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Discuss the claim that the key constitutive elements of international…
Discuss the claim that the key constitutive elements of international relations,
such as ‘anarchy’ and the ‘balance of power’, are socially constructed.
Basics/ Introduction
Socially Constructed- the system should not be taken as a given. Wendt- ‘the fundamental structures of international politics are social rather than strictly material’, the concept of structuration as developed by Giddens (1979: 5) plays a central role with regard to how agents and structures are interrelated and condition each other.
Social Constructivism has become the most notable challenger to Neorealist and Neoliberal theories of International Relations. Postmodernism as well as Neo-Gramscian theories also feature strongly constructivist characteristics
Social Constructivism focuses on how the physical world is interpreted by subjective agents, and how that interpretation is reproduced and changes over time as people interact with each other.
Historical context- end of the cold war, popular amongst North American scholars
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Key author- Immanuel Kant, knowledge is subjective
Anarchy
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Neorealists and others maintain that anarchy exists independently of the particular agents and their interactions, those arguing that the international system is socially constructed point out that anarchy is not necessarily monolithic.
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Milner highlights that it is not always clear what anarchy refers to and that it may change subject to different contexts
Contrast to the argument that anarchy follows some sort of logic, it is rather a constructed institution which emerges due to agents giving it a particular meaning.
It would be hard to argue that European states are subject to the type of Hobbesian anarchy Neorealists subscribe to with regard to their mutual relations.
Anarchy- idea that the world lacks any supreme authority or sovereign. In an anarchic state, there is no hierarchically superior, coercive power that can resolve disputes, enforce law, or order the system of international politics.
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Balance of Power
social constructivists would agree with most (if not all) of the arguments posed by the liberal challenge to realism, the thrust of their attack is more conceptual and theoretically oriented.
As mentioned, Stephen Walt’s “balance of threat” theory, by including “aggressive intentions” as a dimension of threat, widens the stimuli to which states perceive dangers to include more than just material power.
Social constructivists, like Michael Barnett, charge that Walt, having shattered neorealist theory, does not go far enough in defining the ideational elements that determine threats and alliances.
Ideology and ideas about identity and norms are, according to social constructivists, often the most important sources of threat perception, as well as the primary basis for alliance formation itself.