Countering hybrid warfare as ontological security management: The emerging practices of the EU and NATO. FBI says Saddams weapons bluff aimed at Iran. Constructing IR: The third generation. Constructivism has provided a broader approach to understanding international relations and security beyond rationalist frameworks. (2010). The initial empirical norms research tended to simplify normative dynamics to facilitate analysis and dialogue with competing perspectives, treating the norms that they analyzed as relatively static entities with relatively specific meanings and strictures. 115135). Springer, Cham. Hi!Welcome back to the King's College London International Relations Today Youtube channel. Rather it seeks to explore how the current reality evolved (Farrell 2002, p. 59). 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. Yet this dominant view of international relations was significantly challenged by Alexander Wendt in the early 1990s with the simple premise: anarchy is what states make of it (Wendt 1992, pp. Social constructivism is a school of thought in International Relations (IR) theory. Erskine, T. (2012). The article argues that constructivism suffers from the same limitations as any other paradigm in IR, therefore, there is no reason to exclude this theory from forecasting effort. The culture of national security. Constructivism in international relations: The politics of reality. Constructivism is a theory of knowledge which argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning through world interactions and ideas. 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. Cooperation and Conflict, 40(1), 523. Norms and regulations. Cooperation and Conflict, 49(4), 519535. The scope of military conduct can also be institutionalized, and constructivism provides a way to understand such processes. Despite their position of material weakness, the Melians argued that freedom and justice are more important. ), Routledge handbook of private security studies (pp. Empirically oriented constructivists worked to show that shared ideas about appropriate state behavior had a significant impact on the nature and functioning of world politics. The logic of anarchy is but one way in which it is possible to imagine how the international system works. Handbook of Military Sciences pp 116Cite as, 2 Writing in the 1950s, Karl Deutsch differentiated between amalgamated and pluralistic security communities, with the former referring to a security community with a shared government, and the latter involving an integrated yet separated political structure. Critical constructivists would seek to include different identities in how they understand the nation and present a more complex picture of what identity means and how it is contested and can be deconstructed (Fierke 2001). 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). Nordic strategic culture. CrossRef Realist international relations theory and the military. Ideals that were really never in our possession: Torture, honor and US identity. 1999; Jacobsen 2003). The second generations focus on norms emerged in the 1990s and a third generation extends constructivisms scope to bring in critical theory, emotions, and political psychology, among other approaches(See Steele (2017), Steele et al. (1996). Treating social norms as fully formed, static constructs, even for analytic convenience, underplayed this dynamism. Norm-breaking behavior may be evident but is only problematic for constructivist arguments if norms are specific and static. (1999). First, both types of studies may benefit from more attention to the notion of intersubjective communities and their boundaries. Anarchy is not a given of the international system. 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. Conventional constructivists like Wendt see similarities between constructivism and rationalist perspectives and methodologies. Agius, C. (2022). Abstract. The International Affairs Forum (2020), states that constructivists use both material and non-material explanations of social constructs. Its value also depends on the market, so it can go up and down, or buy more or fewer things, dependent on inflation, and other variables. Constructivism accounts for this issue by arguing that the social world is of our making (Onuf 1989). This is a different way to think about and imagine the international realm beyond the narrow confines of rationalist power prescriptions. Social constructivism is well suited to address continuous changes in European integration. Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics. Cham: Springer. The study and practice of international relations has led international relations scholars to suggest different . 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. 1516). But the nuclear issue is also important because it shows how competing ideas about norms co-exist or contrast for example, former US President Donald Trump tried to change the norm around the use of nuclear weapons, arguing for the ability to use low yield nuclear weapons and the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review returned to the idea that nuclear superiority mattered (Tannenwald 2018). 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. Interpreting the impact of a norm. The superior military capabilities of the USA were a significant material advantage that should have compelled Iraq to avoid invasion. 317356). Yet, Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances helps in understanding why an essence of constructivism need not be found. Wendt, A. 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. 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. Yet Saddam did not want to appear weak to enemies such as Iran (Allen 2009). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Scarborough, Establishing Constructivist Social Norms Research, Contestation from Within a Normative Community, Open Questions for the Current Norms Research, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.60, Inter-Organizational Relations: Five Theoretical Approaches, Challenges to Traditional International Relations Theory Posed by Environmental Change, The Practice Turn in International Relations Theory. talk, follow norms, create rules, etc.). I would like to thank Alice Ba, Robert Denemark, Phil Triadafilopoulos, and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful discussions and suggestions on this essay. Two types of normative dynamics can be identified: the first is endogenous contestation; the second is compliance or diffusion. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. 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). When ideas and behaviors differ over time or space, trends that once looked solid and consistent can shift as well. Moreover, for some, constructivism is problematic because it is seen as apolitical and its efforts to form a via media with rationalism bring the state back in (Weber 1999; Zehfuss 2002). While arguments remain about constructivisms ontological commitments and efforts to build a bridge between rationalist and reflectivist approaches, its relevance for military studies can be widely seen in terms of how it can broaden thinking about how to see and respond to other actors in terms of security and cooperation. Constructivism is the new approach to International Relations. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 341370. States may join military alliances to bandwagon with stronger powers, as realists tell us. Social Constructivism is one of international relations approach. Along with recent work on strategic social construction the idea that norms can be deployed in the service of interests (regardless of whether those interests are pre-given or socially constructed themselves) or at least shape strategic behavior (e.g., Barnett and Coleman 2004; Muller 2004; Nielson, Tierney, and Weaver 2006; Seabrooke 2006) the recent writing on compliance has made progress on questions left open by the initial wave of empirical norms research. (3) state identities and interests are in important part constructed . In this section you learn about: Realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism and neo-Marxism as ways of explaining international relations. 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. An example here is in what is generally called the laws of armed conflict, such as the Geneva Conventions, which sets the rules for how victims of war are to be treated, and the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), which addressed the conduct of war, such as the types of weapons permissible in warfare. 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. - Checkel (1998) argues that "without more sustained attention . Considering other factors to explain why states behave the way they do. 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. This chapter will also cover the different branches of constructivist thought and the main critiques of constructivism to highlight its key contributions and the problems it also raises. 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. The norms-oriented work that followed this initial burst of activity in the 2000s built upon the success that was achieved, but also changed the trajectory of research on social norms in world politics to include broader notions of norm dynamics. Constructivist explanations of different phenomena related to the military can highlight how norms and identity come into play. The main empirical focus tended to be on either the development of a European polity (e.g., Checkel 2001) or on attempts at socializing Southern states into (relatively) universal international norms like human rights and sovereign statehood (Finnemore 1996; Risse et al. How are self-understandings and identity constituted in the international realm? 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. Grand strategy, strategic culture, practice: The social roots of Nordic defence. 394395). 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. Constructivisms key influences come from sociological and philosophical perspectives on the nature of reality and phenomena, which brings knowledge, language, and social relations to the fore. The simplification of social norm dynamics at the foundation of the initial wave of constructivist norms writing contributed to the meteoric rise of social constructivism within the international relations literature. Wendt, A. For philosopher John Searle, language played an equally significant role. Yet, constructivists are beginning to define their enterprise more independently of competing approaches. However, the separation between the two kinds of norms research discussed above may ultimately be artificial. It was a tool for constructivists to show that ideas, norms, and morals mattered vis--vis rationalist variables in explanations of world political phenomena. Intersubjective facts like social norms only exist within a community of actors that accept them. Kessler, O., & Steele, B. In the context of the global war on terror, US efforts to extract intelligence from suspected terrorists led to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques which was widely seen to have abrogated or contested the global prohibition on the use of torture (Steele 2008a; see also Birdsall (2016) who argues that it worked to strengthen the anti-torture norm). 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. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 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. In correlation to this, it would be fruitful to acknowledge the role of constructivism in international relations theory, as one could argue it is closely related to this analysis, where one may draw parallels between Norway and Sweden in the comprehension of the research. 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