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CONSTRUCTIVISM, Schemes and Mind Maps of Constructivism

The constructivist approach has been productive in this area because of its focus on the social content involved in the production of international relations, ...

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17-Smit-Snidal-c17 OUP218-Reus-Smit (Typeset by Spi, Delhi) 298 of 316 January 18,2008 18:41
chapter 17
...............................................................................................................
CONSTRUCTIVISM
...............................................................................................................
ian hurd
The basic insight behind the constructivist approach can be understood by un-
packing a quick observation made by Alexander Wendt. He says that 500 British
nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5North Korean
nuclear weapons” (Wendt 1995,73). In this little observation are found traces of
the features that distinguish constructivism from other approaches to international
relations, including its critique of materialism, its emphasis on the social construc-
tion of interests, its relationship between structures and agents, and its multiple
logics of anarchy. On its surface, the empirical puzzle of the threat embodied by
North Korean missiles is easy to explain: as Wendt (1995,73) says, “the British are
friends and the North Koreans are not. This of course begs an understanding of
the categories of friend and enemy, and it is through this opening that Wendt
and other constructivists have addressed both important substantive aspects of
international relations (for instance, “how do states come to see others as friends
and as enemies?”) and the philosophical background it presupposes (for instance,
“how can we study social and relational phenomena like ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ in
international relations?”).
This chapter examines the features that distinguish constructivism from other
approaches to international relations and then looks at some controversies within
constructivist scholarship today and between constructivists and others. There are
many excellent short histories of the constructivist school (e.g., Barnett 2005;Reus-
Smit 2005), and my goal is to avoid repeating them and instead explain what I
think the term constructivism means in international relations. To do so, I also
For very useful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Karen Alter, Chris Reus-Smit, and Duncan
Snidal.
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c h a p t e r 17

CONSTRUCTIVISM

ian hurd

The basic insight behind the constructivist approach can be understood by un- packing a quick observation made by Alexander Wendt. He says that “ 500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons” (Wendt 1995 , 73 ). In this little observation are found traces of the features that distinguish constructivism from other approaches to international relations, including its critique of materialism, its emphasis on the social construc- tion of interests, its relationship between structures and agents, and its multiple logics of anarchy. On its surface, the empirical puzzle of the threat embodied by North Korean missiles is easy to explain: as Wendt ( 1995 , 73 ) says, “the British are friends and the North Koreans are not.” This of course begs an understanding of the categories of friend and enemy, and it is through this opening that Wendt and other constructivists have addressed both important substantive aspects of international relations (for instance, “how do states come to see others as friends and as enemies?”) and the philosophical background it presupposes (for instance, “how can we study social and relational phenomena like ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ in international relations?”). This chapter examines the features that distinguish constructivism from other approaches to international relations and then looks at some controversies within constructivist scholarship today and between constructivists and others. There are many excellent short histories of the constructivist school (e.g., Barnett 2005 ; Reus- Smit 2005 ), and my goal is to avoid repeating them and instead explain what I think the term constructivism means in international relations. To do so, I also

For very useful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Karen Alter, Chris Reus-Smit, and Duncan Snidal.

constructivism 299

define other approaches, including materialism, realism, and rationalism, in order to show how constructivism differs. This involves some controversy, because the lines that separate them are not at all clear. In what follows, I take realism to be at its core about materialism (that is, the theory that states respond to material needs, incentives, and power) and rationalism to be about instrumentalism (that is, the theory that states pursue individual advantage by calculating costs and benefits). Constructivism, by contrast, emphasizes the social and relational construction of what states are and what they want. All these approaches might be used to focus on power politics, cooperation, conflict, or any other substantive phenomena. It is, therefore, wrong to associate a substantive interest in power exclusively with real- ism, because all the “paradigms” of international relations are interested in power, as either motivation, cause, or effect. I differentiate realism as a particular theory about material power in international relations, in contrast with constructivism’s emphasis on the social meaning attached to objects or practices.^1 In asking for an explanation of the importance in world politics of social concepts like friend and enemy, the constructivist challenge opened two paths. One was more empirical and used the tools provided by Friedrich Kratochwil ( 1989 ), Nicholas Onuf ( 1989 ), Wendt ( 1992 ), and other constructivists to explain anomalies of other approaches. The other was more conceptual and concerned how these social con- cepts might work in the world and how they could be studied and used in study. From constructivism’s starting point as a reaction to materialism, individualism, and rationalism, the empirical branch of research was like a downstream flow; it applied the insights of constructivism to understand interesting patterns, behaviors, and puzzles. The philosophic branch went upstream—it sought to understand the reasons for, and implications of, the differences between constructivism and other approaches to social phenomena.

1 The Distinguishing Features

of Constructivism

This section outlines four features of constructivism that distinguish it from other approaches and show how constructivism addresses both philosophical and em- pirical issues that were inaccessible through the prevailing models of international relations in the 1980 s. The four are not necessarily exclusive to constructivism, but each has a constructivist variant that is distinct from both the materialism of (^1) J. Samuel Barkin ( 2003 ), by contrast, defines realism as a concern with “power” and then notes that this is consistent with social construction. I agree that classical realists incorporated non-material forces, but by my definition that makes them less “realist.”

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the 1980 s shared a commitment to materialism in which socially mediated beliefs were not important autonomous forces, and they argued among themselves over the likely implications of such a world for patterns such as cooperation, institution- making, arms races, and balancing (see, e.g., the essays in Baldwin 1993 ). The ideas that give shape to international politics are more than just the beliefs of individuals. They include ideas that are intersubjective (that is, shared among people) and institutionalized (that is, expressed as practices and identities). In- tersubjective and institutionalized forms of ideas “are not reducible to individual minds” (Wendt 1999 , ch. 4 ; Legro 2005 , 5 ). Jeffrey Legro ( 2005 , 6 ) summarizes the constructivist understanding of ideas: “ideas are not so much mental as symbolic and organizational; they are embedded not only in human brains but also in the ‘collective memories,’ government procedures, educational systems, and the rhetoric of statecraft.” This makes it clear that the constructivist insight is not that we replace “brute materialism” with “brute idealism” (cf. Palan 2000 ). Rather, constructivism suggests that material forces must be understood through the social concepts that define their meaning for human life. A purely materialist approach has difficulty explaining why the USA should see British missiles as any less threatening than North Korean missiles. The “self- evident” friendliness of Britain toward the USA as compared to the apparent hos- tility of North Korea is not self-evident from a purely material perspective. After all, the physical consequences of an attack by the nuclear weapons of either country would be devastating. The brute material threat to the USA posed by a British nuclear weapon is at least comparable to, and probably much greater than, that of a North Korean weapon. The difference between the two is the conviction among many American leaders that the North Koreans are more likely to act aggressively toward the USA than are the British. This conviction is based on interpretations of history, rhetoric, and behavior, and it generates the expectation that war with North Korea is more likely than war with the British, and in turn leads to different policy strategies in response to their weapons. For constructivists, beliefs, expectations, and interpretations are inescapable when thinking about international affairs, and their importance shows that the materialist position is untenable. While the shift from a materialist to a socially con- structed view of international relations was controversial in the early 1990 s, it has now been broadly accepted. The constructivist insight has been largely internalized by the discipline.^4 Even materialist theories of international relations now generally openly include at least two kinds of ideas (though mostly individual rather than collective ideas): first, “non-material” factors such as (for Mearsheimer 2001 , 58 ) “strategy, intelligence, [and] resolve,” and, secondly, socially constructed interests. However, they usually also claim that the practical importance of the social content

(^4) Jennifer Sterling-Folker ( 2000 ) argues that this was made easier by the fact that many putatively materialist theories of international relations already incorporated social content. See also Wendt ( 1992 ); Williams ( 2005 ).

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of international relations is minimal when compared to the influence of brute material factors, and so the research agendas of neorealism and neoliberalism have at once conceded the constructivist insight while maintaining their core claims. As the socially constructed nature of world politics has been broadly accepted, it has become clear that what remains contestable between constructivists and others is how (not “whether”) this insight affects the study of world politics, both in its methodology and in its substance. The debate over the construction of state interests and their sources follows from this debate.

1. 2 The Construction of State Interests

The scholarly interest in the “national interest” has always been central to interna- tional relations and foreign-policy analysis. The constructivist approach has been productive in this area because of its focus on the social content involved in the production of international relations, including state interests. While most scholars now acknowledge that state interests are at base ideas about needs, many non-constructivists maintain that the content of those interests is for practical purposes unchanging and includes some combination of the desires for survival, power, wealth, and security. They contend that the socially constructed nature of interests does not alter the fact that the primary interests that drive states are prefigured by the material resources and situation of the states, and so states are either constructed by material forces or can be treated as if their construction is irrelevant to their interests and behavior (e.g., Brooks and Wohlforth 2007 ). States are “minimally constructed.” By contrast, constructivists would argue that the apparent “hostility” of North Korean missiles shows that American leaders respond to the social relationship be- tween the USA and the military resources of others, friend or enemy, rather than to the hardware itself. These social relations are not fixed, and the American national interest therefore cannot be ascertained, let alone pursued, without considering them. The USA has an interest in resisting North Korea, because American leaders perceive a hostile relationship with it, while it has no interest in containing the UK, because it perceives a mutually beneficial relationship. Constructivists often find it useful to examine the historical construction of “national interests” (e.g., Finnemore 1996 , 2003 ; Weldes 1999 ). It is sometimes said that the difference between constructivism and other ap- proaches is that the former is concerned with the construction of interests while the latter take interests as fixed and given (see, e.g., Goldstein 2005 , 126 ). This is not true. Nor is it true that only constructivists suggest that state interests might be influenced by forces at the level of the international system. Constructivists do not have a monopoly on the study of how interests are made or of systemic influ- ences on interests. Many non-constructivists are interested in how states come to

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The co-constitution of states and structures goes beyond recognizing that there are interaction effects between the unit and the system level. Kenneth Waltz empha- sized interaction effects but in a way that maintained states as unchanging units. In Theory of International Politics , he suggested that two states interacting in anarchy are “not just influencing the other” by their actions; “both are being influenced by the situation their interaction creates” (Waltz 1979 , 74 ). Consistent with his materialist premise, Waltz looked for how this changed the material incentives facing states as they weighed policy alternatives. A constructivist approach to co-constitution, by contrast, suggests that the ac- tions of states contribute to making the institutions and norms of international life, and these institutions and norms contribute to defining, socializing, and influenc- ing states. Both the institutions and the actors can be redefined in the process. The recognition of mutual constitution is an important contribution to the theory of international relations, because many interesting empirical phenomena in interna- tional relations are understandable only by a methodology that avoids assuming a neat separation between agents and structures. In studying international norms, it quickly becomes clear that states are concerned simultaneously with shifting their behavior to match the rules and reconstructing the rules to condone their behavior (Hurd 2007 a ). For instance, when states claim they are using force only in self-defense, they cannot avoid reinforcing Articles 2 ( 4 ) and 51 of the UN Charter (which forbid aggressive war) and at the same time are redefining the rules by specifying how they wish the concepts of “sovereignty,” “self-defense,” and “ag- gression” to be understood. International norms are simultaneously the products of state actions and influences upon state action. Thus, the idea that states and the international environment are mutually constituted is inherent in the constructivist approach.

1. 4 Multiple Logics of Anarchy

The constructivist approach leads to a different interpretation of international anarchy from the one offered by neorealists or neoliberals, and, to the extent that the concept of anarchy organizes international life, it therefore leads to different patterns of world politics more generally. “Anarchy” is the term used in international relations to describe a social sys- tem that lacks legitimated institutions of authority (Milner 1991 ). It is a formal condition of a system in the sense that it describes any system that is not orga- nized through hierarchical structures of authority and command. Waltz ( 1979 ), in defining the neorealist school, derived from the structural condition of anarchy a set of predictions about the behavior of units, including balancing behavior, self- help strategies, and a self-interested identity. Wendt’s critique of Waltz showed that these patterns did not follow simply from the structural condition of anarchy; they came from the additional assumption that units see each other as rivals over

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scarce goods. “Rivalry” is a social relationship that can best be understood, in international relations and elsewhere, by examining its social construction. This requires acknowledging that the relationship is not fixed, natural, or permanent. Wendt proposed a spectrum of international anarchies based on variation in the ideas that states have about themselves and others. With enmity at one end and friendship at the other, and with indifference in the middle, the formal condition of anarchy is by itself not very informative about the behavior of the units. After all, he says, “an anarchy of friends differs from one of enemies” (Wendt 1995 , 78 ). This allows for the possibility of community (Adler and Barnett 1998 ; Cronin 1999 ), hierarchy (Simpson 2004 ), rivalry (Wendt 1992 ), and other social relations within a formally anarchic structure. Inter-state conflict is also conditioned by the social qualities of international anarchy, as illustrated by the efforts of states to appear to operate within the confines of the norms on war.^6 Such diverse behaviors, and others, are compatible with the anarchical structure of the international system, and can be addressed through the constructivist approach. (I discuss below the constructivist possibility that the system is not anarchic.) These four elements are the distinguishing features of constructivism in inter- national relations theory. They are related to each other in the sense that, if one adopts the first idea (that is, that world politics is partly socially constructed), then the other three logically follow as implications for studying international relations. However, each of the other three is also consistent with non-constructivist premises. For instance, one need not be a constructivist to study the origins of national interests, nor does finding that anarchy may differ across time and place necessarily mean that one is using a constructivist approach. This has helped to generate controversy over what is and is not constructivist research in international relations. The irreducible core of constructivism for international relations is the recognition that international reality is socially constructed. This has implications for the concept of anarchy, for the agent–structure relationship, and for national interests, but all three of these areas of research are also approachable through non- constructivist means.

2 Controversies within

Constructivism

In defining constructivism in this way, widely diverse research falls within its scope. This includes work with major differences on issues such as the unit of analysis, the possibility of positivist paths to knowledge, and the nature of the international

(^6) On shared norms that govern inter-state war, see Price and Tannenwald ( 1996 ); Price ( 1998 ); Sands ( 2005 ). On humanitarian intervention, see Welsh ( 2002 ).

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international relations. This divides constructivism into a positivist and a postpos- itivist camp, distinguished by their positions on epistemological questions and the methods they believe are useful, given those epistemological positions. Positivist epistemology maintains that the socially constructed international system contains patterns that are amenable to generalization and to falsifiable hypotheses. These patterns are the product of underlying laws that govern social relations, where the laws can be identified by careful scientific research. While the methods that are appropriate to study world politics may not be those of laboratory science (for instance, controlled experiments with a strict separation between ob- server and event), the ultimate goal of the social scientific project is the same as for the physical sciences—explaining cause-and-effect relationships that are believed to exist independently of the observer’s presence. Positivist constructivists are careful to include constitutive explanations among the cause–effect relations they seek to understand, but they approach the study of social constitution with the same tools of social science (e.g., Wendt 1999 , 2000 ; Finnemore 2003 ; Barnett 2005 ). A competing view, represented by postpositivists, is that in social life data are not fully objectifiable, observers cannot be fully autonomous of the subject under study, and social relationships cannot be separated into discrete “causes” and “effects.”^7 What social “laws” a scholar might observe are, therefore, inherently contingent rather than existing naturally and objectively in the world.^8 As a result, according to David Campbell ( 2007 , 209 – 10 ), social inquiry “has to be concerned with the social constitution of meaning, the linguistic construction of reality, and the historicity of knowledge. This reaffirms the indispensability of interpretation, and suggests that all knowledge involves a relationship with power in its mapping of the world.” Claims to knowledge about world politics both reflect and act as structures of power, and there are no “Archimedean points from which to assess the validity of analytical and ethical knowledge claims” (Price and Reus-Smit 1998 , 262 ). In this view, the purpose of theorizing is not to identify and test hypotheses about lawlike regularities. Instead, one objective for research is to interpret how social meaning and power produce the apparent stability in the social world (Devetak 2005 , 169 ). The epistemological divide between positivists and postpositivists runs deep and may represent a decisive fissure among constructivists, and the matter is particularly sharp over the issue of ethics. (See Price, this volume.) For postpositivists, the ethical implications of international relations theory begin immediately once a scholar adopts or argues for an interpretative stance within which claims can be made. Without the positivist’s faith in an independently existing reality of world politics, the postpositivist is attentive from the start about the ethical consequences of the concepts and assumptions that frame the research. The positivist, by contrast, works from the assumption that he or she is insulated behind the claim that

(^7) I am grateful to Elizabeth Shakman Hurd for her comments on this section. (^8) Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit ( 1998 ) argue for a middle position of “contingent gener- alizations.” On the capacity of international relations theory to constitute the international world, see Ashley ( 1986 ); Campbell ( 1998 ); Williams ( 2005 ).

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describing objectively existing relations makes ethical issues a separate question. For the positivist, the question of what “is” can be separated from what “ought.” The postpositivist position within constructivism is no less empirical (though not “empiricist” (Campbell 2007 , 208 – 9 )) than the positivist tradition. It is, how- ever, empirical in a way that reflects the methods appropriate to its epistemology. For instance, Campbell’s study ( 1998 , 13 ) of the Bosnian wars examines how:

the settled norms of international society—in particular, the idea that the national commu- nity requires the nexus of demarcated territory and fixed identity—were not only insuffi- cient to enable a response to the Bosnian war, they were complicit in and necessary for the conduct of the war itself. This is because inscribing the boundaries that make the installation of the nationalist imaginary possible requires the expulsion from the resultant “domestic” space of all that comes to be regarded as alien, foreign, and dangerous.

For Campbell, the Bosnian violence was exacerbated by outsiders’ insistence that there exists an underlying “law” of ethnic intolerance that counsels that the ethnic groups of Bosnia must be physically separated from each other. A more ethical response is possible, he suggests, by critiquing the assumption that individuals have unitary ethnic identities that map cleanly onto unitary territorial nation states.

2. 3 Anarchy or Authority?

Constructivists disagree among themselves on the nature of the international sys- tem. This is reflected in the debate over whether the system can be characterized as an “anarchy.” Most constructivists have operated within what Ashley ( 1988 ) called the “anarchy problematique,” a position that they share with neoliberals and neorealists. This view acknowledges the existence of a formal condition of anarchy among states and makes anarchy a crucial element of the international structure. It sees hierarchy as the alternative to anarchy, where hierarchy refers to a system in which the units “stand vis-à-vis each other in relations of super- and subordination” (Waltz 1979 , 81 ). On this level, constructivists often agree with the neorealists and neoliberals that anarchy is the fundamental organizing principle of the international system, even though they may disagree with their claims about the implications of that condition for state behavior (Cronin 1999 , for instance, argues that there is “com- munity under anarchy”). They argue that the social construction of cultural content within an anarchic system produces variation in the structural constraints and opportunities for units and therefore leads to variation in outcomes and in the patterns of state behavior. As a formal condition, anarchy remains. However, constructivism also opens the possibility that changes in the social rela- tions among states could transform the anarchical system into something that is not anarchic (Wendt 1999 , 307 – 8 ). The key concept here is authority. Authority refers

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problems at the boundary between constructivism and other approaches. Two strands of research, on the relations between strategic behavior and international norms and between rationalism and constructivism, serve as examples of promising research in constructivist international relations theory.

3. 1 Strategic Behavior and Norms

It is a mistake to characterize constructivism as focused on norms as opposed to neorealism and neoliberalism, which are alleged to be focused on power and inter- ests.^9 This is a common trope, and it is highly misleading. It obscures what is per- haps the most interesting and challenging puzzle in international relations theory— disentangling the relationship between strategic actors and social/normative influ- ences. Most constructivists agree that states act in the pursuit of what they see as their interests, and all are as concerned with “power and interest” as are realists (and liberals). What differentiates these approaches are the sources that they identify for state interests, and the content of those interests. There is no reason that the study of international norms by constructivists is inherently mutually exclusive with the study of strategic behavior. The social construction of actors may well create instrumental, goal-seeking agents who pursue their goals in part by comparing costs and benefits, and their behavior cannot be understood apart from that process of construction. In other words, it is a mistake to separate the study of the logic of consequences from the logic of appropriateness (cf. March and Olsen 1998 ). The more strictly that separation is enforced, the less insightful is the empirical research that can result. This conclusion is the logical consequence of my opening definitions, where I suggested that materialism, rather than rationalism, should be seen as the opposite of constructivism.^10 Constructivism generally agrees with rationalists that states perceive some needs and interests and they act in order to satisfy them. To this, constructivism adds two things: an interest in explaining how state needs and interests come to be, and the possibility that different constructions of states could lead to radically different types of states and patterns of state behavior. Construc- tivism problematizes states and their interests and identities, but it has no problem accepting that states generally pursue “interests.” It is with materialism that con- structivism has the more fundamental disagreement—there is a clear distinction between the position that actors respond directly to material incentives and the view that meaning and interpretation necessarily mediate between material forces and

(^9) Mearsheimer ( 1995 , 86 ) identifies “power and interest” as variables associated exclusively with realist theory, so that when others make reference to them he concludes that they have become realists. Fred Halliday ( 2005 , 32 – 3 ) says that constructivist scholars “run the risk of ignoring interests and material factors, let alone old-fashioned deception and self-delusion.” (^10) Michael Barnett ( 2005 ), by contrast, sees rationalism as the opposite of constructivism.

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social actors. Behavior is motivated, and is studied, only through lenses acquired in and through social interaction.

3. 2 Constructivism and Rationalism

The relationship between strategic behavior and international norms raises more general questions about the relationship between constructivism and rationalism, and this theme has recently received a great deal of attention. At issue are questions including whether the two stand as competitors to each other or complements, the nature of the disagreement between them, and the useful scope of each. The two approaches are often presented as competitors to each other. There are two versions of this claim. One suggests that rationalism and constructivism predict different behaviors from states and these differences should be measurable and testable. Jeffrey Lewis ( 2003 ) takes this approach to studying EU decision-making and he performs his “test” by assuming that strategic, instrumental behavior by states is evidence in favor of rationalism, while evidence of norm internalization supports constructivism. He treats the two as mutually exclusive and zero sum. The second version of the competitive relation argues that rationalism and con- structivism are based on ontological commitments that are irreconcilable. These might be about holism or individualism, inherent or constructed rationality, or social construction versus essentialism. To the extent that these are fundamental commitments about what world politics is made of, they are unbridgeable. There are also at least two versions of the claim that rationalism and con- structivism are complementary to each other. One version sees the two as asking different questions about international relations and therefore as being fundamen- tally uninvolved with each other. This view suggests a division of labor in which constructivism is suited to answering questions about how actors acquire their interests and identities and rationalism specializes in explaining the pursuit of interests by already constituted actors. Sterling-Folker ( 2000 , 97 ; cf. March and Olsen 1998 ), for instance, argues that rationalist institutionalism seeks to explain “short-term behavioral cooperation in the moment,” while constructivism aims to explain “its development into communal cooperation in the future.” In her view, the two cannot be competitors over the same turf, because they are targeted at distinct questions. This approach presumes that the real world contains separable realms that are amenable to each approach and that the two realms do not overlap. Conflicts between the two are therefore avoidable as long as the boundary between the two realms is respected. A second version sees the two as providing different views on the shared questions. Duncan Snidal and Alexander Thompson ( 2002 , 200 ), for instance, examine the ways in which international institutions constrain states and, finding both rationalism and constructivism useful, conclude that the two “provide different lenses through which to view the same empirical phenomena

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around them, which includes their own beliefs about the world, the identities they hold about themselves and others, and the shared understandings and practices in which they participate. It should be clear, therefore, what constructivism is not : it does not mean setting aside the ideas that material power is important or that actors make instrumental calculations of their interests; nor does it necessarily assume the a priori existence of sovereign states, epistemological positivism, or the anarchy problematique. Rather, it means that what goes on in these categories and concepts is constructed by social processes and interactions, and that their relevance for international relations is a function of the social construction of meaning. One sign of constructivism’s success in the past twenty years is the degree to which other approaches have come to recognize the socially constructed content of some of the concepts they use. The goods of realist competition, for instance, include status, prestige, reputation, and hegemony, all of which make sense only in terms of either legitimated power or shared understandings. They are, therefore, the stuff of constructivism as well. This has had the result of blurring the boundaries between the approaches, making them hard to define in exclusive terms, and raising the possibility that to attempt to define them creates artificial distinctions. The differences between realism, rationalism, and constructivism may be contested, but we move forward in arguing about them only by first being clear what we mean by the terms.

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