The previous chapter left off on a rather dispiriting note, with sociologist Andrew Abbott's cynical-sounding conclusion that, when Constructivism reappears in the social sciences – as it does for him, on a roughly generational cycle – there are ‘different wrinkles … and of course there is a new terminology … [but] there is no real progress, no fundamentally new concept. We simply keep recalling a good idea’. In this chapter, I show that such a characterization of Constructionism beyond IR both fits with the experience of the New Constructivism in IR theory to some degree only, falling a little wide of the mark. It all depends on what we mean by progress and fundamentally new ideas.

Abbott is correct to the extent that the New Constructivism ultimately makes the same point as the Old: that international politics – like all human life – is a collective accomplishment. The social world, including the main categories and concepts we use to understand it – truth, science, knowledge, cosmologies – are constructed in and through practice. There is nothing natural about them. If progress and fundamentally new ideas are taken to mean something more than this, then no, the New Constructivism is not fundamentally distinct from the Old, and little progress has been made. But if progress is unmoored from the grip of prevailing understandings of the word ‘science’, understandings rooted in ‘solving’ problems we all agree on once and for all, the New Constructivism represents precisely the type of progress IR scholars should aim for. The New Constructivism offers an array of new concepts, perspectives, and methodologies designed to help us overcome the problematic dichotomies associated with the Old Constructivism outlined in Chapter 1, and to help us think about exactly how the socially constructed world shapes our collective and individual doings.

The New Constructivism, and those concepts, perspectives, and methods, has emerged from two recent ‘turns’ in IR theory: the turn to practices and relations. Practice theory draws attention to everyday logics in world politics, and asserts that actors are driven less by abstract forces such as the national interest, preferences, or social norms, than by practical imperatives, habits, and embodied dispositions.