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European Journal of International Security (2026), page 1 of 25doi:10.1017/eis.2026.10064RESEARCH ARTICLEConstructivism and the Capitol riots: Beyond singledominant narratives, towards eventful sociologyJack Holland 1 and Ryan O’Connor 21 Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK and 2 Department of Criminology and Sociology,Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UKCorresponding author: Jack Holland; Email: j.holland@leeds.ac.uk(Received 18 August 2025; revised 31 March 2026; accepted 13 April 2026)AbstractConstructivist research has observed punctuated equilibria in international politics, with rapid changesinterspersingmoreprolongedperiodsofstability,characterisedbyasingleandenduringdominantsecuritynarrative. However, in the contemporary era of af f ective polarisation, single dominant security narrativesarenolongerthenorm.T h is,inpart,ref l ectsthedeclineofthebullypulpit,followingtheriseofacacophonyofstoryingactors.Wearguethatconstructivismrequiresatheoreticalsupplementtohelpmakesenseofthisnew empirical reality. Drawing on eventful sociology, we complement extant IR research on narrative withgreaterfocusoncontingency,iterativeinteraction,andagenticcreativityaspartofaconf i gurationalaccountof the storying of political events. We explore this in the US case – characterised by inward-looking, hyper-partisanpolitics.Analysinganewdatasetof1288politicalandmediatexts,wetracetheconstructionoftheCapitol riots, through the combined actions of myriad storying agents, within two distinct, enduring, andsynergisticnationalsecuritynarratives.T h eoutcomeissurprising:highlydivergentbutintimatelyentwinedstories of continuity. Our f i ndings suggest that constructivism requires updating – to be more contingent,agentic, and conf i gurational – to meet the demands of the new, hyper-polarised era.Keywords: agency; Capitol riots; constructivism; eventful sociology; narrativeIntroductionKingdoms rise and fall, gods are born and destroyed, the world af t er looks dif f erent from the worldbefore, but……the players still have no agency. 1On 6 January 2021, over two thousand rioters entered the US Capitol Building, screened live onrolling news coverage and captured on social media. T h e immediate context was the defeat of USPresident Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, with a joint session of Congress satto count Electoral College votes, formalising the victory of President-Elect Joseph Biden. Outside,thousandsgatheredinoppositiontotheelection’sresultandratif i cation. 2 T h eimmediateimpactsof1 Dan Hirschman, ‘T h e three temporalities of D&D’, Scatterplot (27 July 2018), available at: {https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/07/27/the-three-temporalities-of-dd/}, accessed 14 October 2024.2 Lane Crothers and Grace Burgener, ‘Insurrectionary populism? Assessing the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol’,Populism, 4:2 (2021), pp. 129–45.© T h e Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of T h e British International Studies Association. T h is is an OpenAccess article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), whichpermits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2026.10064 Published online by Cambridge University Press