ABSTRACT
Social constructivist research in international relations (IR) has a complicated relationship with international ethics. Constructivism was an explicitly idealist approach to IR. This idealism enabled constructivism to differentiate itself from the two dominant materialist approaches in 1980s IR theory—neorealism and historical materialism. Constructivism explicitly sets itself up as a social scientific approach that could verify its claims through mainstream positivists' methods. Constructivists have been explicit that they do not think all norms are good. The difficulty that second-generation empirical constructivists have in linking their study of norms to questions of the normative has been an obstacle to the advancement of normative theorizing in their research. Constructivists framed the research agenda as an intervention into debates between neorealists and neoliberals. There has also been some concern that normative constructivists lack clear evaluative criteria with which to determine if a norm is good or bad.
