CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism is one of three main approaches to the study of international relations. Neo-realism, the most influential approach in IR, is founded on a number of core beliefs and assumptions, including, among others: states are the primary actors in international politics; the international system is fundamentally anarchic, providing no central authority for enforcing rules, upholding norms or protecting the interests of the larger global community; the structural condition of anarchy is the main determinant of both national interests and state behaviour, which is oriented towards survival and maximizing power; states are self-interested, rational actors who favour self-help over cooperation; and state actions aimed at ensuring survival create a permanent security dilemma.

A second influential approach within IR is neo-liberalism. It shares many of neo­realism's core assumptions about the actors, issues, structures and power arrangements of the international system, but tends to focus on questions of interstate cooperation, institutions, regimes and political economy, rather than issues of security and conflict. Often called neo-liberal institutionalism, it argues that international institutions, regimes and the shared interests and mutual inter­dependence of states under globalization can mitigate the effects of anarchy, allow states to achieve absolute gains in security and create the basis for real peace and prosperity.

Constructivism has emerged recently as a widely accepted alternative approach to both neo-realism and neo-liberalism; three main developments were crucial to its rise (see Adler, 2003; Barnett, 2005; Price and Reus- Smit, 1998). First, beginning in the 1980s, a debate started between critical scholars and the dominant neo-realists and neo-liberalists which opened up the space for an alternative constructivist research agenda. Drawing from critical and sociological theory, scholars such as John Ruggie (1983), Richard Ashley (1984), Alexander Wendt (1987), Friedrich Kratochwil (1989) and Nicholas Onuf (1989) presented a powerful critique of neo-realism and neo-liberalism, in part by demonstrating the effects of normative structures and ideational factors on world politics. The admission by leading neo-realists and neo­liberals, most notably Robert Keohane (1989), that such criticisms were valid but needed to be backed up by testable theories and empirical research, led to a proliferation of constructivist-oriented studies.

The ‘constructivist turn' in international relations was given further impetus by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which occurred without any significant shift in the distribution of capabilities in the international system and largely through domestic political transforma­tion, in part due to the impact of so-called ‘norm entrepreneurs' like Mikhail Gorbachev. This seriously undermined the explanatory power of neo-realism and neo-liberalism which had failed to predict, and had no real basis for understanding, such as revolutionary transformations in the international system (Kratochwil, 1993).

Since then, constructivism has developed in a number of different directions, depending upon the specific theoretical traditions drawn upon, the central focus of the research and the main methodological approaches employed by the researcher. As a consequence of these fault-lines, there is now an increasing variety of labels for constructivist scholarship, includ­ing: conventional, modernist, post-modern, thick, thin, narrative, strong, systemic and holistic - among others (Adler, 1997: 335-6; Barnett, 2005: 258). Arguably the most important division is between modernist and post-modernist forms (Price and Reus-Smit, 1998:267-8; Smith, 2004:501).Theprinciple differences between post-modern construc­tivism and other constructivist approaches is one of analytical focus and methodology: post-modernists tend to focus closely on the relationship between knowledge and power and employ forms of genealogical, predi­cate, narrative and deconstructive analysis influenced by the Foucaultian theoretical tradition (see for example, Campbell, 1992, 1993, 1998). However, in practice it is often difficult to distinguish between different types of constructivism and with the decline of high epistemological debate in favour of analytical engagement and empirical

research, such differences have waned in importance.

Despite the heterogeneity of constructivist forms, they all share a number of concepts, assumptions and ontological commitments that collectively amount to a distinctive analytical approach within IR. First, con­structivism's core observation, and arguably its most important contribution, is the social construction of reality. Rooted in earlier sociological theory, this notion has a number of related elements, including the claim that the perceptions, identities and interests of individuals and groups are socially and culturally constructed, rather than existing outside of or prior to society, as individualist and rationalist approaches like neo-realism assume. Related to this, constructivists point to the existence of social facts; unlike brute facts such as gravity or oceans which exist independently of human agreement, social facts are wholly dependent on human agreement.

Second, constructivists hold to a partic­ular view of the agency-structure problem. Taking a mediative position, they argue that agents and structures are inter-dependent and co-constitutive (Adler, 1997: 325-6). That is, agents produce structures through their beliefs, actions and interactions, while structures produce agents by helping to shape their identities and interests. In other words, based on a form of holism, constructivism views the agency-structure relationship as a dynamic, continuous and contingent process. Such a conception is important because it brings human agency back into political analysis; it recognizes that agents have some autonomy and their beliefs, practices and interactions help to construct, reproduce and transform existing structures (Barnett, 2005: 259). This is a contrasting position to the structural determinism of neo-realism, for example.

A third constructivist commitment is to ideas, language, symbols and other discursive processes as constitutive - of identities, interests, beliefs and perceptions, which in turn construct powerful normative structures. A form of idealism, constructivism does not reject the existence of material reality.

Importantly, constructivists argue that lan­guage and discourse has a ‘causal' effect on social action in that discourses function to define issues and problems, confer normative and political authority on certain responses, create actors authorized to speak, silence and exclude alternative forms of action and construct and endorse a certain kind of widely accepted common sense (Milliken, 1999: 229). In these ways, some courses of action are enabled and made possible, while others are excluded and disqualified (Laffey and Weldes, 1997; Yee, 1996). In addition, discourses do not exist independently of society, but are a kind of structure that is actualized through regular use by people; they are a ‘structure of meaning-in-use' (Milliken, 1999: 231). Obviously, ideas and language are historically and culturally contingent, which helps to explain historical and contextual differences in political practices and social realities in ways that rationalist and structural accounts often cannot.

Fourth, constructivists share an under­standing of the importance of normative structures, and in particular, of the way they construct categories of meaning, constitute identities and interests and define standards of appropriate behaviour (Howard, 2004; Ruggie, 1997). While some of the rules and norms of international politics are reg­ulative, many are constitutive in the sense that they create the very possibilities of behaviour.

Lastly, in terms of social science, construc­tivists reject the narrow logic of traditional social scientific explanation based on linear notions of cause and effect and adopt a more interpretive ‘logic of understanding' (Milliken, 1999). That is, they subscribe to a broader notion of social causality that takes reasons as causes, in the sense that norms and rules structure or constitute - that is, ‘cause' - the things that people do (Adler, 1997: 329). Constructivists also argue that understanding the structure, which is an antecedent condition to action, does important explanatory work.

Thus, constructivism provides a particular sort of explanatory theory which rejects the search for laws in favour of contingent generaliza­tions which ask the question, ‘how possible?', rather than simply ‘why?' (Alkopher, 2005; Price and Reus-Smit, 1998). Consequently, constructivists employ a variety of methods in their research, including: ethnographic and interpretive techniques; discursive and genealogical methods; historical and com­parative approaches; and large-n quantitative studies and computer simulations.