Beyond Dichotomies in World Politics

Abstract

The turn to culture in the study of world politics, and the implicit adoption of contextualism as a normative/methodological framework, has sought to confront the perceived deficiencies of conventional approaches and the universalist and rationalist assumptions that underpin them. Against the certainties of a unified framework of explanation for all phenomena, the culture concept has been formulated as an alternative framework underpinned by an implicit contextualism within which the diversity of subjectivities are given due recognition. In international normative theory, as expressed primarily in a particularistic communitarianism, the cultural turn has sought to award precedence to community based norms and values rather than more abstract global norms which universalize the individual as the principle bearer of rights. The most enthusiastic proponents of the turn to culture have made extraordinary claims for the possibilities that it opens up. The extravagance of some claims, however, is matched by the burden of problems that emerge when concepts of culture and context, and the particular version of community which is posited alongside these, are themselves subjected to close scrutiny. Rather than breaking down the crude dichotomous formulations that abound in perceptions of world politics, culturalist approaches have tended to strengthen them. In addition, the culture concept and allied notions of context have often simply inverted conventional hierarchies, privileging the local over the global or universal while reinforcing conservative, authoritarian and nationalist ideologies and agendas.