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. 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. How shared culture and identity matters in international security can be illustrated with the example of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Geneva Convention is an example of both a regulative and a constitutive norm, in that it not only proscribes state behavior but established a new international normative order, creating expectations for international behavior. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2018.1533385. Like its revision of anarchy as an ordering principle in international relations, constructivism also changed perceptions about the relationship between agents and structures, brought attention to how ideas matter as much as material factors, and how identity, norms, and culture shape global relations. Likewise, culture plays a significant role in international security. ), Handbook of military sciences (pp. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. Introduction to international relations 98% (51) 3. In addition, norms-oriented research and the constructivist literature writ large has begun to concern itself more with research questions that fall out from constructivist thought independently without as much reference to competing approaches (Checkel 2004). This aspect of the literature is more focused on how actors understand the norms that constitute them and alternatively consider how actors that reason through norms can contest and reconstruct the norms that bind communities together. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saddam-idUSTRE56113O20090702. (3) Normative emergence how an idea reaches intersubjective status in a community. Norms and regulations. The category of social norm was not an invention of constructivism. 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. 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. These initial works laid the theoretical foundation for an approach to world politics that included the assumption that important aspects of politics are socially constructed, a commitment to mutual constitution as an answer to the agent-structure problem, a dedication to the importance of intersubjective reality in contrast to objective/subjective realities, and a focus on ideational and identity factors in analyses of world politics. Social Constructivist International Relations and the Military. While constructivists do not deny the importance of material factors, they also argue that ideas also matter, and in some cases, matter more. Prominent in this part of the literature was Finnemore and Sikkinks (1998) development of the norm life cycle whereby normative entrepreneurs (see also Nadelmann 1990) work to persuade states of the appropriateness of a new norm and serve as a catalyst for a cascade of new normative understandings. In the other mode, actors actively consider their normative context in an attempt to reason about the best (appropriate) course of action actors reasoning about social norms. Constructivism in international relations: The politics of reality. 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. 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. Constructivism argues that culture, social structures and human institutional frameworks matter. Hopf, T. (1998). Mlksoo, M. (2018). The ability to apprehend what is going on inside actors heads to understand motivations and interpretations is currently a matter for debate (Cederman and Daase 2003; Jackson 2004; Wendt 2004; Krebs and Jackson 2007) but, that debate notwithstanding, the notion that different actors within the same normative community i.e., a group structured by the same norm(s) could have different and contested understandings of that norm is at the foundation of the recent work on norm contestation. It was first coined by Nicholas Onuf in 1989 in his book " The World of our making " where he put. In his view, theories of cultures can not supplant theories of politics, and no casual theory of identity construction exists. 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. 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. Social norms were conceptualized as aspects of social structure that emerged from the actions and beliefs of actors in specific communities; norms shaped those actions and beliefs by constituting actors identities and interests. Wendt, A. On the contrary, the two parts of the norms literature described above tend to find themselves on different ends of the reasoning about normsreasoning through norms spectrum. Moreover, military alliances are increasingly not just about physical security but about binding together states with shared interests, identities, and norms. Constructivism was and remains a very different approach to world politics than its erstwhile competitors. To be specific, I navigated core tenets of constructivism in terms of its ontology, epistemology, and methodology, respectively. Constructivism sees power in terms of what it does and means (Guzzini 2005); ideas have power (e.g., that democracies are good). Within this (1996). European Security, 27(3), 374392. 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). 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. PS: Political Science and Politics, 50(1), 7174. In addition, taking constructivist thought to its logical conclusion, there is no such thing as nonnormative behavior or pure material self-interest independent of a normative context. Silverstone, S. (2021). ), Constructing international relations: The next generation (pp. CrossRef 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. 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. ), The culture of national security. 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. Some preexisting knowledge of speech act theory, constructivism, and securitization theory is useful before reading this chapter . A similar concern motivated Risse (2000) to draw on Habermass work with communicative action and propose a new behavioral logic that would inject agency and more purposive reflection into the process of social construction. For neorealists, the relative material capabilities of states determine hierarchy and power in international relations. (2002). It is especially relevant and pertinent as a tool of criticism of widely held empirical and normative theories. 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. Allowing the meaning of social norms to vary in the course of analysis can quickly devolve into an expository morass. 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. 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. Rationalist critiques relate to constructivist methodology and epistemological claims. The strategic cultures of states are not the same: they are guided by perceptions, beliefs, ideas and norms that determine how states view the international system and how they use military force and priorities (Neumann and Heikka 2005, p. 6). Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. Introduction. The social construction of Swedish neutrality: Challenges to Swedish identity and sovereignty. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(1), 2543. Wiener (2004:198) warns us that studying norms as causes for behavior leaves situations of conflicting or changing meanings of norms analytically underestimated. Certainly norms exhibit stability, as they are recognizable by the common expectations that they structure but, paradoxically, norms are also in a constant state of dynamism and flux. 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. Constructivism is the new approach to International Relations. 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. 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). Onuf, N. (2013). New York: Routledge. On the contrary, this analytic device has a deep history in the sociological and economic literatures. Neumann, I. Fierke, K. M., & Wiener, A. 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). 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