Interaction narratives, constitutive rules, and historical structures:
US, India, and Pakistan between 10/12/99 and 9/11/01
by Sanjoy Banerjee
International Relations Department
San Francisco State University
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Prepared for the 2005 meeting of the International Studies Association, Honolulu
Constructivism has established itself in the IR literature. Kowert and Legro
(1996:469) observed that their fellow authors in the Katzenstein (1996) volume had little
to say about the “process of identity construction.” Further, they observed that in many
situations there are multiple known norms with contrasting prescriptions, and little theory
was available to predict which norm will be most influential (Kowert and Legro
1996:486). Process-tracing models remain scarce in the constructivist IR literature.
Bennett and George (1997) argue that process tracing, the specification of a causal
mechanism working over time, provides a strong basis for valid causal inference. A
process-tracing constructivist theory would specify how cultural formations guide the
construction of situations, how these constructions guide the invocation of categories and
lead to action, as well as how constructions and actions reinforce or undermine the
cultural formations that govern them. This article will present a process-tracing
constructivist theory. It will use that theory to reconstruct the interaction of the US, India,
and Pakistan between the Pakistani military coup of 12 October 1999 and the al-Qaeda
attacks of 11 September 2001.
Rule-oriented constructivism
This paper will focus on how concurrent autobiographical narrations of their
interactions by international subjects generate actions and reproduce themselves
collectively. Among the larger cognitive-semantic formations that have been examined in
the international relations literature is that of narrative (Boynton 1991; Alker 1996;
Banerjee 1998). I shall also examine how these narratives arise from the subjects’
experiences of interaction with others. I shall pay close attention to the concepts and
constitutive rules that form the building blocks of the narratives. International interaction
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