Global Liberalism Versus Political Islam: Competing Ideological Frameworks in International Politics1

Abstract

Over past decade, a vibrant international relations (IR) research agenda has developed around role of and dynamics of normative change in world politics (for reviews, see Adler 1997; Checkel 1998; Desch 1998; Hopf 1998). From an initial concern with demonstrating that norms matter (for example, Katzenstein 1996) to more recent research that delineates specific actors, mechanisms, and causal processes by which particular come to be accepted by actors in international system (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998: Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Risse 2000), study of international has emerged as a core constructivist concern in IR. Despite this progress, however, one cannot fail to note that constructivist research agenda on and normative change appears to be curiously ill-equipped to shed light on many recent developments in world politics, such as use of violence by ideologically motivated actors and transnational networks or role of religion and culture in international affairs. Ironically, it is work of someone far removed from social constructivist research agenda-Samuel Huntington (1996) in The Clash of Civilizations--who generated most public debate in 1990s on role of ideational factors in world affairs. And, in aftermath of September 11, Huntington's controversial thesis appears to resonate even more strongly, while meat and bones of mainstream constructivist research agenda-the benign power of international norms, global civil society, and strategies of communicative action, argumentation, and persuasion--appear to have lost some of their sway. This essay will argue that failing of social constructivism to grapple with some of issues that have come to fore in world politics over past several years is result of two theoretical limitations that have constrained constructivist research agenda. The first can be referred to as the liberal bias of mainstream social constructivism, in which constructivists concerned with normative change in world politics have overwhelmingly focused their attention on a relatively narrow range of cases-on actions, discourses, beliefs, and strategies used by liberal actors promoting liberal in international system. They have, thus, universalized strategies of norm promotion through study of only a small subset of contending and actors that compete for attention in international society and have lost sight of fact that liberalism is only one possible ideological framework that can be used for framing political action. The second limitation in current research agenda is a lack of theory regarding relationship between individual agents and global ideological structures--a disconnect between structural theories of international system and micro