Ole Jacob Sending

AGENCY, ORDER, AND HETERONOMY

Constructivist theories have produced a wealth of insights about the dynamics by which social facts shape actors’ identities and how distinct logics of action are at work in upholding and producing particular orders. Reviewing this literature, I argue that the normsoriented scholarship has failed also on its own terms in that it has tailored different logics of action to the task of explaining particular political orders rather than agency proper. These norm-centred accounts present themselves as agent-oriented, but subsume the exploration of agency within an account of the micro-level foundation for a norm-anchored order. In lieu of such a perspective, I unearth one key insight from Richard Ashley and treat agency as an achievement. It is an effort to balance external forces in such a way as to achieve a semblance of agency or control. This view of agency is, I think, implicit in Kratochwil and Onuf’s work on rules. I explicate this view and demonstrate how it offers better tools with which to explore the historically changing conditions within which actors seek to present themselves as proper agents and to shape any given order, which cannot be reduced to, or subsumed within, any particular logic of action.

“Roving Elites and Sedentary Subjects: The Hybridized Origins of the State”

In the introduction to this volume, Hurt and Lipschutz ask about historical precedents for the present-day hybridization of state power and capitalist accumulation strategies and practices. As is well known, the emergence of capitalism was marked by a number of earlier and relevant shifts of governmental rationality, leading back to the break with mercantilism, which was decisive in singling out economics as a separate sphere in western societies. This process was a key drama in western state building during the mercantilist seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was indigenous to those states. Similar processes emerged in other states only as a result of contact (trade, conquest, colonization etc.) with western states. Characteristically, at present non-western states have a less clear division of political and economic spheres than do western states, and in some states, it makes little sense to talk about separate spheres at all. One of the defining features of what are often called “fragile states” is precisely that the public and the private is not separate, thus contradicting the ideal-typical model of a Weberian state on which the category rests (Eriksen 2011).

The limits of global authority: World Bank benchmarks in Ethiopia and Malawi

Global benchmarks (re)shape political conversations and institutionalise authoritative languages. It does not necessarily follow, however, that benchmarks can exert a lasting or significant influence over policies and behaviour of benchmarked actors. We analyse how the World Bank uses benchmarks to manage its relations with both donors and recipient governments. We analyse the role of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), both at headquarters and in relation to the recent history of two countries in Africa: Ethiopia and Malawi. We find that the CPIA is not – and contrary to what one would expect from the CPIA’s nominal function and the literature on benchmarks – a very important tool for signalling incentives and allocating funds, or shaping the policy dialogue or the World Bank’s strategy in these two countries. Rather, the CPIA is used highly selectively as one factor among many in the negotiations between World Bank staff and governments. We conclude that the CPIA helps establish the World Bank as an actor that embodies global authority on development issues, including with donors, but that there is a tension between such global authority on the one hand, and concrete authority to shape policy in domestic contexts, on the other.

Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics, Introduction

In this Introduction, we accomplish two main goals. First, we provide theoretical tools to better grasp the role and character of diplomacy and how it may be changing in the contemporary era. We develop a relational framework focused on two dimensions: the evolving configurations of state and non-state actors and the competing authority claims that underpin diplomatic practices on the world stage. Second, we begin to theorize the ways in which diplomacy makes and remakes world politics. The remainder of the book offers rich case studies to empirically substantiate our broad argument about the constitution of world politics in practice. In this Introduction, our more limited objective is to explain the significance of our argument for key debates in international relations (IR).

Diplomats and Humanitarians in Crisis Governance