This article seeks to account for the theoretical contributions of poststructuralism to the issues of social and historical change in international relations. The author argues that despite poststructuralism’s contributions, both to the ongoing metatheoretical debates in the field about the reifying and naturalising tendencies of positivism in the study of International Relations and to the understanding of language and discourses in the formation of evolving relations of power, poststructuralism did not manage to escape the pitfalls and lacunas of reification, functionalism and structuralism.