Reflection and implication: Methodology and theorising

Abstract

This article elaborates on the following two questions and their implications. First, how can we as analysts offer compelling explanations for weak states’ agency and behaviours in the current global political and economic environments marked by multiplicity and fluidity? Second, what are the major causal factors that enable or influence weak actors’ agency, and under what conditions is their agency facilitated or constrained? Although an extensive literature in the discipline of International Relations (IR) confirms that today’s world is highly complex and diverse in terms of who or what matters in global politics, the subject of weak states and their agency is still not adequately discussed. Furthermore, the issues of methodology and theorising for the subject remain uncharted territory. By reflecting upon the main arguments and empirical findings of our special issue, this concluding article makes a case for ‘open-ended’ analytic eclecticism as an alternative methodological/analytical scheme, and lays preliminary ground for theorising weak states’ agency in the changed and changing global environments in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• Weak state
• varieties of agency
• methodology
• eclecticism
• provisionality
• theorisation
• multiplex

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to anonymous reviewers and the editors of The Pacific Review for their thoughtful reviews of this article and our special issue. My thanks also go to MJK for engaging with me in invigorating conversations on the ideas of theorisation put forth in this article. The devleoepment of these ideas was also supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-202000000001530).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As is the case in the use of other key IR terms, such as power, sovereignty, and identity, ‘agency’ is a contested term and notion; this is the very reason why the special issue’s introductory article intentionally takes a broad and encompassing understanding, defining states’ agency in international relations as ‘the ability to act on and achieve their intended outcomes in regional or global politics’. But, for the purpose of theorisation, I need to further elaborate on this broad understanding. Taking cues from Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) seminal work on agency, by the term ‘the ability’, which is the key component of ‘agency’, I mean to refer to ‘practical‐evaluative capacity’ to contextualise past acts and events and initiate future projects ‘within the contingencies of’ the present moment.

2 Although I acknowledge that this expansive understanding of agency still operates within the narrow (i.e. reified and substantialist) ontological commitments embedded in mainstream IR theory and I find myself agreeing with post-human, new materialist, and new cosmological sensibilities to ‘relational’ and practice-theoretic thinking on agency in terms of both ontology and epistemology (Efstathopoulos, Kurki, & Shepherd, 2020; Eun, 2021; Kurki, 2020; Tickner & Querejazu, 2021; Zanotti, 2018), this short paper nevertheless focuses attention on the agency of reified entities, namely a ‘state’ in order to preserve the conceptual cohesion of this special issue and thus contribute to providing one seamless account.

3 The dots in Figure 1 indicate the possibility of the existence of other sources of foreign policy actions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yong-Soo Eun

Yong-Soo Eun is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea and the Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge series, IR Theory and Practice in Asia. Yong-Soo is broadly interested in IR theory, identity, Global IR, postcolonialism, and an ontology of the virtual. He is the editor of Going beyond Parochialism and Fragmentation in International Studies (Routledge, 2020) and the author of Pluralism and Engagement in the Discipline of International Relations (Palgrave, 2016). His work has also been published in Global Studies Quarterly, International Studies Perspectives, Perspectives on Politics, and Review of International Studies among other venues.