Fourth Debate, Ir Theory, Plurality, Hegemony, Gap-bridging

Abstract

This article aims at questioning the claim, recently, that IR discipline has become more pluralistic than ever. This claim is grounded in the belief that IR, during the post–third–debate area, has managed to get rid of the grip of the binary positioning within the subsequent “great debates.” It is argued that the constructivist research project, attempting at bridging the reflectivist–rationalist gap through a middle grounded theory, has pushed the field into a non–hegemonic/pluralistic area characterized by an unusual non–binary positioning, labeled as a fourth debate between constructivism, reflectivism and rationalism. The article argues that the epistemological division among constructivists, inherited from the third debate itself, has posed some very limitations to the field’s ambition towards pluralism during the fourth debate, as if the field has been reproducing the same features of the positivist–post-positivist divide during the third debate. In other words, constructivism has become stereotypically trapped by the same unbridgeable divide between two epistemologically incommensurables, rationalist–constructivists and reflectivist–constructivists. This debating pattern has reproduced “another” third debate.