A constitutive approach to
personality
OR my pursuit of anti-foundationalist theory
Theoretical Perspectives in
International Relations
Dr Kelly Staples, University
of Leicester
Background interests
Cosmopolitan/communitarian debate
 Relationship between sovereignty, rights,
and exclusion
 Application of theory to real-world
complexity/uncertainty
 Stateless persons and refugees

Key questions
Is there an uncontroversial and yet
meaningful way to conceive of
cosmopolitan rights?
 How is the relationship between the
individual and the world mediated by
norms and politics?

Key influences
Hannah Arendt
 [Contemporary Hegelian recognition
theory (and recent work on
misrecognition)]
 Mervyn Frost’s constitutive theory
 Molly Cochran’s critical reading of Frost

Arendt
Relationship between statelessness, sovereignty
and human rights
 Importance of specific relationships, qualities and
‘a place in the world’ to individual status
 Hollowness of guarantees of status based on ‘the
abstract nakedness of being human’

◦ (Arendt 1973: 300)

‘Only with a completely organized humanity
could the loss of home and political status
become identical with expulsion from humanity
altogether’
◦ (Arendt 1973: 297)
Criticisms of Arendt

Constructs an ‘ontological trap’
◦ (Rancière 2004: 302)
Depoliticises rightlessness
 Assumes a binary in/out structure to
inclusion
 Cedes too much power to the state

Frost

‘Ethical constructivism’
◦ (1996: 114)

Engagement with ‘settled’ norms and shared
understandings of practices
◦ (1996: 77-8)

Construction of guiding ‘background theory’ (the
constitutive theory of individuality)
◦ (1996: 127)

Focus on ‘the system of mutual recognition within
which individuality comes to be of value’
◦ (1996: 141)
Criticisms of Frost
Aims too high (in search of ‘proper’
understanding)
 Allows existing institutions to overdetermine his ethical claims
 Insufficiently critical of existing
recognition practices, including the
society of sovereign states

Cochran
Outlines quasi-foundationalism
 Communication (and hence theorising)
requires some basis
 Weak foundations, and their
epistemological implications should be
acknowledged
 The ‘contingent end of the spectrum of
ways of defending ethical claims’

◦ (Cochran 1999: 167)
Theoretical features

Fallibility – acknowledgement of role of
values, contingency and fallibility
◦ Sidestepping of search for ‘universalist
epistemological legitimacy’ (Jabri and Chan 2013:
107; Rorty)



Implies flexibility
Communicability - commitment to the
avoidance of controversial values
Interpretation - critical engagement with
international meanings, identified through
research into aspects of IR
Constructivism
 Critical post-positivism
 Quasi-foundationalism
 Interpretivism

Theoretical application

Rights of stateless persons
◦ Relationship between nationality, state system,
international society and rights
◦ Statelessness as stripping ‘the citizen of his status
in the national and international political
community’
◦ Paradox that rights to nationality/recognition are
provided through exercise of state sovereignty
◦ Exploration of difficulties of recognising people as
persons in their own right
◦ (Staples 2012)
Recognition of statelessness
Rejection of Arendt/Agamben pessimism
(power versus bare life) and of
contentious claims about rights
 Engagement with practical and normative
dimensions of status and recognition

Acknowledgement of non-sovereign
relations of recognition
 Towards tentative claims about the needs
of strangers, and our connections to them

Weak foundations

Practice based (including meanings)
◦ State interest in exclusion and in regulation of
persons’ inter-state movement
◦ Enduring practice of close citizen-state
relations
 Which combine to constitute non-recognition of
statelessness, and frequent forced migrations of
stateless persons
◦ Important inter-state practices of recognition
(with individual effects)
Contingent claims

‘More-or-less universal implications of
plurality’
◦ Linked to widespread assumption that ‘everyone
has been assigned an advocate/protector’
(Goodin 2008: 275)

Specific vulnerabilities associated with
plurality and its general value

Preliminary contours of recognition needs of
stateless persons
Preliminary account of ethical limits of
current practice




I argue that the recognised state duty ‘of a
State to grant its nationals a right of
residence and to receive them back in its
territory’ (Hudson 1953: 10) is connected in
various ways today to recognition of
individual rights
Neither individual rights nor state rights as
independent
Practical tension can be mitigated by closer
attention to meanings and connections
constitutive of state and individual rights
today
Theoretical scope

‘a realistic goal for theory is to explore
the roles that existing institutions and
norms seem to play in enhancing
recognition and to better understand the
limits of those functions so that the
injuries which result might be mitigated’.
◦ (Staples 2012)
Theoretical limits
No possibility of finally reconciling human
rights and sovereignty (or any other
contradictory norms or practices)
 No way to rationalise practices, nor to
advance ‘proper’ understanding of IR

References




Arendt, H. (1973) Origins of Totalitarianism, 5th
edition, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Cochran, M. (1999) Normative Theory in
International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Frost, M. (1996) Ethics in International Relations: A
Constitutive Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Goodin, R. (2008) ‘What is so special about our
fellow countrymen?’, in Thom Brooks (ed.), The
Global Justice Reader, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.
263–83.
Jabri, V. and S. Chan (2013) ‘The Ontologist Always
Rings Twice: Two More Stories about Structure and
Agency in reply to Hollis and Smith’, Review of
International Studies 22: 1, 107-10.
 Rancière, J. (2004) ‘Who is the subject of the rights of
man?’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103: 2/3, 297–310.
 Rorty, R. (1998), ‘Human rights, rationality, and
sentimentality’, in Truth and Progress: Philosophical
Papers Volume 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 167–85.
 Staples, K. (2012) Re-theorising Statelessness: A
Background Theory of Membership in World Politics,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
