In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. During the First World War, Belgium, driven by a sense of honor, chose to fight Germany even though the Belgians risked and experienced catastrophic consequences (Steele 2008b). Recent efforts to ensure gender equality in militaries represent a normative shift, affecting operations and culture. Constructivism and the nature of international relations Constructivism efforts to give a better understanding of international relations by its method which is based on social theory. 3. Percy, S. (2016). Constructivism in international relations: The politics of reality. Realists have traditionally seen neutral states as weak and small, responding only to the external anarchic realm (Agius 2006). Social Constructivist International Relations and the Military, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02866-4_105-1, Springer Reference Political Science & International Studies, Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences, Realist International Relations Theory and The Military, International Relations and Military Sciences, Liberal International Relations Theory and The Military, Poststructuralism in International Relations: Discourse and the Military, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saddam-idUSTRE56113O20090702, https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2018.1533385, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. NATO and the New Europe. They are thus animated entities that strengthen, weaken, and evolve. In the timeless wisdom of realist thought, the story of international relations is that the world is structured by anarchy. They consider that actors can stand outside a normative structure to consider options. It will then consider some key criticisms of this approach and conclude with a short summary. Constructivists discuss questions of identity and belief. Mlksoo, M. (2018). Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars . Social Constructivism or Constructivism is a theory in International Relations which holds that developments in international relations are being constructed through social processes in accordance with ideational factors such as identity, norms, rules, etc. Further, constructivists became more cautious about basing their analyses on the logic of appropriateness. Constructivist International Relations theorists tend to use concepts of socially constructed identities, ideas and norms to empirically and analytically examine . Identities are also constructed. Kessler, O., & Steele, B. The goal was to show how a target behavior can be accounted by considering the ideational context, how ideas and norms constitute interests, or how social norms influence actors understandings of the material world. Schmidt, B. The Sandholtz (2008:121) passage quoted above brings together the two types of normative dynamics discussed in this section. Norms and identity in world politics. Norms and identity in world politics (pp. Yet Saddam did not want to appear weak to enemies such as Iran (Allen 2009). Denmark exhibits of soft form of neoliberalism compared to that of the USA or UK, affecting views of the role of the market in terms of outsourcing security; moreover, Denmark has hard commitments to international humanitarian law which is likely to have tempered direct engagement of PMSCs (2019, pp. Wendt, A. It stresses the social dimensions of International relations. Constructivist explanations of different phenomena related to the military can highlight how norms and identity come into play. Altmetric. Introduction. European Journal of International Relations, 5(4), 435450. 55K views 2 years ago International Relations Constructivism is one of critical theories in IR criticizing the classical theories. Social Constructivism, especially after the 1980s, has become a common approach in dealing with and examining different issues in the field of humanities and social sciences. What does it derive its name from (it's fundamental proposition)? As Koschut (2014, p. 525) explains, this can transform the behaviour of states from a self-help manner to trust-building. Think here about realist logic at the end of the Cold War with the demise of bipolarity, NATO should have gone the same way as the Warsaw Pact. International Politics, 53(2), 176197. Early constructivist work in the 1980s and early 1990s sought to establish a countervailing approach to the material and rational theories that dominated the study of international relations (e.g., Wendt 1987, 1992; Onuf 1989; Kratochwil 1989; Ruggie 1993; Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986). They (2005:25) note, As domestic actors search about for new ideas to legitimate their self-interested preferences, the norms and institutions of the international system often provide them. While Cortell and Davis do not problematize the substance of the financial liberalization norm under examination, they do attend to a neglected aspect of norm dynamics the actions of those actors who are targeted for socialization. The traditional theories (Idealism and Realism) had diverted all focus to state and Power. However, the separation between the two kinds of norms research discussed above may ultimately be artificial. And while the focus on norms is important, there is an overwhelming tendency to examine good norms theres often the assumption that norms are good or ethical without critically analyzing what makes them good and what they mean for international change (Erskine 2012; Kowert and Legro 1996). Farrell, T. (2002). Rather it seeks to explore how the current reality evolved (Farrell 2002, p. 59). Social constructionism is not the norm. Norms, identity, and national security in Germany and Japan. This has led the constructivist literature away from Keohanes (1988) original vision of a division of labor constructivists provide insight into what the interests are, rational approaches take the analysis from there (Legro 1996). Whereas Morgenthaus classical realism described interests in terms of power as a truism of international relations, in empirical terms, power might not be a driver for states interests and actions. The dominant belief about identities in our societies is essentialism. 5. Norms, identity, and their limits: A theoretical reprise. This means that the absence of a central power over states produces a world of perpetual insecurity, or Hobbesian state of nature (see Realist International Relations Theory and The Military by Schmidt in this volume), with conflict and violence a constant possibility. ), The culture of national security. This logic fitted well with the commitment to mutual constitution (the notion of what is appropriate for different identities is socially constructed) and it also laid the groundwork for the norms-based challenge to strictly material explanations of world politics. The causes of the Iraq war. - 51.75.65.162. 2. Meanings: socially constructed. It was a tool for constructivists to show that ideas, norms, and morals mattered vis--vis rationalist variables in explanations of world political phenomena. Critical constructivists pay greater attention to issues of power and dominant discourses that construct national identity.. If any further proof were needed for the continuing rise to fame of constructivism in International Relations, this would be it . Cham: Springer. (2009). His refusal to allow the UN weapons inspectors into Iraq during the buildup to war in 2003 was seen as irrational to many in the west. Constructivists hold that . At the same time, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) had successfully pushed for the UN to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2020. What Is Social Constructivism? Wendt, A. But Wendt also identified a Lockean culture that demonstrated some restraint in warfare and a Kantian culture that was guided more by cooperation (Wendt 1999). What is the main argument of constructivism? This reimagining is not new. Consider the shared norms that define military conduct and the institutions that have evolved around military practice; from the Geneva Conventions to the classic texts on warfare that are part of military training, a process of social interaction is taking place where norms are learned, and culture and identity are shaped. Following the initial success of empirical norms studies that established the efficacy of studying norms and showed that they mattered, current norms research explores when/where norms matter and how/when/why norms themselves change to a greater extent. Although the theory lies more on non-material factors that govern states, it explains that politics also plays a role in international relations. (Eds.). forthcoming). 3536). More info. The second generations focus on norms emerged in the 1990s and a third generation extends constructivisms scope to bring in critical theory, emotions, and political psychology, among other approaches(See Steele (2017), Steele et al. Instead social norms are generic rules that allow agents to behave and get along in a wide range of situations. For liberals, the belief that liberal ideas such as democracy and the free market are ideas to be shared to make the world a better place suggests a transfer of ideas rather than an exchange of ideas. - Checkel (1998) argues that "without more sustained attention . This is a different way to think about and imagine the international realm beyond the narrow confines of rationalist power prescriptions. The market for ontological security. This chapter will explore what constructivism is, and its underlying claims and key influences, while comparing its core tenets to theories such as realism (see Realist International Relations Theory and The Military by Schmidt in this volume) and liberalism (see Liberal International Relations Theory and The Military by Silverstone in this volume). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to adequately cover these approaches, the Baumann chapter in this volumediscusses securitization; for works on ontological security that speak to international security and aspects of the military, see Mitzen (2006), Krahmann (2018), and Mlksoo (2018).) Zehfuss, M. (2002). Security institutions as agents of socialization? In R. Abrahamsen & A. Leander (Eds. Constructivists also emphasize how domestic norms and values play a role in how states and their militaries approach conflict or understand the causes of conflict. Agius, C. (2022). Advance of Theory of Constructivism in IR The theory's rise is generally attributed after the end of cold war . The inescapable tension between general rules and specific actions ceaselessly casts up disputes which in turn generate arguments, which then reshape both rules and conduct. The logical chain from general norms to contestation is not long. Constructivism is the claim that significant aspects of international relations are historically and socially contingent (subject to change), rather than inevitable consequences of human nature or other essential characteristics of world politics. (2008a). While arguments remain about constructivisms ontological commitments and efforts to build a bridge between rationalist and reflectivist approaches, its relevance for military studies can be widely seen in terms of how it can broaden thinking about how to see and respond to other actors in terms of security and cooperation. As Tannenwald says, [e]ven as states pursue their interests, they do so within a normative structure (2017, p. 17). Yet, constructivists are beginning to define their enterprise more independently of competing approaches. While neorealists argued that attacking Iraq was not in the national interests of the USA and that containment was more effective (Mearsheimer and Walt 2003), neoconservative hawks determined otherwise. Adler, E. (1997). PS: Political Science and Politics, 50(1), 7174. Power in the constructivist sense is less concerned with material power but sees ideas and discourses as powerful; power can be exercised in different ways. Second, analytic tractability is necessary and is no trivial accomplishment. Two types of normative dynamics can be identified: the first is endogenous contestation; the second is compliance or diffusion. Cham: Springer. Special issue. To gain acceptance and make the case that constructivist ideas mattered empirically, constructivists endeavored to demonstrate how their ideational perspective could provide superior understanding and explanation of political phenomena. (1992). Acharya (2004) goes further in that he allows for the substance of international norms to be molded to fit local contexts localization. Hagstrm, L., & Gustafsson, K. (2015). van Meegdenburg, H. (2019). Actors (usually powerful ones, like leaders and influential citizens) continually shape - and sometimes reshape - the very nature of international relations through their actions and interactions. Constructivism insists that reality is subjective. 124). Social constructivism is well suited to address continuous changes in European integration. In more historical examples, states that chose neutrality during times of war did so against strong material factors that would have potentially granted them safety and survival had they opted to join one side or the other. INRODUCTION T O INTERNA TIONAL RELA TION THEO RIES 23/10/2018. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. 23) and recognized as a medium of exchange for goods and services. The realist reading of Thucydides account of the Melian Dialogue (431BC) in the Peloponnesian War is seen as the classic illustration of power politics. In correlation to this, it would be fruitful to acknowledge the role of constructivism in international relations theory, as one could argue it is closely related to this analysis, where one may draw parallels between Norway and Sweden in the comprehension of the research. People who share an identification are then assumed to share unique traits and attributes. Second, there is a division between what is generally called conventional and critical constructivism (Hopf 1998), largely over questions of state centricity and treatment of identity. Tannenwald, N. (2018). Klotz (1995), for instance, chronicled how the anti-apartheid norm shaped the expectations and actions of the US towards South Africa in the 1980s. In eliciting conformance and stabilizing expectations norms do not and cannot define all possible behavior, especially when a norm first emerges. Under a constructivist lens, the primacy of state survival in realist thought also undergoes reconsideration. Contrastingly, neorealist prescriptions of power see it as hard, material, military power (such as large military forces or superior weapons) and are concerned with its distribution in the international system. Grand strategy, strategic culture, practice: The social roots of Nordic defence. (One of the foundational texts that covers chapters on security and strategic culture, albeit from a mainly conventional perspective). Not all states respond to external phenomena in the same way, which invokes a need to consider how domestic and cultural factors shape the identity and interests of actors. Those facts that rely on human agreement (institutional facts) differ from brute facts (like mountains, for example), which do not need human institutions for their existence. Hopf, T. (1998). 1 2. introduction "the focus of social constructivism is on human awareness or consciousness and its place in world affairs. Constructivism accounts for this issue by arguing that the social world is of our making (Onuf 1989). On the contrary, this analytic device has a deep history in the sociological and economic literatures. International Relations from a Social Perspective. Within this Chapter 4 Constructivism and Interpretive Theory CCRAIGPARSONS [A constructivist argument claims tear people do one thing and not anurher due co the presence of certain social construct ideas, belies, noms, idenies, or some other iterpreuire fer through which people perceive the wood. Constructivism can produce richer understandings of the very basic questions that construct military studies: enemy perceptions, how identity drives threat/amity/cooperation in international relations, how states and actors respond to threat and the meanings that certain types of warfare involve, the stories told about war and what it means to be secure. This analytic move facilitated conversation and competition with rational/material theoretical competitors. Whose progress, which morals? While constructivists know that social norms are always being reconstituted in the dynamic interplay of agents and social structures known as mutual constitution, social norms do elicit common behavioral expectations such that they are recognizable as relatively stable shared ideas. At the other end of the spectrum are constructivists who argue that agents reason through social structures. While states may choose to participate in war or not for strategic or material reasons, it is often ideational justifications (i.e., related to justice, values or existential threat) that provide the compelling argument for or against war. There. (Ed.). London: Routledge. Perhaps this is simply a matter of what questions are being asked. (1996). Actors can see and interpret the world and approach it differently therefore, anarchy is what states make of it. For Wendt, different cultures of anarchy were possible, which meant that the neorealist idea of a self-help system was limited to just a Hobbesian version that depended on military power for security. Yet this dominant view of international relations was significantly challenged by Alexander Wendt in the early 1990s with the simple premise: anarchy is what states make of it (Wendt 1992, pp. Likewise, understanding sovereignty means recognizing the principle of non-interference in another states internal affairs, recognition of a state as an entity and associated rights that come with that: all states recognize each other as sovereign, despite the huge differences in their ability to exert internal control and exercise international power (Farrell 2002, p. 54; Wendt 1992; Hopf 1998). When the Bush administration introduced the category of unlawful enemy combatant in the global war on terror, these individuals were not afforded the protections under the Geneva Conventions (Tannenwald 2017, pp. For philosopher John Searle, language played an equally significant role. I would like to thank Alice Ba, Robert Denemark, Phil Triadafilopoulos, and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful discussions and suggestions on this essay. How shared culture and identity matters in international security can be illustrated with the example of nuclear weapons. The construction of social reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ontological security in international relations. Berger, T. U. Critical methodology and constructivism. Save. Neumann, I. This dynamism, it should also be noted, may not always be positive ideas about security can also regress or become less normative or progressive. This recent research speaks to and is driven by broader questions of conceptualizing the relationship between actors and norms whether actors reason through or about social norms. The article argues that constructivism suffers from the same limitations as any other paradigm in IR, therefore, there is no reason to exclude this theory from forecasting effort. Norms were conceptualized as having specific behavioral strictures (a relatively bounded set of appropriate behaviors) that did not change. But norms are never static and this meaning has also changed over time for instance, with the rise of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), sovereignty as an institution has become contingent on states fulfilling certain criteria such as not committing human rights abuse. While this is obviously a false dichotomy and constructivist studies do not treat norms as exclusively internal or external to actors, the distinction matters for how scholars approach compliance and contestation. This chapter will take the reader through the key ideas of social constructivism also referred to as constructivism in this chapter showing how norms, culture, and ideas about identity shape actors, condition their relations with each other, and can impact the so-called given nature of international relations and transform understandings of power relations. Only those with equal power could make such demands, and the Athenians make good on their threat to destroy the Melians, declaring that might is right and the weak suffer what they must (Thucydides 1951, pp. Kurki, M., & Sinclair, A. Throughout the chapter, reference will be made to constructivisms epistemological (how we know it), ontological (what we know), teleological (what is the purpose), and methodological (the tools we use to study) standing, where it is located in IR theorizing, and what it can mean for understanding military phenomena (see Philosophy of Military Science by Sookermany in this volume). Wendts contention was that rather than see anarchy as a given condition of the international system, ordering relations and compelling states to behave in certain ways to secure themselves, anarchy, rather, depends on whether states buy into this view. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 341370. In Searles book The Construction of Social Reality, he opens with a puzzle that concerned him for a long time: that there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreementthings that exist only because we believe them to existlike money, property, government, and marriagesThese contrast with such facts as that Mount Everest has snow and ice near the summit or that hydrogen atoms have one electron, which are facts totally independent of any human opinions (1995, pp. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saddam-idUSTRE56113O20090702. Yet, the analytic choices made had consequences for how norms were understood and these initial conditions significantly shaped both constructivist analysis and the kind of critiques of norms research that subsequently emerged. Scholars working in this vein often begin by critiquing the analytic move to freeze the content of norms. Even among security communities such as the Nordic states, different strategic cultures can be found because they are informed by a range of historical and cultural experiences, with different experiences of war and conflict, membership of alliances, and other factors (see special issues of Cooperation and Conflict (2005) and Global Affairs (2018) for further discussions). International Security, 23(1), 171200. First, norms are relatively stable if they were not, it would be hard to justify or observe this analytic category. What if behavior was due to factors other than norms or ideas? The second is compliance or diffusion actors from different normative communities seek to enlarge their communities or to hold on to extant norms in the face of external normative challenges and disputes that arise can lead to normative change in both communities. Other scholars deemed the logic of appropriateness (as well as the logics of consequences and arguing) to be too agentic to fit well with constructivist tenets. As Johnston (2001:494) clarifies, socialization is aimed at creating membership in a society where the intersubjective understandings of the society become taken for granted. These studies generally began from the perspective of a single, established norm and posited mechanisms (arguing, bargaining, persuading, and learning) for how the community of norm acceptors could be enlarged (Acharya 2004). The analytic focus is shifting to the targets of socialization and the dynamic and agentic process whereby actors interact with their normative context. Social constructivism emerged out of key debates in international relations theory in the 1980s concerned with agents and structures and has come to be seen as the fourth debate in international relations theorizing, which pitches constructivist against rationalist perspectives (Fierke and Jrgensen 2001, p. 3). Hi!Welcome back to the King's College London International Relations Today Youtube channel. The empirical studies in this area were diverse. Treating social norms as fully formed, static constructs, even for analytic convenience, underplayed this dynamism. Hidden in plain sight: Constructivist treatment of social context and its limitations. From this mainly structural perspective, social norms were conceptualized as an alternative to rationalist/materialist variables in explanations of world politics. The second big claim of constructivism is that ideas matter with rationalist theorizing, material factors take precedence. The rise of social constructivist thought in international relations theory as part of the fourth debate (see International Relations and Military Sciences by Roennfeldt in this volume) represented one of those break through moments that challenged some of the orthodoxy and key assumptions that guided the discipline. Mitzen, J. Holding social norms relatively constant in order to do this was deemed an acceptable trade-off. Seeing the world in this way as mutually constituted, driven by the interests of actors which relies on their ideas of themselves and others, and their approach to phenomena brings about different possibilities in international relations and security. Constructivisms key influences come from sociological and philosophical perspectives on the nature of reality and phenomena, which brings knowledge, language, and social relations to the fore. But we dont call it torture! New York: Routledge. Wiener (2004:203) argues that the interpretation of the meaning of norms, in particular, the meaning of generic sociocultural norms, cannot be assumed as stable and uncontested. Glanville, L. (2016). Part of Springer Nature. The seminal volume edited by Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999) was the fountainhead for much of this research as it provided an explicit mechanism for how a particular set of human rights norms diffused beyond the community that originally endorsed them. The work of Cortell and Davis (2005) and Acharya (2004) are relevant examples of this type of compliance research. Identity and culture can be problematic categories and distract from other factors that can explain international relations, such as capitalism or patriarchy (Kurki and Sinclair 2010). Studies of contestation and norm change have begun to examine diverse issues like organizational change in international financial institutions (Nielson, Tierney, and Weaver 2006; Chwieroth 2008); European integration (Meyer 2005; Van Kersbergen and Verbeek 2007; Dimitrakopoulos 2008); environment (Bailey 2008); election monitoring (Kelley 2008); and security (Kornprobst 2007). Issues such as those discussed immediately above raise the third criticism about constructivism, that "a weak or at least a controversial epistemology has become the basis for a strong pedagogic policy" (Phillips 1995, p. 11)).The primary influence underpinning much of the theoretical commitments of constructivist pedagogy was a highly influential paper written by Posner et al. The basics of constructivism Social norms were considered, in many ways, the medium of mutual constitution. This matters because it suggests that international relations is more dynamic rather than fixed. The shared understandings given to objects are referred to as inter-subjective meanings, which Adler explains as collective knowledge (1997). The influence of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241805) on constructivist thought can be seen regarding ideas about knowledge and objectivity, in that knowledge of the world is filtered through frameworks of understanding. This was a vastly different kind of theorizing than was current in the mainstream of international relations that was locked in the neorealist/neoliberal debate (e.g., Krasner 1983; Keohane 1984, 1986; Baldwin 1990; Grieco 1990). It examines the socialization process as more one of contestation between different normative systems and has broadened the scope of analysis to include attempts at socializing both powerful and weaker actors. Recent studies have taken the generic nature of norms more seriously and have subsequently focused on how actors must operationalize their normative context to take specific actions (Hoffmann 2005; Van Kersbergen and Verbeek 2007; Sandholtz 2008). Cham: Springer. Studies of compliance and contestation must grapple with this fundamental characteristic of social norms in a more explicit way moving forward. Adler explains as collective knowledge ( 1997 ) ( 2014, p. 59 ) logical chain general. Conformance and stabilizing expectations norms do not and can not define all possible behavior, when. Roots of Nordic defence, strategic culture, practice: the first is endogenous contestation the! P. 525 ) explains, this analytic device has a deep history in the and. As an alternative to rationalist/materialist variables in explanations of world politics, weaken, and scholars holding social were! 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