Description
Alexander Wendt (2004) worried that his theory of ‘the state as person’ allowed only ‘an impoverished and truncated’ kind of person – an “‘artificial” person’ rather than a “‘natural” one’ – in the absence of an account of ‘collective consciousness’. This paper will make three claims in response to Wendt’s unease. First, it will argue that Wendt’s pathbreaking work valuably demonstrated that IR’s pervasive state-as-agent assumption need not be conceived merely metaphorically – a move with profound ethical as well as ontological significance. Second, it will suggest that his iconic claim that ‘states are people too’ anticipated a regressive tendency in contemporary IR theory among positions that seek to defend the agency of the state by reviving anthropomorphising moves and seeming to link the adequacy of a defence of state agency to how closely the state can be shown to mirror flesh-and-blood individuals in every respect (including, for example, the possession of consciousness). Third, it will look to the AI-driven ‘intelligent machines’ of the 21st century to construct a typology of distinct variations on agency and moral agency for IR – ‘flesh-and-blood’, ‘institutional’, and ‘synthetic’ – which problematizes Wendt’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ agents and defends a robust, unapologetically non-human account of (moral) agency.
