Constructivism in International Relations

Constructivism in international relations (IR) refers to a family of theoretical approaches that share three analytical focal points in appraising world politics: intersubjectivity, the mutual constitution of agents and structures, and the double hermeneutics (i.e., the interpretation of interpretations). Heavily inspired by sociological thinking, constructivism is not a substantive theory of international politics in the same way that neorealism is, for instance. In the IR discipline, constructivists generally seek to redress the lack of attention given to social factors in political life, which characterizes rationalist utilitarian models. Starting from the premise that world politics basically consist of social relations, constructivist scholars believe that international politics are not fundamentally different from other [Page 426]spheres of human activity, where practices are produced, reproduced, and contested inside a meaningful and patterned social context.

Although constructivism emerged 5 decades ago in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, it did not reach the field of IR until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Two main evolutions favored the rise of constructivism in IR. First, the failure of dominant theories to predict or, more simply, to explain the end of the Cold War, arguably one of the most important international changes in decades, led to something of an existential crisis in the discipline. Second, the rise of the “third debate” in IR theory about epistemology shook up more orthodox understandings about how social scientists should go about the study of world politics. During the 1990s, constructivism gradually imposed itself as a via media, or middle ground, in the IR theoretical landscape, revisiting a number of disciplinary foundations with novel ideas such as Alexander Wendt's “anarchy is what states make of it” (Wendt, 1999).

One evocative way to locate constructivism in IR is to look at the notion of interest and the analytical work that it does according to different theories. Like rationalism, constructivism assumes that agents have interests and that they act on the basis of those interests. But while rationalism takes preferences to be exogenously given (i.e., the origin of interests falls outside the scope of the theory), for constructivism the question of where interests come from is front and center in the analysis. Just how do people come to want what they want? From a constructivist perspective, the crucial issue of interest formation cannot be dismissed without losing sight of a fundamental dimension of politics. If it is true that interests drive the world, then we must know where they come from and how they form. By contrast with the rationalist science of decision making, focused on how people act on the basis of preexisting preferences, then, constructivism favors the analysis of sense making—that is, how people define and construe their interests. Instead of being magically read off a material structure, interests are contextually defined (Focal Point 1: intersubjectivity); they are not individually defined by atomized individuals but generated in and through social relations (Focal Point 2: mutual constitution of structure and agency); and they need to be interpreted, at the levels of action and observation (Focal Point 3: double hermeneutics).

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