1134959
IPT0010.1177/17550882221134959Journal of International Political TheoryFriedner Parrat
research-article2022
Original Research Article
Interpretivists in the English
School: Aren’t we all?
Journal of International Political Theory
1–21
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https://doi.org/10.1177/17550882221134959
DOI: 10.1177/17550882221134959
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Charlotta Friedner Parrat
Swedish Defence University, Sweden
Abstract
This article is a reply to Bevir and Hall, who recently argued in this journal that the
English School needs to reflect more on its philosophy. They are right. Yet, their
preferred distinction between a structural and an interpretivist strand of the School is
not a constructive way forward. This is because their distinction between a structural
and an interpretivist strand of the school is too stark, their chosen dimensions for
sorting through the School are arguably not the most fruitful, and the inclusion of the
English School’s normative agenda must remain independent of whether one is inclined
to start from structure or from agency. After elaborating these points, the article
moves on to suggesting a number of other philosophical issues which would be more
relevant for the English School to work through. It ends with an empirical illustration of
what an integrated English School approach, inspired by structuration, could look like.
Keywords
English School, interpretivism, philosophy of science, structuration
‘[E]ven insiders sometimes find it hard to describe, let alone spell out [the English
School] approach to the field’ (Bevir and Hall, 2020a: 121). How, indeed, can we philosophically make sense of a theoretical tradition, the earliest proponents of which chose
formulations such as this one: ‘Assuming, if we must, that for the purpose of internal
domestic social thinking the state, though theoretically a reality, is in reality no more than
an idea – what now is its status in the context of its inter-relatedness with other states’
(Manning, 1962: 27)? Dunne (1995: 379) in the mid-1990s categorised the English
School as constructivist and structurationist. In principle, we have moved on since then.
Yet, as Bevir and Hall (2020a) have argued recently in this journal, the English School
still needs to reflect more on its philosophy. They have a point, but their preferred
Corresponding author:
Charlotta Friedner Parrat, Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University,
Box 27805, Stockholm 115 93, Sweden.
Email: charlotta.friednerparrat@fhs.se
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distinction between a structural and an interpretivist strand of the School is overstated. In
addition, integration rather than division is characteristic of the English School, and also
a more fruitful strategy when it comes to advancing its particular research agendas, as
well as the study of international relations overall.
To put my discussion of the English School into context, I want to start this article
with a word on what the English School is not. It is not exclusively a history of thought.
Although the study of past thinkers and their approach to world issues is an important
and integral part of the School, its primary concern is with understanding world affairs,
current and historical. The ideas which it studies are therefore primarily those of the
practitioners of international politics, not those of the observers. Now, to some extent
these will necessarily overlap, and more so the further back in history we look, but the
distinction is nevertheless important to uphold in engaging with Bevir’s and Hall’s rather
far-reaching suggestions of how to refurbish the School. I take care to point this out, both
because Bevir and Hall have previously published extensively on the history of thought
(Bevir, 1999; Hall, 2012; Hall and Bevir, 2014); and because there are some indications
that those levels converge in their argument about the English School (Bevir and Hall,
2020b: 157–160).
To this, Bevir and Hall may want to reply that their hermeneutic approach to analysis
does not accept the separation of observer and observed (Finlayson, 2007: 548); and that
the suggestion of differentiating between the two levels is what actually marks a ‘modernist social science’. But it is a difference which has at least sometimes been upheld by
the authors themselves (Hall, 2017), and which is mainly upheld within the English
School. For instance, in the same special issue that Bevir and Hall edited, O’Hagan
makes clear the inherent differences in studying apples or oranges; or in studying statespeople or what thinkers and analysts have previously thought about statespeople: ‘This
article does not focus on the role of civilization at the level of the practices and utterances
of actors. Rather, it employs an interpretivist approach to explore how English School
scholars themselves engage with the concept of civilization to render the narrative of the
globalization of international society’ (O’Hagan, 2020: 204). Similarly, Jackson’s (2020)
contribution is a history of thought. Both of these articles focus on what previous generations of English School scholars have written, not on understanding dilemmas or traditions faced by practitioners (although Manning admittedly straddled the line, Jackson’s
critique clearly engages with Manning as a scholar). Navari’s (2020b: 257) contribution
is a more straight-forward intervention on how the English School works, or perhaps
should work, but still contains an important history of thought component, including the
dilemma Bull probably faced when moving from Australia and India back to the UK,
which led him to re-evaluate his views on international society.
The conflation of political analysis with history of thought affects Bevir’s and Hall’s
substantial arguments about the English School. First, their suggestion to replace what
the English School often calls ‘structures’ with traditions works for the history of thought
in the School, but not as easily for political analysis. This becomes clear when reading
some of Bevir’s and Hall’s previous work on international thought. ‘Traditions’, they
write, ‘live on, change, or die, in the minds of individuals’ (Hall and Bevir, 2014: 828)
Then, these individuals may encounter a dilemma, which forces them to ‘re-evaluate
their inherited beliefs’ (Hall and Bevir, 2014: 829) and change their minds. But this all
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happens at the level of the observer, and it is decidedly individual: each thinker revises
his or her own thinking in a very personal process. In the English School, the main object
of analysis is not individual thinkers but intersubjectively shared understandings, primarily among practitioners. These may, of course, be modified by particularly influential
agents’ individual processes, but more probably, they are modified by common reassessments and reactions to both internal and external prompts.
Yet, if we take Bevir and Hall’s intervention at face value and really engage with their
argument as if they want the English School to study practitioners’ thoughts and acts,
rather than observers’, there are several outstanding issues which they raise and which
merit addressing in this article. The first part of this article details the problems in Bevir
and Halls bifurcation of the English School into an interpretivist and a structural wing,
arguing that we are all interpretivists, although perhaps not exactly in the sense which
Bevir and Hall would prefer. The piece continues with drawing out the implications,
primarily for the English School but with a wink to non-positivist IR at large, of accepting Bevir and Hall’s construction of the field, and outlines some other unresolved philosophical issues that would arguably be more worth the while to discuss as we take the
English School forward. The article ends with an attempt to illustrate the interactions of
structures and agents in English School analysis. For clarity, and in order to make the
discussion more concrete, this part draws on (the primary institution of) trusteeship.
Arguably, it integrates exactly the points that Bevir and Hall highlight to sustain their
argument: the preoccupation of what they call the structural wing of the School with
institutions, and the careful empirical investigation of paper-trails by what they call the
interpretivist wing. The illustration serves to show that although there is some division
of labour in the School, where institutional theorising starts from an aggregate level, and
historical interpretation starts from the level of statespeople, these two levels can, and
often should, be usefully integrated in English School works.
The problem: A Broad Church in need of philosophical
order?
The English School, having, according to the conventional story, eagerly defined itself in
terms of the first debate (as neither realist nor idealist) and second debate (as the classical
approach), has arguably not engaged sufficiently with the third debate,1 the one on metatheoretical positions. The meta-theoretical underpinnings of the School remain remarkably unclear. Bevir and Hall are right about this; however, I will maintain that the
philosophical direction that they suggest for the School is not optimal. In particular, three
parts of Bevir and Hall’s argument are problematic for the English School. First, their
distinction between a structural and an interpretivist strand of the school is overstated.
Second, their suggested dimensions on which to separate the strands are largely misconstrued. Third, the inclusion of the English School’s normative agenda is an important part
of the School’s DNA and must remain independent of whether one is inclined to start
from structure or from agency. The main thrust of the argument is that the English School
already does interpretivist work, so that Bevir and Hall largely end up beating a dead
horse. Yet, if their intervention indeed leads to a reinvigorated debate about philosophical commitments in the School, this will doubtlessly be beneficial to its agenda.
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Structural ES as a modernist social science
Bevir and Hall (2020a) suggest that ‘interpretivists think of “society” as a kind of tradition into which individuals are initiated, not as some kind of structure in which they are
held’ (p. 125). The tradition affects people’s thinking, including their actions, but there is
nothing inevitable about it, and people may well change their minds over time. Bevir and
Hall posit that those they see as structuralists may take issue with their way of thinking
about society as a tradition in which people are socialised, for three reasons.
First, they think that structuralists ‘often conceive the ideational and material as contrasting facets of international affairs’ (Bevir and Hall, 2020a: 125). This is in principle
acceptable: it is possible to separate the cannons from the idea of the cannons. As Wendt
(1995: 78) once pointed out, it will of course matter to our perception of threat or security
who has the cannons, but the cannons themselves seem to be a stable material fact, which
can be analytically separated from the meaning and interpretation which surround them.
This acceptance, however, does not exclude that there is an ideational aspect to the cannons, which might indeed be more important than their physical and material incarnation. This recognition is, arguably, what distinguishes the common philosophy of science
of most in the English School from naturalism. Recognising a material aspect to something does not have to amount to denying its ideational aspect, or to give the material
aspect precedence, analytically or otherwise. Those aspects do not have to be contrasting
but may very well be complimentary.
Second, Bevir and Hall (2020a) point out that ‘structuralists sometimes treat social
concepts as if they captured fixed kinds’ (p. 125). To some extent, this depends on the
time frame. In the longue durée universe of English School analysis, some social kinds
may well be sticky and remain seemingly constant for a certain time: a few years, a few
decades or even maybe sometimes a century. But that does not mean that they are fixed
in principle. The social world changes, and even those classified as structuralists by
Bevir and Hall see social kinds, like the institutions of international society, as evolving
(Buzan, 2004; Friedner Parrat, 2017; Holsti, 2004; Knudsen and Navari, 2019; Spandler,
2015). Inspired by Abbott (2001), I have explicitly argued that what looks like stability
in social kinds such as nation-states or institutions of international society is really reproductive work performed by agents (Friedner Parrat, 2017: 628).
Bevir and Hall (2020a: 126) explain: ‘structuralists might treat social concepts as
natural kinds precisely because they think of them as referring to a material part of the
social world that is not constructed in part by ideas and theories’. Let us explore this with
a social concept of common purchase in the English School such as the institutions of
international society. These institutions consist, according to researchers placed on the
structural side of Bevir and Hall’s division, of reproductive practices and some combination of norms, beliefs, ideas, expectations and principles (Holsti, 2004: 21–22; Knudsen,
2019: 30–31). There is not much of material quality in this conceptualisation, even
though certain of them may over time take on formal overcoats, including material
aspects such as buildings, employees and ceremonial gear. The interrelation between
institutions and their formal anchoring in international organisation is the topic of
Knudsen and Navari’s (2019) edited volume International Organization in the Anarchical
Society. Bevir’s and Hall’s assertion is simply not true. Not even the staunchest of ES
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institutionalists think of social concepts as ‘referring to a material part of the social
world’. Rather, they all acknowledge the social world as ‘constructed in part by ideas and
theories’. This assertion thus refers to a straw-man.
Third, Bevir and Hall (2020a: 126) claim that ‘structuralists sometimes equate social
explanation with the more general explanations of natural science. They suggest that we
can explain social phenomena by reference to the causal properties of structures or other
such social facts’. This seems far-fetched given that many researchers in the English
School tradition have rather sought to avoid causal explanation at all costs (Navari,
2009). One could even argue that a lot of the methodological opacity of the English
School comes down to a refusal to even discuss methods and scientific standards because
of the inapplicability of the available vocabulary, defined by the positivist other (for a
rare exception, see Suganami, 1996, 1999, 2008, 2011).
Causality, or wider causation, has never been a prime concern for the English School,
a circumstance which has often been rehearsed by its more positivistically inclined critics (Copeland, 2003; Devlen et al., 2005; Jones, 1981). Rather, the English School project is one of ‘ontological theorising’ (Guzzini, 2013: 534), a relentless questioning of
‘what is’, perhaps most easily translated to positivists as ‘thick description’ (cf. Jackson,
2020: 140). Yet, this classification of the world into analytical categories may in itself be
a performative action, so that researching and teaching about international society in
extension makes practitioners act as if it were there, and in that sense influence their
thoughts and actions (Friedner Parrat, 2020: 768). Note that this is one of the instances
where observers and observed meaningfully converge.
In the sense of naturalist explanation, social facts such as institutions do not cause
anything. What Bevir and Hall may refer to is instead the widespread idea that social facts,
such as international society and its institutions, in the minds of some English School
scholars constitute things. For instance, sovereign states, and sovereignty as a principle, is
sometimes understood as relational creatures (Jackson and Nexon, 1999; Nexon, 2009),
and in that sense, international society constitutes sovereign states. The way to be recognised as a sovereign state is to be accepted as such by the other states. Yet, even in this
limited sense, structures do not cause anything, but agents, working within the limits of
what they understand as possible and desirable, do the actual acting. This understanding
of structure, which I would claim is commonplace in the English School, is not too far
removed from Bevir and Hall’s preferred ‘traditions’2; still, the category mistake of conflating the political analysis of the English School with the history of thought makes a
direct translation between ‘tradition’ and ‘structure’ impossible. The structure that constrains and enables statespeople can in principle not be re-evaluated and changed by individual agents, as can inherited traditions by individual thinkers. Since this direct translation
between tradition and structure does not work, Bevir and Hall seem to place what they
take to be the structural strand of the English School in a naturalist conception of science.
That is largely overstated. But how do they get to that idea?
Is structuralism versus interpretivism really the central query?
Bevir and Hall arguably use the label interpretivism in an unconventional manner, when
applied to political analysis. As the categories are set up in this article, the researcher’s
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choice seems to one of either naturalism or interpretivism. This might work in the history of thought, but in political analysis, there is more to this distinction. Drawing on
the usual canon of IR meta-theory, one may want to split IR into some version of an
interpretivist category and a naturalist category (Guzzini, 1998; Hollis, 1994; Hollis and
Smith, 1990; Moses and Knutsen, 2007; Wendt, 1999).3 Additionally, those categories
can be split into a holist and a monist compartment. Regardless of whether one starts
from a naturalist or an interpretivist philosophy of science, one might want to study IR
either from a holist perspective where the whole somehow influences the parts, or from
a monist perspective where the parts somehow make up the whole. This second move
seems distorted in Bevir’s and Hall’s conceptualisation of the English School, leading
to a very simplified idea of international society and its institutions as (quasi-) naturalistic objects.
The upper left corner of the resulting matrix, which is where Bevir and Hall place the
‘structuralist modernist’ strand of the English School, is decidedly naturalist and holist
in nature. Yet, few if any, of the researchers whom Bevir and Hall place in that corner
would accept being categorised as naturalists. They do not stress ‘the inevitability or
unavoidability of certain systemic logics, or, at the very least, [. . .] their power over
states and individuals’ (Bevir and Hall, 2020a: 124). Rather, what we might understand
as structures consist of reproductive practices associated with norms, beliefs and expectations, meaning that individuals act as they see fit or best in the circumstances within
which they find themselves. They may recreate a practice, but they may also opt to
modify or adapt it, in a way rather similar to Hall and Bevir’s (2014) understanding of
how dilemmas lead agents to reconsider the beliefs they have received from the tradition to which they belong. The difference is that statespeople in the English School must
do this collectively, if it is to have any effect on the practice. Even international anarchy
is, to paraphrase Wendt (1992), what (agents of) states make of it (for instance a society,
with common institutions). Either way, statespeople’s understanding of the situation in
which they find themselves, and the sense they make of its constraints and possibilities,
guide their actions. There is nothing inevitable or unavoidable in this, although it can be
sticky and sometimes utterly resistant to (agentially induced) change.
The conventional placement of the English School is thus in the upper right corner of
the naturalist/interpretivist and holist/individualist matrix (Dunne, 1995; Navari, 2020b;
compare Wendt, 1999). It is interpretivist in the sense of caring about meaning and
human reflexivity, but at a holist level rather than an individual level. Concepts such as
society show that it is about shared meaning (sometimes also shared over time, which is
what makes some social kinds sticky and durable), and not about individual meaning.
For instance, in Bain’s book (2003) about trusteeship, he follows practitioners’ paper
trail from a British debate over how to govern India, through discussions among the
European colonial empires at the Berlin Conference in 1885, the post-war settlements at
Versailles and San Francisco, and finally to decolonisation. Bain’s account is agential,
and he does not claim that trusteeship is a fixed or natural kind. Yet, it is completely
doable to argue that trusteeship can be understood as a primary institution of international society, as agents’ intersubjective beliefs about it, and actions in its name, had
ordering functions at the time studied by Bain. For the peoples categorised as ‘childlike’
and in need of guidance from trustees, the constraining ordering function of trusteeship
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was undeniable. On that receiving end, it was experienced as a structure which was definitely rather hard than soft, and which legitimised their subjugation. Nonetheless, over
the space of a few decades, it came completely undone as agents struggled to invalidate
it, and finally, even the practitioners in the colonial empires withdrew their support from
it. The legitimising and reproductive work stopped being performed, and the structure
collapsed.
Can only interpretivist be normative?
Buzan (2004) arguably formalised a split in the English School between a normative
wing and a structural wing in his From International to World Society. He was not the
creator of that split, however, as it had for some time been a common procedure to separate normative inquiry from analytical ditto (as Bevir and Hall are clearly aware, see
Bevir and Blakely, 2018: 431). The positivist and naturalist ideal of social science certainly dictated that IR should be analysing international relations, not having normative
opinions on it. At any rate, Buzan’s formulation at the face of it harmonises quite well
with Bevir and Hall (2020a: 122), who place Buzan and all his adepts on the ‘structural’
side of their construction of the English School, and reserve normative thinking for the
‘interpretivists’ on the other shore. ‘Eschewing both intellectual and diplomatic history
on the one hand, and normative concerns on the other, they have advanced what might
best be termed a structural account of international society that borrows heavily from
what we term the “modernist” social sciences’ (Bevir and Hall, 2020a: 121). Yet, in
Buzan’s formulation, this does not say that the ‘structural’ wing cannot work with agency,
but only that it does not prioritise prescriptive normative theory. In terms of the metatheoretical matrix alluded to in the previous section, Buzan’s split is within the upper
right square, whereas Bevir’s and Hall’s is vertical, between naturalism and interpretivism. It is also worth noting that Buzan (2014: 24) retreats from the split in a later book,
claiming that ‘in more recent times the mainstream view is that the normative and structural sides of the argument should not, and cannot, be separated’.
However, Buzan’s partition of the School into a structural and a normative wing was
no more fruitful than Bevir and Hall’s partition of it into an interpretivist and a structural
strand. Of course all individual researchers do not have to do it all, but can start where
their own talent and interest take them, but for the School as a whole it is completely
doable, and often done, to match a holist starting point with a normative outlook
(Williams, 2011). Arguably, prescriptive normative theory is vital to the English School
analysis of change, and one of its distinctive features. Given ‘the performative quality of
the subject matter’ an attitude of possible improvement is also called for (Friedner Parrat,
2020: 770) – not least to avoid the trap of mixing categorisation with recommendation,
or is with ought, pointed out by Jackson (2020). Alleged structuralists are also interpretivists, and their work is open to normative considerations, although not everybody might
choose to take up that challenge.
In addition, the School cannot, and should not, ‘absolve’ the scholars whom Bevir and
Hall call structuralists from the responsibility of being normatively sensitive. Whether
one wants to call the norms, beliefs and expectations that surrounds us, and that to some
extent influence our choices, structures or traditions, those received ‘truths’ should be
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subject to normative scrutiny. Since English School researchers do not treat their structures as determining agents’ behaviour, there are ethical arguments to make about which
practices agents recreate and which they endeavour to modify. Obviously, there are
important questions to ask about the normative effects of defining war ‘in the strict sense’
(Keal, 2017; Pejcinovic, 2013), as well as whose work is omitted when scholars reproduce and teach traditions, including English School theory (Costa Buranelli and Taeuber,
2022; Friedner Parrat et al., 2020). Moreover, there is a quiet normative loading in the
traditional English School understanding of institutions (Schmidt and Williams, 2023).
The institutions that maintain international society contribute to upholding order (Bull,
1977), and so the is easily slides into an ought. The question of whether that order is
worth upholding, and in that case for whom, should not be swept under the carpet.
Yet, the ebb and flow of engagement with normative theory in the School is worth
pointing out. Much of it has been channelled into the debate between solidarists and
pluralists, which originated in Bull’s distinction between enough norm-convergence
between states to enforce international law, solidarism and a pluralism of interests and
norms, which was not conducive to common enforcement (Bull, 1966b). Over time, this
distinction turned into a partly empirical, partly normative, debate over what degree of
norm-convergence could be detected in international society (Jackson, 2000; Mayall,
2000; Weinert, 2011; Wheeler, 2000; Wheeler and Dunne, 1996). It is arguably now
becoming established that these positions are normative rather than empirical, concerned
with whether solidarism (increasingly conceptualised as universalism of liberal norms)
or rather more toleration of differences, as in pluralism, is more desirable (Buzan, 2014;
Williams, 2005, 2011).
Bevir and Hall are right that philosophical choices influence the English School’s
possibility of advancing normative theory, but not quite in the sense they claim. Buzan’s
split between ‘structural’ and ‘normative’ for a while contributed to establishing ‘solidarism’ and ‘pluralism’ as empirical, rather than normative markers: ‘[P]luralism describes
“thin” international societies where shared values are few, and the prime focus is on
devising rules for co-existence within a framework of sovereignty and non-intervention.
Solidarism is about “thick” international societies in which a wider range of values is
shared, and where the rules will be not only about coexistence, but also about the pursuit
of joint gains and the management of collective problems in a range of issue-areas’
(Buzan, 2004: 59). In turn, a terminology of ‘solidarist’ and ‘pluralist’ institutions
cropped up, with a clear tendency to see ‘liberal’ institutions as solidarist, and claiming
for them a level of universalism that was perhaps rather desired than empirically justified. As Bevir and Blakely (2018: 430) put it: ‘There is a link between the expectation of
a normal science of ethics and a vision of modernity as convergent on a final enlightened
phase’. In the end, normative issues are part and parcel of English School analyses, and
are arguably better discussed in terms of what is desirable than in terms of empirical
markers, since those are anyway rarely conclusive (Friedner Parrat, 2020: 771).
In the study of trusteeship, it is possibly less challenging to keep track of the normative aspects when working through an institutional approach than through historical
interpretation. For the direct study of the paper-trail, the normative questions must be
kept at arms-length by a thorough contextualisation of the problem at hand. At the aggregate institutional level, acknowledging the effects of trusteeship on order and on justice
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is more straightforward: it had a profound influence on the world as we know it, in a
robustly unjust way that is still conditioning international affairs today.
The implication: What happened to non-positivist
international theory?
In Bevir and Hall’s depiction of the English School, there thus seems to be two available
philosophical positions. Either one is an interpretivist, working with hermeneutic methods, or one is a ‘modernist social scientist’, which seems to be a very broad category
indeed. In its most extreme, it reads as naturalism, working with positivist methods. Such
a construction of the field erases all space for any non-positivist social science, making the
choice one about positivist social science or humanities. This conceptualisation of the
field is a disaster, not only for the English School but for IR overall, as is impoverishes the
discipline back to the 1980s at least. In particular, it jettisons the constructivist breakthrough, which relied heavily on English School works, understood as ‘the traditional
approach’ (Bull, 1966a) to provide footholds in their struggle for recognition by the
American mainstream (Der Derian, 1995). This break-through was a precondition for
many of the disciplinary moves and turns taking place since then, including the ‘historical
turn’ and the revival of the history of international thought (Hall, 2017). All of this, the
move suggested by Bevir and Hall threatens to throw out with the proverbial bath water.
Embracing interpretivism, write Bevir and Hall (2020b: 164), would mean ‘returning
the English school to the study of agents and to seeing “international society” as a contingent construct that exists in the minds of actors and observers, rather than some kind
of structure [. . .]. It would not imply a complete turning away from interest in institutions, but it would involve affirming the early English school’s position that they are also
contingent mental constructs, socially generated and sustained, reflecting the beliefs of
engaged agents about their rules, usefulness and propriety’. This hints that the argument
hinges on the ontology of social facts such as institutions. The English School should, in
Bevir and Hall’s version, not think of international society or its institutions as something
that actually exists, but solely as ideas in the minds of participants and/or observers.
Perhaps this is the main point of contention between alleged structuralists and interpretivists of the kind Bevir and Hall want to see. But I maintain that it is a red herring.
Rather, English School researchers are in general very accepting of the notion that
changes come with agency.
An alternative way of understanding international society and its institutions is that
they get ontological existence because observers and practitioners believe in them, find
them useful or act as if they were there. Moreover, when people like Manning, Wight or
Bull moved between the academy and the British Foreign Office or larger policy world,
they brought ideas with them in both directions. Those ideas were subsequently spread to
their students through their teaching, and in larger circles through their commentary and
authorship. There is some support for this notion of performativity also in the British
Committee works that Bevir and Hall reference; for instance, Butterfield (1966: 132–133)
argues that earlier international societies (before seventeenth century Europe) did not
have a balance of power, because they did not think of it as such. And Manning’s (1962)
work is of course replete with references to ‘notional’ entities which exist ‘in effect’.
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Buzan (2004: 12–14) suggests that three versions of international society can be distinguished: a set of ideas in the minds of practitioners, a set of ideas in the minds of theorists (like Wight’s three traditions), or a set of concepts imposed by external observers.
He, moreover, points out that among those who see international society as ideas in the
minds of theorists, ‘there is some tendency [. . .] to treat the English School as part of the
history of ideas, and therefore as essentially a philosophical debate, as opposed to a discussion about the condition of the real world’ (Buzan, 2004: 13). Here, the difference
between doing history of thought and doing political analysis resurfaces. A historian of
thought would obviously be interested in the ideas in the minds of theorists and, to some
extent, practitioners. Meanwhile, the political analyst is more focused on the ideas of the
practitioners, and analyses them with the help of externally imposed concepts or idealtypes (perhaps derived from the work of the intellectual historian), which may or may
not harmonise with the vocabulary of the practitioners themselves. In the case of the
English School, arguably, the analysts’ concepts harmonise rather well with the practitioners’, which is related to the above argument about performativity.
Yet, international society could very well exist in all of the versions above, especially
if we historicise its evolution. As an idea in the minds of statespeople and political thinkers, as well as an analytical tool for observers, it can have performative effects, which
over time makes it ontologically real (Friedner Parrat, 2019: 84–86). In a thumbnail
sketch, a concept, which originated as an idea by legal thinkers in early modern Europe,
can find its way into practitioners’ own understanding of how they are managing their
relations within la famille des nations, be taught to generations of students by teachers
like Manning, and eventually become an established truth for both statespeople, analysts
and the general public.
Outstanding philosophical issues in need of discussion
Despite claiming that Bevir’s and Hall’s critique of the English School grounds in the
category mistake of conflating the history of thought with political analysis, rebutting a
number of their arguments, and declaring one of their overall messages to be a red herring, I nevertheless agree with Bevir and Hall that there are unresolved philosophical
issues in the English School. I will not argue for a list of priorities, but simply point to a
selection of three philosophical queries which could use some sustained reflection.
First, one of them decidedly concerns the distinction between material and ideational
realities. Drawing on Wendt’s argument about cannons above admittedly amounted to
taking a shortcut, since the material side of cannons is usually not really questioned by
anyone. The material incarnations of cannons would typically be at least provisionally
accepted as natural facts – even by those who do not buy into the idea that anyone can
verify their existence with their senses – because of their lethal effects which some
unhappy souls are made to experience. But what about the possible material parts of
social facts? Can they have material components at all? Social facts, such as the institutions of international society, sometimes take on ‘formal overcoats’ as mentioned above.
This mainly implies secondary institutionalisation in international organisations, and
then brings with it material attributes such as buildings, staff and ceremonial gear. But
what exactly about that is material? The stones of the building of the old Palais des
Friedner Parrat
11
Nations in Geneva definitely are, but not the functions it contains or the awe it sometimes
inspires. Likewise, the UN staff are real people who exist in a material sense, but their
roles are at least in part ideational. Yet, drawing the line is tricky, as the everyday business of accountants or bureaucrats is not necessarily what one envisages as an ideational
occupation. Finally, ceremonial gear such as red carpets or monuments most definitely
have material incarnations, but their importance resides almost exclusively in their symbolic value; that is, in their ideational component. To agree with Bevir and Hall: the
material part of it does not cause, or explain, anything. But does that make it irrelevant?
Navari argues that there are two basic philosophical positions in the English School
with regard to the ontology of social facts: philosophical idealism and philosophical realism. She defines the idealist position as one allowing ‘the creation of institutions on the
basis of sentiment, hope, and invention’, and the realist position as one ‘which accepts
the necessity of grappling with a recalcitrant reality’ (Navari, 2019: 13). Yet, both of
these positions seem overstated: for anything to change, there must surely always be
some sort of wilful action within the bonds of what harsh reality dictates? Perhaps the
function of the buildings of the Palais des Nations can change (this has happened, as the
buildings went from being the League of Nations headquarters to becoming the UN
headquarters in Europe) without altering the buildings. More probably, however, this
would be, and has been, a process that entailed material alterations such as refurbishments and renovations. Moreover, the UN headquarters were built in New York City to
replace the Palais des Nations, not only to reflect the migration of hierarchy across the
Atlantic, but also because the Palais des Nations ‘had become a symbol of failure’ (Mires,
2013: 85) and as such a reminder of a dated world order. Adding a time component, what
seems to be hard, material reality can over time be reinterpreted in new ideational light,
which subsequently may motivate a change in the material reality. It seems that this distinction, too, could thus be overcome by integration along lines similar to structuration.
Second, another important question, which arguably fudges a lot of conversation in
the School, is the one about the state. In some ES work, the state is treated as an actor,
whereas in other authors, it is clearly a setting which enables and constrains agents working within it; that is, in common ES parlance, a structure. In the second understanding,
order is made through states (rather than by states). Consequently, authors who treat
states as actors can be interpreted as using a convenient shorthand for the individual
agents who do the actual work within the web of possibilities and limitations that they
manoeuver. It should be duly noted that for instance Buzan (2004: 25–26) can be read
both ways. He attempts clarify his stance on this by describing international society as a
second-order society, ‘where the members are not individual human beings, but durable
collectivities of humans possessed of identities and actor qualities that are more than the
sum of their parts’. This entails understanding states as settings that are both constraining
and enabling for the statespeople attempting to act through them. For instance, Barak
Obama, Angela Merkel and Tony Blair are all simultaneously freer to act, and have a
much more limited capacity to do so, now that they are out of office than they were as
world leaders. Yet, Buzan’s statement could also be read the other way around, to describe
the state as an entity with actor qualities. Accordingly, this states-as-actors shorthand
may lead readers’ thought to a world-view where states are understood as actors in their
own right.
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Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)
In Navari’s account, ‘the dynamic elements in ES accounts of international life are
either collective or individual agents who hold institutional positions. They are states,
state leaders, non-governmental organizations, development officers, agency bureaucrats, and so on’ (Navari, 2020a: 467; my emphasis). Navari thus identifies the state as a
possible agent. Yet, other thinkers have rather treated the state as an institution, notably
Holsti (2004: 28–72) and Bull (1977: 68). Arguably, the structuration framework should
allow these two intuitions to coexist so that international politics happens through states,
but the exact mechanics of this are still not clear. Bevir’s and Hall’s suggestion to focus
more on agency is probably helpful here. This leads on to another unresolved issue.
Third, the confusion surrounding the status of the state fudges discussions of structuration.
If one thinks of states as actors, and international society as a structure, one sort of agentstructure problematique follows. But if one thinks instead of statespeople as the agents,
affecting their own state, and the others, and sometimes international society as a whole, in
their sometimes skilful manoeuvring to recreate and modify international practices, norms
and rules, a different sort of structuration follows, with at least three levels. Double this up
with more English School concepts, such as world society, and yet another type of structureagent problematique in the interaction between these two domains might result (Troy, 2022).
Then a fourth floor needs to be added to the integrated analytical warehouse.
Finally, what easily washes out in all of these discussions seems to be history. I have
previously argued that the English School should reject all kinds of determinist history
(both liberal/progressivist and realist/cyclical) and stick to a contingent conception of
history in which matters could have been otherwise (Friedner Parrat, (2020: 765–767).
This argument builds on a long tradition of English School thought, starting from
Butterfield (1931). Yet it is one that is sometimes not factored into our analyses, which
instead, unreflectingly, tilt into one of the determined views, either of continuous progress or of cyclical repetitions. In plain text, the insight about contingent history means
that all our efforts to schematically tease out what is what among structures, constraints,
enabling circumstances and agential creativity and wilfulness can only be meaningfully
demonstrated in historical context. It is only by historicising the contingent evolution of
institutions that the twists and turn they take can be understood, along with the limits and
possibilities they impose on statespeoples’ actions today. This was recognised by the
members of the British Committee in both of their edited volumes (Bull and Watson,
1984: 9; Butterfield and Wight, 1966: 12), and it is emphasised by Bevir and Hall (2020b:
154), although more in relation to the history of thought than to institutional analysis.
This historicisation, in turn, is arguably best done by a careful attention to agents’ actions
and arguments within their own context, where ‘situated agents constantly react against,
support or renovate the institutions within which they act’ (Navari, 2020b: 264). The context and the actions of the agents within that context can be treated as two sides of the same
coin. I now turn to illustrating this very process of integration in the next section.
Soft structures and wilful and creative agents in historical
context
Approaching English School theory as historicised structuration places it well for the
study of change and continuity. The idea of thinking and creative agents, acting for what
Friedner Parrat
13
they consider to be desirable and possible within their understanding of their own context, leaves room for contingent and gradual modification of that context. For this to
work, international society needs to be understood as processual and relational. Agents
are constituted (as agents) and empowered as well as constrained in and through interaction. This can be studied empirically. In this respect, English School scholars could very
well be inspired by other interpretivist inquiries. As pointed out by Hay (2011: 173),
interpretivists have generally very high ambitions for their empirical studies, working
inductively using essentially ethnographic methods. Methods similar to these are sometimes employed in the English School (Costa Buranelli, 2020; Spandler, 2019), or more
often, using detailed historical analysis (Schouenborg, 2022; Yao, 2019).
Below, I offer a brief illustration of what an integration of work that Bevir and Hall
call interpretivist and structuralist could look like. The point of departure is Bain’s
work on trusteeship, which lies close to the history of thought approach favoured by
Bevir and Hall. However, Bain argues for a slightly different view of history as a construction of the past for the present, inspired by Michael Oakeshott. ‘The past as such
is gone and therefore has nothing to say; and whatever lessons are attributed to is are
in fact statements of the desirability of particular conclusions, which are made in the
present about the present’ (Bain, 2009: 160; compare Thompson, 2012). Bain (2009:
162) therefore does not study trusteeship to ‘deriv[e] a transcendental meaning of the
institution, or to determine the conditions which may give rise to a condition of trusteeship, but rather to understand what it denotes in the context of international society’.
This sensitivity to what agents’ thoughts and utterances do in international society as
well as to the historical evolution of the issues at hand makes it well suited to illustrate
how an agential starting-point and a structural approach may interact to make more
sense of world politics.
In the following, I consequently apply an institutional top-down view to Bain’s work
to demonstrate how institutional theorising and agent-centred history cross-fertilise each
other through this story. If primary institutions consist of reproductive practices, coupled
with discursive legitimation of norms, beliefs and expectations, then that discursive
legitimation can be mapped using the ‘paper trail’ left behind by the multitude of agents
involved in its creation and reproduction. In this vein, Bain shows how arguments about
trusteeship developed, and norms emerged, through writings and speeches of statesmen,
politicians and scholars. At the same time, it is possible to theorise how specific aspects
of their context delimits the freedom of these agents to manoeuver; or in other words:
what they take for granted.
An integrated approach to the evolution of trusteeship
New ideas of how the British India Company ought to rule India entered the public discourse in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century by the interventions of
political figures and thinkers. Prime Minister Pitt argued in relation to his India Act
(1784) that the success of the East India Company’s rule in India ‘must chiefly depend
on the establishment of the happiness of the inhabitants, and their being secured in a state
of peace and tranquillity’ (quoted by Bain, 2003: 37). These new ideas of how to rule
others rooted in enlightenment thinking, and thus excluded traditional rights of conquest.
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Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)
‘[T]he architects of empire during the eighteenth century had to confront the legacies of
the American and French Revolutions in a way that the Spanish and Portuguese empires
in the Americas did not. The rights of man and the idea of social contract disallowed all
appeals to divine right, Papal blessing, and the right of conquest as justifications of
dominion in Africa and Asia’ (Bain, 2003: 17). The British claim of a right to rule India
thus came to depend on the assertion that Indians were incapable of ruling themselves
and needed trustees to look out for them.
These ideas of ruling India in a way which ‘contributed to the security and happiness
of the native people’ (Bain, 2003: 43) subsequently came to limit what could and could
not be done in India (or defended in public discourse). British colonial rule was publicly
justified by people like James Mill, Charles Grant and Lord William Bentinck, based on
the idea of trusteeship, stipulating that Indians, and later also other peoples under colonial rule, were ‘immature’ or ‘childlike’ and therefore needed to be ruled by others, who
were deemed ‘mature’ or ‘adult’ (Bain, 2003: 43–50). Bain (2003: 50) takes care to point
out that ‘the idea of trusteeship exerted a rather uneven influence on the policies adopted
by the government of India’ but that it nevertheless shaped arguments about implementation or lack thereof, and in general about the obligations of power. The idea was finally
so entrenched in the British debate as to be perceived as evident by its participants.
‘Trusteeship assumes that the fit, that is, the virtuous, shall rule on behalf of the incapable’ (Bain, 2003: 26). This idea of course presents its proponents with the task of
deciding who is fit and virtuous, and who is incapable. One solution, embraced by thinkers like John Stuart Mill and James Lorimer in the mid-nineteenth century, was to think
in terms of a ‘ladder of civilization’ and thus to distinguish between ‘savages, barbarians
and civilized peoples’ (Bain, 2003: 74–76). As Keal points out, this categorisation of
peoples was often used by Europeans to justify violent conquest in other parts of the
world (Keal, 2017: 167–170; Pejcinovic, 2013). Yet, the idea of ‘civilization’ (Gong,
1984), including the implication that some had it and some did not, was ‘janus-faced’, in
the sense that it was not only employed as a defence for empire by its proponents, but
also as an argument against it by its critics (Phillips, 2012: 7).
The idea of trusteeship was institutionalised at the international level in connection
with the Berlin conference in 1884–1885. Bain (2003: 53–77) again follows the evolution of trusteeship in the British debate, by people like Lord Lugard, over the colonisation of Africa and the partition of the continent between European colonial powers at that
summit meeting, where Bismarck voice to the idea of trusteeship. Once the idea that
Europeans, understood as ‘mature’ peoples, had a responsibility to rule other, ‘childlike’,
peoples for their own good, had become established at the international level, it can be
read as a structure. From the Berlin conference on, trusteeship was, among the European
colonial empires, how dependent territories should be ruled. Its international acceptance
(or institutionalisation) was an enabling circumstance for colonisers, and at the same
time a constraint on action for their representatives, in the sense that deviations from the
discourse of trusteeship would cost. So would at least the most striking violations of it in
practice, notably the massive abuse in the Congo Free State (Bain, 2003: 68–74). In this
sense, the institution of trusteeship now put limits to the level of exploitation that could
be accepted. Those limits were clearly not hard enough to stop abuse and exploitation,
but they were sufficiently substantial to inflict costs on offenders, which comes through
Friedner Parrat
15
in the diplomatic clinch between Britain and Belgium that took place over the Congo
Free State. Even more strikingly, however, trusteeship was an enabling structure for
those representatives of European colonial empires who could use the idea that others
were incapable of governing themselves to legitimate their imperial expansion and
extraction of resources. Obviously, it was also a constraint for those who were put under
tutelage and who would have wished to argue for their right of self-determination.
At this time, there was no perceived contradiction in the imperial states between seeking trade and gains from Africa, and caring for the development of Africans. Europeans
could exploit Africa, but should not harm the indigenous populations. Bain (2003: 60–
68) devotes considerable attention to Lugard’s ‘dual mandate’; that is, to showing how
the economic theories of the time, which united free trade with all sorts of human progress, contributed to making African development, as well as abolishment of the slavetrade, conditional on the spread of free commerce. Bain (2003: 67) writes: ‘It is no doubt
true that delegates to the Berlin Conference worked to increase the wealth of their own
countries; and, in doing so, they concealed their effort to obtain greater access to the
natural wealth of Africa for their traders and investors. However, they also went to great
lengths to establish principles of conduct that were meant to protect Africa’s native
inhabitants from the ravages of slavery and war, and to promote their advancement in the
standards of civilization’. At the Brussels Conference, convened 5 years after Berlin,
many of the same points re-emerged.
At the end of the First World War, the dominant understanding shared by representatives of the European empires was that those territories that had been colonies to
the losing belligerents were still not ‘mature’ enough to rule themselves. They were not
considered to be ready for independence, but would need to be put under the trusteeship of somebody else. To look at how this structure changed, we have to go back to
the agents who continuously re-enacted and reinterpreted trusteeship in practice as
well as in discourse. In Bain’s (2003: 90–94) study, an important agent is J. C. Smuts,
a South African member of the Imperial War Cabinet, who wrote the first proposal of
what became the League of Nations compromise relating to former colonies of
Germany and the Ottoman Empire. Smuts managed to blend the American ideal of
self-government for all peoples with the will of the colonial empires to keep their own
empires intact, into an idea of mandates, administered by trustees but under international oversight. Those mandates would develop progressively and 1 day graduate into
self-government. Yet, in formulating the new understanding of trusteeship which was
to be included in the League of Nations Covenant, involved agents drew on older
thinking, notably on the ladder of ‘civilization’ and Lorimer’s distinction between savages, barbarians and civilised peoples (Bain, 2003: 102). In the League of Nations, this
translated as class A, B and C mandates, supposedly with different timelines and possibilities for future independence.
Once the mandates system was in place at the League of Nations, we might again look
at it as a constraining and enabling structure, delimiting what practitioners and observers
in the context of trusteeship could do. It decidedly had ordering effects, and in this case,
it even received material attributes, such as its venue at the Palais Wilson, and Secretariat
staff to oversee the mandates system. With the Second World War, however, the colonial
empires started to come apart. The efforts their representatives made to hold on to the
16
Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)
colonies looked very different from the American preference for independence for all
dependent territories. This difference in outlook characterised the whole process of reorganisation of international affairs, from the Atlantic Charter, through the Yalta Conference
and all the way to the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco. The controversy
also led the British government to invest in the development of its colonies so as to show
progress in order to hold on to its right to govern them, redefining its own status from that
of trustee to that of partner (Bain, 2003: 115–116).
Yet, there was also agreement on certain points between Britain and the US. ‘For all
their differences, the two sides were not divided on the basic assumption of trusteeship,
namely that most colonial peoples were incapable of managing their own affairs and that
their preparation for independence or self-government, whichever the case may be,
would be a gradual undertaking’ (Bain, 2003: 120). It was thus not perceived by the winning coalition as an available option to provide these territories which independence
straight away. The leaders of the war-time coalition decided at Yalta that trusteeship
should be applied to the territories already in the mandates system, territories previously
administered by enemy powers, and ‘any other territory which might voluntarily be
placed under trusteeship’ (Bain, 2003: 121). This selection is also included in article 77
of the UN Charter. Although the language of the trustees as advanced nations is less
outspoken in the UN Charter than in the League Covenant, it was still taken for granted
that trust-territories need guidance from more advanced nations (Lyon, 1993: 102).
After extended struggle, the UN General Assembly voted to abolish colonialism in
1960. Bain (2003: 135) describes the ideational change thus: ‘[D]ecolonization abolished the distinction upon which the idea of trusteeship depended. There were no more
“child-like” peoples that required guidance in becoming “adult” peoples: everyone was
entitled by right to the independence that came with adulthood. Thus, it no longer made
any sense to speak of a hierarchical world order in which a measure of development or a
test of fitness determined membership in the society of states’. Wilful and creative
agents, such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika and Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana, pushed against the constraints they faced, and employed the possibilities they saw to change a system that oppressed them.
The deinstitutionalisation of trusteeship as a primary institution is evident from both
the invalidation of the practice, and from the rejection of the idea that some peoples
needed others to rule on their behalf. The competing norm of equality of peoples, clearly
expressed through the process of decolonisation, at that point in time proved much more
powerful than the division between mature and immature peoples. General Assembly
resolution 1514, Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples, (1960) passed with no votes against and only seven abstentions. Most of the
previously administered territories were independent by 1975, but a handful of them
remained under international administration up to 1994. The Trusteeship Council consequently closed shop, and suspended its activities.
What we can read from the integration of Bain’s work with the institutional agenda is
the interplay of agents and structures which the agents manage to change, but mostly
slowly and incrementally, by pushing against the constraints they experience. Agents
were the ones who formulated the arguments, convinced their audiences, negotiated the
agreements and led the revolts against oppressive rules. Yet, when seen as an aggregate,
Friedner Parrat
17
those acts and utterances amount to the evolution of a primary institution, which emerged,
became institutionalised, provided (a sort of) order, and then was abandoned. These two
views are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.
Conclusions
As has hopefully been demonstrated throughout this article, the ‘real’ misfit between
Bevir’s and Hall’s brand of interpretivism and the English School does not lie so much
in the difference between a naturalist understanding of structure and an agential understanding of normative changes, but rather in the difference between the work of the historian of thought and the political analyst. Bevir and Hall’s bifurcation of the English
School into a structuralist and an interpretivist strand is largely a straw man. Although
some in the School tend to start with individual agents, and some rather with a holist
understanding of how various agents intersubjectively share meaning and let it guide
their actions, both starting-points square with an imagined mainstream of the School.
Naturalist ontologies are not well suited to the form of enquiries in which the English
School takes interest, and pure individualism also falls outside of the School’s realm.
There is, simply, no positivist other to turn against within the English School.
Intersubjectivity is a common denominator, be it reflected or not, and whether we think
about it as traditions, informing agents’ beliefs and indirectly their actions, or as enabling
and constraining structures, guiding what courses of actions agents see as available,
appropriate or desirable, does not really matter in actual research practice. In both cases,
agents take their context into account when choosing their actions, and actively contribute to recreating or modifying that context.
What is clear is that Bevir and Hall reduce the space between their preferred version
of interpretivist individualism and naturalist structuralism to almost nothing. There is
cause for reclaiming that space, or rather: for rejecting the assertion that the available
philosophical positions are either that of a naturalist structuralist or that of an interpretivist individualist. In order to advance the English School project, we need to hold on to
notions of the performativity of intersubjectively constructed institutions. It is all about
integration and locating middle grounds, not about pushing the extremes.
There are other philosophical questions in the English School, however, that beg for
answers. I outline three of those, but more for pointing out the existence of unresolved philosophical queries than for suggesting constructive ways of addressing them. First, the relationship between material and ideational components of the social world is not really clear
in the English School. Second, the question of whether the state should be theorised as a
structure or as an agent is not settled, and how that decision plays into the sort of structuration which is most fruitful to English School theory also not clear. Third, how to steadily
conceptualise history as contingent rather than determined remains to be discussed.
Finally, I demonstrate, through the example of how Bain’s detailed work on (the intellectual history of) trusteeship can be translated into a structuration approach, that working in the English School needs not be a question of either/or, but of how to integrate
both into a fruitful whole. If this exercise has contributed to clarifying anything about the
philosophical positions of the English School, thanks are due to Bevir and Hall for
prompting it.
18
Journal of International Political Theory 00(0)
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Stefano Guzzini and Cornelia Navari for the conversations that
helped shape the argument of this piece. Thanks are also due to participants in what I jokingly like
to call “The Swedish Committee on the Theory of International Politics”, and to the editor and
anonymous reviewers of this journal. The usual disclaimers apply.
ORCID iD
Charlotta Friedner Parrat
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2616-3276
Notes
1.
2.
3.
Or fourth, depending on vocabulary. In this, I follow Lapid (1989).
As a footnote, it may be noted that ‘structures’, which Bevir and Hall now interpret as quasimaterial objects with causal properties, are of common purchase in the constructivist vocabulary influencing much meta-theoretical reflection in the ES. It was once a permitted term also
for Bevir and Hall, so the materialist/naturalist connotations therefore seem to be a rather new
attribute to the concept (Bevir and Rhodes, 2005; Hall, 2014).
We may note that Jackson argues against categorising methods in this way (Jackson, 2011: 36,
2020: 137), but here I am referring to philosophical perspectives, as are Bevir and Hall.
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Author biography
Charlotta Friedner Parrat is an assistant professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence
University. Her research interests include international society theorising, grand strategy and tactics. She has previously published in journals such as Political Studies, Journal of International
Organization Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Defence Studies and International Studies
Review.