The Language of International Actorness

Abstract

Most of us have some preconception of world affairs, no matter how incomplete it is. Scholars of IR are not unanimous in their views on what precisely constitutes the scope of the discipline. While the political state used to be considered the major, if not the only, point of interest for theorists of IR, recent decades have witnessed an uncontrolled growth of other international entities. In this chapter, our focus is on the language used in both IR theory and practice whenever specific reference is being made to the major divisions of the world-system. Those divisions have traditionally been called actors (or agents). Both terms evoke the idea either of acting or of those who actively participate in relations and exert their influence upon other actors.