In the 1980s and 1990s, efforts to wind back the proliferation of nuclear weapons which by this stage had reached staggering proportions, particularly in the USA and USSR prompted scientists and nuclear experts, civil society organizations, and other actors, to form what is called epistemic communities. Table of Contents Table of Contents. Considering other factors to explain why states behave the way they do. Kessler, O., & Steele, B. Wiener (2004:191, 192) notes that this behavioralist approach operates with stable norms and is best suited to inferring and predicting behavior by referring to a particular category of norms that entail standards for behavior. While these studies unveiled how the norms they examined contributed to dynamic political processes, they tended to hold the norms themselves constant. 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. The belief that reality is socially constructed leads constructivists to place a greater role on norm development, identity, and ideational power than the other major theoretical paradigms. Altmetric. In military exercises with other nations, states share practices and ideas and in doing so, learn from each other. 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. Power is influenced by norms, ideas, and practices; in a constructivist reading, power depends on how it is used and what it means in the interaction of states. In other words, actors can never significantly remove themselves from their social structure to make independent judgments. Countering hybrid warfare as ontological security management: The emerging practices of the EU and NATO. Intersubjective facts like social norms only exist within a community of actors that accept them. Special issue. The rest of this section explores this distinction in greater detail, discussing the behavioral logics at the foundation of the about/through spectrum before examining the recent compliance and contestation literatures that are developing new ideas about norm dynamics. Constructivists are certainly aware that actual behavior in world politics fails to correlate exactly to what are in essence ideal typical models of behavior. Constructivism was and remains a very different approach to world politics than its erstwhile competitors. 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. (Eds.). Theories of International Relations. As one notable example, Keohane (1988:392) critiqued this new perspective by arguing that the greatest weakness of the reflective school lies not in deficiencies in their critical arguments but in the lack of a clear reflective research program that could be employed by students of world politics. At the forefront of the initial empirical push in constructivist research were the norms-oriented and identity approaches. Springer, Cham. Constructivism focuses on the social context in which international relations exist. Norm-breaking behavior may be evident but is only problematic for constructivist arguments if norms are specific and static. The link was not copied. Ideational or even soft power the influence that is exerted that does not rely on hard power but rather attracts others to ideas and values (see Realist International Relations Theory and The Military by Schmidt in this volume) can be effective in global politics and choosing to go to war over ideas rather than material gains or even to not take advantage of material gain and an increase in power, serve as examples. However, the success of this initial wave of constructivist norms studies was built on an analytic move that would engender significant debate in the 2000s. Instead, practices are the result of inarticulate, practical knowledge that makes what is done appear self-evident or commensenical.. For constructivists, a focus on identity makes it possible to consider more deeply how domestic factors, ideas, discourses, cultures, and norms shape the interests of states and the choices states make. Self-identity and the IR state. Practice theory and relationalism as the new constructivism. Social Constructivism Summary Notes. 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. Social Constructivism is one of international relations approach. Constructivism demonstrates the flexibility and critical stance that characterizes the reflectivist theories by stressing the socially constructed aspect of international realities and highlighting the ever-changing nature of the study of International Relations. (2017). What makes the UK feel safe in the matter of the USAs nuclear arsenal is that these states have a shared identity centuries of connection, friendship, shared beliefs and language, and similar cultures. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. Presents a social constructivist reading of securitization theory that, besides the Copenhagen school, also includes other constructivist interpretations of security that draw on securitization and speech act theory. This pivot is an interesting development in norms research for two reasons. 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).) It matters if one assumes that norms are manipulable by political actors who can reason about them from an external standpoint or if norms (and social structure more generally) more fundamentally constitute actors such that they cannot stand outside the social norms that shape their interests and behaviors. To be specific, I navigated core tenets of constructivism in terms of its ontology, epistemology, and methodology, respectively. Meanings: socially constructed. London: Routledge. European Security, 27(3), 356373. Norm contestation during the US War on Terror. 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. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(1), 2543. These criticisms are predominantly about where constructivism claims to fit in IR (as the middle ground between rationalist and reflectivist approaches) and its methodological commitments. B., & Heikka, H. (2005). The first wave of empirical constructivist studies tended to freeze norms. Critiques of constructivism tend to come from three areas: rationalist criticisms, issues over how constructivists see identity, and finally, criticism that constructivism is apolitical. (2008a). Journal of European Public Policy, 6(4), 669681. Wendt, A. To dig deeper into what makes an agent or what structures global politics, constructivists look to norms and culture to make sense of what represents or guides behavior and how ideas of self inform that. Constructivist thought makes it clear that social norms do not exist independently of communities of actors that believe in and enact them. Constructing institutional interests: EU and NATO enlargement. In addition, the students who took POL487 in fall of 2008 at the University of Toronto provided a wonderful sounding board and inspired feedback for the development of some of the ideas in this essay. Social Constructivism in International Relations and the Gender Dimension . NATO and the New Europe. This had some success. Ideals that were really never in our possession: Torture, honor and US identity. Th e article argues that constructivism suff ers from the same . Staff & Defence College, Norwegian Defence University College, Oslo, Norway, Norwegian Defence University College / Norwegian Military Academy, Oslo, Norway. Norms and identity in world politics. This reimagining is not new. Abstract. Risse (2000:6) captured the essence of the internal critique when he noted that the logic of appropriateness actually encompasses two different modes of social action and interaction. In one mode, appropriate actions are internalized and become thoughtlessly enacted at times as a precursor to or foundation of strategic behavior (Risse 2000:6) actors reasoning through social norms. Cham: Springer. Constructivism The international relations theory that suggests that people create their own reality, . Manchester: Manchester University Press. This logic structured seminal empirical work that endeavored to show how ideational and normative factors could explain puzzles in world politics (e.g., Klotz 1995; Finnemore 1996). (Ed.). While realists would argue that decision to go to war are based on rational state interests, constructivists would argue that the Geneva Convention represents the idea that war is a social and cultural practice and driven by moral considerations. Where liberals would declare that the west won, proving capitalism and democracy were the only workable ways to organize societies, in a constructivist reading, the end of the Cold War was largely down to the changes that were taking place in the former Soviet Union under Gorbachev (Risse-Kappen 1994). Rather than see security and conflict in the same way, actors will interpret and pursue security based on the ideas, norms, identities, and values that have meaning for them. Sookermany, A. M. (2021). A number of recent studies have examined just this tension and the range of empirical topics being considered from this perspective is now quite broad. Assuming that actors reason through social norms means beginning analysis with the understanding that the very way that actors view and understand the world is shaped by social norms. The underlying idea of the logic of appropriateness that actors draw upon ideas about what they should do in specific situations given who they are was consistent with social constructivisms commitment to the causal and constitutive (Wendt 1998) effects of norms. He considers that existing norms constrain the possibilities for action, but that different understandings of those norms inevitably arise in the community of norm acceptors. The simplification of social norm dynamics at the foundation of the initial wave of constructivist norms writing contributed to the meteoric rise of social constructivism within the international relations literature. When actors follow the logic of arguing, they seek common understandings through discourse and dialogue. Ones position on this spectrum of reasoning about norms or reasoning through norms has consequences. As we have seen in chapter 4, various factors can influence a country's interpretation of a convention. All of this came about through processes of socialization and persuasion, where interested groups such as NGOs, epistemic communities, and other actors not only successfully changed the norm around the treatment of civilians and combatants in warfare but instigated this norm as part of identity, and how states define right behavior. Studies of compliance and contestation must grapple with this fundamental characteristic of social norms in a more explicit way moving forward. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Moreover, for some, constructivism is problematic because it is seen as apolitical and its efforts to form a via media with rationalism bring the state back in (Weber 1999; Zehfuss 2002). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saddam-idUSTRE56113O20090702. 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. Yet, the degree to which agents are able to independently evaluate their social context (as well as their material reality as far as that goes) and act upon it is what separates different behavioral logics and it is one way that different constructivist approaches in the current second wave (Acharya 2004) of norms research can be differentiated. 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. Abstract Social constructivism is not among the most popular theoretical approaches used in forecasting in International Relations. Early empirical approaches did engage with normative dynamics and change (e.g., Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), but the understanding of dynamics and change was relatively circumscribed. The empirical studies in this area were diverse. INRODUCTION T O INTERNA TIONAL RELA TION THEO RIES 23/10/2018. Pouliot (2008:259) argues that most of what people do in world politics, as in any other social field, does not derive from conscious deliberation or thoughtful reflection. (It should be noted here that social constructivism is often seen as part of a broader set of theoretical approaches that are concerned with identity and discourses, such as ontological security and securitization. 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. Agius, C. (2006). About us. (A vital critique of conventional constructivism that uses the case study of Germany and the debates to join in military interventions outside the NATO area). For the Athenians, the refusal of the Melians the much weaker party to submit and their preference for neutrality was an affront to their power. Post modernism // Refer political theory (section 1A) also. Table of Contents; Introduction to Social Constructivism: Rise of Social Constructivism in IR: Constructivism as social theory: Constructivist theories of International Relations: The traditional theories (Idealism and Realism) had diverted all focus to state and Power. 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. Philosophy of military sciences. International Relations: Constructivism pt1 1. Structures and agents influence each other. Tannenwald, N. (1999). Constructivism argues that culture, social structures and human institutional frameworks matter. Foreign Policy, 134, 5059. (1999). It was a tool for constructivists to show that ideas, norms, and morals mattered vis--vis rationalist variables in explanations of world political phenomena. 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. Critical constructivists prefer to examine state identity in terms of its wider story (Fierke and Jrgensen 2001). Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Studies. It is ideas, according to constructivists, that play a large role in determining how actors act. Adler, E., & Barnett, M. Critical constructivists would seek to include different identities in how they understand the nation and present a more complex picture of what identity means and how it is contested and can be deconstructed (Fierke 2001). 451497). London: Routledge. Empirically oriented constructivists worked to show that shared ideas about appropriate state behavior had a significant impact on the nature and functioning of world politics. International Organization, 52(4), 887917. New York: Oxford University Press. Jacobsen (2003:60) recognizes the need to theorize this relationship observing that, constructivists of all stripes seem to agree that it is vital to theorize links between subjective experience and social/institutional structures. The two versions of norm dynamics discussed above posit different conceptions of the intersubjective/subjective relationship, but neither has developed the final answer to this open question. The promise of constructivism in international relations theory. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Alexander Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics has been predicted to gain a status similar to that which Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics is thought to have enjoyed in the 1980s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Constructivism is an International Relations (IR) theory. They consider that actors can stand outside a normative structure to consider options. Abstract. This chapter will also cover the different branches of constructivist thought and the main critiques of constructivism to highlight its key contributions and the problems it also raises. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. (One of the foundational texts that covers chapters on security and strategic culture, albeit from a mainly conventional perspective). In P. J. Katzenstein (Ed. Social Constructivist International Relations and the Military. ), Handbook of military sciences (pp. The growth of Private Military Companies (PMCs) or Private Military Security Contractors (PMSCs) in the 1990s and their increased use in conflicts has been a consequence of a range of different factors: increasing neo-liberalization, cuts to defense budgets and a desire for states to outsource security. This dynamism, it should also be noted, may not always be positive ideas about security can also regress or become less normative or progressive. Pouliot and Adler draw on Bourdieu to develop a logic of practice and Hopf devised a logic of habit to reflect these concerns. Social constructivism is well suited to address continuous changes in European integration. Constructivism has provided a broader approach to understanding international relations and security beyond rationalist frameworks. Erskine, T. (2012). Ontological security in international relations. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. International relations and military sciences. Cham: Springer. 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. 124). e. In international relations, constructivism is a social theory that asserts that significant aspects of international relations are shaped by ideational factors. 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). In the attempt to understand when and where norms are likely to be efficacious, these authors stake out a position on the reasoning aboutreasoning through norms spectrum. Second, analytic tractability is necessary and is no trivial accomplishment. 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. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2018.1533385. 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. Norms that challenged ideas like genocide, apartheid, the use of nuclear weapons, how to treat prisoners of war, how combatants are defined, and the role of women in armed forces emerge in opposition to existing norms. (2009). Studies of norm diffusion or spread moved constructivists into the area of socialization. 1. What Is Social Constructivism? Critics too began to understand social norms as static and specific and this facilitated an erroneous notion that evidence of norm-breaking behavior somehow invalidated or falsified constructivist theorizing. The Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink volume developed the spiral model that explained socialization of recalcitrant Southern states into universal human rights norms by referring to the linkages between and actions of transnational human rights activists, domestic human rights activists in the target state, and powerful Western state sponsors. In contrast to these other approaches, constructivism is a social theory (or family of social theories) or theory of process (Adler 1997, 2003; Checkel 1998; Wendt 1999; Hoffmann 2009), which means it necessarily lacks a priori commitments on key elements of international relations theories the identity, nature, interests, and behavior of important actors and the structure of world politics. Instead of calculating what is best for improving its utility, an actor motivated by the logic of appropriateness will instead reason what actors like me should do. From the perspective of those who work on norms, there are very good reasons to focus on static and specific norms when analyzing international relations. Norm emergence studies were concerned with how ideas come to achieve normative status (e.g., Nadelmann 1990; Klotz 1995; Finnemore 1996; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) and why some ideas become norms and others do not (e.g., Cortell and Davis 1996, 2000; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Legro 2000; Payne 2001). The first is endogenous contestation actors that accept a general norm and are constituted by it nevertheless have different understandings of it or operationalize its strictures differently, leading to disputes and change in the meaning of the norm from within. Security institutions as agents of socialization? 317356). 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. Mearsheimer, J. J., & Walt, S. M. (2003). In the context of the global war on terror, US efforts to extract intelligence from suspected terrorists led to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques which was widely seen to have abrogated or contested the global prohibition on the use of torture (Steele 2008a; see also Birdsall (2016) who argues that it worked to strengthen the anti-torture norm). (1996). In essence, they theorized norm diffusion as taking place from a community of Western states constituted by compliance with universal human rights norms to individual Southern states. Not all states interpret power in the material or hierarchical sense. (2010). Instead, norms are general principles that must be translated into specific actions (Gregg 2003). (Eds.). New York: M. E. Sharpe. 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. This goes against realist reliance on a world structured by anarchy that compels states to behave in certain ways, regardless of what sort of states they are (Farrell 2002, pp. Krahmann, E. (2018). Advance of Theory of Constructivism in IR The theory's rise is generally attributed after the end of cold war . Post modernism is relatively new in international relations. / (social) constructivism [1] [ ] [2] Legro (1996) provided insight on a traditional security issue by delineating how normative ideas embedded in organizational culture at the domestic level could explain puzzling (for traditional international relations theories) variation in war fighting decisions in World War II. This social learning aspect differs from realisms prescriptive approach that says nations will follow the strongest militaries to develop their strength and technological prowess with the anarchic structure of the international system guiding this logic. The shared understandings given to objects are referred to as inter-subjective meanings, which Adler explains as collective knowledge (1997). The essay proceeds by first describing the initial establishment of constructivist norms research and critiques that flowed from the original choices made. Constructivism in international relations: The politics of reality. Identities are also constructed. Hi!Welcome back to the King's College London International Relations Today Youtube channel. Reviewing the complementary identity-oriented approaches is beyond the scope of this essay, but its neglect here in no way reflects the importance of this crucial aspect of constructivist theorizing (on identity see, e.g., Hall 1999; Hopf 2002). Bruner (1990) and Piaget (1972) are considered the chief theorists among the cognitive constructivists, while Vygotsky (1978) is the major theorist among the social constructivists. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. These initial waves of constructivist writing met the challenge issued by Keohane and played a significant role in vaulting constructivism into prominence during the 1990s and early 2000s (Checkel 1998, 2004). Douglas, B. As Farrell tells us, liberals and realists do not agree on what prevents war is it democracy (as liberals would contend?) Yet Saddam did not want to appear weak to enemies such as Iran (Allen 2009). The Sandholtz (2008:121) passage quoted above brings together the two types of normative dynamics discussed in this section. I also explored the growing body of constructivist . In addition to considering how the two types of norm dynamics are related, the current norms literature brings traditional open questions in constructivism into sharp relief. (1992). 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). 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). 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. In discursive terms, language can convey meaning and associations, and define what is considered within and outside the norms (see Poststructuralism in International Relations: Discourse and the Military by Baumann in this volume). After making the case that norms matter and developing a number of theoretical frameworks to show how norms emerge, spread, and influence behavior, norms-oriented constructivists have shifted their attention to a new set of questions, and in particular compliance with the strictures of social norms and change in norms themselves. Conventional constructivism is not interested in replacing one reality of world politics with another. In this sense, power is a social category. Its 1999 Strategic Concept altered the organization from a Cold War alliance to something more akin to Deutschs idea of a security community that was based on common values, norms, and identity, making democracy and human rights central. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. When interacting with external norms, the targets of socialization reason about and in some cases manipulate the social norms (international or domestic) that shape their behavior. 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