This study fills what has long been recognized as a major gap in the field of International Relations (IR): an account of when and how change occurs in the structure of the international system. Attempts to create social change, to create or to alter intersubjectivity, are relatively common; the crucial question is why some attempts succeed while most fail. I argue that social
change is itself a rule-governed social activity, which I term institutional politics, and that attempts to create social change are more likely to succeed if they are pursued in a manner consistent with what H.L.A. Hart called secondary rules, or rules about rules. This central hypothesis is investigated in three cases: the emergence of great power management following the Napoleonic war, attempts to ban war as an instrument of state policy in the inter-war period,and the period of institutional contestation instigated by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Available evidence in all three cases provides strong overall support for the central hypothesis and for the other core expectations of my theory. In addition to achieving important descriptive and explanatory advances with respect to the dynamics and morphology of the international
system, the study makes significant contributions to the constructivist literature in IR; namely, it suggests a basis on which to improve conceptual consolidation and comparability, and it moves
beyond a primary focus on norm promoters to include explicit theorization of the evaluative acts of their audiences. The most important policy implication of the study is the need for explicit renovation of the contemporary international system’s stock of secondary rules, to counter a decline in their legitimacy among a much more heterogenous set of members.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/31911 |
| Date | 11 January 2012 |
| Creators | Raymond, Mark |
| Contributors | Welch, David A. |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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