Chapter 9 Revision Guide

  • Constructivism in IR emerged from a critique of the more traditional IR theories during the Cold War period. They shared a rejection of the static material assumptions that dominated and instead emphasized the social dimensions of IR and the possibility for change.
  • Constructivism is based on the general notion that international relations are socially constructed. To construct something is an act which brings into being a subject or object that otherwise would not exist. Social phenomena such as states, alliances or international institutions, are not thought to exist independent of human meaning and action.
  •  Language emerges as a key medium of meaning-making and knowledge production processes in such understandings of social construction.
  • The central themes of change, sociality, and processes of interaction point to the added value of constructivism within a field that has emphasized generalization across time, materiality and rational choice.
  • The term constructivism was introduced to IR by Nicholas Onuf (1989) to refer broadly to a range of postpositivist perspectives, which shared a critique of the static assumptions of mainstream IR theory.
  • Scholars have since made a distinction between ‘conventional’ constructivism and more critical variations, including poststructuralism. 
  • Conventional constructivism is said to occupy the middle ground between rationalism and poststructuralism. By adopting a positivist epistemology, constructivists have gained considerable legitimacy, such that their debate with rationalists has come to occupy an important place in the discipline.
  • Constructivism adds a social dimension that is missing from rationalist approaches. What is rational is seen as a function of legitimacy, defined by shared values and norms within institutions or other social structures rather than purely individual interests.
  • Critical constructivists have questioned the individualist ontology of rationalism and instead emphasize a social ontology. As fundamentally social beings, individuals or states cannot be separated from a context of normative meaning which shapes who they are and the possibilities available to them.
  • Agent-Structure Debate: Structures (social and normative orders that precede individual actors) not only constrain agents (actors). They also constitute identities and possibilities of action for agents. The individual or state can influence their environment as well as being influenced by it, through a process of interaction and mutual constitution.
  • Constructivists emphasize social cognition where intersubjective meanings have some independent status as collective knowledge not merely the aggregation of individual beliefs. Nonetheless, individual cognition and rationality in constructivism suggests this difference is less stark.
  • There is a tension between conventional constructivism and that with its roots in the linguistic turn, particularly regarding consistency.
  • In conventional constructivism, these inconsistencies arise from the combination of a social ontology with an epistemology that rests on a separation between an external world and the internal thought processes of individuals.
  • Conventional constructivism rests on positivist epistemology, however, and thus on a correspondence theory of language. That is, objects are assumed to exist independent of meaning, and words act as labels for objects in this reality. Hypothesis testing is then a method of comparing scientific statements about the world with the world to see whether they correspond.
  • Consistent constructivism rests on a longer lineage, outside of IR, with a genealogy that intersects with, but is distinct from, poststructuralism. Constructivism is, from this perspective, first and foremost an epistemological position, heavily indebted to the ‘linguistic turn’.
  • The linguistic turn builds on the notion that we cannot get behind our language to compare it with that which it describes. Language is bound up in the world rather than a mirror of it.
  • Consistent constructivism is based on an understanding of language and action as rule-based. This approach to language requires that we ‘look and see’ how language is put to use by social actors as they construct their world.
  • As such it is less concerned with the intentions of individuals than the intention expressed in social action. For example, the ‘intention’ of individuals engaged in ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia could not be separated from a world in which neighbours had become ‘dangerous others’. Intention and action were defined in a public language by socially constituted actors.
  • This approach also highlights problems apparent in the frequent emphasis on causality of conventional constructivism and the conflation of reason and cause.
  • The competition to identify the ‘true’ cause or intention usually devolves into a battle of interpretations. Reasons, however, can be given in public language and make actions possible, such as the presence of WMD in Iraq, whether they were believed or not.
  • This suggests we should focus less on the desire for ultimate truth and more on social fact. This requires an appreciation that the action happened conjoined with a probing how this action became possible.
  • Case Study. Realists would approach the study of politics surrounding Covid-19 through a lens of national interest, citing border closures as exemplar. For constructivists, the key question is the extent to which a pandemic can be considered a social construction. This requires that we consider the relationship between the physical origins of the pandemic and the meaning-making process that its political responses are premised on and have engendered.
  • Case study continued. The language and speech acts of war in response to the virus is a key analytical entry point for constructivists, who argue that such terminology:
  • - ensures that the invisible enemy (the virus) is made visible as a political phenomenon
  • - creates circumstances that allow for the implementation of a particular set of political regulations/policies as well as changing social norms
  • - places ‘us’/‘we‘ (humans) into a war against ‘them’ (the microbes)
  • - serves an understanding of the ‘frontline’ as one that is now populated by medical staff rather than nurses
  • - fosters an understanding of the victims of this war s a) undifferentiated by the virus but b) a marker of prior structural inequalities when the severity of illness is mapped onto demographics
  • Conclusion. The interactions of the War on Terror have produced a reality, but this reality is constituted out of meanings that the main actors have brought to their interactions. The reality is therefore far more multidimensional and social than posited by epistemological approaches that assume an objective reality ‘out there’.
  • Constructivist analysis opens a space for greater reflexivity by actors, making it possible for actors to step back and ask questions about how their own actions may contribute to the construction of the very problem they seek to address.
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