Constructivists discuss questions of identity and belief. 1999). Norms are shared beliefs, knowledge, and practice about the world in this sense, they are intersubjective, meaning a norm can be understood and shared amongst actors. 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). 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). In this sense, power is a social category. Considering other factors to explain why states behave the way they do. Empirical norms studies have both drawn on these debates and fueled them with empirical data supporting different claims. 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). When ideas and behaviors differ over time or space, trends that once looked solid and consistent can shift as well. 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). 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 military exercises with other nations, states share practices and ideas and in doing so, learn from each other. In his study of how the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its constituent states interacted with global norms, Acharya (2004:251) demonstrates that localization does not extinguish the cognitive prior of the norm-takers but leads to its mutual inflection with external norms. International norms are adapted to local circumstances by actors with the ability to observe and manipulate ideas from the external normative context in so doing they alter the substance of the international norm to build congruence. 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. 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). European Security, 27(3), 374392. 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). (2017). Combining the beliefs, norms and values of influential individuals, as well as the state as a whole, creates its identity, which then influences its behaviors. 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. The focus was not on analyzing norms as much as it was using norms as a device to analyze world politics. (1999). 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. Google Scholar. 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 sees power in terms of what it does and means (Guzzini 2005); ideas have power (e.g., that democracies are good). Instead, practices are the result of inarticulate, practical knowledge that makes what is done appear self-evident or commensenical.. (3) Normative emergence how an idea reaches intersubjective status in a community. Likewise, culture plays a significant role in international security. Silverstone, S. (2021). Two have become particularly prominent compliance with the strictures of social norms and change in norms themselves. 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. Studies of compliance and contestation must grapple with this fundamental characteristic of social norms in a more explicit way moving forward. People who share an identification are then assumed to share unique traits and attributes. Main Theorists. They (2005:25) note, As domestic actors search about for new ideas to legitimate their self-interested preferences, the norms and institutions of the international system often provide them. While Cortell and Davis do not problematize the substance of the financial liberalization norm under examination, they do attend to a neglected aspect of norm dynamics the actions of those actors who are targeted for socialization. Captured by Alexander Wendts now-famous maxim anarchy is what states make of it, social constructivism is the idea that the world out there is not given, as realists would argue, but rather, socially constructed. In doing so, social constructivism places a focus on the importance of mutual constitution: international politics is shaped by both structures, such as anarchy, or agents, such as states and other actors. ), Handbook of military sciences (pp. Katzenstein, P. J. Finally, the third theory of international relations, known as Constructivism, focuses on ideas, shared beliefs and identity as the main drivers of success. 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. International Theory, 4(3), 449468. European Review of International Studies, 3(3), 713. Constructivist explanations of different phenomena related to the military can highlight how norms and identity come into play. The compliance literature is most often concerned with the actions of actors (Japan in the Cortell and Davis piece or the Southeast Asian nations in Acharyas work) who have yet to accept or internalize international norms (financial liberalization and cooperative security/humanitarian intervention). The empirical studies in this area were diverse. Scholars working in this vein often begin by critiquing the analytic move to freeze the content of norms. Roennfeldt, C. F. (2022). 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. But for constructivists, it is social structure that is important (Farrell 2002, p. 52). Subsequently, states do what they can to secure themselves, which often means resorting to military force. 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. Self-identity and the IR state. Second, analytic tractability is necessary and is no trivial accomplishment. much IR-theory, and especially neorealism is materialist; it focuses on how the distribution of material power denes balances of power between states and explains the behaviour of states. 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. 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. 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). Allowing the meaning of social norms to vary in the course of analysis can quickly devolve into an expository morass. This also goes to the foundation of questions of the causes of war. The basics of constructivism Security communities. 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. 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. Part of Springer Nature. 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. As Luke Glanville illustrates, while there were favorable conditions to ensure a successful R2P intervention (Gadaffi had made clear threats that evoked calls for genocide, the League of Arab States wanted international action and Libya had few allies), [E]ven those states that refused to endorse the resort to military forcerecognized the weight of the imperative to protect Libyan civilianseven if they disagreed over the means with which to do so (2016, p. 193). (2010). Thucydides the constructivist. 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). This suggests that there is something beyond the timeless wisdom of realism that offers only a tragic view of world politics that will never change. / (social) constructivism [1] [ ] [2] In M. Evangelista & N. Tannenwald (Eds. 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. International Studies Quarterly, 60(3), 475485. The traditional theories (Idealism and Realism) had diverted all focus to state and Power. ), Do the Geneva Conventions matter? International relations require various perspectives to comprehend the complexity of the interactions that take place in the international sphere. On the learning literature more generally, see Levy , Jack , "Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield (Review Article)," International Organization 48 (Spring 1994 . As Koschut (2014, p. 525) explains, this can transform the behaviour of states from a self-help manner to trust-building. Think here about realist logic at the end of the Cold War with the demise of bipolarity, NATO should have gone the same way as the Warsaw Pact. Early constructivist work in the 1980s and early 1990s sought to establish a countervailing approach to the material and rational theories that dominated the study of international relations (e.g., Wendt 1987, 1992; Onuf 1989; Kratochwil 1989; Ruggie 1993; Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986). If it was not, then the international order and what security means could be something completely different. 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. Agius, C. (2022). International Relations from a Social Perspective. forthcoming). 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. Constructivists interested in norm change have recently begun reconceiving norm dynamics in a different way and have focused on contestation within communities of norm acceptors. 60 ( 3 ), 713, 27 ( 3 ),.... Prominent compliance with the strictures of social norms to vary in the course of analysis can devolve. Looked solid and consistent can shift as well empirical data supporting different claims relations various... 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