Constructivist View of Power in International Relations

Constructivism

Constructivism can be understood as a metatheoretical commitment that is based on three characteristics. First, it makes the epistemological claim that meaning, and hence knowledge, is socially constructed. It is constructed because concepts are the condition for the possibility of knowledge. Our senses are not passive receptors of “given” facts. The very identification of facts out of the ongoing noise depends on preexisting notions that guide our view of the world. This knowledge is moreover socially or intersubjectively constructed. Concepts are part of language. Language is not reducible to something entirely subjective or objective. Language is not subjective because it exists independently of us to the extent that language is always more than its individual usages and before them. Language is not objective because it does not exist independently of our minds and our usage (language exists and changes through our use). Language is intersubjective.

Second, constructivism makes the ontological claim that the social world is constructed. As in John Searle's famous example about a money bill, this piece of paper is “money” only because of our shared beliefs. As all people who have had to go through periods of hyperinflation recognize, the moment that this shared belief ceases to exist, the bill is literally no more than a piece of paper. This assumption does not entail that everything is constructed, but it covers that part of reality in which the social sciences are usually interested. Hence, the physical type of support for money (paper, plastic, etc.) is usually not the most relevant for [Page 139]social analysis. What is most relevant is the social or institutional fact—the ontological result of “our making.”

Third, since constructivism clearly distinguishes and problematizes the relationship between the levels of observation and action, it is finally defined by stressing the reflexive relationship between the social construction of knowledge and the construction of social reality. In other words, it focuses on reflexivity. On the microlevel, reflexivity has to do with what Ian Hacking calls the looping effect. Categories we use for classifying/naming people interact with the self-conception of those people. Whereas it makes no difference to stones how we classify them, it can make a difference to people and affect their self-understanding and behavior: identity thus becomes a crucial term for constructivism. On the macrolevel, reflexivity refers to self-fulfilling prophecies. The concern in the response to Samuel Huntington's clash of civilization thesis had much to do with this reflexive relationship between knowledge and the social world. Whether the main fault lines of conflict really have to be thought in this way, if all people assume they do, and act accordingly, the world would indeed become one of inevitable clashes of civilizations. Assuming the claim to be true, our actions would tend to produce the very reality the claim was only supposed to describe. But the relationship between social reality and the social construction of knowledge also works from social facts to knowledge, a component perhaps less touched on in constructivist writings.

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