ABSTRACT
The controversy between social constructivism and rational choice has become one of the most significant recent debates in the field of international relations and has largely crossed disciplinary boundaries between international relations and comparative politics. A focus on arguing helps to clarify two issues in the rationalist-constructivist debate. First, it furthers our understanding of how actors develop a common knowledge concerning both a definition of the situation and an agreement about the underlying “rules of the game” that enable them to engage in strategic bargaining in the first place. Most social constructivists in international relations and comparative politics emphasize a different rationality, the “logic of appropriateness”: “Human actors are imagined to follow rules that associate particular identities to particular situations, approaching individual opportunities for action by assessing similarities between current identities and choice dilemmas and more general concepts of self and situations”.
