ABSTRACT

Such a perception indicates the commitment of realists to a narrow conception of security, defined in terms of states, militaries and the use or threat of force. But it is also little more than a caricature of constructivism in International Relations. Constructivists would argue that their approach actually enables a more sophisticated and complete understanding of dynamics traditionally associated with realist approaches to security, from that of the nature of power generally (Barnett and Duvall 2005) to the security dilemma and the balance of power (Hopf 1998). And as Friedrich Kratochwil (1993) and Alexander Wendt (1992) have argued, constructivist approaches are able to come to terms with periods of structural change enabled by strategic actors in world politics; most prominently the end of the Cold War. This places such approaches in a particularly strong position relative to structuralist theories such as neorealism that assume sets of interests held by all actors created by the nature of the international system itself.