Constructivism Dmitry Pobedash Ural State University
Neo-neo consensus • People (good/bad) are rational • International relations can be objectively described, analyzed, managed (planned? ) • States are (important/only) rational actors (of cooperation/confrontation) • War needs to be avoided (permanently / temporarily)
Critique of neo-neo mainstream • From positivist positions • • Marxism Neo-Gramscianism Social Constructivism? • Post-positivist approaches • Post-modernist • Post-colonial • Some feminist
Positivism • Same methodology for science and nonscience • Fact-value distinction, facts are neutral • Social world (like natural one) has regularities to be discovered • Truth determined by appeal to facts (empiricist epistemology – empirical validation or falsification)
Positivism vs critical theories Positivism considers possible • To separate fact and value • To distinguish subject and object • To achieve objective knowledge about the world Post-positivism holds • Facts and values are entangled • Subject-object distinction tricky • All knowledge claims are relative to some purpose
What is IR for? (AW) Traditional approach • To explain how the international system works • To provide policy makers with recipes • Thus supporting the status-quo (even if inadvertently) Critical approach • To uncover the deep structures • To identify alternatives so that we can liberate ourselves from their oppression
Rationalism • Scientific (true) knowledge can be received only by rational reasoning • Actors (states) unitary and rational • Exogenously given actors act in an exogenously pregiven world according to instrumental reason
Normative theories • Defining politics as empirical domain is restricting, may be political • All theories have values, open or hidden • Cosmopolitanism – humanity as a whole or individuals • Communitarism – political community
Social Constructivism Core • Social construction of knowledge – Theories are value-laden • Construction of social reality – Environment for actors not only material but cultural and institutional – Actors’ properties are not intrinsic but socially contingent – Shared meanings are subject to change
Alexander Wendt • Identities and interests are constructed and supported by intersubjective practice • Identity is more basic than interests • Notions of self and the environment shape interactions and are shaped by them • Social reality is created • International system could be reshaped
Alexander Wendt • State-centric structural theory of IR • The way IR are conducted is socially constructed rather than transhistorically given • International system IS anarchic • Self-help is not its necessary feature but an institution developed and sustained through process
Symbolic Interactionism • People act on the basis of meanings that objects and other actors have for them • These meanings develop in interactions Wendt’s conclusion: • Behavior is influenced by intersubjective rather than material structures and • Is based on collective meanings through which actors acquire identities
Identity “relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations about self” • Identities provide the basis for interests that are defined during conceptualizing situations • Cooperation may change actors’ identities
IR Constructivism • AW – steering rather than driving, creating expectations about IR • Interests constituted by both material objects and ideas • History ‘built in’ rather than used as a descriptive method • Role of language, communication
New Actors • • Epistemic communities NGOs Transnational advocacy networks Moral communities
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