ABSTRACT
The emergence of a broad range of constructivist perspectives has over the past decade and a half played an important role in stressing the centrality of culture and identity in security relations, and in putting these issues at the heart of theoretical debate. However, the development of this ‘constructivist challenge’ has perhaps inevitably also borne the mark of the intellectual context against which it emerged. Most strikingly, constructivist theory has until quite recently been largely silent on the question of power, stressing instead the importance of norms and values. Similarly, it has generally avoided questions of strategic action. As noted earlier, these absences are not difficult to understand:1 the identification of ‘power’ with material military power, its oft-asserted role as the determining factor in security relations, and the identification of ‘strategy’ with a narrow instrumentalism that takes for granted both the identity of actors and their rationality, certainly provides ample reason to avoid the concepts when trying to articulate a broader and more sociologically sophisticated understanding of security and state action. Yet one of the most debilitating consequences of these developments is that culture has often come to be opposed to ‘interest’, ‘power’ and ‘strategy’ – and as a realm of ‘norms’ or ‘ideas’ contrasted to traditional concerns of strategic and security analysis.
