Tannenwald, N. (2018). Hilde van Meegdenburg argues that in the case of Denmark, the use of PMSCs has been limited because it is not seen to align with Danish values. A constructivist lens on PMCs, however, reveals how questions of national identity can also be central to their use. 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. Introduction: Ideational AlliesPsychology, Constructivism, and International Relations . 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. 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. 12). Wendt, A. Pouliot (2008:259) argues that most of what people do in world politics, as in any other social field, does not derive from conscious deliberation or thoughtful reflection. Allowing the meaning of social norms to vary in the course of analysis can quickly devolve into an expository morass. While states may choose to participate in war or not for strategic or material reasons, it is often ideational justifications (i.e., related to justice, values or existential threat) that provide the compelling argument for or against war. Both compliance and contestation studies have broadened our understanding of norm dynamics allowing norms themselves to change and exploring the conditions under which norms will elicit conformance but they do so in different ways. (1999). The use of logic of appropriateness put constructivists in the curious position of having to show that norms, ideas, and identity mattered instead of material interests, which from a constructivist viewpoint is nonsensical. What does it derive its name from (it's fundamental proposition)? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saddam-idUSTRE56113O20090702. 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. Conventional constructivists like Wendt see similarities between constructivism and rationalist perspectives and methodologies. 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. New York: Columbia University Press. Sending goes so far as to claim that the logic of appropriateness is incompatible with constructivist thought because it violates the tenets of mutual constitution and does not allow for change he contends (2002:458) that in the logic of appropriateness, social structure has objective authority over actors, not allowing for the kind of reflection necessary for mutual constitution and change. Countering hybrid warfare as ontological security management: The emerging practices of the EU and NATO. As shared objects, they appear as external to any particular actor actors experience norms, at least in part, as external rules. 331336). (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. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. 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). Recent studies have taken the generic nature of norms more seriously and have subsequently focused on how actors must operationalize their normative context to take specific actions (Hoffmann 2005; Van Kersbergen and Verbeek 2007; Sandholtz 2008). 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). The construction of social reality. Critics too began to understand social norms as static and specific and this facilitated an erroneous notion that evidence of norm-breaking behavior somehow invalidated or falsified constructivist theorizing. Some scholars have sought a way through or out of the logic of appropriateness/logic of consequences debate by following March and Olsens (1998) suggestions about scrutinizing the relationship between the logics, especially possible temporal sequencing of the logics, theorizing that sometimes actors calculate optimal material courses and at others they reason about their normative/identity obligations (Shannon 2000; Nielson, Tierney, and Weaver 2006; see Muller 2004 for a caution on this synthesis strategy). European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 341370. 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). 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. Gheciu, A. Identifies the norms and ideas associated with them. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(1), 2543. The promise of constructivism in international relations theory. 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 sees power in terms of what it does and means (Guzzini 2005); ideas have power (e.g., that democracies are good). This is particularly relevant to military studies in terms of understanding the strategic culture of specific states: culture can have an important influence on how states see security, how they interpret threat and train and organize their military forces. One of the big problems for rationalists, (When considering critiques of constructivism, it is important to note that those critiques are guided by the underlying epistemological and ontological positions of rationalist or other forms of theorizing.) 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. (1) Normative behavior how an extant norm influences behavior within a community. International relations and military sciences. In A. M. Sookermany (Ed. A further example of norm erosion can be seen in the norm against the use of torture. Constructivists say that to understand these sorts of questions, one cannot simply turn to material factors like military power these do not explain why some states are seen as threats and others as benign. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars . Percy, S. (2016). In contrast to these other approaches, constructivism is a social theory (or family of social theories) or theory of process (Adler 1997, 2003; Checkel 1998; Wendt 1999; Hoffmann 2009), which means it necessarily lacks a priori commitments on key elements of international relations theories the identity, nature, interests, and behavior of important actors and the structure of world politics. 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). The Constructivist Approach to Explain National Identity . Glanville, L. (2016). 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. 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. for example, is that ideas and norms are hard to test empirically (Moravcsik 1999); they are intangible things that are difficult to measure or quantify, and it is hard to know if they played a significant role in affecting behavior (Farrell 2002, p. 60). Of course, norms can be subjected to revision or even reversed. / (social) constructivism [1] [ ] [2] 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. 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). Today's video is the third in our IR 101 series in which we discu. 124). Constructivism insists that reality is subjective. Trust, collective identity, shared norms, and intersubjective meanings are important for alliances and security communities, helping to ensure collective vision and purpose (Adler and Barnett 1998). Introduction to special section: from Nordic exceptionalism to a third order priority variations of Nordicness in foreign and security policy. Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations: An Ideational Alliance. For decades, the theory of International Relations was dominated by two approaches: realism and liberalism. Cham: Springer. Main Theorists. Introduction: Reconstructing epistemic communities. Social Constructivism is one of international relations approach. Social Constructivism Summary Notes. New York: Routledge. The first wave of empirical constructivist studies tended to freeze norms. Global Affairs, 4, (45), 355362. To conclude social constructivism believe that reality does not exist outside our consciousness, it only exists as 'intersubjective awareness' among people. The scope of military conduct can also be institutionalized, and constructivism provides a way to understand such processes. NATO and the New Europe. 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. Ideals that were really never in our possession: Torture, honor and US identity. Anarchy is not a given of the international system. 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. Ones position on this spectrum of reasoning about norms or reasoning through norms has consequences. In Searles book The Construction of Social Reality, he opens with a puzzle that concerned him for a long time: that there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreementthings that exist only because we believe them to existlike money, property, government, and marriagesThese contrast with such facts as that Mount Everest has snow and ice near the summit or that hydrogen atoms have one electron, which are facts totally independent of any human opinions (1995, pp. Just as liberalism was a response to realism, economic structuralism is a response to liberalism. 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. 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. Sookermany, A. M. (2021). Hegemony, entrepreneurial leadership, domestic context, framing, moral argument, and epistemic community actions figured prominently in these works as the impetus for emergence (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990; Haas 1992; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse 2000). International Organization, 52(4), 887917. 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