Episode 27: Everything is Relational

Featured • Theory & Methods • Whiskey & IR Theory

1 02 2023

It’s a nostalgia episode for our two hosts, Patrick and Dan.

They tackle Mustafa Emirbayer’s 1997 article in the American Journal of Sociology, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” According to Emirbayer, “Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static ‘things’ or in dynamic, unfolding relations.”

Was that also true of International Relations? PTJ and Dan certainly thought so back in 1999.
Is it still true today? The two may or may not answer this question, but they do work through Emirbayer’s article in no little detail.

Additional works alluded to in this podcast include Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (1975); Emirbayer and Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency” (1994); Emirbayer and Mische, “What is Agency” (1998); Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II (1993); Pratt, “From Norms to Normative Configurations: A Pragmatist and Relational Approach to Theorizing Normativity in IR” (2020); Sommers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach” (1994); Tilly, Durable Inequality (1998); and Wiener, Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations (2018).

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.