Browsing by Author "Hirvelä, Johannes"

China’s rise and its potential ramifications have been a hotly debated issue in International Relations during the 2000s. The different ways to approach this phenomenon all depend on the essentially contested concept of power and the theoretical understanding of it. The aim of this study is to illustrate how neorealist arguments on power operate in the ongoing IR debate on China’s rise, to assess how well do they respond to some social constructivist critiques, and to reflect what does the rhetoric of neorealist power narratives actually reveal about the meta-theoretical debate in IR. Using snowball sampling and argumentation analysis, I examined five much referenced scientific articles of Sino-American origin (published during 2003-2011) that dealt with China’s rise from different angles. The method used was theory-oriented argumentation analysis that combined ‘New rhetorics’ and Pragma-dialectics. The basis for this methodological choice was the contention that the rhetorical conventions of neorealist power narratives used in the context of China’s rise could expose some fundamental flaws in the Neorealist theory of power as well as reveal who do these narratives communicate with and what kind of debate do they seek to engage in. One key observation of the study was that the power narratives in the articles studied were in essence loyal to the strand of Neorealism represented by Kenneth Waltz: Power was presumed to be a quantifiable collection of capabilities, controlled by rational state actors. This concept of aggregated national power and changes in its global distribution amongst states were considered to be rather a deterministic causal force in the international system. Thus, today’s neorealist conceptualisations of power have barely evolved from those of 1979, despite the spirited debate initiated thenceforth. The neorealist concept of power does not sufficiently take into account how statuses and positions in the global power hierarchy of states are based on how different resources are socially constructed and recognised as legitimate symbols of power. In terms of rhetoric and dialectic, the neorealist power argumentation in the articles studied hint that the different theoretical schools of IR are not engaging in common and active critical discussion when it comes to China’s rise and the concept of power in that context. Both implicit and explicit use of the capability concept of power for the empirical analysis of international system dynamics was seen as a neutral and fundamentally unproblematic step in the argumentation process, which implies that the studied articles sought to participate in the debate mainly inside the neorealist epistemic community, instead of trying to advance their arguments in the meta-theoretical discussion fora. This may indicate that being committed to its knowledge interests, Neorealism is in the process of secluding itself and forming into a more separate field of study – that of international security – where its own materialist narratives of power and states’ status hierarchies remain largely uncontested.