Constructivism

International Relations (IR) is a discipline of the twentieth century. Forged in an era that saw the advent of the total state and total war, and reaching maturity in an environment marked by systemic ideological conflict and the pervasive threat of nuclear Armageddon, the discipline’s historic mission has been to divine insights that might facilitate the realization of a modicum of order in an obstinately anarchic world. The durability of anarchy, the state’s retention of a monopoly of legitimate violence, and the perennial possibility of Great Power war are foundational assumptions of the discipline. Already subject to intense scrutiny following the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion, these assumptions have been further called into question in the post-9/11 era. The advent of unipolarity has spawned numerous interpretations emphasizing the quasi-imperial position now occupied by the American colossus in world affairs, a position that arguably confounds the dichotomy between the domestic and the international that has historically been constitutive of IR as a distinctive field of inquiry (Cox 2003; Katzenstein 2005; Mann 2003). In addition, while the threat of Great Power war appears to be in abeyance, the international community now confronts in transnational jihadist terrorism a threat that differs fundamentally from the powerful revisionist states that threatened international peace and security in the twentieth century (Fishel 2002; Mendelsohn 2005). Finally, the traditionally state-centric focus of IR has been problematized by both globalization as well as the increasing prevalence of state failure across large swathes of the developing world (Fukuyama 2004; Rotberg 2002). It is in this more fluid global context that constructivism has matured as a distinctive

approach to the study of global politics. Constructivists are defined by their emphasis on the socially constructed character of actors’ interests and identities, and by their concomitant faith in the susceptibility to change of even the most seemingly immutable practices and institutions in world politics. In this chapter, I argue that precisely because of these commitments, constructivists are well placed to enhance our understanding of fundamental normative and institutional transformations that are currently reshaping the world polity. The widespread failure of the IR community to anticipate either the fall of the Berlin wall or the collapse of the Twin Towers (the two iconic bookend events demarcating the immediate post-Cold War era) reflects the need to readjust the discipline’s orienting assumptions in ways that can accommodate the more complicated and less state-centric environment in which global politics is now played out. Fortunately, such a readjustment need not come at the expense of theoretical diversity. Constructivists’ analytical emphasis on the determining influence of nonmaterial factors in world politics and their sensitivity to possibilities of transformative international change have the potential to enrich the work of

researchers writing from a range of divergent theoretical perspectives. Moreover, given the diverse character of constructivists’ normative commitments and their prescriptive claims about world politics, I will also argue that constructivism is unlikely to emerge as a coherent and commensurable competitor to the established grand traditions of IR theorizing (realism, liberal internationalism, and to a lesser extent Marxism and critical theory). Finally, notwithstanding the historic centrality of paradigmatic debate as a means of catalyzing intellectual advances within the discipline, I will suggest that the rationalistconstructivist divide (Ruggie 1998) has outlived its heuristic usefulness as the field’s orienting polarity. The partial transcendence of this polarity through the growing popularity of analytical eclecticism should ideally encourage acknowledgment of the far more stimulating normative disagreements dividing constructivists from realists, liberals, and others, for such an acknowledgment is essential if IR is to reengage with the prescriptive as well as the explanatory tasks that initially formed its twin raisons d’etre. The following discussion proceeds in five parts. I first review constructivism’s origins

in the ‘third debate’ between rationalists and critical theorists that dominated the field in the 1980s, before identifying the common ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that have historically differentiated constructivists from their rationalist counterparts. Second, I examine the argument for permanent estrangement between constructivism and rationalism as it has been articulated from both sides of the rationalist-constructivist divide. Third, I consider arguments for a possible convergence between rationalist and constructivist approaches to the study of IR. Fourth, having reviewed both sides of the debate, I then advance an alternative view, suggesting that debates between ‘fence builders’ and ‘bridge builders’ are fundamentally miscast to the extent that they remain preoccupied by differences in analytical approach to the exclusion of the more fundamental normative differences that separate the various strands of IR theory from one another. Far from being mourned, these fundamental disagreements should be celebrated inasmuch as their recognition enables IR theorists to more vigorously engage with the ethical as well as the explanatory challenges that are raised by the contemporary transformative processes now reshaping the state system. Finally, I argue that while the discipline has been enriched by the turn toward analytical eclecticism inspired by constructivism’s emergence, constructivism’s full promise will only be truly realized once the tasks of critique as well as explanation are comprehensively reintegrated into the mainstream of IR theory.