From State’s Agency to Essentialism

This paper revisits the assumption of unified state personhood in traditional constructivist IR by examining how state subjectivity, national unity, and internal plurality are negotiated in Chinese debates on ethnic governance and community-building. Existing constructivist accounts have usefully challenged Eurocentric understandings of agency by recognising non-Western states as culturally and historically situated subjects. Yet when state agency is understood as a singular cultural voice, this recognition may also obscure the plurality of social experiences within the state and leave limited space for sub-state actors to articulate their own positions. Taking the discourse of a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation as a case, this paper asks how national community can be theorised without reducing internal diversity to either external liberal-legalist narratives or state-centred narratives of unity and security. It argues that the problem is not simply whether state narratives are authentic or imposed, but how different layers of subjectivity—state, nation, ethnicity, locality, and everyday social experience—are relationally constituted. To address this problem, the paper introduces the concept of “Third Space” as an epistemically plural and relational site of subject formation. Rather than treating the state as a single cultural subject, this approach foregrounds the need to understand national unity as a negotiated and reflexive process. In doing so, the paper contributes to constructivist IR by rethinking state personhood from the perspective of internal plurality, relational subjectivity, and the politics of representation.