintained as long-term processes themselves. Nevertheless, they too unfold and

change in the overarching, integrated system of nature. This holistic treatment of process had important

influence on later thinking in the field

Hegel, may also be considered a prominent process philosopher. Precisely in his notion of the

development of history or thought lies his contribution; the real and ideational worlds operate in a

dynamic of change and process that is ever developing vis-à-vis a dialectic which synthesises opposites

into a new unified—but changing—whole. According to Hegel, it is only through such processual terms

that we can understand reality and the ideas that both describe and formulate it. [19]

Dewey and The American Pragmatists

Drawing on the history of thought laid out by the Greeks and the eighteenth century

processualists, the pragmatic tradition in American philosophical thought became strongly infused with

process thinking by the nineteenth century. Charles Sanders Peirce was one of the first pragmatists

affected. Peirce held, like Leibniz and Hegel, that neither the universe nor what composed it were static.

Instead, constant change and development affect being, and because of ever changing circumstances, a

practical, situation-oriented approach is most appropriate for theorising and acting. Peirce’s philosophy

of nature emphasised chance, spontaneity, and evolution; his pragmatism is compatible with this stance

because, he maintained, thought or theory must ‘prove its utility’ in practice, and this is done in a

processual, dynamic, and evolutionary way.

William James also developed his pragmatism with several process-thinking ideas. His concern

with time and the events which proceed under it has a central place in pragmatism; in his ‘pluralistic

universe’, process is central to the ‘the causal dynamic relatedness of activity and history’. [20] This

concentration of activity becomes a law and novelty and change are no more ‘chance’ than ‘creative

activity’ when understood within the law. Progress occurs not by jumps in advancement, but rather by

‘leaking’ interfused experiences (the nature of which are central) that dismiss ideas of any kind of closed

and static ‘block universe’.[21] This ‘worldview of flux, spontaneity, and creative novelty’, Rescher

notes, ‘projects a philosophy of substantiality without substance’ where knowledge is not found but

made.[22]

The shifting river of process ideas continues to influence contemporary American philosophy and

has emerged as an influential school of thought. At the cusp of the twentieth century, one of the most

prominent British philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead, took up a teaching and research position at

Harvard and thus directly injected American thinking on process which his groundbreaking positions.

The masthead of the journal Process Philosophy, in fact, defines the field ‘as applying principally,

though not exclusively, to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his intellectual associates’. His

thinking in these matters has proved extremely influential and his thoroughness and rigor has anchored

process philosophy as a legitimate and contenting approach.


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Whitehead’s stance took process up directly as its cornerstone. In his major work, Process and

Reality, Whitehead set out a critique of scientific materialism and substance philosophy with a

methodology to cope with what he called ‘the flux of things…the one ultimate generalisation around

which we much weave our philosophical system’.[23] Not substances, but ‘actual occasions’ make up

reality and experience. Relational process at work, Whitehead believed, either shape the internal

composition of new things (‘concretion’) or bring about new successors to realisation (‘transition’). In

Whitehead, entities are enmeshed in a system of processes, and accordingly, as Rescher notes, ‘there

simply are no hard-edged objects with sharp-boundaried locations in space’.[24]

Perhaps the most prominent American pragmatist, John Dewey, offers important relational

insights as well as a means for a practical critique and application of p/r to International Relations.

Dewey’s social and political philosophy is largely concerned with questions of democracy,

individualism, and liberalism, including some radical views on these subjects. Drawing from his larger

philosophical stance, as Stuhr maintains, Dewey ‘claimed that the self is irreducibly social in nature and

argued that the social is the largest most inclusive ontological category’.[25]

Dewey drew on his fellow pragmatists, Peirce and James, as well as their predecessors, in

developing a notion of what he called ‘trans-action’ or relational thinking.[26] Experience, Dewey

suggested, is self-creation that occurs in an open-ended process of human development, leading to

innovation. Coming to terms with time and change both in politics and for the self was central for

Dewey: ‘the ground of democratic ideas and practices is found in the potentialities of individuals, in the

capacity for positive developments if properly developed’.[27] Dewey understood the inherent flux and

instability of existence, and thus withdrew support for any system that would govern life with fixities,

instead favouring a pragmatic, experiential approach adapted to changing times and circumstances. By

1929, in Experience and Nature, he concluded that ‘the import…of essences is the consequence of social

interactions, of companionship, mutual assistance, direction and concerted action in fighting, festivity,

and work.’[28]

Drawing on this, in a seminal work, Knowing and the Known, Dewey and Arthur Bentley set out the

basic outlines for process relational thinking.[29] They distinguished between two strains of

substantialist approaches, self-action (‘things…as acting under their own powers’ and inter-action (thing

[as] balanced against thing in causal interconnection’).[30]

Self-action, characterised by thinking sinceAristotle, holds that entities possess being and are powered by their own essential essence or action. This

thinking is played out in political terms through the classical political theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and

Kant who argue for ‘the will’ and individualism (as well as the scientific tools to evaluate it). This draws

into much of the contemporary social sciences, and colours approaches like rational choice (the basic

unit of analysis is a static individual), game theory (discrete ‘players’ with strategies and rewards make

independent decisions), and even Kantian norm-driven theories (free, moral driven actors are central).

Each requires durable, static, and discrete ontological ‘givens’ as the starting points for any inquiry.

Inter-action, Dewey and Bentley argued, is an approach that places emphasis on the causal

interconnection between entities (which are still static and substantialist in nature). Perfected by Newton,

physical, ‘variable-centred’ approaches interact in causal and temporal ways.[31] The applications of this

approach are also prominent in both contemporary natural and social sciences and particularly in the


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‘structure-agency’ dynamic.

For Dewey and Bentley, the idea of ‘trans-action’ best represents authentic process and relational

thinking. Trans-action, in brief, is a specific understanding of process which sees the socio-political

world as a series of relational transactions between non-detachable ‘entities’ (states, for example).

Trans-action occurs ‘where systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and

phases of action, without final attribution to “elements” or other presumptively detachable or

independent “entities”, “essences” or “realities”, and without isolation of presumptively detachable

“relations” from such detachable “elements”’.[32] This approach, labelled ‘relational’ by Emirbayer,

means that the units or entities in the transaction ‘derive their meaning, significance, and identity from

the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction…which becomes the primary unit of

analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves.’[33] The relation between them is the focus, not

exclusively the entities themselves.

A trans-action understanding is similar to—although in some ways significantly different

from—structuration theory, as elaborated by Giddens as well as by some constructivist critics. Although

the concept of trans-action was first articulated in the early twentieth century, yet despite its potential to

be usefully developed, there has been scant application of these ideas to political analysis.[34]

The pragmatic connection can be found in a strain that runs throughout Dewey’s work—philosophy

has to connect with the real requirements of society in its examinations of the forces shaping

contemporary social conditions; as Stuhr clarifies: ‘Dewey often pointed out that he was not interested in

making philosophy pragmatic, but rather in making practice intelligent’.[35] Dewey’s work informs and

tempers the p/r approach advocated here which does not exhaust entities in global trans-action

—examples of which are provided below—but rather seeks to unlock aspects of both social continuityand change.

Our concept of p/r as an approach to the study of IR differs from traditional perspectives on IR that

involve levels of analysis and prescribed theoretical frameworks. However, it shares a similar underlying

purpose with the more traditional approaches. Our notion of p/r is interested in concrete, empirical

questions about the nature and practices of international phenomena. Ultimately, in our view, p/r is a

pragmatic analytic stance which examines the most important processes that create significant entities

and the possibilities for their social trans-actions.

IV ACTUALISING PROCESS RELATIONALISM

This final section of the paper will attempt to demonstrate the analytic utility of the p/r approach

discussed here. We have argued that the analytic challenges of current world politics resist the theoretical

limitations of much mainstream IR theory. For this reason we have chosen to consider the case of p/r with

two international phenomena which are at once among the most significant and also most analytically

slippery aspects of contemporary world politics: international territorial borders and the state.

Borders and P/r

Most examinations of borders in the social sciences are informed by prevailing geopolitical


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assumptions and positivist epistemologies.[36] Generally, studies have traditionally focused on territorial

conflicts or the status of international legal boundaries, and in those cases, work tends to accept them as

abstract or given expressions of modern political territoriality: in such studies they are become static

reifications of what are, beneath the projections, socially constructed and arbitrary phenomena,

characteristic of a particular form of territoriality. Scant attention has been paid to the active, material, or

discursive dimensions of borders, such as securitisation or narratives of national identity, which support

particular state border policies. Fewer still take a critical approach or, more importantly, seek to explain

the processual systemic forces that have historically formulated the possibilities for forms of territorial

demarcation which are no less than the fundamental principle of differentiation in the international

system, making international relations, as we understand them, possible.

Borders, in fact, open themselves to such consideration; they are complex, multidimensional, and

contradictory, requiring careful, wide theorisation. A broader explanation of the very concept of a

‘border’, from a p/r perspective, can provide good insights into the larger dynamics of the international

state system. Our approach, drawing on developments outside IR, takes them not simply as fixed lines,

but as processes and relations which are continuously reproduced and sustained by the material,

sociological, and discursive practices of the state, other actors, and the international system.[37]

A pragmatic p/r approach—backed by the ontological tradition alluded to above—would seek to

explain how and why particular, real-world forms of political territoriality, such as the modern interstate

border, persist by examining the processes which sustain boundaries discursively and materially across

the international system and across time. While conclusions may still be drawn about the predominance

of state territoriality, for instance, this could be done without assuming states as the pre-interpreted

primary unit of analysis and by unlocking the structures created and embedded in discursive, enabling

territorial practices.

Every border in the world can thus be seen as a particular, historically contingent web of

processes. As borders are essentially forms of political and social processes that (despite what traditional

IR scholars may say) are not static entities or ‘givens’ in the international system. They are, in many

ways, the ‘skin’ of the ‘state as container’ and changes in them reflect the changing nature of states and

the flows over and through them. As a result, a p/r analysis would not begin an inquiry with a

presumption of natural, bounded and integrated entities (like firm ‘given’ boundaries), rather, it would

look at the socio-political and historical factors leading up to, creating, and constantly reproducing them.

This idea may become clearer when contrasted against more orthodox approaches. In much

traditional IR theory, emphasis is placed first and foremost on entities (most commonly the state, but also

individuals, borders, nationalisms, non-state actors, and so on, potentially units in traditional ‘levels of

analysis’[38]). These are taken as ‘given’, existing before any social relations are engaged between two

or more entities; they come theoretically ‘pre-formed’ and then enter into dynamic flows. Ernst Cassirer,

in a well-known defence of this principle, writes ‘Relation is not independent of the concept of real

being; it can only add supplementary and external modifications to the latter, such as do not affect its

“real” nature’.[39]

Because of their unique nature as ‘junctions’ of a variety of different political, cultural, and social

processes and systems—particularly as transnational situations which expose the dimensions and

implications of globalisation in local, personal, and direct ways—borders, when approached from a p/r


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stance, can serve as fruitful ‘laboratories’ for social science research.[40] For example, state policies of

inclusion and exclusion over interstate frontiers, such as migration control, economic integration, or

information flows, are intensely salient social and political practices that have particular relevance in an

increasingly globalising world. Our p/r approach can offer an account of these by investigating the

possibilities for, in Dewey’s terminology, the social trans-actions across boundaries—which in turn help

sustain them, such as a free-trade discourse that promotes liberalised control of capital flows across

boundaries. Moreover, because the approach seeks to uncover the particular conditions which reproduce

territorial borders, it offers the potential for additional insight into both their origin and maintenance as

well as their possible transformation.

In the end, a research agenda concerned with political territoriality that operates from our p/r

perspective would recognise the modern bounded state as only one form of socio-political organisation

in history. Because of the historical contingency of these particular forms of socio-political organisation,

and in order to understand the current formulations of territoriality and identity and in the contemporary

international system, the systemic development of modernity’s ‘dominant spatial story’ that crafted our

current situation must be analysed. This could involve an exposition of pre-modern forms of political

territoriality and the transition, both processually and epistemologically, to the modern dominant state

form. Contemporary practices and discourses of territoriality, then, are historically unique and contingent

political differentiations; they can only be thoroughly evaluated by examining their immersion in a larger

web of long-standing political and social processes and relations which are socially and politically

constructed. The p/r approach advocated here, would, for example, examine concrete activities such as

state boundary regulation that leads to social and political practices of exclusion, intersubjective legal

norms and international recognition, as well as the epistemological assumptions concomitant with

modern cartographic methods.

The State and P/r

The modern state has been much theorised and discussed, and its form and its nature have been

written on widely.[41] Yet among the various theories of the state—the Marxist, pluralist, elite-based and

the neo-Weberian institutionalist—scant attention has been paid to the process of the production and

reproduction of the state. This element is significant not only insofar as it can shed light on what states are

and how they act, but also because the process of the reproduction of state power is itself an important

element of the functional power of states.

At this stage we will focus on this second aspect of a p/r approach due both to the limits of space

and also the pragmatic tendencies of our p/r. The complaint that most theories of the state do not consider

the state’s processual element has two dimensions: the first is that they do not consider the formation and

re-formation (or production and reproduction) of state power as a never-ending process of related social

occurrences which then mould the state as an actualised form of social domination. The point is that the

relations of the state, such as practices of sovereignty, economic restructuring, and tariff barriers, create

the state and the system of relations between them. Despite reference to the mutually constitutive natureof the relationship between domestic and international, made by institutional-functional writers such as

Mann and Giddens, such theories are unable to come to terms with the nature of this process of mutual

constitution understood as the social mechanisms which at the same time produce apparently separate


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spheres.

The second complaint is targeted specifically at the neo-Weberians such as Skocpol, Tilly and

Mann. Their problem is that they fail to recognise that the functional-institutional theory of the state

should be premised on that very functionality as a source of power. When organising a theory of the state

it is a useful heuristic device to separate the institutional elements (such as bodies of rule making) from

functional ones (such as provider of security). Yet there is an ineluctable relationship between institutions

and functions of the state: they simultaneously are, reproduce and justify the state.[42] In essence, the

provision of institutions and functions should be seen not only as a property of the state, but also as a

dimension of its power.

One way around these criticisms which a p/r approach can provide is to think of the state as a bundle

of institutions that collectively make moral, political and social claims which frame the social relations of

the people bounded by the limitations set by a given body of institutions and delimited territory. This

bundle is located at the centre of a series of social networks and its claims radiate outwards in a

centripetal fashion. This set of institutions is distinguished from other social institutions by the nature of

these claims, the most important of which is the transcendental claim that it is the highest legitimate moral

authority within its territory. This is a necessary antecedent to the traditional Weberian statement that the

state is the institution which claims the monopoly of legitimate violence in given territory.[43] The

ultimate deployment of violence is not the best means of distinguishing this form from others. The state is

marked out as manifestly distinct social institution by the totalising nature of the state’s claims and the

way these claims are materially enforced.

State institutions can be differentiated from non-state institutions which perform similar roles

because they are institutions of control, which frame social relations within the society based on the

transcendent claim to moral authority which in turn has a dual international and domestic anchor. The

institutions, taken individually, are pillars of the state – they support the overarching set and reinforce its

claims – while at the same time they are that which they support. They should be considered to be both

the structures of the state which also configure the state. Finally, the international context and production

of this institution is of paramount importance. States must be thought of as institutions that carve up the

social world into separate formal entities, but which are substantively part of a broader social whole. The

transcendent claim to authority over a territory is premised on the assumption that the world is made up of

similar parcels of authority which each regard as of the same type.

This reasonably institutionalist description is informed by a processual view of the institutions and

their functions as a source of power. More specifically, the processual presumptions forces us to consider

the way in which the process of state production and reproduction shapes and influences the nature of

state power. That is, in thinking about the functions of state not merely as conveyor belts of resources to a

dominant centre, one must recognise that they have a further functional aspect which can be thought of as

state ‘power-as-practice’. The extra dimension of functionality is served not just in the instrumental sense

that, for example, taxation provides the state with the means to pay people to enforce laws, adjudicate

disputes and so on. In deploying institutions of power justified in terms of a transcendent moral claim,

these institutions serve the state by reinforcing its position as a solidified network of social power. Theinstitutions are not merely the means for producing and reproducing state power, they are the real forms

of it at the same time as being the reinforcement mechanism. Hence, the playing out of state power can be

described as a form of ‘power-as-practice’, that is the process of state power is itself usable because it is


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invoked in the name of the state. This notion is central to the process of state reproduction for it considers

the ways in which states, as social institutions, are able to reproduce their universalising form of political

and social domination.

The concept of power-as-practice adds a third processual dimension to the traditional functional

notion of state institutions best articulated by Skocpol. Skocpol argues that state institutions have two

roles, they extract power from society and then deploy it to control the territory and population. [44] The

concept sketched out here argues that the practice of this extraction and deployment is itself a crucial third

dimension of state functional power. Power-as-practice attempts to probe the process of state reproduction

for it is central to the state’s political power.

In this way p/r can not only produce a novel interpretation of the origins and nature of the state as an

institution of rule. It is also able to take a more analytic mode and, through concepts such as power-

as-practice produce new insights and explanations of state action. More specifically, the p/r of the state

forces analysts to come to terms with the simultaneous domestic and international nature of the state and

its sources of social power. For example, state collapse—such as the fragmentation of the USSR—is

always seen as a surprising event. Yet, it should not be. The p/r approach focuses on the process of state

reproduction and asks how states are able to maintain their rule, not only in a general sense of states as a

broader form of rule, but also in specific cases of the way in which a given state, such as the Soviet

Union, is able to reproduce its dominance. Because it has answers to the anterior question of reproduction

p/r is able to answer questions regarding state collapse by showing how it could not go on reproducing

itself as it had previously been able to do. Thus a p/r approach not only tells a different story when applied

to IR research questions, but can also produce more useful analysis of the nature of both specific

international phenomena and their interactions which produce given events in time.

V CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have sketched the outlines of a new theoretical tool for the study of world politics

which draws on the traditions of process philosophy and adopts a pragmatic analytic stance that

considers the most significant processes that create significant entities and the possibilities for their

social trans-actions. Having introduced the theoretical and historical background to this approach, we

briefly applied it to two international phenomena: territorial borders and the state.

The utility demonstrated by these two cases could easily be applied to one of the most contentious

topics in IR—globalisation. First and foremost, because globalisation is a set of transformative

processes, is ideally suited for a p/r approach. Furthermore, because of its fundamental ontological

concern with the processual, p/r is well-equipped to evaluate the many contradictions and uneven

consequences of globalisation resulting from its integrative imperatives. This offers opportunities to

yield analytic insights, especially because many traditional approaches in IR are concerned with static

entities and hence epistemologically fall short when trying to grapple with the challenges of

globalisation.

Clearly much work remains to be done, both theoretically and empirically. The p/r which we haveadvocated here seeks to supplement and not supplant more orthodox theoretical approaches to IR. As

such, its promise relies IR’s current theoretical pluralism. Such pluralism is vital if IR is to take full

advantage of its position to offer unique and useful insights on an emerging global era.


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[1] Ian Clark, Globalisation and International Relations Theory Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 16.

[2] Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘Relations Before States: Substance, Process, and the Study of World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 3 (1999): 291-332.[3] Charles Tilly, International Communities, Secure or Otherwise, (New York: Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia

University Pre-Print Series, 1996), 2.

[4] Emirbayer Mustafa, ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 2 (1997): 281-317.

[5] Jackson and Nexon, ‘Relations Before States’.

[6] Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto’, p. 282.

[7] Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

London: Penguin 1969 [orig. 1966], pp. 485-6, italics added.[8]

Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York 1996), 38.

[9] Rescher, Process Metaphysics, 39.[10] Ibid., 39.

[11] Note this does not mean that process philosophy seeks to dispense with the concept of a ‘thing’, but rather seeks to discuss

its significance through a different, potentially more informative way of understanding things. Nor does process philosophy

require or seek a change in ordinary language, e.g. saying ‘pen process’ in place of ‘pen’!

[12] Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto’, 287.[13]

Rescher, Process Metaphysics, 7.

[14] See, for example, Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1999) and the debates which this has provoked, e.g. Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s “Social

Theory of International Relations” and the Constructivist Challenge in Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29.1,

2000, pp. 73-104, as well as other constructivist accounts, such as Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and

Rule in Social Theory and International Relations Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.

[15] Process philosophy, particularly in its religious and theological dimensions, is by no means an exclusively Western

doctrine. The idea had currency in ancient Egypt, is prevalent in Buddhism (which expresses a philosophy of becoming), and

similar conceptualisations existed in early India. See Charles Hartshorne, ‘The Development of Process Philosophy’ in

Philosophers of Process, eds. Douglas Browning and William T. Myers (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 1998).

[16] G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2d ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

1983), frag. 217.

[17] Ibid., frag. 211, 215.

[18] See A.E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work , 3d ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1929).

[19] On Hegel, see J.N. Findlay, Hegel: A Reexamination (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958) and Charles Taylor, Hegel

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).[20] See William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890) and A Pluralistic Universe (New York:

Longmans Green, 1909), 122.

[21] James, A Pluralistic Universe, 153

[22] Rescher, Process Metaphysics, 16.

[23] Alfred North Whitehead, ‘Process’, in Philosophers of Process, 289.

[24] Rescher, Process Metaphysics, 22.

[25] John J. Stuhr, ‘Dewey’s Social and Political Philosophy’, in Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern

Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1998), 85. See also George Herbert Mead,

Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

[26] See John Dewey, ‘The Development of American Pragmatism’.[27] John Dewey, Time and Its Mysteries (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1940), 157.

[28] John Dewey, Experience and Nature (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1929).

[29] John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949).


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[30] Ibid., 108.

[31] Se Andrew Abbott, ‘Transcending General Linear Reality’, Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 169-86.

[32] Dewey and Bentley, Knowing and the Known, 108.

[33] Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto’, 287.

[34] Dewey and Bentley, Knowing and the Known, 108.

[35] Stuhr, ‘Dewey’s Social and Political Philosophy’, 97.

[36]As Newman and Paasi argue, ‘boundary studies have had a long, descriptive, and relatively non-theoretical history’ in

geography and related social science fields. See David Newman and Anssi Paasi, ‘Fences and Neighbours in the Postmodern

World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 22, no. 2 (1998): 189.

[37] For examples of such work, see Tyler Volk, ‘Borders’, in Metapatterns; Eviatar Zerubavel, The Fine Line: Making

Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 2 and ‘Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social

Classification,’ Sociological Forum 11, no. 3 (1996): 421. See also Anssi Paasi, ‘Constructing Territories, Boundaries and

Regional Identities’, in Contested Territory: Border Disputes at the Edge of the Former Soviet Empire, ed. Tuomas Forsberg

(Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1995) and David Newman and Anssi Paasi, ‘Fences and Neighbors in the Postmodern World:

Boundary Narratives in Political Geography,’ Progress in Human Geography 22, no. 2 (1998): 186-207.

[38] On levels of analysis, see Buzan, ‘On Levels of Analysis’ and Kenneth Waltz, Man the State and War (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1954).

[39] Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York: Dover,

1953).

[40] See Mathias Albert, ‘Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity’, in Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity, ed. David

Newman (London: Frank Cass, 1999). See also James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd, ‘Borders, Border Regions and

Territoriality: Contradictory Meanings, Changing Significance’, Regional Studies 33, no. 7 (1999): 594.

[41] Some of the notable monographs include Peter B. Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1985; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States,

1760-1914 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; John A. Hall, Coercion and Consent: Studies on the Modern State

Cambridge: Polity, 1994; Andrew Vincent, Theories of the State Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power,

Socialism London: New Left Books, 1978; Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence; Robert A. Dahl, Democracy,

Liberty and Equality, Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986; David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State: Essays on

State, Power and Democracy Cambridge: Polity, 1989.

[42] The situation in which certain elements of state power are undermined due to a failure to adequately provide these can bethought of as a corollary of this claim.

[43] See Weber, Economy and Society, pp. 901-40. For a discussion of this see Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 145-166.

[44] Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979.


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