Wendt, A. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 15(1), 923. Constructivist explanations of different phenomena related to the military can highlight how norms and identity come into play. Google Scholar. Foreign Policy, 134, 5059. Handbook of Military Sciences pp 116Cite as, 2 London: Routledge. Norms, identity, and national security in Germany and Japan. The irreducible core of constructivism for international relations is the recognition that international reality is socially constructed. The empirical studies in this area were diverse. Hi!Welcome back to the King's College London International Relations Today Youtube channel. Zehfuss, M. (2002). This realization was part of what prompted the serious focus on domestic political/normative contexts in much of this literature. Main Theorists. Discourse has power because language can shape how we view phenomena simple acts such as defining a conflict as one of terrorism, for example, then calls into effect a range of policy options associated with countering terrorism. Norms and regulatory instruments around the use of PMSCs and in what capacity they are used have emerged with the view to regulating them (Percy 2016, p. 221). 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. John Dewey (1933/1998) is often cited as the philosophical founder of this approach. 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. Moreover, social constructivism emphasizes social relations in global politics, and sees security and international politics as determined by ideas as well as material factors. 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). International Organization, 52(4), 887917. International Relations, 22(2), 243261. There is significant overlap with the socialization literature here as the mechanisms by which an idea becomes a norm are not all that different from the mechanisms by which an actor outside a normative community is brought within. Moreover, one of constructivisms strongest contributions has been in relation to the agency-structure debate, showing how mutual constitution provides a different reading of world politics and international relations but also opens the possibility for change. Lebow, R. (2001). Although the theory lies more on non-material factors that govern states, it explains that politics also plays a role in international relations. In addition, the use of norms to study international relations directly challenged the orthodox assumption that the international realm was one largely devoid of sociality, merely a system of power calculations and material forces (a challenge also issued by the English school; see Bull 1977). This has implications for the concept of anarchy, the agent-structure relationship, and national interests, but all three of these areas of research are also approachable through non-constructivist means. From this mainly structural perspective, social norms were conceptualized as an alternative to rationalist/materialist variables in explanations of world politics. There. 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. Norms and identity in world politics (pp. 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). Arguments over the different actions feed back and alter the meaning of the original norms. 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. Van Kersbergen and Verbeek (2007:221) go so far as to posit that this vagueness is actually designed into norms to facilitate maximum adherence. 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. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. 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. This was seen as a backward step and a challenge to the taboo norm that had developed over preceding decades. Yet, Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances helps in understanding why an essence of constructivism need not be found. For military studies scholars, his three cultures of anarchy help capture how conventional constructivism relates to military affairs and international security). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. As political processes such as the 2008 economic crisis in Europe and Brexit show, theorising a polity. 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. This had some success. Haas, P. M. (2016). 5. An example of this can be seen in the case of Libya in 2011, which is broadly hailed as a successful R2P intervention. Interpreting the impact of a norm. 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. forthcoming). But some states refuse to do this, even if it is in their material interests to do so (see the example of neutral states in this chapter). After all, these were Cold War institutions whose purpose was now over with the end of superpower politics. The analytic focus is shifting to the targets of socialization and the dynamic and agentic process whereby actors interact with their normative context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 6667). They do not simply replace bad norms but become established through what Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) call a norm cycle where new ideas and shared understandings emerge, become instituted and normalized. 317356). Conformance how social norms as intersubjective objects stabilize expectations and even bound what is considered to be possible (Yee 1996) was a crucial area for constructivists because without evidence of conformance with the strictures of social norms, constructivists could not demonstrate that norms mattered. Cham: Springer. 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. Realists have traditionally seen neutral states as weak and small, responding only to the external anarchic realm (Agius 2006). Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? Constructivism and European integration. (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. ), Handbook of military sciences (pp. Tun, H. (2005). They are thus animated entities that strengthen, weaken, and evolve. 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. Rather than passive receptacles, norm takers have a very active role to play in socialization and can influence the meaning of the norms that constitute the very community they are being asked to join (Ba 2006). The dominant belief about identities in our societies is essentialism. A further example of norm erosion can be seen in the norm against the use of torture. Schmidt, B. What is the main argument of constructivism? Steele, B., Gould, H., & Kessler, O. Understanding how ideas about danger and threat are socially constructed, and how states form social relations in the international system is a key starting point in discussions about global security. Manchester: Manchester University Press. What Is Social Constructivism? Cooperation and Conflict, 49(4), 519535. Ideals that were really never in our possession: Torture, honor and US identity. International relations require various perspectives to comprehend the complexity of the interactions that take place in the international sphere. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. Under a constructivist lens, the primacy of state survival in realist thought also undergoes reconsideration. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars . 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. Hagstrm, L., & Gustafsson, K. (2015). [1] [3] In P. J. Katzenstein (Ed. In the timeless wisdom of realist thought, the story of international relations is that the world is structured by anarchy. Third, rather than see international relations as an anarchic realm where the lack of a central authority above states guarantees security, constructivism makes the claim that agents and structures are mutually constituted or shaped by each other. An example of this can be seen in the rationalist understanding of behavior in warfare. Those who study contestation do allow for reasoning about norms, appealing to notions of interpretation to generate different understandings of a norm with a community of norm acceptors. (2009). Constructivist ideas are present when attention is turned to alliances and security communities. The second big claim of constructivism is that ideas matter with rationalist theorizing, material factors take precedence. 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. Culture can refer to symbolic or evaluative standards that guide relations and provide meaning. Keywords Constructivists International norms International relations Rationalism Strategic behaviour Learning Objectives. It is especially relevant and pertinent as a tool of criticism of widely held empirical and normative theories. Neumann, I. Critiques of constructivism tend to come from three areas: rationalist criticisms, issues over how constructivists see identity, and finally, criticism that constructivism is apolitical. This is natural given that this work is still in the area of socialization. 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. The Constructivist Approach to Explain National Identity . Mitzen, J. 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). (2001). 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. Instead, constructivism is held together by consensus on broader questions of social process its position on the agent-structure problem and the primacy of the ideational and the intersubjective aspects of social life (for overviews of constructivism see Onuf 1998; Ruggie 1998; Finnemore and Sikkink 2001; Ba and Hoffmann 2003). Anarchy is not a given of the international system. Central to constructivism are concepts such as norms, institutions, and culture. 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 a school of thought in International Relations (IR) theory. However, this focus did little to advance understanding of how norms themselves change without necessarily being replaced (Van Kersbergen and Verbeek 2007; Hoffmann 2005; Chwieroth 2008; Sandholtz 2008). 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. Onuf, N. (2013). 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. Cooperation and Conflict, 40(1), 523. Abstract. Reuters, 2 July. 3. Grand strategy, strategic culture, practice: The social roots of Nordic defence. Adler, E., & Barnett, M. Nonetheless, constructivist approaches to identity, norms, and ideas about the world and its social relations can impact understandings of what it means to be secure. 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 logic of arguing has inspired the development of significant empirical research (e.g., Muller 2004; Bjola 2005; Leiteritz 2005; Mitzen 2005) and it is the foundation for some approaches to reasoning about social norms (the logic of consequences is also implicated in approaches that consider that actors reason about norms). As shared objects, they appear as external to any particular actor actors experience norms, at least in part, as external rules. 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. From this perspective, the logic of appropriateness, as it was developed through engagement with the logic of consequences foil, allowed the socially constructed ideational/normative world to play a role by providing cues as to what behaviors were appropriate. Second, and more significantly, both the norm compliance and norm change research agendas engage seriously with notions of normative contestation, directly problematizing aspects of norm dynamics that tended to be held constant in earlier work. The initial wave of empirical norms work provided a solid foundation for the newly emergent constructivist approach, but it tended to bracket the vibrant existence of norms themselves. Constructivism's approach to the subjects of threat, conflict and security in global politics originated from their fundamental emphasis on the social dimensions of international politics, thus it defined them as socially constructed elements in the process of identity formation under the influence of the norms and shared values of society. 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. It will then consider some key criticisms of this approach and conclude with a short summary. 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. Cham: Springer. For philosopher John Searle, language played an equally significant role. Making sense, making worlds: Constructivism in social theory and international relations. In this sense, power is a social category. Norms, identity, and their limits: A theoretical reprise. 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. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. Searle, J. R. (1995). This pivot is an interesting development in norms research for two reasons. Kowert, P., & Legro, J. 4. 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. Social constructivism can also help make sense of security and military phenomena, such as alliances and threat perceptions, or why states go to war. 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. First, unlike realist theory which sees actors as like units which respond to external phenomena in the same way, constructivists argue that who actors think they are matters. Bjrkdahl, A. According to this approach, the behaviour of humans is determined by their identity, which itself is shaped by society's values, history, practices, and institutions. Instead, attempts at synthesis of constructivism and rationalism are now en vogue (e.g., Fearon and Wendt 2001; Schimmelfennig 2001, 2005; Checkel and Zurn 2005; Kornprobst 2007; Culpepper 2008; Kelley 2008). Norms in international relations: Some conceptual and methodological reflections. American Political Science Review, 95(3), 547560. This matters because it suggests that international relations is more dynamic rather than fixed. Constructivism accounts for this issue by arguing that the social world is of our making (Onuf 1989). 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). Constructivism relies in part on the theory of the social construction of reality, which says that whatever reality is perceived to be, for the . [3] Steele, B. Fierke, K. M., & Jrgensen, K. E. He argued: If behavior in the real social world can almost always be located in some of the intermediate spaces between the corners of the triangle, one single metatheoretical orientation will probably not capture it. 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. 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). Behavioral logics are concrete expressions of how mutual constitution works and what motivates actors to behave they way that they do. 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. 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. But for constructivists, it is social structure that is important (Farrell 2002, p. 52). Post Cold War Era- Provided much diverse approach to understand and analyze international relations. Undoing the freezing of norms has been based on a reimagining of social norms as generic social facts that are inherently dynamic. Acharya (2004) goes further in that he allows for the substance of international norms to be molded to fit local contexts localization. Indeed, norms, identity, and ideas are key factors in constructivist theory. ), Constructing international relations: The next generation (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). 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). Post modernism // Refer political theory (section 1A) also. The development of and debate over logics of behavior is the foundation of the reasoning about normsreasoning through norms spectrum. Scholars working in this vein often begin by critiquing the analytic move to freeze the content of norms. Clearly this is a continuum because if agents were truly independent from or entirely dependent upon social structures, we would not be talking about constructivism. 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. (3) Normative emergence how an idea reaches intersubjective status in a community. International relations and military sciences. Constructivism is relevant to military studies in numerous ways. 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. Abstract: The history of social constructivism in International Relations (IR) is marked by cognitive change and continuity. Treating social norms as fully formed, static constructs, even for analytic convenience, underplayed this dynamism. Conventional constructivists like Wendt see similarities between constructivism and rationalist perspectives and methodologies. 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. Constructivism has provided a broader approach to understanding international relations and security beyond rationalist frameworks. A constructivist lens on PMCs, however, reveals how questions of national identity can also be central to their use. Norms and regulations. In this section you learn about: Realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism and neo-Marxism as ways of explaining international relations. Percy, S. (2016). Despite their position of material weakness, the Melians argued that freedom and justice are more important. Similarly, treating social norms as static independent variables led to calls for constructivists to define the conditions under which normative and nonnormative influences on behavior are likely to be the most important in determining behavior (Legro and Kowert 1996; Risse et al. Focusing on these elements of normative dynamics led to progress in how constructivists understood conformance with normative strictures, the spread of existing norms, and the emergence of new norms. 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/. 394395). 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. How are self-understandings and identity constituted in the international realm? In his view, theories of cultures can not supplant theories of politics, and no casual theory of identity construction exists. 1516). The scope of military conduct can also be institutionalized, and constructivism provides a way to understand such processes. The translation requires interpretation a subjective understanding of the intersubjective context to decide on a behavior. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, You can also search for this author in Advance of Theory of Constructivism in IR The theory's rise is generally attributed after the end of cold war . Norms and identity in world politics. 6061). However, when defined as ideas or expectations about appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998:891), it became an ideal conceptual tool for operationalizing processes of social construction. 1. European Security, 27(3), 374392. Glanville, L. (2016). (1951). 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. Identities are formed through shared meanings and understandings of the world, which then brings in culture, intersubjective or shared meanings and norms and values. 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. 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. If the meaning of a norm can change or if different communities of actors adhere to different norms (or different versions of a norm), then norm-breaking takes on a different meaning. Abstract Social constructivism is not among the most popular theoretical approaches used in forecasting in International Relations. In M. Evangelista & N. Tannenwald (Eds. McCourt, D. (2016). 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. If any further proof were needed for the continuing rise to fame of constructivism in International Relations, this would be it . The way in which issues are constructed and interpreted as threatening can also depend heavily on identity and views of the external realm. Introduction to International Relations Theory 100% (10) 63. (Ed.). Constructivism is a structural theory of the international system that makes the following core claims: (1) states are the principal units of analysis for international political theory; (2) the key structures in the states system are intersubjective rather than material; and. We dont do that: A constructivist perspective on the use and non-use of private military contractors by Denmark. Social Constructivism in International Relations and the Gender Dimension . Constructivists argue that international life is social, resulting from the ways people interact with each other (i.e. In The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory, David McCourt offers a refreshing take on Constructivism by reviewing old, present, and new concepts in Constructivism and connects them pragmatically with methodological examples.Moreover, this book functions as a handbook on 'how to constructivist' in an era defined and dominated by new advances in computational social science. 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