Deontic power, authority, and governance in international politics

Abstract

Barnett and Duvall have offered a highly useful constructivist taxonomy of power in response to the rationalist question of why constructivists formerly lacked a theory of power. However, in applying their taxonomy of power to the question of global governance, they draw upon a specific interpretation of their ‘structural’ form of power from the radical theory of Steven Lukes. This move generates a number of ontological and analytic issues that constructivists normally avoid. This article offers three amendments to Barnett and Duvall’s thesis. These involve the (1) recognition and use of the subsumption of the constitutive forms of power that they theorize within the concept of ‘deontic power’, introduced in the institutional philosophy of John Searle and (2) recognition that the posited distinction between subjective and objective interests returns us to a rationalist and materialist ontology that resolves the question of actor interests and motivations through exogenous imputation by the analyst – a retrograde step for constructivist theory that can and should be avoided. (3) In developing the deontic bases of the constitutive forms of power introduced by Barnett and Duvall, we will recover the social means by which power can be exercised as authority.