Critical Approaches and The Legacy of The Agent-Structure Debate in IR PDF

Cambridge Review of International Affairs,
Volume 23, Number 3, September 2010
Critical approaches and the legacy of the agent/structure

debate in international relations
Samuel Knafo
University of Sussex
Abstract This article examines the significance of the concept of agency for the project
of critical theory as defined by Robert Cox. Even if numerous scholars recognize the
importance of agency, very few have managed to set up an agenda that uses this notion
in productive ways. I argue that this failure largely stems from the desire to present
power as a structural phenomenon. If we see power as embedded in the very structure of
society, it becomes difficult to see how social forces can escape the inherent tendencies
imposed by structures. For this reason, the issue of social change has continued to elude
critical theory making it difficult to open up space for an approach based on agency.
Against structural conceptions of power, I present an agent-based conception of power
which can serve to contextualize international relations in different terms. By presenting
power in terms of practice, I argue, one can better overcome the reifying gaze of
positivism.
Introduction
Twenty-five years ago Robert Cox established his famous distinction between
problem-solving theory and critical theory by characterizing the latter as being
focused on social change. For Cox,
critical theory, unlike problem solving theory, does not take institutions and social
and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself
with the origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.
(Cox 1981, 129)
Since then, the emphasis on social change has been seen as a powerful strategy
for challenging mainstream approaches in IR. The notion of agency, in particular,
rapidly gained saliency in the discipline as a means to escape the reifying
determinism of positivism. Yet, after three decades, the impact of this concept
remains surprisingly limited. Even if numerous scholars recognize the importance
of agency, very few have managed to set up an agenda that uses this notion in
productive ways. Discussions about agency remain mostly meta-theoretical and
seem to have little impact on concrete studies in the field.
I would like to thank Andreas Antoniades, Joseph Baines, George Comninel, Martijn
Konings, Richard Lane, Thierry Lapointe, Kamran Matin, Alex McLeod, Tony Porter, Dinah
Rajak, Anna Stavrianakis, Jeppe Strandsbjerg and Benno Teschke.
ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/10/03049324 q 2010 Centre of International Studies
DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2010.487896
494 Samuel Knafo

I argue that the limited impact of the notion of agency in the work of critical
scholars stems from its incompatibility with the notion of structural power. Many
scholars take the notion of structural power to be a distinctive component of
critical approaches to international relations (IR). Yet, the agent/structure debate
shows how difficult it is to marry a structural conception of power with a notion of
social change associated with agency. The reason for this incompatibility is simply
that when we present power as embedded in the structures of society, it becomes
difficult to see how social forces can escape the inherent tendencies imposed by
these structures.
The development of a conception of structural power has thus pushed critical
theory back towards some of the problems of positivism, most notably its tendency
to reify IR. Because it overemphasizes dynamics of social reproduction, the idea of
structural power has made it difficult to account for social change. As a result,
critical scholars often misleadingly oppose power to agency as if those with power
have no agency and those with agency have no power. Agency here tends to be
wrongly conflated with resistance and thus reduced to a limited moment of the
analysis. When agency is discussed, it is generally associated with disadvantaged
social forces that are most interested, presumably, in changing society. But, being
weaker, they are often seen as struggling to garner the power needed to realize
their vision of a different world. For this reason, they always seem to be in waiting
for the moment when they will be empowered and finally able to change things.
On the other hand, those with power are seen to have no interest in changing
society. Keen to reproduce a given order, they appear, in fact, to have no agency.
As a result, there often seems to be no change in the making, since we only have
powerless agents of change and powerful agents of reproduction.
This paradox illustrates the lack of space that exists within the dominant
structural framework of analysis of critical scholars. While many of them went
beyond positivism in insisting on the need to widen the range of analysis and
look at the agency of actors, little room was made for agency in most accounts.
Ultimately, this reflexive call for becoming more aware of moments of agency when
people do change society did not offer a platform, or an alternative methodology,
to move beyond positivism. In fact, it became increasingly common for critical
scholars to argue that the agent/structure problem cannot be solved at the level of
method, thus consolidating a drift away from methodology and towards ontology.
Agency has thus been increasingly repackaged as an object of analysis to be studied
rather than a principle of analytical rigour for understanding history on its
own terms.
Going beyond this approach to agency as a distinct object of research, this article
reformulates what is at stake in the agent/structure debate from the perspective of
methodology, recognizing that the central role of agency is not simply a matter of
arguing that there is agency or to study various instances of agency (an ontological
issue), but to reflect on the implications it has for the way we analyse IR. The main
significance of agency is methodological in that it provides a principle of critical
rigour to avoid reification. As I argue, it sets a methodological imperative that is
central to the development of a proper historicist and critical approach.
As a source of rigour for critical thinking, agency helps to specify what can
and cannot be said about power and, more generally, social construction. If the
concept of structural power is incompatible with agency, we need to determine an
alternative way to analyse power which does not deny this agency. In other words,
Legacy of the agent/structure debate 495

the real problem is to solve a riddle: if people act in ways that are not
predetermined by structures, how can one analyse the relationship between
power and structures without reifying them? To address this, we must always
contextualize manifestations of power in relation to agency (for example, in
relation to the specific actors involved and the change they generate). The purpose
of systematically framing the analysis in these terms is to highlight the productive
dimension of power which is too often concealed in analyses that emphasize
structural power.
This article examines the agent/structure debate in relation to the critique of
positivism. Throughout this piece, critical theory is referred to from purely a
methodological perspectivethat is, as a framework that does not posit causal
laws to human nature and interaction outside or prior to history (Bieler and
Morton 2001, 17). The first section outlines the problem for critical scholars wishing
to use the notion of agency in order to move away from positivism. In section two,
the concept of agency will be dealt with more specifically to show how the tension
between structural power and social change has yielded a notion of agency that
fails to address the problems of positivism. Here, I turn to the school of critical
realism, which has pushed the notion of agency as traditionally formulated to its
logical conclusion. In section three, I address the notion of structure in order to
show that the problems with the concept of agency, in fact, reflect a deeper problem
with the way critical scholars think in terms of structural power. This has resulted,
I contend, in an overemphasis on structural determination; one that reifies social
reality by suggesting that discourses and institutions have inherent tendencies that
are imprinted on society regardless of how social actors relate to them. Finally, the
fourth section reconceptualizes the notion of power in relation to agency, which can
allow for a truly historicist conception of power that can overcome the reifying
gaze of positivism. To illustrate what difference this makes, I will draw upon
my previous work on the gold standard and 19th-century international monetary
governance.
Agency and the move beyond positivism
My starting point is the critique of positivism that is often found in the literature
of IR. Positivism refers to approaches that reify social reality and present it
as a normal or natural order, rather than as a socially constructed one. This
definition of positivism follows from the general use of the term among critical
theorists (Lapid 1989; Gill 1993), even if my emphasis differs somewhat from
others.1 Instead of focusing on the separation of the subjective and objective world
(Wight 2006, 15), or the empiricist epistemology of positivism (Smith 1996), I see
the problems of positivism as being rooted in the way it seeks to generalize laws of
social development (Nicholson 1996, 128). This quest for broad generalizations
1
The categories of positivism and critical theory that I use here are not meant to
map exactly the actual configuration of debates in IR, but rather to refer to two distinct
epistemological dispositions that can be distinguished on the basis of their ability to grasp
the process of social construction. In doing so, I wish to problematize the way in which
critical theorists too often distance themselves from positivism without realizing how they
themselves reproduce some of its problems, more specifically its tendency to reify social
structures.
496 Samuel Knafo

drives positivists to develop methodological tools that downplay the specificities
of their object of research in order to infer more general and abstract laws. The
problem with this predilection for transhistorical models is that it creates the
impression of causal laws that are universal because, supposedly, they can be
observed across a wide variety of societies. In that sense, these laws conceal what
is socially constructed, since they always seem to transcend the particular context
in which they are instantiated.2
This positivist framework has two important consequences when one thinks
about social construction. First, positivism neglects social change by virtue of the
method it promotes. Indeed, the more a theory is inclined to derive general laws of
social development, the more that social change loses its significance. Change
becomes a matter of historical curiosity, but it is no longer deemed scientific as an
object of research. Positivism thus tends to split science and history as if they
are different orders of explanation, one being theoretical, the other descriptive.
A second consequence, of particular importance for critical theories, is that
this framework tends to present structures in apolitical ways, as if structures
transcend power relations.3 For positivists, structures always precede politics.
They set out the fundamental laws that govern society. Because they operate at
a general level, they appear impervious to the specific politics that are played
out below them. These structural laws are thus often seen as being generated
independently from power dynamics and, while they set the terrain for social
struggles, they are not directly linked to any specific interest or worldview. It is as
if structural conditions apply equally to all actors.
To illustrate these features of positivism, one can turn to the theory of realism.
This tradition presents the international system as being driven by the imperative
of survival which emerges from the fragmentation of the system into various
communities protected by their own state (Gilpin 1984). Without an overarching
authority, all states are said to be compelled to ensure their own security through
the accumulation of power (Waltz 1979). Not only is this imperative considered
almost timeless, it is also seen as apolitical in that it results from the asociality of
the international system (Waltz 1959). The international system is, in fact, often
deemed akin to a state of nature. In that sense, structural determination precedes
any exercise of power, and is not associated with the specific interests of any social
force. An important corollary is that power is then considered in behavioural
terms as an attribute of states.4 It is the ability of states to mobilize resources in
order to achieve certain goals that matters most here (Aron 1966). Moreover,
power is seen as having little impact on the structures of the international system.
While the distribution of power determines the configuration of the inter-state
2
See Knafo (2008) for a more extended discussion of positivism.

It should be noted that, technically, positivists would often reject the idea of structures
by adopting a more pragmatic view on knowledge. Yet their approach based on
generalization implies the existence of structural laws. Even when they only do as if such
causal laws exist, while thinking that they do not, the method still produces the two
problems raised here.
4
There are some exceptions, notably among neorealists and liberal institutionalists
who have attempted to problematize the notion of power (Keohane and Nye 1977; Baldwin
1989). Here one finds the foundations for a notion of structural power that shares some
features with the critical notions of structural power that will be discussed below. For a
discussion see Guzzini (2000).
3

system, and thus the strategic considerations of states, it is governed by
imperatives that ultimately escape the agency of states. In other words, power
cannot realistically redefine the deeper structures that govern the international
system. Being more permanent, structural laws are deemed to be the object of
science, while politics is relegated to the second order of historical facts.
The tendency of positivism to reify structures was criticized by various
approaches in the 1980s. The common element that united these critical approaches
was a desire to emphasize the process of social construction. This generally meant
two things. First, these early critical approaches rejected the notion that social
structures were neutral, or apolitical. Referring to different types of structures, they
showed how structures are in fact tightly connected to specific interests or
discourses as means through which power is exerted. Social construction was thus
primarily conceived as the process by which social forces establish the conditions,
or structures, for exerting power over others. This implied a re-articulation of the
notion of power in order to move beyond a sole focus on behavioural, and more
apparent, forms of power. Structural conceptions of power were introduced to
emphasize how peoples behaviour is shaped by their environment (Strange 1988;
Gill and Law 1993). As such, structures were increasingly seen as being imbued
with power. In fact, structural determination often became indistinguishable from
power, since, it was argued, the way structures shape society is never neutral
(Lukes 1986).
In rejecting the positivist dualism between power and structure, critical
theorists also challenged the notion that structures transcend history. Since
structures were seen as consolidating the interests and worldviews of dominant
social forces, it became necessary to problematize how these structures are
established in the first place through power struggles. This added a second
critique of positivism as critical theorists accused it of failing to account for social
change. Partly in reaction to the rise of structural realism, numerous authors thus
began to champion more dynamic approaches that move away from the rigid
determinism of positivism (Cox 1981; Ruggie 1983; Ashley 1986).
The focus on social construction was meant to overcome the two key problems
of positivism: first, its tendency to see structures as politically neutral, and,
second, its tendency to neglect the role of social forces in setting them up.
However, this broad notion of social construction raised its own difficulties, as it
proved difficult to reconcile these two aims. Indeed, while the notion of structural
power put a premium on social change, it also, paradoxically, made it difficult
to conceptualize social change because it entailed a circular logic: if structures
empower the very people who are interested in protecting a given social order,
how can we explain change? In other words, how can less privileged social forces
overcome the biases embedded in society in order to transform it? This critical
framework based on notions of structural power thus implicitly gave rise to a
tension between its conceptualization of power and its desire to highlight social
change. Having emphasized that social structures strengthen dominant forces,
change again seemed to elude critical theorists.
One can appreciate, in light of this problem, the significance of the
agent/structure debate. In articulating the notions of agency and structure, one
of the objectives of contributors to the debate was to overcome the problem
of structural determinism (Giddens 1984, 14). In short, having asserted that
structures tend to reproduce a given social order, it was necessary to trace change
498 Samuel Knafo

back to a different source: agency. Hence, by purporting that individuals have the
ability to act in ways that are not predetermined by structures, these authors
hoped to make space for an account of social change. Agency seemed to offer the
perfect means to articulate structural power and social change in a coherent
framework of analysis.5 It apparently resolved a tension that had been created by
the analytical move of socializing structures.
Agency and the elusive source of social change
This section will examine how the debate has evolved in such a way as to
objectify agency and limit its methodological usefulness. More specifically, this
section explores how the inability to overcome the agent/structure dualism at a
methodological level resulted in a tendency to shift the burden to ontology.
Instead of fulfilling a methodological function to frame the analysis, agency has
been turned into an object of research. It is now construed in ontological terms
as a dimension of reality that needs to be taken into account. Yet, because it is
only a part of social reality, it can comfortably coexist with a highly structural
framework (the other part of reality). For this reason, the concept of agency
did little to challenge structural determinism and its tendency to reify social
reality.
This shift towards ontology can be traced back to a fundamental
methodological problem that proved difficult to overcome in the initial stages of
the debate. In IR, the debate was initially built on the basis of Giddens (1984)
important emphasis on the duality of structures. He argued that structures
represent constraints but also resources for action. On this basis, agency and
structural reproduction had to be considered inseparable aspects of social reality
and had to be both taken into account in any analysis. Alexander Wendt took up
this argument in his 1987 article, The Agent Structure Problem in International
Relations Theory.6 One of his main propositions was that the ability of people
to transform their social environment is a crucial dimension of social reality
which needs to be integrated more directly into the analysis along with social
reproduction. As Wendt and Duvall later stated,
the goal of structurationist ontologies is to replace the dualism of agency and social
structure that pervades individualist and collectivist ontologies with a perspective
that recognizes the codetermined irreducibility of these two fundamental units of
social analysis. (Wendt and Duvall 1989, 59)
5
There is another alternative to the inclusion of agency for theorizing social change,
which is to focus on internal contradictions, as if change were generated by the structures
themselves. This type of approach is often associated with world system theory
(Wallerstein 1980; Arrighi 1994). I cannot deal properly with this view here but it has been
extensively criticized elsewhere (Brenner 1977). In short such approaches lead to a form of
functionalism in that social change is always explained in terms of the need to overcome
various problems of the system. Why one specific solution is necessary to overcome a
contradiction rather than another, however, can never be explained within this framework.
6
Although it is debatable whether Alexander Wendt belongs to the critical tradition in
IR, his writings on agency are still couched in the broad critical terms that I outlined earlier.
Wendt, in fact, initially defined himself as a critical theorist whose concern was precisely to
problematize social structures by showing how they are socially constructed (Wendt 1994).

While this intervention was certainly important, the end product remained
flawed. One could agree that there was no separation at the ontological level, but
the dualism quickly reappeared as soon as one tried to derive the implications of
this idea for the way we analyse IR. In the end, the study of social reproduction
and social change could thus never be fully articulated to one another because
each implied a different form of causation. On the one hand, structures were said
to shape the behaviour of agents, establishing the rules and norms that condition
people. On the other hand, agency was presented as the ability to step out of social
conditioning and, to some extent, freely transform structures.7 Hence, the two
types of causation appeared opposite to one another even when both aspects
could be said to exist in a single moment. While both structural determination and
agency could be said to be inherently tied to one another from an ontological
standpoint, the dualism proved difficult to overcome methodologically. This is why
the concept of bracketing out each moment seemed to resurface at various points
of the debate (Archer 1995) as if one needed to abstract from one of the two
modalities in order to perceive the other. As one author put it: as long as actions
are explained with reference to structure, or vice versa, the independent variable
in each case remains unavailable for problematisation in its own right (Carlsnaes
1992, 250).
This very problem prompted various critics to suggest that structuration theory
amounted to nothing more than a restatement of the problem (Palan 2000).
In Explaining and Understanding International Relations, Hollis and Smith (1990)
pointed out that ultimately one could not overcome the problem by superposing
two different forms of causality (one structural and one related to agency). As they
stressed, it is one thing to recognize that people maintain some margin of freedom
even if they are conditioned by their context, but it is another to integrate these
two aspects into a coherent methodological framework. Hollis and Smith
warned against the temptation to resort to a collage of two narratives that
could never be fully articulated to one another. For them, it was all too plain
that structuration theory is more of an ambition than an established body of
theoretical achievements. It is more a description of social life than a basis for
explanation (Hollis and Smith 1991, 406). From this they concluded that, although
it is appealing to believe that bits of the two stories can be added together, we
maintain that there are always two stories to tell and that combinations do not solve
the problem (Hollis and Smith 1990, 7). In other words, the agency/structure
dialectic could not reconcile reproduction and change because it offered no
methodological basis on which to ground an explanation.
It is in this context that one can understand the turn to ontology that has
been particularly associated with critical realism (Wight 2006; Jessop 2008). As
contributors to the debate proved unable to overcome the dualism implicit at the
7
This voluntarist conception presents agency as an inherent property of individuals
which ends up being construed in opposition to social structures that condition them,
rather than as a capacity that is itself socially constructed and which needs to be
problematized as such. We never know where agency comes from other than that it is
always there. Having taken agency as a given, everything that is socially constructed will
then appear as opposed to this innate capacity of agents. Our theoretical framework thus
necessarily projects a conception of agency that is desocialized, since it precedes, in a way,
the social.
500 Samuel Knafo

methodological level, it has become increasingly common to solve the dilemma
by shifting the burden to ontology.8 Colin Wight (2006), for example, pushes the
debate to its logical conclusion by arguing that the agent/structure dilemma
cannot be solved at a theoretical level. He further argues that it is impossible to
predetermine how important agency is before examining specific cases. Hence, it
is only in reference to concrete developments that one can calibrate the respective
emphasis on agency and structural determination (Wight 2006). From this
perspective, the goal is to assess concretely to what extent people do make a
difference.
This type of argument has led to a new framework that is more open to
examining agency as an object of research. Critical realists have made important
contributions examining how various agents manage to influence the course of
history (Bieler 2006; Hay 1996). In part, this involves putting forwards softer
conceptions of structural determination that do not predetermine how things will
turn out. Bob Jessop for example, proposes to see the structural impact in terms of
strategic selectivity (Jessop 2008). He argues that structures do not determine the
outcome but do make certain forms of strategies more viable than others. This can
help to explain why certain strategies are adopted rather than others, but one
should not assume a necessary causal relationship. The goal is to leave the
dialectic between agent and structure open for historical study again with the idea
that it is only at the level of ontology that one can determine how structure and
agents relate to one another. In other words, critical realists turn the issue of
agency and structural determination into an object of enquiry to be debated in each
specific case.
It is a key argument of this article that such an ontological solution rests on an
illusory assumption that one can distinguish agency from structural determination. The criterion to establish agency as a fact hinges here on the possibility of
showing that a significant change has occurred that was not predetermined by
structures. The problem is that the threshold that demarcates this criterion will
necessarily vary depending on the approach or the author. Indeed, what appears
for some authors to be a moment of agency can easily be reinterpreted by others
as being determined by broader structural forces that were neglected in the
first place.
A good example of this problem can be found in one of the classic uses of the
notion of agency. It emerged in the context of the debate on the inevitability of
globalization. During this debate, Eric Helleiner, for example, showed how key
decisions made by state officials allowed financial globalization to proceed, and
drew the conclusion that globalization was a product of state agency (Helleiner
1994). Yet, these decisions, which he saw as enabling globalization, can easily be
read instead as proofs of the very opposite. Is it a coincidence, one might ask, that
all these decisions to liberalize and allow globalization to proceed pointed in
8
Colin Wight (2006) has contested this type of claim by arguing that the literature on
structure and agency has mostly adopted a misleading epistemological focus. However,
this assessment fails to see that the literature, in fact, already assumes that structure and
agency are two aspects of ontology. Hence, the debate has been mostly about finding
ways to recognize this ontological duality by adopting a proper epistemological
standpoint.

the same direction? Hence, various authors have seen in these turning points
the proof that structural constraints were actually narrowing the freedom of state
officials (Goodman and Pauly 1993; Clarke 1987).
The point here is that separating agency from structural determination always
requires an arbitrary distinction that can never be convincingly established on
the grounds of ontology. There is simply no way to determine in reality what
agency consists in, as if it were an object to be distinguished from structural
determination.9 In the end, any action can always be traced back to some form of
structural determination. Because of this difficulty, critical scholars have struggled
to make space for social change in their analysis. Indeed, the difficulty of
establishing historically the agency of actors has led this dimension to be squeezed
out of most accounts except in its most spectacular forms. This generally yields a
conception of social change as being exceptional, shortlived and cataclysmic, as
reflected in the idea of social revolution or epistemic change. If many approaches
in IR insist that agency must play a role at one point in the analysis, that instance is
rarely reached. Social change thus continues to be pushed into the interstices of
history and to be seen as an exceptional case by contrast to the prevalent dynamics
of reproduction.
The limit of this ontological solution to the agent/structure dualism is
compounded by a second problem. Indeed, the notion of agency, as construed,
tends to be a poor, if not sterile, heuristic tool for understanding social dynamics.
The concept is largely constructed as a residual category in that it is defined as that
aspect of social dynamics that escapes, at least partially, structural determination.
Such a conception makes it virtually impossible to theorize agency itself (Doty
1997, 81).10 As a moment of freedom from structural conditioning, it appears to be
something formless about which we can say very little. If one can point to the
occurrence of agency or describe an act of agency, there is little more to say about
it. Arguing that agency is shaped by institutions or structures would be, in effect,
tantamount to denying it. Cast as the ability to escape social conditioning, agency
cannot have any historical shape or be thought in relation to historical structures.
For this reason, the notion of agency acquired a voluntarist and ahistorical form,
one that is mostly defined in abstraction from its social and historical context
(Knafo 2002).
This explains why this notion has had little heuristic value in IR, even when
people admit to its theoretical importance. When authors wish to move beyond
the simple description of individual actions, they are necessarily driven to focus
9
One can add that such a judgment will always rest on an arbitrary assessment that is
more susceptible to confirm our assumptions than to challenge them. When we try to make
the distinction between agency and structural determination everything that appears to us
as normal actions will appear to be determined by structures. By contrast, actions that
strike us as out of the ordinary will be perceived as cases of agency.
10
Interestingly, Doty (1997), while correct in her assessment of this notion of agency,
fails to grasp the implications of this point. Hence she exacerbates the problem by insisting
that agency should be reconceptualized as a moment of undecidability. In doing so, she
takes the limit itself of this conception of agency to be the key feature of social construction
(the fact that it cannot be captured theoretically). In this way, she ends up celebrating the
limits of theory rather than rearticulating a conception of agency that is more productive
from an epistemological standpoint.
502 Samuel Knafo

on structural determination.11 Thus, the introduction of the notion of agency
did little to solve the structural bias of the discipline. Even, constructivists,
who initially championed the notion of agency, fell back on the tendency to
overemphasize the role or social structures and norms at the expense of the
agents who help create and change them in the first place (Checkel 1998, 325).
Most scholars now continue to rely on structural arguments for explaining
social developments, even when they go to great lengths in order to bring agency
back at a theoretical level. Because of this classic tradeoff between explanation
and description, the structural framework of interpretation maintains its strong
gravitational pull. Agency thus continues to be relegated to a descriptive and
secondary role, while the structural moment gives us the analytical material that
does the explaining. Treated as an exogenous variable, agency is invoked in order
to follow the advent of specific social configurations which are then assumed to
last for a given time. Yet this agency seems to have little importance for grasping
the significance of these social structures. It only informs us about how structures
come about.12
Even in the work of critical realists, which generated important studies of social
change and resistance, the desire to maintain a level of structural determination
(even if only as a bias rather than an explicitly causal mechanism) perpetuates a
reifying moment in the way they analyse social processes. To come back to Jessops
argument that structures do not predetermine the outcome, this idea still assumes
that one can determine what are the (potential) effects of structures. In other words,
it changes little in the analysis other than recognizing that these tendencies may not
fulfil themselves. While this keeps the course of history open, it ultimately fails to
address the more important problem of positivism: reification. It is precisely the
assumption that one can predetermine what are the effects of structures that I wish
to put into question in the next section.
In the end, other than asserting that societies could be different, agency
continues to have minimal explanatory value for understanding what did happen.
At best, referring to agency serves here to prove, in a circular fashion, that
there was indeed agency, but this is as far as the notion can go. Coming back
to Helleiners argument about globalization, one can admit that his emphasis
on the role of key officials is fruitful for challenging deterministic conceptions
of globalization. But it offers little in terms of casting a different picture of
globalization. For Helleiner, agency allowed the structural forces of globalization to
11
Similarly, any attempt to substantiate agency irremediably falls back on structural
determinism. Even critical realists, who explicitly tried to carve out a middle ground
between structural determinism and empiricism/agency have repeatedly failed to do so, as
everything they touched turned into structural determinism. For example, Colin Wights
(2006, 212 214) attempts to unpack agency leads him back to structural determination. His
analysis of agency simply falls back on a structural analysis of agents based on identity and
social positions.
12
This is well exemplified by Jonathan Josephs (2008) attempt to put forth the notion of
hegemony as a means to mediate the relationship between structure and agency. Here, it is
not clear how hegemony escapes the agent/structure dualism, since once again agency is
simply used as a means to follow how structures are put in place, but the explanation of
the purpose that such a structure fills is still structural. Agency tells us about the way
institutions (or discourses) are implemented while structural analysis tells us what these
institutions do.

operate, most notably by liberalizing economic flows, but this analysis does not
change how we see globalization itself. Ultimately, globalization might have been
engineered by specific actors, but we are never shown how these decisions
fundamentally shaped the nature of globalization. The notion of agency here seems
to say little more than the obvious: social dynamics are indeed socially constructed.
Hence, critical scholars continue to rely on a structural framework of analysis
to explain what structures do and what is the purpose behind their design. As for
agency, it is now mostly a marker that attests to an authors sensitivity to the
role of social forces in shaping the world, but without really transforming
the structuralist bias that informs the historical analysis. In this way, the idea of
agency is generally evoked as a formal defence against determinism, but one
without heuristic value for explaining the significance of concrete historical
developments. For this reason, I argue that it provides mostly a token recognition
of the problem of social construction.
The limit of structural determination
The intention to overcome the dualism between agency and structure only yielded
unsatisfactory answers. Various strategies were proposed to take both sides of the
story into account in a dialectical manner, but this amounted at best to a statement
of good intentions. As discussed above, trying to compensate for structural
determinism by adding agency to the mix failed to make sufficient room for the
latter.
What then is the problem with structural frameworks of analysis, especially
those that use the notion of structural power? This section will demonstrate how a
structural framework leads critical scholars back towards positivism, a problem
that is particularly salient because of the emphasis on structural power. While
power may be structural in form (ontology), attempts to analyse it in structural
terms (method) lead critical scholars to reify social reality (Sewell 1982).13
The problem of reification can best be explained in relation to the issue that
initially spurred the rise of continental structuralism. What distinguished this
approach was a keen awareness of the radical autonomy of practice in relation
to structures. Saussure (1979) had initially emphasized that language may have
rules, but one still cannot know what people will do with language despite the
constraints that these rules impose. In other words, grammar does not provide an
explanation for why people say one thing rather than another. This distinction was
initially used for the purpose of condemning empiricism and historicism as being
unable to provide a proper ground for defining structures. But this problem can
actually be inverted. If there are an infinite number of possibilities that agents
can exploit within a structural framework, how can the effects of structures be
determined? Are we then simply reduced to describe concrete practices?
13
The notion of structure is a difficult one to specify. At the most basic level, structures
refer to any form of constraints that affects (or structures) how people act. More concretely,
a structure represents a set of arrangements through which social relations are formalized.
There are two different aspects to this formalization: discourses and institutions. These
structures in turn give rise to unintended effects which can themselves create a second
order of structural constraints in the form of unintended consequences that emerge from
the actions of agents.
504 Samuel Knafo

The problem of the gap between structure and practice remains a crucial issue
for social theory today. While it is certainly possible to relate the actions of people
to all sorts of constraints and rules they confront, it would be wrong to assume
that one follows necessarily from the other, as if these actions were the necessary
or normal product of these constraints; as if people were forced to relate in
a specific way to the constraints they experience. Thus, structures do create
imperatives, but this does not mean that there is only one way to react to these
imperatives. To say, for example, that a market obliges people to find ways to
remain competitive does not tell us what strategies people will choose in order to
do so (Knafo 2002, 160). In other words, institutions and discourses provide rules
of the game, but they do not determine how people play it (Konings 2005, 108). In
what follows, I develop further the point that we cannot determine the trajectory
of a society by examining social structures in themselves (for example, the logic
of capitalist accumulation, the discourse of modernity, et cetera). As I argue, the
significance of social dynamics is not given by the structures themselves, but by
what people do with them.
The main issue is a methodological one in that structural readings create a
misleading perspective on social dynamics that blurs the process of social
construction and reifies social reality. Indeed, the argument that structures
constrain or condition people to act in certain ways often leads critical theorists to
focus on those agents who are constrained by structures. But, for every agent who
is constrained, there is always another who is empowered. For example, one can
argue from a Marxist perspective that workers must subject themselves to the
imperatives of the market because they no longer own their means of production
and thus need to enter wage relations to get their means of subsistence. However,
this structural constraint on workers provides at the same time agency for
capitalists who can use this power to exploit labour in various ways. In other
words, when we focus on the restrictive nature of structures we limit ourselves to
only one side of a social relation. What appears to be the product of structural
constraints is always a product of agency when properly resituated within a social
relation that takes into account the power of another actor exploiting these
structural constraints. The agency/structure debate is thus ill defined because it
examines the issue in terms of a dual relation between structure and agent, when
in fact we are dealing with a social relation between agents which is only mediated
by structures.
This point is crucial because structural constraints do not materialize as
imperatives for one agent if there is no other agent who threatens to act upon these
constraints. This is, in a way, a banal statement. Most people would agree that law,
for example, never applies homogeneously across society. Some people have more
means to mobilize it and exploit it than others. Some can afford to ignore it. In this
way, law has no determinate effect that could be derived in abstraction from the
agents involved. Many critical theorists would subscribe to this point. But we
often miss its wider implications because it is often interpreted as a sign of
structural biases rather than an indication of the centrality of agency. In other
words, the key here is not that some agents escape the constraint of the law, but
that the law is mobilized by specific agents and for specific purposes. One cannot
assume how law will be used. To analyse its structural effects in abstraction from
specific uses and actors involved will thus lead us to reify legal institutions and
their effects. Ultimately, legal constraints will take different forms depending on

the way people exploit them, just as workers experience differently the constraints
that stem from the market depending on the way capitalists exploit their
vulnerabilities.
What appears to be a product of structural constraints should thus be analysed
as a product of agency. The reason for this is that one gets a richer picture of social
dynamics when taking into account the people who exploit structures, rather than
simply those who are constrained by them. The focus is then set on what is being
achieved through these structures, rather than simply on the product that results
from these actions. In other words, we examine the process of social construction,
rather than limiting ourselves to its outcome. If we conceal from view the role
played by social actors in order to interpret this phenomenon in structural terms,
we risk giving the impression that structures themselves generate such results. It
leads us to reify reality. Social outcomes then appear to be necessary products of a
structure, as if the latter had an inherent logic.
Unfortunately, this point is often neglected, for there remains an assumption
among critical theorists that differences in the way people exploit structures are
largely secondary and simply constitute variations on a common theme. Indeed,
critical scholars are often adamant that there are limits to the possible which are
established by these structures and which enable us to keep a structural viewpoint
while still entertaining the possibility that, within these limits, concrete strategies
can vary.14 Some Marxists might accept, for example, that capitalists pursue
different strategies of accumulation, yet still emphasize that all capitalists face
tight competitive pressures that limit what they can do. These references to the
limits of the possible represent convenient assertions that enable scholars to
maintain a structural viewpoint while paying lip service to diversity and/or
agency. This idea of limits simply justifies a static analysis of structures (for
example, in terms of how they reproduce something already given) which hinders
our ability to grasp how people construct their social reality through structures.
One can say that this perspective highlights how a state of affairs is maintained,
but social reality is here, in a way, already constructed. Pointing to limits thus
overemphasizes the restrictive nature of structures and downplays their
productive leverage.
This emphasis on the restrictive nature of structures not only reifies social
reality; it reinforces our own assumptions about social reality because the focus is
set on what cannot be done, rather than what is being achieved. Assessing what
cannot be done is highly arbitrary and necessarily depends on what we assume
should be possible. It encourages anachronistic and biased readings that
consolidate our own assumptions about social reality. We thus, for example, often
project on the past our understanding of the present and measure the significance
of past developments in relation to what we assume should be possible. For this
reason, the notion of limit undermines the project of critical theory. It serves to
translate our assumptions of the possible into limits that are confronted by others
14
This is the problem with various scholars influenced by critical realism (for instance,
Bieler and Morton 2001) who insist on the existence of deep structural constraints. The issue
is not whether they exist or not, but whether it is possible to determine the nature of this
structural conditioning. This idea of deep structures drives a wedge between theory and
history, creating again the illusion that one can determine the logic of these structures in
abstraction from history.
506 Samuel Knafo

(or by us). In doing so, we are bound to miss the significance of social construction
because we always play it out in our own terms.15
This represents a significant problem for critical theory because a structural
framework reifies social reality and hinders our ability to challenge our own
assumptions. To analyse power as being embedded in structures creates the
impression that these structures always have the same effect. This makes it easy to
simply project our own assumptions about these structures, and about how power
operates through them. If given structures always produce similar effects, then
what we know about these structures always applies regardless of the context. It is
for this reason that a self-reflexive critical approach, one that seeks to put into
questions its own assumptions, cannot rely on a structural approach to power.
In the end, even if power operates through structures, it still should not be interpreted
in structural terms.
To illustrate this argument, it is useful to look more closely at a historical case in
order to show what difference a systematic focus on agency makes. For this
purpose, I turn to my work on the gold standard in order to illustrate the problem
with a structural approach. According to the critical literature, the gold standard
represents a perfect case of structural power. It was a monetary regime that was
first implemented in Britain in the context of early 19th-century economic
liberalism and which was said to structurally bind economic policy to capitalist
imperatives. The idea behind the gold standard was to anchor a monetary system
on the basis of gold reserves that were held by central banks. The simple
commitment to make banknotes fully convertible into gold at a fixed rate was said
to have a powerful effect in limiting state intervention and promoting selfregulating markets (Ruggie 1982; Capie 2002). For the state now had to be careful
not to adopt policies that could provoke capital outflows and deplete gold reserves.
As scholars of the gold standard put it, states thus had to sacrifice national
autonomy to promote free capital flow and stable conditions of investments.
However, this apparently straightforward interpretation of the gold standard
is misleading and illustrates how a structural viewpoint can lead us to reify social
structures. In line with my argument about structural mediation, it should be
observed that the gold standard imposed certain constraints on states but only
because it created distinct opportunities for financiers to arbitrage and speculate
on currencies (Knafo 2006). Convertibility offered numerous opportunities for
arbitrage and for speculative attacks on banks. To think about the constraints on
central banks without factoring the agency that financiers gained is to limit
ourselves to one side of the equation. In the end, the gold standard was only a
source of concern for central banks when financiers threatened to speculate
against these banks. Hence, central banks experienced differently the constraint of
convertibility depending on who held banknotes, what kind of strategies these
actors adopted and the way they converted banknotes into gold.16
15
This scenario is often played out in an inverted form with the assumption that a
specific limit we confront today is said to have been absent in the past, or in another society.
However, the key assumption is here again what we presume should be or was possible.
16
For this reason, central banks could in fact stray far away from what would be
considered prudent behaviour by todays standard because they were able to negotiate and
make sure that key financiers and merchants would not exploit the commitment of
convertibility in ways that were detrimental for central bankers (Jonung 1984).

This structural bias has not only led scholars to reify this institution but also
reinforced their own assumptions about the significance of the gold standard.
Interestingly, analyses of the gold standard are generally based on a comparison
with more recent monetary systems. Unsurprisingly, the restrictive nature of the
gold standard is thus accentuated by the fact that it proved incompatible with
Keynesian macroeconomic policy (Eichengreen 1992). However, the assumption
that the gold standard served to limit modern expansionary economic policies is
ahistorical because Keynesian policies had never been implemented when the
gold standard was first established. It is thus misleading to emphasize this
constraint of the gold standard as a determining feature of monetary policy in the
19th century.
As I will show in the next section, the gold standard was in fact a flexible
structure of governance in comparison with previous monetary systems (Knafo
2006, 79 80). It was, after all, a means to lend credibility to banknotes by ensuring
that they would be convertible into gold. The irony, then, is that the restrictions
imposed by the gold standard and exploited by financiers were only significant
because of the possibilities they opened up for central banks. While the gold
standard limited the amount of banknotes that could be issued, it still enabled the
issue of banknotes in the first place.
As this example demonstrates, structural interpretations are not specific
enough to grasp the social significance of given structures and the complex
articulation of power that they buttress. In emphasizing the problems with
approaches that focus on the restrictions that structures impose on agents, I do not
wish to deny that there are limits to the possible. Clearly people cannot do
whatever they wish. Yet this does not mean that these limits actually determine
in a significant way what people actually do. To assume that the existence
of constraints or imperatives can explain why agents act in one way or another
entrenches social theory in a form of positivism. It perpetuates the illusion that
people follow a template already laid out by the structures within which they
operate. To put it differently, when we assume that the behaviour of agents can
be deduced from the structures in which they are embedded, we take these
behaviours for granted as the normal manifestations of structural constraints.
We take the strategies adopted by actors as already given by the structures
themselves, as if these strategies were the only way to relate to given structural
imperatives or constraints.
To assume that capitalists, for example, would always exploit workers in the
same way is precisely to naturalize their behaviour as if there was a normal
strategy for them to adopt. Developments such as mass production or Fordism
can thus be almost naturalized as necessary steps in the development of
capitalism, rather than specific innovations by agents in their attempt to come to
terms with their own social reality. For this reason, innovations are too often
minimized and presented as the predetermined outcome of an overarching logic.
In this way, change is reduced to an inconsequential development; one that, oddly
enough, becomes significant only when repackaged as a functional requirement of
social reproduction itself. In other words, this structural conception leads us to
reduce change to its very opposite: a means for reproducing the status quo.
It is important to emphasize this point, because too often the debate over
structure and agency degenerates into a discussion over whether agents have an
autonomous freewill or not. Albeit an interesting question, this is of secondary
508 Samuel Knafo

relevance to what is at stake here. The important problem relates to the way we
make sense of the world. It is an epistemological issue because it concerns the
nature of critical knowledge and a methodological one because it relates to the
type of rigour that is required to overcome the pitfalls of positivism. Thus, I am not
rejecting the notion that structures do, in a way, condition the behaviour of agents.
Rather, I challenge the idea that scholars can derive explanations from the
structures themselves as if they had an inherent causal effect. Doing so reifies
structures and thus reproduces the problem initially identified with positivism.17
A drift towards essentialism is then inevitable and well exemplified in the broad
generalizations that pervade the work of critical scholars. It is on this basis that
some Marxists can posit that 400 years of market development in Western Europe
are ultimately driven by a single logic of accumulation that was presented
by Marx in Capital; or that some poststructuralists can hastily conclude that the
West has been shaped by a similar discursive structure of modernity for the past
300 years.
Agency and the practice of power
The problem of positivism is linked to its tendency to naturalize a socially
constructed reality. Critical scholars sought to solve this problem by proposing a
richer ontology that emphasized social construction. In the context of this move,
agency seemed to fill a key role by highlighting that structures are the result
of past human interactions (Bieler and Morton 2001, 25). Yet, this solution
underestimated the problem of positivism and failed to address it at a
methodological level. As argued above, it is insufficient to point out that people
were responsible for establishing structures (an ontological argument) if we
continue to attribute an inherent logic to these structures. It is not enough to
develop an ontology that posits that structures are socially constructed, if we
implicitly suspend this process of construction when analysing structures as if
they were simply reproducing something already given or inherent.
The key misunderstanding in this debate is the belief that we need to overcome
the agent/structure dualism. The scholars who have attempted to do so have been
forced to shift the focus away from methodology and towards ontology (Wight
2006). By contrast, I argue that the problem is not the dualism itself, as is often
believed. There is simply no way around this incompatibility of structural power
and agency. One can seek to make this relationship as dialectical as possible, but
there will always be a choice to be made even if it is a reluctant one. It is necessary
to recognize this in order to clarify what is stake in this methodological debate.
Once it is accepted that it is impossible to have it both ways, one can finally decide
which of these two sides should be privileged.
17
Another rendition of this problem can be found in Quentin Skinners work. His
magnificent Foundations of modern political thought (1978) shows how political theorists have
repeatedly misunderstood the canon in political theory by focusing on key ideas found in
the work of great theorists. But, as Skinner shows, often the most striking ideas to modern
eyes were in fact common to the era in which these authors wrote. Hence without
resituating these authors in their intellectual context in order to better assess their actual
contributions, commentators often neglect the actual distinctiveness of these theorists, their
agency, in re-appropriating a discourse to challenge certain of its assumptions.

In this section I propose that only a radical emphasis on agency can take critical
theory beyond positivism and reification. Instead of seeing it as a moment or a
specific object that should be identified and studied,18 agency is approached as a
principle of critical rigour to historicize IR. From this perspective, agency is not an
ability that people can choose to activate in certain circumstances; rather, it is
always constitutive of social dynamics. For this reason, it must frame more
fundamentally how we think about social phenomena such as power. To move
beyond positivism and its tendency to reify social reality, it is necessary to account
for agency all along the way of the analysis.
The point in embracing this methodological principle is not simply to limit
what can be said about social reality or to force oneself to only describe the world.
Rather, this methodological principle generates richer insights on power because
it highlights the productive dimension of power which is too often concealed.
While various scholars point out the dual nature of structures at a theoretical level
(enabling and constraining), in practice the analysis constantly gravitates towards
the constraining and determining aspect of these structures.
As one reifies structures by assuming that they have inherent biases, the power
struggles that are played through these structures tend to be reified. The result is
that power becomes construed as a passive phenomenon that seems embedded
in structures. It has no agency, always serving to reproduce an already given
structure. It also appears already settled, as if it is no longer negotiated among
social actors. Seen as being embedded in a structure, power is reified as a force
that keeps having the same effects. The question of practice then always appears
secondary. It is here used for the most part to illustrate how power works (as an
example) rather than to challenge our understanding of it.
To perceive the productive aspect of power, one needs to be more specific in
the analysis than what a concept of structural power can allow for. The best way to
convey this point is to shift the traditional emphasis away from weaker social
forces and resistance and turn to the agency of the powerful. While power is more
obvious at this level, agency tends to slip out of the picture. Theorists often
underestimate the challenge there is for social forces to exert power over others.
This is not an evident process. Firstly, social actors must conceptualize their
complex reality in order to relate to it. For example, trying to conceive strategies
for regulating an economy that is constituted by millions of different activities is a
great challenge that always partly eludes state officials (Scott 1998). Secondly,
developing proper institutions in order to gain leverage over this reality is also
tricky, partly because other agents resist and subvert attempts to do so (Certeau
2002; Crozier and Friedberg 1980).
To say that dominant social forces have more power to determine what should
be done does not mean that they can easily achieve what they set out to do.
Assuming so often leads critical scholars to make three problematic assumptions:
(1) that dominant forces fully understand the problems they face; (2) that they
know how to solve these problems, as if there was a predetermined and objective
course to ensure reproduction; and (3) that they control the consequences of what
they do, as if other social forces react passively to their actions. For this reason,
18
The classic mistake that reflects this bias is the tendency in the literature to conflate
agency and resistance, as if only weaker forces are agents of change.
510 Samuel Knafo

one cannot emphasize enough how power, and the ability to shape society, is
continuously exaggerated and misunderstood by social theorists who focus on
structural power.
Exerting power is always a challenge and requires constant innovations. Indeed,
the social context in which people act always evolves and creates difficulties that
need to be dealt with. For this reason, there is always a pragmatic element in the
way people exploit structures in order to relate to others. This pragmatic dimension
is central to power dynamics and indicates that the question of power can never be
settled. More importantly, it shows that these pragmatic considerations are more
than complications that would limit the effectiveness of power. They shape the
motives that drive power and what is actually being played out between social
forces. People are always working to adjust their strategies in order to gain leverage
over what escapes their control. For this reason, power struggles are mainly about
the attempt to build a certain agency over social phenomena that escape ones
grasp. One can say that power is effective only if it translates into agency. In other
words, what is significant about power dynamics is precisely the attempt of specific
agents to construct and reshape their agency. Power is always about agency; about
the attempt by social forces to develop means to relate to a social reality that partly
escapes their control and which they seek to influence or change.19
To problematize power as a dynamic and constructive phenomenon, it is
important to recover this pragmatic dimension often neglected in a structural
conception of power.20 Failing to specify power in these terms leads us to
overestimate the power of dominant actors and to miss the purpose of given
structures. Indeed, structures are established and transformed precisely in order
to gain leverage and to influence a social reality. Structures are thus intimately tied
to agency. Their purpose is precisely to create agency (for some), not simply to
close it off (for others).
This conception can be defended on ontological grounds, but it is for
methodological reasons that I put this argument forward. The issue is one of
19
For poststructuralists influenced by Foucault, there is no space for a concept of agency
because there is no subject that stands outside of the very practice that constitutes that
subject. Dyrberg (1997, 29) conceptualizes this issue by pointing out that power operates in
a circular fashion by reference to base values and structural determinants, which are at one
and the same time the medium and outcome of power. Structural determinants and
practice are thus bound in such a way that none of these aspects can be seen as standing
outside as a prior determinant that could be said to shape the other. On this issue, see also
Campbell (1996). This idea, however, only stands if one remains within an ontological
framework where the objective is to determine the logic of causality. As Dyrberg correctly
shows, there is no way to isolate a moment of causality that one could ascribe to an agent
constituted in abstraction from practice; as if the agent were defined prior to what is done or
performed. However, if we switch the terms of the debate to think of the issue in terms of
epistemology, that is as a means to problematize what is socially constructed, then there is
no point in seeking the agent responsible for this agency. In other words, the issue is not to
identify the cause that produces what we are trying to explain, but rather to problematize
the significance of what is achieved from the perspective of agents and the way they relate to
their social context.
20
This is not to revert to Roxanne Dotys (1997) ontology of practice as something
radically indeterminate. Rather the objective is simply to problematize social dynamics as
being shaped by the specific problem of practice; by the difficulty social forces have in
relating to a social context that is always specific.

critical rigour. The recognition of agency helps to specify what difference
power makes (its productive aspect) by emphasizing the actors involved in
social struggles and the changes that these struggles generate. What the agency/
structure debate reveals is that it is insufficient to simply argue that agency is an
integral feature of IR.21 Change and reproduction may be two sides of the same
coin,22 but the real issue is to determine what kind of methodology can deal with
this problem. As I showed, attempts to reconcile both perspectives will continue to
privilege structures and reproduction over agents and change. Hence, one cannot
avoid making a choice between these two sides of the story. The argument of this
article is that this choice is not an ontological one which would depend on
determining which of the two is more prevalent. It is a methodological one which
concerns the purpose of analysis or what we hope to achieve through it.
From the critical perspective developed here, the ambition is to determine
which angle provides a more incisive approach to challenge our own assumptions
about IR. As argued throughout this piece, the methods of positivism are based
primarily on generalization and tend to reify social reality. It is this path that
critical scholars are forced to take when they focus on social reproduction and
structural power. While it is attractive because it makes it easier to generalize
conclusions about the way power operates, this structural emphasis pushes
critical theory towards positivism and reification. By contrast, an emphasis on
social change offers a better means to challenge ones own assumptions. It
provides the necessary historical precision to grasp more clearly the difference
that power makes. It is with this purpose in mind that critical scholars must
privilege agency and change over structure and reproduction, because only a
focus on change can really grasp the productive nature of power.
Analysing power from the perspective of agency does not imply that we are
condemned to describe history. Rather, structures and power must be analysed
from the perspective of the agents involved and the change that they generate.
One can still arrive at abstract and general conclusions based on this perspective,
but the process of theorizing moves towards specification rather than
generalization. It aims at showing how a logic we assume to be inherent to a
given structure is in fact specific to a given context.
As discussed earlier, scholars tend to project their own assumptions about a
structure when they only look at the constraints that it imposes. Looking back at the
21
Even if we start from the idea that peoples practice is fundamentally shaped by their
ability to use a strategy learned in one context in order to apply it in another (social
conditioning), these contexts always differ. The same behaviour will thus have different
effects because of the specific context in which it is adopted. Hence, even when replicating a
similar strategy, there is always an innovative aspect to social practices because of their
specific effect within the new context in which they are pursued. This is why people can
often innovate and transform their reality even without realizing the significance of the
transformation that is taking place. In the end, while no actions are truly revolutionary, in
the sense of breaking completely with the past, people still always innovate, even if most of
the time the consequences appear minor. Such social changes should not be dismissed as
superficial on the basis that they serve to reproduce something already given, as if they
simply served to make the structure work.
22
As various historians have shown, people change their structural conditions in the
very process through which they attempt to reproduce or bolster the forms of power they
already have (Brenner 1987).
512 Samuel Knafo

gold standard will help illustrate this. The main reason why scholars misunderstood the gold standard is that they started from the constraint of convertibility.
This implied first that it had been imposed on the state and secondly that it was
motivated by financial interests. However, looking more closely at the history of
the gold standard, one realizes that the opposite was true. It was actually imposed
by the British state on banks, such as the Bank of England, that were, at the time,
private or semi-private. Specifying the actors involved thus gives us already a
precision that changes substantially our assessment of this institution.
But how did this change the power of the British state?23 If it was a constraint
imposed by the state on banks, what form of empowerment did it provide to the
former over the latter? This development was particularly significant because it
unwittingly created new tools of governance. As I have argued elsewhere, the aim
was to develop a new framework of governance for the state to relate to a banking
sector that escaped state control. It was a means to control more specifically the
practice of banknote issuing which was growing rapidly in England. This led,
most notably, to the centralization of banknote issuing under the aegis of the Bank
of England and increasingly subjecting the Bank to state control. In the process,
central banking was progressively constructed as the state experimented with
monetary governance in order to get a grip over developments that escaped its
control.
In sum, a structural approach led scholars to posit that the gold standard had
limited the range of possibilities for monetary policy. However, in doing so, this
literature missed how the gold standard had created a radically new form of
agency by profoundly transforming the way states relate to monetary phenomena.
Scholars thus only saw the restrictive impact of the gold standard (the limits
imposed on central banking) because they took for granted what the gold
standard actually constructed (central banking). When we invert our reading in
order to examine the leverage that the gold standard provided for states, it then
appears a crucial stepping-stone towards the construction of monetary policy,
rather than something fundamentally constraining it (Knafo 2006, 97). It was
precisely this new agency that made the institutions of the gold standard, initially
developed in Britain, so alluring in the late 19th century as other states raced to
emulate its example.
Conclusion
Critical theorists have often misunderstood what is at stake in the agent/structure
debate. By seeking different forms of causality in order to capture two aspects
of social construction (reproduction and change), they have entertained a
23
From a methodological standpoint, the agency/structure debate concerns the way we

contextualize power. When we contextualize from a structural perspective, we fall back on
the structures themselves to define this context and thus explain social developments.
However, this type of contextualization neglects the agents involved and the specific ways
in which they relate to one another. For this reason, I invert the traditional relationship that
is established between structures and agency. Whereas structures, such as institutions or
discourses, are generally perceived as a means to contextualize actions associated with
agency, the significance of these structures must be framed from the perspective of agency:
how can these structures provide leverage to relate to a specific situation?

problematic dualism positing that social construction can be conceptualized as two
distinct modalities. Such a framework offers no space to reconcile the notions of
power and agency, which are thus generally opposed to one another, the former
being privileged to explain the significance of social dynamics. This bias
undermines the project of critical theory, since, in attributing social developments
to the existence of given structures, it further reifies the social reality that theorists
wish to critically engage. A structural framework of analysis therefore
overestimates what can be derived from the analysis of social structures and
consequently tends to relegate any conception of agency to irrelevancy.
The notion of power has been rearticulated in relation to agency in this piece.
As I have argued, the idea of agency tells us more about the limits of theory in
relation to history than it tells us about the actions of individuals. It offers a
methodological rigour that highlights how far one can go theoretically before
engaging history. Furthermore, several arguments were emphasized throughout
this piece. First, structures have no significance outside of the way they are
historically implemented and exploited by specific agents as means to relate to
other actors. Second, I argued that we should take the effects of this construction
more seriously by making social change a systematic focus of our analysis. This
perspective enables one to better specify the significance of social structures and
the struggles for power that revolve around them. More specifically, it brings into
focus the way in which social forces experimentin order to relate to a social
reality that always partly eludes their controland the impacts that these
adjustments have.
The debate on agency and structure is fundamentally about methodology, not
about ontology. It concerns the implications that the concept of agency has for the
way we analyse IR, or more specifically its usefulness for accentuating the critical
thrust of our analyses (that is, their ability to put into question what we take for
granted). Hence, the notions of agency and structures do not refer to two
ontological dimensions of social reality that we need to recover, but rather to a
broader epistemological issue, one that is at the very heart of the opposition
between positivism and critical theory.
It is on this basis that I offered a re-reading of Robert Coxs opposition between
problem-solving theory and critical theory. What lies behind the opposition
between structure- and agent-based readings of social construction is the problem
of reification. It is directly linked to the contrast between positivism and critical
theory. The problem of positivism is that it reifies social reality by assuming that
social dynamics are determined, or constructed, by structures. In seeking to
generalize certain conclusions about structures, it reifies them and creates the
impression that these structure generate an inherent logic, or bias. Approaches
that adopt such a framework present reality as a given. Structural readings
therefore always reinforce our assumptions about the world by reifying it and, in
so doing, blunt the critical edge of theory.
The task then for critical theorists is to address the issue of methodology in
light of this recognition of agency and what it involves for the way we theorize
about IR. Putting into question what we take for granted requires that we
highlight how structures have a different significance depending on the way
specific agents relate to them. Agency provides a methodological rigour to specify
how structures are used differently by social agents in order to gain leverage over
phenomena that escape their control (agent related) and to determine what power
514 Samuel Knafo

produces in this process (social change). This focus on agency is necessary for the
project of critical theory, because without the methodological rigour it provides,
that is without reading all social processes in terms of agency, there is nothing to
stop us from lapsing back into the reifying gaze of positivism.
Notes on contributor
Samuel Knafo is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex.
His work focuses on liberal financial governance and the political economy of
speculation. Recent publications include Liberalisation and the political economy
of financial bubbles, Competition and Change (2009) and The state and the rise of
speculative finance in England, Economy and Society (2008).
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Cambridge Review of International Affairs,

Volume 23, Number 3, September 2010

Critical approaches and the legacy of the agent/structure

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See Knafo (2008) for a more extended discussion of positivism.

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