© The Author 2008.
State Personhood in Ontological Security Theories of International Relations and Chinese Nationalism: A Sceptical View*
Corresponding author. Email: alanna.krolikowski@gmail.com
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
International Relations theory continues to grapple with the question of how to account for the behaviour of corporate actors, such as ethnic groups, social classes or, more often than not, states.1 The viability of certain theoretical approaches that are potentially relevant to explaining contemporary international relations, including theories of socialization, learning and persuasion, partly hinges on resolving this problem. Although it is widely acknowledged that extrapolating theoretical concepts from the individual level to states operating in an international system can be problematic, International Relations theorists continue to use and defend this approach. They often justify this theoretical position using a Friedman-style instrumental rationale: treating the state as a person is theoretically productive because it generates empirically supported hypotheses.2
But the theories that these and other assumptions generate often remain untested, thus creating situations in which a primarily deductive model of enquiry rests upon an instrumental resort to assumptions that lacks
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Ontological Security Theory in International Relations |
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China's Ontological Security, Basic Trust and International Behaviour |
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Ontological Security and Chinese Nationalism |
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Conclusion |
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