Steele, B. (Ed.). Undoing the freezing of norms has been based on a reimagining of social norms as generic social facts that are inherently dynamic. 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. At the core of social constructivism is the idea that international politics - and indeed human relations - are "socially constructed" rather than "given." Its core ideas are based around three ontological positions relating to identity, ideas, and mutual constitution. ), Handbook of military sciences (pp. Prominent in the initial empirical norms research in this vein were studies that examined how given norms in a particular community diffused to actors outside the community (e.g., Risse-Kappen 1994; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Checkel 2001; Johnston 2001). Foreign Policy, 134, 5059. Introduction to international relations 98% (51) 3. 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. Christine Agius . Actors can see and interpret the world and approach it differently therefore, anarchy is what states make of it. For Wendt, different cultures of anarchy were possible, which meant that the neorealist idea of a self-help system was limited to just a Hobbesian version that depended on military power for security. The translation requires interpretation a subjective understanding of the intersubjective context to decide on a behavior. Staff & Defence College, Norwegian Defence University College, Oslo, Norway, Norwegian Defence University College / Norwegian Military Academy, Oslo, Norway. This pivot is an interesting development in norms research for two reasons. Constructivism is the new approach to International Relations. Steele, B., Gould, H., & Kessler, O. However, the success of this initial wave of constructivist norms studies was built on an analytic move that would engender significant debate in the 2000s. In his view, theories of cultures can not supplant theories of politics, and no casual theory of identity construction exists. INRODUCTION T O INTERNA TIONAL RELA TION THEO RIES 23/10/2018. Constructivist explanations of different phenomena related to the military can highlight how norms and identity come into play. 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. 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. There. Guzzini, S. (2005). 5. - Checkel (1998) argues that "without more sustained attention . Yet the logic of appropriateness appears to cede the ground of purposeful, goal-oriented behavior to rationalist perspectives (whether it actually cedes this ground is an additional, and crucial question). 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 the meaning of a norm can change or if different communities of actors adhere to different norms (or different versions of a norm), then norm-breaking takes on a different meaning. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2018.1533385. Hidden in plain sight: Constructivist treatment of social context and its limitations. Lebow, R. (2001). ), Do the Geneva Conventions matter? 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). It will then consider some key criticisms of this approach and conclude with a short summary. 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Neumann, I. Special issue. Cham: Springer. New York: M. E. Sharpe. (2005). Second, at a broader level, the current norms literature is wrestling with the relationship between intersubjective and subjective reality. The Pacific Review, 28(1), 122. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). 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. 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). This logic structured seminal empirical work that endeavored to show how ideational and normative factors could explain puzzles in world politics (e.g., Klotz 1995; Finnemore 1996). The Geneva Convention (1949) is an example of an international regime. It is a social institution with norms, rules, and procedures to govern how civilians and combatants should be treated in war. Berger, T. U. (2001). Ideas do not float freely: Transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war. By Fizza Hameed Khan, Mahnoor Iqbal, Malaika Shahbaz, Sidra Noor, Raniya Ishtiaq. In the attempt to understand when and where norms are likely to be efficacious, these authors stake out a position on the reasoning aboutreasoning through norms spectrum. The identity of agents such as states matter because identity helps determine national interests. (1) Normative behavior how an extant norm influences behavior within a community. Philosophy of military sciences. The inescapable tension between general rules and specific actions ceaselessly casts up disputes which in turn generate arguments, which then reshape both rules and conduct. The logical chain from general norms to contestation is not long. The category of social norm was not an invention of constructivism. International Studies Review, 4(1), 4972. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. 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. In: Sookermany, A.M. (eds) Handbook of Military Sciences. They consider that actors can stand outside a normative structure to consider options. Mearsheimer, J. J., & Walt, S. M. (2003). Ontological security in international relations. The Sandholtz (2008:121) passage quoted above brings together the two types of normative dynamics discussed in this section. Critiques Lack a theory of agency: - According to Hopt (The Promise of Constructivism in international relations theory, 1998), constructivism is an approach, not a theory; or at most a theory of process. Constructivists provided empirical studies on a full range of topics important to the international relations discipline both in areas largely neglected by mainstream international relations like human rights (Klotz 1995; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999), development (Finnemore 1996), and areas directly relevant to mainstream concerns like security (e.g., Legro 1996; contributors to Katzenstein 1996; Price 1997; Tannenwald 1999). 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). 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. But norms are never static and this meaning has also changed over time for instance, with the rise of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), sovereignty as an institution has become contingent on states fulfilling certain criteria such as not committing human rights abuse. New York: M. E. Sharpe. First, norms are relatively stable if they were not, it would be hard to justify or observe this analytic category. Recent efforts to ensure gender equality in militaries represent a normative shift, affecting operations and culture. Early empirical studies of social norms tended to consider social norms as static and relatively specific social facts. The constructivist focus on norms is important for understanding teleological aspects of its idea of international relations that ideas can change world politics (Hopf 1998). While neorealists argued that attacking Iraq was not in the national interests of the USA and that containment was more effective (Mearsheimer and Walt 2003), neoconservative hawks determined otherwise. "It's refreshing to see the authors address the pedagogy of English language learners within a non-deficit model. In P. J. Katzenstein (Ed. Wendt, A. In eliciting conformance and stabilizing expectations norms do not and cannot define all possible behavior, especially when a norm first emerges. Regional order and peaceful change: Security communities as a via media in international relations theory. Moreover, one of constructivisms strongest contributions has been in relation to the agency-structure debate, showing how mutual constitution provides a different reading of world politics and international relations but also opens the possibility for change. ), Handbook of military sciences (pp. Instead social norms are generic rules that allow agents to behave and get along in a wide range of situations. e. In international relations, constructivism is a social theory that asserts that significant aspects of international relations are shaped by ideational factors. Cooperation and Conflict, 40, 1. Psychology and Constructivism in International Relations: An Ideational Alliance. 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. 3. The scope of military conduct can also be institutionalized, and constructivism provides a way to understand such processes. (2002). NATO and the New Europe. Rather the controversies mainly focus on how far one can push one logic of action to account for observable practices and which logic dominates a given situation. Beginning with the assumption that actors reason about social norms means considering norms to be (at least somewhat) external to actors, part of their social context, but at least potentially manipulable by actors. Agius, C. (2022). Constructivism (International Relations) For decades, the international relations theory field was comprised largely of two more dominant approaches: the theory of realism, and liberalism/pluralism. 331336). Actors (usually powerful ones, like leaders and influential citizens) continually shape - and sometimes reshape - the very nature of international relations through their actions and interactions. Social constructivism is a school of thought in International Relations (IR) theory. What if anarchy was not a given condition that ordered world politics? Constructivism The international relations theory that suggests that people create their own reality, . (). What if behavior was due to factors other than norms or ideas? 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. This matters because it suggests that international relations is more dynamic rather than fixed. Cooperation and Conflict, 49(4), 519535. Wendts contention was that rather than see anarchy as a given condition of the international system, ordering relations and compelling states to behave in certain ways to secure themselves, anarchy, rather, depends on whether states buy into this view. New York: Routledge. And while the focus on norms is important, there is an overwhelming tendency to examine good norms theres often the assumption that norms are good or ethical without critically analyzing what makes them good and what they mean for international change (Erskine 2012; Kowert and Legro 1996). Not all states interpret power in the material or hierarchical sense. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. Katzenstein, P. J. For decades, the theory of International Relations was dominated by two approaches: realism and liberalism. The influence of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241805) on constructivist thought can be seen regarding ideas about knowledge and objectivity, in that knowledge of the world is filtered through frameworks of understanding. Constructivism argues that culture, social structures and human institutional frameworks matter. 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. Birdsall, A. Conventional constructivism is not interested in replacing one reality of world politics with another. Even among security communities such as the Nordic states, different strategic cultures can be found because they are informed by a range of historical and cultural experiences, with different experiences of war and conflict, membership of alliances, and other factors (see special issues of Cooperation and Conflict (2005) and Global Affairs (2018) for further discussions). New York: Columbia University Press. Constructivists argue that international life is social, resulting from the ways people interact with each other (i.e. Haas, P. M. (2016). The growth of Private Military Companies (PMCs) or Private Military Security Contractors (PMSCs) in the 1990s and their increased use in conflicts has been a consequence of a range of different factors: increasing neo-liberalization, cuts to defense budgets and a desire for states to outsource security. Onuf, N. (2013). Koschut, S. (2014). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-saddam-idUSTRE56113O20090702. 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