International Relations: Constructivism pt1 1. An example of this can be seen in the rationalist understanding of behavior in warfare. New York: Routledge. Constructivism focuses on Norms, Ideas, and behaviors in order to understand how IR works and why people do what they do. Kessler, O., & Steele, B. Katzenstein, P. J. As Farrell tells us, liberals and realists do not agree on what prevents war is it democracy (as liberals would contend?) 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. Tun, H. (2005). Social constructivism primarily seeks to demonstrate how the core aspects of the international relations are contrary to the assumptions of Neorealism and Neoliberalism within the frame of social construction, taking up forms of ongoing processes of social practice and interaction. Moravcsik, A. London: Penguin. Hagstrm, L., & Gustafsson, K. (2015). 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). Instead, practices are the result of inarticulate, practical knowledge that makes what is done appear self-evident or commensenical.. The Peloponnesian War. Quintessentially, Finnemore and Sikkink (1998:914) noted the highly contingent and contested nature of normative change and normative influence in their examination of the norm life cycle. The main two paradigms is the Realists and the Liberalist school of thoughts. Rather the controversies mainly focus on how far one can push one logic of action to account for observable practices and which logic dominates a given situation. 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. Mlksoo, M. (2018). In essence, these scholars and those who draw upon their work consider that much of behavior in world politics arises from ingrained, unconscious motivations either habits or practices that drive precognitive behavior. The category of social norm was not an invention of constructivism. How shared culture and identity matters in international security can be illustrated with the example of nuclear weapons. In international relations, constructivism is a social theory that asserts that significant aspects of international relations are shaped by ideational factors (which are historically and socially constructed), not simply material factors. Kissinger's implicit embrace of constructivism might have been a thermonuclear detonation in the Great International Relations Theory Paradigm War of the 1980s and 1990s. While some of the major criticisms of constructivist thought should be at the forefront when considering security and military problems through this lens, the potential to see the world in more dynamic terms is one of constructivisms leading contributions. Another topic that requires further consideration in future research is the relationship between intersubjective and subjective reality. Introduction: Reconstructing epistemic communities. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, You can also search for this author in Social constructionism is not the norm. 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. 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. (). 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. If it was not, then the international order and what security means could be something completely different. First, norms are relatively stable if they were not, it would be hard to justify or observe this analytic category. 317356). The shared understandings given to objects are referred to as inter-subjective meanings, which Adler explains as collective knowledge (1997). Arguments over the different actions feed back and alter the meaning of the original norms. The first wave of empirical constructivist studies tended to freeze norms. States may join military alliances to bandwagon with stronger powers, as realists tell us. Realists have traditionally seen neutral states as weak and small, responding only to the external anarchic realm (Agius 2006). Viewed in this way, as Onuf insists, "Constructivism applies to all fields of social inquiry" and "is a way of studying social relations - any kind of social relations." Guzzini, S. (2005). Put simply, social norms were treated as independent variables explanations for varied behaviors observed in world politics. Comprised of a series of conventions that go back to 1864, it is now a part of customary international law, so it applies to all states during warfare. Even so, more recently there has been some rejection of the ICC by a few African states, signaling that some states are unwilling to accept its authority. In addition, rather than taking the external norm as given, recent socialization studies examine compliance with international norms as a process by which states (already normatively constituted) interact with, manipulate, and (sometimes) incorporate external ideas in a dynamic fashion. 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. Constructivists are often too fast and loose with the use of the term norm without a concomitant discussion of what the community of norm acceptors looks like and by what criteria we can identify a community of norm acceptors. According to constructivism the priority is for social features instead of material. Social phenomenon such as states, alliances or international institutions, are not thought to exist independent of human meaning and action. Undoing the freezing of norms has been based on a reimagining of social norms as generic social facts that are inherently dynamic. The initial empirical norms research tended to simplify normative dynamics to facilitate analysis and dialogue with competing perspectives, treating the norms that they analyzed as relatively static entities with relatively specific meanings and strictures. Although the theory lies more on non-material factors that govern states, it explains that politics also plays a role in international relations. 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). Finally, the sociology of the discipline faced by early empirical constructivist studies virtually forced constructivists to adopt a focus on static norms. Constructivism has provided a broader approach to understanding international relations and security beyond rationalist frameworks. (Eds.). New York: Columbia University Press. A constructivist lens on PMCs, however, reveals how questions of national identity can also be central to their use. For philosopher John Searle, language played an equally significant role. 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. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. 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. New York: Oxford University Press. Constructivism, which reached the shores of IR in the 1980s, describes the dynamic, contingent and culturally based condition of the social world. Kowert, P., & Legro, J. 3536). Constructivism is relevant to military studies in numerous ways. There. For realists, the material structure of the world matters. Social norms were conceived as aspects of social structure that emerged from the actions and beliefs of actors in specific communities and in turn norms shaped those actions and beliefs by constituting actors identities and interests. forthcoming). 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 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. 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. The strange career of Constructivism in International Relations" en Puchala, Do . 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. The main empirical focus tended to be on either the development of a European polity (e.g., Checkel 2001) or on attempts at socializing Southern states into (relatively) universal international norms like human rights and sovereign statehood (Finnemore 1996; Risse et al. European Review of International Studies, 3(3), 713. Klotz (1995), for instance, chronicled how the anti-apartheid norm shaped the expectations and actions of the US towards South Africa in the 1980s. Identities are also constructed. 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. (2021). But the nuclear issue is also important because it shows how competing ideas about norms co-exist or contrast for example, former US President Donald Trump tried to change the norm around the use of nuclear weapons, arguing for the ability to use low yield nuclear weapons and the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review returned to the idea that nuclear superiority mattered (Tannenwald 2018). Post modernism is relatively new in international relations. The second big claim of constructivism is that ideas matter with rationalist theorizing, material factors take precedence. This was seen as a backward step and a challenge to the taboo norm that had developed over preceding decades. Adler, E. (1997). ), The culture of national security: Norms and identity in world politics (pp. In this regard, although posited by Wendt as a via media (1992, 1999) or middle ground (Adler 1997) with rationalism, constructivism offers a different view of key concepts like power. Seizing the middle ground: Constructivism in world politics. It brought former Warsaw Pact nations into its fold and strengthened convergence around normative issues such as human rights through social learning (Gheciu 2005; Fierke and Wiener 1999). Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. The social construction of Swedish neutrality: Challenges to Swedish identity and sovereignty. 124). 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. This is a continuous, two-way process (2013, p. 4). While early constructivist theorizing proved to be an exciting new avenue for thinking about international relations in the abstract, both constructivists and their critics were eager to see constructivist theory applied empirically. International Organization, 53(3), 433468. 5. Less explicit attention was paid to the alternative perspectives on socialization: processes by which groups are maintained, the manner in which the targets of socialization affect both the socializers and targets of socialization (see Acharya 2004; Ba 2006), or the socialization of reluctant powerful actors (Cortell and Davis 2006; Johnston 2008). By the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, constructivists were engaging with both the small number of big important things that Waltz (1986:329, cited in Finnemore 1996:1) famously claimed for structural realism and the large number of big important things that other approaches ignored (Finnemore 1996:1). This realization was part of what prompted the serious focus on domestic political/normative contexts in much of this literature. However, some scholars found the mode of action where actors consciously reason about what is appropriate to be a problematic foundation for constructivist thought. (1999). Liberal international relations theory and the military. In the timeless wisdom of realist thought, the story of international relations is that the world is structured by anarchy. His (2000:2) logic of arguing is designed to clarify how actors develop a common knowledge and how norms and ideas can have a constitutive effect while retaining the reflection and choice Sending (2002:458) deems necessary for mutual constitution and change. Google Scholar. Compliance studies tend to fall on the side of reasoning about norms, considering how actors react to external norms and attempts at socialization, while contestation studies tend to view actors as reasoning through norms, examining how communities of norm acceptors can alter the meaning of constitutive norms through their bounded interpretations of prevailing norms and actions in line with those interpretations. The Athenians demand that neutral Melos side with them against Sparta. There is an implicit equivalence made between contestation that goes on within a normative community (generated by the gap between general rules and specific situations) and contestation that occurs between different normative communities (inevitable tension between norms). (2016). Social constructivism can also help make sense of security and military phenomena, such as alliances and threat perceptions, or why states go to war. Essentialism believes that our identities are linked to a fixed, universal, innate 'essence'. Within this Abstract. Two strands of research, on the relations between strategic behaviour and international norms and between rationalism and constructivism, serve as examples of promising research in constructivist international relations theory. Critical constructivists prefer to examine state identity in terms of its wider story (Fierke and Jrgensen 2001). New York: Routledge. After all, these were Cold War institutions whose purpose was now over with the end of superpower politics. Finnemore, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). This reimagining is not new. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Hoffmann (2005) employs insights from the study of complex adaptation to understand how states that all accepted the norm of universal participation in climate governance came to have different subjective understandings of that norm. Initial constructivist norm studies thus tended to focus on how behavior in a community coalesces around a norm or is reconstituted when a norm emerges. The current literature on compliance with social norms has taken a question that motivated the socialization studies of the 1990s Why do some transnational ideas and norms find greater acceptance in a particular locale than in others? (Acharya 2004:240) in new directions. Some preexisting knowledge of speech act theory, constructivism, and securitization theory is useful before reading this chapter . McCourt, D. (2016). At the core of social constructivism is the idea that international politics - and indeed human relations - are "socially constructed" rather than "given." Its core ideas are based around three ontological positions relating to identity, ideas, and mutual constitution. 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. (1996). Onuf, N. (2013). To be sure, the international relations literature still contains healthy debate and sparring between constructivism and realism/liberalism (e.g., Petrova 2003; Fehl 2004; Williams 2004; Goddard and Nexon 2005; Srenson 2008). These dual visions of normative dynamics are likely related, but the norms literature has yet to describe how. Seen in the timeless wisdom of realist thought, the culture of national security: norms and identity in politics... As weak and small, responding only to the external anarchic realm ( Agius 2006 ) & Sikkink K.... War institutions whose purpose was now over with the end of superpower.... On PMCs, however, reveals how questions of national security: norms and identity matters in international relations to. 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