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Agents, Structures and International Relations 220 PDF

This document discusses theories of agency in international relations and the social world. It argues that defining agency simply as "the faculty or state of acting or exerting power" is problematic when applied to social structures, as it blurs the distinction between agents and structures. The document considers an alternative definition of agency proposed by Gayatri Spivak that includes three key elements: accountability, intentionality, and subjectivity. It states that subjectivity is the most fundamental of these elements, and that agency is located within the "freedom of subjectivity".

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84 views1 page

Agents, Structures and International Relations 220 PDF

This document discusses theories of agency in international relations and the social world. It argues that defining agency simply as "the faculty or state of acting or exerting power" is problematic when applied to social structures, as it blurs the distinction between agents and structures. The document considers an alternative definition of agency proposed by Gayatri Spivak that includes three key elements: accountability, intentionality, and subjectivity. It states that subjectivity is the most fundamental of these elements, and that agency is located within the "freedom of subjectivity".

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Agents, Structures and International Relations

their own emergent powers; and human agents have a set of different
emergent powers. Human individuals are, of course, structured entities,
but this does not mean that the analogy between humans-as-agents and
structures-as-agents is a productive one. For the ways in which each
entity is structured endow it with properties not possessed by entities
with differing structures. This point becomes crucial when we attempt
to uncover what it is to talk of agency in the social world.
Barry Buzan, utilising a standard dictionary definition of agency,
argues that what is particularly agential about agents is the ‘faculty
or state of acting or exerting power’.108 This form of language is cer-
tainly common within the natural sciences where the common meaning
ascribed to such usage is that of the natural force or effect on matter, an
oxidising agent perhaps. It is also, perhaps, the dominant view of agency
in the IR discipline with agency generally theorised as the exercise of
power. But in transposing such talk into the social realm, I think Buzan is
guilty of underplaying the specifics of that realm. For what sets the lim-
its of the boundaries between the social world and the natural world are
the dual notions of meaning and intentionality, and both, I would argue,
are properties best reserved for human agents. On the other hand, if we
accept Buzan’s definition we are forced to conclude that structures must
at the same time be agents since they too possess the ‘faculty or state
of acting or exerting power’. Given this, the agent–structure problem
dissolves into a quagmire where no distinction can be drawn between
agents and structures. Given the specific nature of the social world, how
might we reconsider the notion of agency so that we might continue to
distinguish between the properties possessed by geo-historically located
agents and those possessed by geo-historically located structures?
Gayatri Spivak argues that: ‘Agency relates to accountable reason. The
idea of agency comes from the principle of accountable reason, that one
acts with responsibility, that one has to assume the possibility of inten-
tion, one has to assume even the freedom of subjectivity in order to be
responsible. That’s where agency is located.’109 According to Spivak,
then, there are three main elements to a theory of agency in the social
world: accountability, intentionality and subjectivity. Of the three, the
most fundamental is subjectivity, not least because, as Spivak correctly
points out, it is in the ‘freedom of subjectivity’ that agency is located.
Without some level of ‘freedom of subjectivity’ notions of accountability

108 Buzan et al. (1993: 103). 109 Spivak (1996: 294).

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