Abstract
In their response to our article »Office Hours«, Nicole Deitelhoff and Lisbeth Zimmermann issue three major points of critique towards our proposal of a critical approach to norm research: They criticize, firstly, our discussion of constructivist norm research, secondly, our use of the concepts of local and Western and, thirdly, the overall critical potential of our proposed approach, which they criticize as going merely beyond an unmasking gesture. We take our response to our critics, firstly, as an opportunity to clarify some of the arguments made in our article. Secondly, we confront the points of criticism outlined above and show that Deitelhoff’s and Zimmermann’s critique can only be maintained if one accepts their specific reading of our article. Moreover, it gets tangled up in three major contradictions and is built upon a problematic understanding of the relation between empirical facticity and normative evaluation.
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Again Price justifies this point with reference to Frost, whom he accuses of falling back on constitutive social norms of global politics in his argumentation, while not defending or examining them empirically. This, according to Price, is exactly where the potential of constructivist research lies, which he therefore considers as a productive supplement of normative approaches (Price 2008a: p. 198).
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A similar point is made by Toni Erskine in regard to the remaining chapters of Price’s edited volume. After her reading of the volume, Erskine sums up: »The constructivists represented in Price’s volume, by contrast, combine underlying ethical convictions and curiosity with detailed empirical analyses and a perceived imperative to prove their social science credentials, which seems to result in an accompanying tendency to downplay any ethical element of their work« (Erskine 2012: p. 459).
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For another similarly optimistic conclusion in regard to the core postulates of constructivist ethic, see also Hoffmann (2009: pp. 245–248).
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Cf. on this the contributions of Acharya (2011) and Tickner (2003) as well as Hutchings (2011) and Bilgin (2008) for critical statements on the West/non-West dichotomy, with further references.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank the editors of the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen for their helpful comments as well as Alexander Spencer and Michael Pollok for proof-reading the English translations.
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