Constructivism is a social theory rather than a substantive theory of international politics.

Broadly speaking, constructivists are con­cerned with the way agents and structures co­constitute each other, the socially constructed nature of actors and their identities and inter­ests, and the importance of ideational, norma­tive and discursive factors in the shaping of international political reality.

Constructivism offers insights for conflict analysis and conflict resolution at the inter­national level because it draws attention to a range of factors and processes that are frequently missing from the rationalist and structurally based explanations of neo-realism and neo-liberalism, including: the historically contingent and mutually constitutive nature of the structures and agents of international conflict; the socially constructed nature of identities, interests and structures; the role of discursive factors, such as political language, ideas, norms, knowledge, symbols, history and culture, in the initiation and reproduction of conflict; and the key role played by elites and other conflict agents in constructing and manipulating group identities, among others.

Together with neo-realism and neo­liberalism, constructivism is now a well- established and widely accepted approach within international relations (IR). However, it has yet to make a significant impact on the study of international conflict and conflict resolution which continues to be dominated by rational choice and structurally based quantitative approaches. In spite of its under utilization, constructivism is the most well-suited of all the main IR approaches to understanding conflict and conflict resolution, not least because it focuses on many of the same issues and shares a similar positive approach to the agency of actors.

The chapter begins with a brief overview of constructivism - its origins, types, shared assumptions and ontology, and its method­ological approaches. The second section rev­iews a number of constructivist studies on interstate and intrastate conflict; it argues that constructivism can make a genuine con­tribution to conflict analysis, particularly in terms of the ideational and discursive basis of political violence. The third section assesses some of the implications of a constructivist account of war and conflict for conflict resolution, while the final section attempts to provide an evaluation of constructivism and make some suggestions regarding a future research agenda.

Two important caveats are needed at the outset. First, constructivism is an approach to social research - a theoretical lens and a set of conceptual tools - and not a substantive theory in itself. In this sense, and similar to case study, experimental and game theoretic approaches (see Levy, Pruitt and Avenhaus in this volume), constructivism does not have anything specific to say about war, conflict or conflict resolution; anything that can be said about conflict resolution can only be inferred from the broader theory and research findings of particular constructivist studies.

Second, a great many of the insights drawn from constructivism are not necessarily original when placed in the context of the wider conflict resolution field. The construc­tivist emphasis on agents and structures, the role of identity and the importance of language and discourse, for example, were concerns of early peace studies' scholars like Kenneth Boulding, Johan Galtung, John Burton, Edward Azar, Herb Kelman and others. The importance of constructivism lies mainly in its potential contribution to the international conflict management sub­field, which has tended for the most part to adopt neo-realist and neo-liberal approaches and has ignored much of the research emanating from peace studies (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall, 2005). Constructivist research is particularly useful for the way in which it both theorizes some of these central concepts more completely into social theory, and the way it explores the micro-physics of their practice in actual cases. In sum, constructivism provides a complementary and confirmative approach to the broader field of conflict resolution, rather than a novel or rival approach.