The Promise of TedHopf

Constructivism in
International Relations
Theory

challenger to theA
continuing dominance of neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism in the
study of international relations in the United States, constructivism is regarded
with a great deal of skepticism by mainstream scholars. 1 While the reasons for
this reception are many, three central ones are the mainstream's miscasting of
constructivism as necessarily postmodern and antipositivist; constructivism's
own ambivalence about whether it can buy into mainstream social science
methods without sacrificing its theoretical distinctiveness; and, related to this
ambivalence, constructivism's failure to advance an alternative research pro-
gram. In this article, I clarify constructivism's claims, outline the differences
between "conventional" and "critical" constructivism, and suggest a research
agenda that both provides alternative understandings of mainstream interna-

Ted Hopf is Visiting Professorof PeaceResearch,The Mershon Center, Ohio State University. He is the
author of Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World,
1965-1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) and is at work on Constructing Foreign
Policy at Home: Moscow 1955-1999, in which a theoryof identity and internationalrelationsis developed
and tested. He can be reachedby e-mail at «hopf [email protected]».

I am most grateful to Matt Evangelista and Peter Katzenstein who both read and commented on
many less-than-inspiring drafts of this work, and, more important, supported my overall research
agenda. I am also thankful to Peter Kowert and Nicholas Onuf for inviting me to Miami in the
winter of 1997 to a conference at Florida International University at which I was compelled to
come to grips with the difference between critical and conventional constructivisms. I also
benefited from especially incisive and critical comments from Henrikki Heikka, Badredine Arfi,
Robert Keohane, James Richter, Maria Fanis, Ned Lebow, Pradeep Chhibber, Richard Herrmann,
David Dessler, and one anonymous reviewer . I would also like to salute the members of my
graduate seminar in international relations theory at the University of Michigan, in particular, Irfan
Nooruddin, Frank Penirian, Todd Allee, and Jonathan Canedo helped me figure out the relation-
ship between the mainstream and its critics.

1. The canonical neorealist work remains Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of InternationalPolitics (Read-
ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). The debate between neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism
is presented and summarized in David A. Baldwin, ed., Neorealismand Neoliberalism(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993). Constructivist challenges can be found in Nicholas Greenwood
Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theon; and InternationalRelations (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed ., The Culture of National Security:
Norms and Identity in WorldPolitics(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Yosef Lapid
and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder, Colo.:
Lynne Rienner, 1996).

InternationalSecurity,Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 171-200

© 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

171

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 International Security 23:1 j 172

tional relations puzzles and offers a few examples of what constructivism can
uniquely bring to an understanding of world politics.
Constructivism offers alternative understandings of a number of the central
themes in international relations theory, including: the meaning of anarchy and
balance of power, the relationship between state identity and interest, an
elaboration of power, and the prospects for change in world politics. Construc-
tivism itself should be understood in its conventionaland critical variants, the
latter being more closely tied to critical social theory . The conventional con-
structivist desire to present an alternative to mainstream international relations
theory requires a research program. Such a program includes constructivist
reconceptualizations of balance-of-threat theory, the security dilemma, neolib-
eral cooperation theory, and the democratic peace . The constructivist research
program has its own puzzles that concentrate on issues of identity in world
politics and the theorization of domestic politics and culture in international
relations theory.

Conventional Constructivism and Issues in Mainstream

International Relations Theory

Since constructivism is best defined in relation to the issues it claims to

apprehend, I present its position on several of the most significant themes in
international relations theory today .

ACTORS AND STRUCTURES ARE MUTUALLY CONSTITUTED

How much do structures constrain and enable the actions of actors, and how
much can actors deviate from the constraints of structure? In world politics, a
structure is a set of relatively unchangeable constraints on the behavior of
states. 2 Although these constraints can take the form of systems of material
dis/incentives, such as a balance of power or a market, as important from a
constructivist perspective is how an action does or does not reproduce both
the actor and the structure. 3 For example, to the extent that U.S. appeasement
in Vietnam was unimaginable because of U.S. identity as a great power,

2. Most important for this article, this is the neorealist conceptualization of international structure .
All references to neorealism , unless otherwise noted , are from Waltz, Theoryof InternationalPolitics.
3. Friedrich Kratochwil suggests that this difference in the understanding of structure is because
structuralism entered international relations theory not through sociolinguistics, but through
microeconomics . Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?" in Lapid
and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, p . 211.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 173

military intervention constituted the United States as a great power. Appease-

ment was an unimaginable act. By engaging in the enabled" action of inter- II

vention, the United States reproduced its own identity of great power, as well
as the structure that gave meaning to its action. So, U.S. intervention in
Vietnam perpetuated the international intersubjective understanding of great
powers as those states that use military power against others .
Meaningful behavior, or action,4 is possible only within an intersubjective
social context. Actors develop their relations with, and understandings of,
others through the media of norms and practices. In the absence of norms,
exercises of power, or actions, would be devoid of meaning. Constitutive
norms define an identity by specifying the actions that will cause Others to
recognize that identity and respond to it appropriately. 5 Since structure is
meaningless without some intersubjective set of norms and practices, anarchy,
mainstream international relations theory's most crucial structural component,
is meaningless. Neither anarchy, that is, the absence of any authority above the
state, nor the distribution of capabilities, can socialize" states to the desiderata
II

of the international system's structure absent some set of meaningful norms

and practices. 6
A story many use in first-year international relations courses to demonstrate
the structural extreme, that is, a situation where no agency is imaginable,
illustrates the point. The scenario is a fire in a theater where all run for the
exits.7 But absent knowledge of social practices or constitutive norms, struc-
ture, even in this seemingly overdetermined circumstance, is still indetermi-
nate. Even in a theater with just one door, while all run for that exit, who goes
first? Are they the strongest or the disabled, the women or the children, the
aged or the infirm, or is it just a mad dash? Determining the outcome will
require knowing more about the situation than about the distribution of ma-
terial power or the structure of authority. One will need to know about the
culture, norms, institutions, procedures, rules, and social practices that consti-
tute the actors and the structure alike.

4. The critical distinction between action and behavior is made by Charles Taylor, "Interpretation
and the Sciences of Man," in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., InterpretiveSocialScience:
A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 33-81 .
5. Ronald L. Jepperson , Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, "Norms, Identity, and Culture
in National Security," in Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, p. 54.
6. David Dessler, "What's At Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?" InternationalOrganization,Vol.
43, No. 3 (Summer 1989), pp . 459-460.
7. Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration(Baltimore, Md .: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1962).

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 I 174

ANARCHY AS AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Given that anarchy is structural, it must be mutually constituted by actors
employing constitutive rules and social practices, implying that anarchy is as
indeterminate as Arnold Wolfers's fire. Alexander Wendt has offered a con-
structivist critique of this fundamental structural pillar of mainstream interna-
tional relations theory. 8 But still more fundamentally, this move opens the
possibility of thinking of anarchy as having multiple meanings for different
actors based on their own communities of intersubjective understandings and
practices. And if multiple understandings of anarchy are possible, then one can
begin to theorize about different domains and issue areas of international
politics that are understood by actors as more, or less, anarchic.
Self-help, the neorealist inference that all states should prefer security inde-
pendence whenever possible, is a structurally determined behavior of an actor
only to the extent that a single particular understanding of anarchy prevails. 9
If the implications of anarchy are not constant across all relationships and issue
areas of international politics, then a continuum of anarchies is possible. Where
there are catastrophic consequences for not being able to rely on one's own
capacity to enforce an agreement, such as arms control in a world of offensive
military advantage, neorealist conceptualizations of anarchy are most apt. But
where actors do not worry much about the potential costs of ceding control
over outcomes to other states or institutions, such as in the enforcement of
trade agreements, this is a realm of world politics where neorealist ideas of
anarchy are just imaginary.

IDENTITIES AND INTERESTS IN WORLD POLITICS

Identities are necessary, in international politics and domestic society alike, in
order to ensure at least some minimal level of predictability and order. 10
Durable expectations between states require intersubjective identities that are
sufficiently stable to ensure predictable patterns of behavior. A world without

8. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power
Politics," InternationalOrganization,Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), 391-425 .
9. Elizabeth Kier, for example, shows how the same "objective" external structural arrangement
of power cannot account for French military strategy between the two world wars . Elizabeth Kier,
"Culture and French Military Doctrine before World War II," in Katzenstein, The Cultureof National
Security, pp. 186-215.
10. The focus on identity does not reflect a lack of appreciation for other elements in the construc-
tivist approach , such as norms, culture, and institutions. Insofar as identities are the most proxi-
mate causes of choices, preferences, and action, I concentrate on them, but with the full recognition
that identities cannot be understood without a simultaneous account of normative, cultural, and
institutional context.

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 The Promiseof ConstructivismI 175

identities is a world of chaos, a world of pervasive and irremediable uncer-

tainty, a world much more dangerous than anarchy. Identities perform three
necessary functions in a society: they tell you and others who you are and they
tell you who others are. 11 In telling you who you are, identities strongly imply
a particular set of interests or preferences with respect to choices of action in
particular domains, and with respect to particular actors.
The identity of a state implies its preferences and consequent actions. 12 A
state understands others according to the identity it attributes to them, while
simultaneously reproducing its own identity through daily social practice. The
crucial observation here is that the producer of the identity is not in control of
what it ultimately means to others; the intersubjective structure is the final
arbiter of meaning. For example, during the Cold War, Yugoslavia and other
East European countries often understood the Soviet Union as Russia, despite
the fact that the Soviet Union was trying hard not to have that identity . Soviet
control over its own identity was structurally constrained not only by East
European understanding, but also by daily Soviet practice, which of course
included conversing with East Europeans in Russian.
Whereas constructivism treats identity as an empirical question to be theo-
rized within a historical context, neorealism assumes that all units in global
politics have only one meaningful identity, that of self-interested states. Con-
structivism stresses that this proposition exempts from theorization the very

11. Henri Tajfel, Human Groupsand SocialCategories:Studies in SocialPsychology(Cambridge , U.K.:

Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 255. Although there are many accounts of the origin of
identity, I offer a cognitive explanation because it has minimal a priori expectations , assuming only
that identities are needed to reduce complexity to some manageable level.
12. Dana Eyre and Mark Suchman, for example , find that, controlling for rational strategic need,
domestic coalition politics, and superpower manipulation, countries in the third world prefer
certain weapons system s over others because of their understanding of what it means to be
"modern" in the twentieth century . Dana P. Eyre and Mark C. Suchman, "Statu s, Norms , and the
Proliferation of Conventional Weapons: An Institutional Theory Approach," in Katzenstein, The
Culture of National Security, pp. 73-113. Other examples of empirical research that have linked
particular identities to particular sets of preferences are "civilized" identities driving attitudes
toward weapon s of mass destruction ; notions of what constitute s "humanitarian" shaping deci-
sions to intervene in other states; the identity of a "normal " state implying particular Soviet foreign
policies; and "antimilitarist" identities in Japan and German shaping their post-World War II
foreign policies. These arguments can be found in Richard Price and Nina Tannenwald, "Norms
and Deterrence: The Nuclear and Chemical Weapons Taboos," pp. 114-152; Martha Finnemore,
"Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention," pp. 153-185; Robert Herman, "Identity,
Norms, and National Security: The Soviet Foreign Policy Revolution and the End of the Cold War,"
pp. 271-316; and Thomas U. Berger, "Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and
Japan," pp . 317-356. All of the above are in Katzenstein , The Culture of National Security.On identity
and mutual intelligibility, see Roxanne Lynn Doty, "The Bounds of 'Race' in International Rela-
tions, " Millennium: Journalof InternationalStudies, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Winter 1993), p. 454.

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 International Security 23:1 j 176

fundamentals of international political life, the nature and definition of the

actors. The neorealist assumption of self-interest presumes to know, a priori,
just what is the self being identified . In other words, the state in international
politics, across time and space, is assumed to have a single eternal meaning.
Constructivism instead assumes that the selves, or identities, of states are a
variable; they likely depend on historical, cultural, political, and social context.
Constructivism and neorealism share the assumption that interests imply
choices, but neorealism further assumes that states have the same a priori
interests. Such a homogenizing assumption is possible only if one denies that
interests are the products of the social practices that mutually constitute actors
and structures. 13 Given that interests are the product of identity, that is, having
the identity "great power" implies a particular set of interests different from
those implied by the identity "European Union member," and that identities
are multiple, constructivist logic precludes acceptance of pregiven interests. 14
By making interests a central variable, constructivism explores not only how
particular interests come to be, but also why many interests do not. The
tautological, and therefore also true, most common, and unsatisfying explana-
tion is that interests are absent where there is no reason for them, where
promised gains are too meager. Constructivism, instead, theorizes about the
meaning of absent interests. Just as identities and interests are produced
through social practices, missing interests are understood by constructivists as
produced absences, omissions that are the understandable product of social
practices and structure. The social practices that constitute an identity cannot
imply interests that are not consistent with the practices and structure that
constitute that identity. At the extreme, an actor would not be able to imagine
an absent interest, even if presented with it.15

13. Robert Keohane calls the failure to contextualize interests one of the major weaknesses of
mainstream international relations theory. Robert 0. Keohane, "International Institutions: Two
Approaches, " InternationalStudies Quarterly,Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 1988), pp. 390-391.
14. Jeffrey Legro, for example , has shown how the preferences of great powers before and during
World War II with respect to the use and nonuse of strategic bombing, and chemical and submarine
warfare, are unfathomable without first understanding the identities of the military organizations
responsible for shaping those preferences . Jeffrey W. Legro, "Culture and Preferences in the
International Cooperation Two-Step," AmericanPoliticalScienceReview, Vol. 90, No. 1 (March 1996),
pp. 118-137.
15. See, for example, Tannenwald, "Norms and Deterrence ," and Kier, "Culture and French
Military Doctrine before World War II," p. 203. For a brilliant account of how social structure
enables and impedes the construction of identity and interest, see Jane K. Cowan, "Going Out for
Coffee? Contesting the Grounds of Gendered Pleasures in Everyday Sociability," in Peter Loizos
and Evthymios Papataxiarchis, eds., Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece
(Princeton, N .J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 196-197.

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 The Promise of Constructivism I 177

The consequences of this treatment of interests and identities work in the

same direction as constructivism's account of structure, agency, and anarchy:
states are expected to have (1) a far wider array of potential choices of action
before them than is assumed by neorealism, and (2) these choices will be
constrained by social structures that are mutually created by states and struc-
tures via social practices. In other words, states have more agency under
constructivism, but that agency is not in any sense unconstrained. To the
contrary, choices are rigorously constrained by the webs of understanding of
the practices, identities, and interests of other actors that prevail in particular
historical contexts .

THE POWER OF PRACTICE

Power is a central theoretical element for both mainstream and constructivist
approaches to international relations theory, but their conceptualizations of
power are vastly different. Neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism assume
that material power, whether military or economic or both, is the single most
important source of influence and authority in global politics. 16 Constructivism
argues that both material and discursive power are necessary for any under-
standing of world affairs. I emphasize both because often constructivists are
dismissed as unRealistic for believing in the power of knowledge, ideas,
culture, ideology, and language, that is, discourse. 17 The notion that ideas are
a form of power, that power is more than brute force, and that material and
discursive power are related is not new. Michel Foucault's articulation of the
power /knowledge nexus, Antonio Gramsci's theory of ideological hegemony,
and Max Weber's differentiation of coercion from authority are all precursors
to constructivism's position on power in political life.18 Empirical work exists

16. A rare effort in the mainstream literature to break away from this focus on material power is
Judith Goldstein and Robert 0. Keohane, eds. , Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993).
17. As R.B.J. Walker has clarified , "To suggest that culture and ideology are crucial for the analysis
of world politics is not necessarily to take an idealist position .... On the contrary, it is important
to recognize that ideas , consciousness, culture, and ideology are bound up with more immediately
visible kinds of political, military, and economic power." In R.B.J. Walker, "East Wind, West Wind:
Civilizations , Hegemonies, and World Orders ," in Walker, ed ., Culture, Ideology, and World Order
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), p. 3. See also Onuf, World of Our Making, p. 64. Joseph
Nye's conceptualization of "soft" power could be usefully read through a constructivist interpre-
tation . See Joseph S. Nye , Jr., Bound to Lead:The Changing Nature of American Power (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), esp. pp. 173-201.
18. Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge:SelectedInterviewsand Other Writings, 1972-1997, by Michel
Foucault(Brighton , Sussex, U.K.: Harvester Press , 1980); Antonio Gramsci, Selectionsfrom the Prison
Notebooks,trans. and ed ., Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 I 178

in both international relations theory and security studies that demonstrates

the need to appreciate both the material and the discursive aspects of power. 19
Given that the operation of the material side of power is familiar from the
mainstream literature, here I concentrate on the discursive side, the power of
practice in constructivism.
The power of social practices lies in their capacity to reproduce the intersub-
jective meanings that constitute social structures and actors alike. The U.S.
military intervention in Vietnam was consistent with a number of U.S. identi-
ties: great power, imperialist, enemy, ally, and so on . Others observing the
United States not only inferred U.S. identity from its actions in Vietnam, but
also reproduced the intersubjective web of meaning about what precisely
constituted that identity. To the extent, for example, that a group of countries
attributed an imperialist identity to the United States, the meaning of being an
imperialist state was reproduced by the U.S. military intervention. In this way,
social practices not only reproduce actors through identity, but also reproduce
an intersubjective social structure through social practice. A most important
power of practice is its capacity to produce predictability and so, order. Social
practices greatly reduce uncertainty among actors within a socially structured
community, thereby increasing confidence that what actions one takes will be
followed by certain consequences and responses from others. 20
An actor is not even able to act as its identity until the relevant community
of meaning, to paraphrase Karl Deutsch,21acknowledges the legitimacy of that

Publishers, 1992); and Max Weber, From Max Weber,ed., Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
19. Price and Tannenwald show that even power as material as nuclear missiles and chemical
artillery had to be understood and interpreted before it had any meaning. In Price and Tannen-
wald , "Norms and Deterrence ." Robert Cox has provided an account of the rise, reproduction, and
demise of nineteenth-century British supremacy, and the rise and reproduction of U.S. dominance
in the twentieth century through a close reading of the interaction between material and discursive
power. Robert W. Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Orders : Beyond International Relations
Theory," Millennium: Journalof InternationalStudies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 126-155.
20. Onuf sees these reproducible patterns of action as the product of "reflexive self-regulation ,"
whereby agents refer to their own and other's past and anticipated actions in deciding how to act.
Onuf, World of Our Making, p. 62.
21. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication:An Inquiry into the Foundations of
Nationality (New York: MIT Press, 1953), pp. 60-80. Deutsch was a constructivist long ahead of his
time to the extent that he argued that individuals could not engage in meaningful action absent
some community-wide intersubjectivity. Another work constructivist in essence is Robert Jervis's
The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press , 1970).
Applying Erving Goffmann 's self-presentation theory to international politics , Jervis pointed out
that state actions, such as gunboat diplomacy, were meaningless unless situated in a larger
intersubjective community of diplomatic practice.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 179

action, by that actor, in that social context. The power of practice is the power
to produce intersubjective meaning within a social structure. It is a short step
from this authorizing power of practice to an understanding of practice as a
way of bounding, or disciplining interpretation, making some interpretations
of reality less likely to occur or prevail within a particular community. 22 The
meanings of actions of members of the community, as well as the actions of
Others, become fixed through practice; boundaries of understanding become
well known. In this way, the ultimate power of practice is to reproduce and
police an intersubjective reality. 23 Social practices, to the extent that they autho-
rize, discipline, and police, have the power to reproduce entire communities,
including the international community, as well as the many communities of
identity found therein. 24
State actions in the foreign policy realm are constrained and empowered by
prevailing social practices at home and abroad . Richard Ashley, for example,
writes of a foreign policy choice as being a kind of social practice that at once
constitutes and empowers the state, defines its socially recognized competence,
and secures the boundaries that differentiate the domestic and international
economic and political spheres of practice and, with them, the appropriate
domains in which specific actors may secure recognition and act competently.
Finally, Ashley concludes, foreign policy practice depends on the existence of
intersubjective "precedents and shared symbolic materials-in order to impose
interpretations upon events, silence alternative interpretations, structure prac-
tices, and orchestrate the collective making of history." 25
Although I have necessarily concentrated on articulating how discursive
power works in this section, the power to control intersubjective under-
standing is not the only form of power relevant to a constructivist approach
to world politics. Having resources that allow oneself to deploy discursive
power-the economic and military wherewithal to sustain institutions neces-

22. See Doty, "The Bounds of Race," p. 454; and Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World
of Defense Intellectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 32 (Summer
1987), pp. 687-718.
23. See Richard K. Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State : A Double Reading of the Anarchy
Problematique," Millennium: Journal of InternationalStudies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 1988), p. 243,
for a discu ssion of this proces s.
24. Richard K. Ashley, "The Geopolitic s of Geopolitical Space : Toward a Critical Social Theory of
International Politics, " Alternatives, Vol. 12, No. 4 (October-December 1987), p . 409.
25. Richard K. Ashley, "Foreign Policy as Political Performance ," InternationalStudies Notes (1988),
p. 53.

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 I 180

sary for the formalized reproduction of social practices-is almost always part
of the story as well.

CHANGE IN WORLD POLITICS

Constructivism is agnostic about change in world politics. 26 It restores much
variety and difference to world affairs and points out the practices by which
intersubjective order is maintained, but it does not offer any more hope for
change in world politics than neorealism. Constructivism's insight that anarchy
is what states make of it, for example, implies that there are many different
understandings of anarchy in the world, and so state actions should be more
varied than only self-help. But this is an observation of already-existing reality,
or, more precisely, a set of hypotheses about the same. These different under-
standings of anarchy are still rooted in social structures, maintained by the
power of practice, and quite impervious to change. What constructivism does
offer is an account of how and where change may occur.
One aspect of constructivist power is the power to reproduce, discipline, and
police. When such power is realized, change in world politics is very hard
indeed. These intersubjective structures, however, although difficult to chal-
lenge, are not impregnable . Alternative actors with alternative identities, prac-
tices, and sufficient material resources are theoretically capable of effecting
change. Robert Cox's account of British and American supremacy, for example,
perhaps best illustrates the extraordinary staying power of a well-articulated
ideological hegemony, but also its possible demise. And Walker rightly ob-
serves that constructivism, to the extent that it surfaces diversity, difference,
and particularity, opens up at least potential alternatives to the current prevail-
ing structures. 27 Constructivism conceives of the politics of identity as a con-
tinual contest for control over the power necessary to produce meaning in a
social group. So long as there is difference, there is a potential for change .
Thus, contrary to some critics 28 who assert that constructivism believes that
change in world politics is easy, that "bad" neorealist structures need only be
thought away, in fact constructivism appreciates the power of structure, if for
no other reason then it assumes that actors reproduce daily their own con-
straints through ordinary practice. Constructivism's conceptualization of the

26. Critical constructivism denies this vigorously .

27. R.B.J.Walker, "Realism, Change, and International Political Theory," InternationalStudies Quar-
terly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (March 1987), pp. 76-77.
28. See, for example, John J. Mearsheimer, "The False Promise of International Institutions, "
InternationalSecurity, Vol. 19, No . 1 (Winter 1994/ 1995), pp. 5-49, esp . 37-47.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 181

relationship between agency and structure grounds its view that social change
is both possible and difficult. Neorealism's position that all states are meaning-
fully identical denies a fair amount of possible change to its theoretical struc-
ture .
In sum, neorealism and constructivism share fundamental concerns with the
role of structure in world politics, the effects of anarchy on state behavior, the
definition of state interests, the nature of power, and the prospects for change.
They disagree fundamentally, however, on each concern. Contra neorealism,
constructivism assumes that actors and structures mutually constitute each
other; anarchy must be interpreted to have meaning; state interests are part of
the process of identity construction; power is both material and discursive; and
change in world politics is both possible and difficult.

Constructivisms: Conventional and Critical

To the degree that constructivism creates theoretical and epistemological dis-

tance between itself and its origins in critical theory, it becomes "conventional"
constructivism. Although constructivism shares many of the foundational ele-
ments of critical theory, it also resolves some issues by adopting defensible
rules of thumb, or conventions, rather than following critical theory all the way
up the postmodern critical path. 29 I situate constructivism in this way to
highlight both its commonalities with traditional international relations theory
and its differences with the critical theory with which it is sometimes mislead-
ingly conflated. 30 Below I sketch out the relationship between conventional
constructivism and critical social theory by identifying both those aspects of
critical theory that constructivism has retained and those it has chosen to
conventionalize. The result, conventional constructivism, is a collection of
principles distilled from critical social theory but without the latter's more
consistent theoretical or epistemological follow-through. Both critical and con-
ventional constructivism are on the same side of the barricades in Yosef Lapid's
characterization of the battle zone: the fixed, natural, unitary, stable, and

29. Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein differentiate the kind of "sociological" analysis performed
in their volume from the "radical constructivist position" of Richard Ashley, David Campbell, R.B.J.
Walker, and Cynthia Weber. See Jepperson , Wendt, and Katzenstein, "Norms, Identity, and Cul-
ture," p. 46, note s 41 and 42.
30. As, for example, in Mearsheimer, "The False Promise of International Institutions," wherein
constructivism, reflectivism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism are all reduced to "critical
theory," p. 37, note 128.

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 I 182

essence-like, on the one (mainstream international relations theory) hand, and

the emergent, constructed, contested, interactive, and process-like, on the other
(constructivist) one. 31
Conventional and critical constructivism do share theoretical fundamentals.
Both aim to "denaturalize" the social world, that is, to empirically discover
and reveal how the institutions and practices and identities that people take
as natural, given, or matter of fact, are, in fact, the product of human agency,
of social construction. 32 Both believe that intersubjective reality and meanings
are critical data for understanding the social world .33 Both insist that all data
must be "contextualized," that is, they must be related to, and situated within,
the social environment in which they were gathered, in order to understand
their meaning. 34 Both accept the nexus between power and knowledge, the
power of practice in its disciplinary, meaning-producing, mode. 35 Both also
accept the restoration of agency to human individuals. Finally, both stress the
reflexivity of the self an4 society, that is, the mutual constitution of actor and
structure. 36
Perhaps where constructivism is most conventional is in the area of meth-
odology and epistemology . The authors of the theoretical introduction to The
Culture of National Security, for example, vigorously, and perhaps defensively,
deny that their authors use "any special interpretivist methodology ."37 The
authors are careful to stress that they do not depart from "normal science" in
this volume, and none of the contributors either deviates from that ground or
questions whether it is appropriate .38 This position is anathema to critical
theory which, as part of its constitutive epistemology, has a lengthy bill of
particulars against positivism.

31. Yosef Lapid, "Culture's Ship: Returns and Departures in International Relations Theory," in
Lapid and Kratochwil , The Return of Culture and Identity, pp. 3-20.
32. Mark Hoffman, "Critical Theory and the Inter-Paradigm Debate," Millennium: Journal of Inter-
national Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 233-236.
33. Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space," p. 403.
34. In this respect, both critical and conventional constructivism can be understood as sharing an
interpretivist epistemology, more generally. See Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man."
35. James Der Derian, On Diplomacy. A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford, U.K.: Basil
Blackwell, 1987), p. 4.
36. R.B.J. Walker, "World Politics and Western Reason : Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony," in
Walker, Culture, Ideology, and World Order, p. 195; and Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical
Space," pp . 409-410 .
37. Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, "Norms, Identity, and Culture," p. 67.
38. The only, even partial, exceptions are Price and Tannenwald, "Norms and Deterrence," and
Michael N. Barnett, "Institutions, Roles, and Disorder: The Case of the Arab States System,"
International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 271-296 .

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 183

Conventional constructivism, while expecting to uncover differences, iden-

tities, and multiple understandings, still assumes that it can specify a set of
conditions under which one can expect to see one identity or another. This is
what Mark Hoffman has called "minimal foundationalism, accepting that a
contingent universalism is possible and may be necessary." In contrast, critical
theory rejects either the possibility or the desirability of a minimal or contin-
gent foundationalism. 39 Ashley chides all noncritical approaches for "anticipat-
ing analysis coming to a close." In allowing for such premature closure, the
analyst participates in the normalization or naturalization of what is being
observed, and risks hiding the patterns of domination that might be revealed
if closure could only be deferred. 40 To reach an intellectually satisfying point
of closure, constructivism adopts positivist conventions about sample charac-
teristics, methods of difference, process tracing, and spuriousness checks. In
making this choice, critical theorists argue, constructivism can offer an under-
standing of social reality but cannot criticize the boundaries of its own under-
standing, and this is precisely what critical theory is all about. 41
So, for example, Thomas Berger makes claims about Japanese and German
national identities that imply a certain outcome for an indefinite period of time
to come. 42 Such a claim requires the presumed nonexistence of relevant unob-
servables, as well as the assumption that the practices, institutions, norms, and
power relations that underlay the production of those identities are somehow
fixed or constant. Critical theorists would see this as an illusion of control; none
of these factors can be so easily immobilized for either analysis or prediction .
This difference manifests itself as well in how critical and conventional
constructivism understand identity. Conventional constructivists wish to dis-
cover identities and their associated reproductive social practices, and then
offer an account of how those identities imply certain actions. But critical
theorists have a different aim . They also wish to surface identities, not to
articulate their effects, but to elaborate on how people come to believe in a

39. Mark Hoffman, "Restructuring, Reconstruction, Reinscription, Rearticulation : Four Voices in

Critical International Theory," Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring
1991), p. 170. David Campbell argues that no identity (or any other theoretical element for that
matter) may be allowed to be fixed or final. It must be critically deconstructed as soon as it acquires
a meaning. David Campbell, "Violent Performances: Identity, Sovereignty, Responsibility," in Lapid
and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, pp. 164-166. See also Stephen J. Rosow, "The
Forms of Internationalization: Representation of Western Culture on a Global Scale," Alternatives,
Vol. 15, No . 3 (July-September 1990), p. 289, for differences on this issue .
40. Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space," p . 408.
41. Hoffman, "Restructuring, Reconstruction, Reinscription, Rearticulation," p . 232.
42. Berger, "Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan."

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 International Security 23:1 184 J

single version of a naturalized truth. In other words, critical theory aims at

exploding the myths associated with identity formation, whereas conventional
constructivists wish to treat those identities as possible causes of action. Critical
theory thus claims an interest in change, and a capacity to foster change, that
no conventional constructivist could make.
In addition, and in a related vein, critical theorists self-consciously recognize
their own participation in the reproduction, constitution, and fixing of the
social entities they observe. 43 They realize that the actor and observer can never
be separated. Conventional constructivists ignore this injunction, while largely
adopting interpretivist understandings of the connectivity of subjects with
other subjects in a web of intersubjective meaning. The observer never becomes
a subject of the same self-reflective critical inquiry.
Conventional and critical constructivists also split over the origins of iden-
tity.44 Whereas conventional constructivists accommodate a cognitive account
for identity, or offer no account at all, critical constructivists are more likely to
see some form of alienation driving the need for identity. As remarked above,
conventional constructivism accepts the existence of identities and wants to
understand their reproduction and effects, but critical constructivists use criti-
cal social theory to specify some understanding of the origin of identity.
Tzvetan Todorov and Ashis Nandy, for example, assume that European iden-
tities were incomplete (indeed, every self is incomplete without an other) until
they encountered peoples in the Americas and India, respectively. 45 The neces-
sity of difference with an other to produce one's own identity is found in
Hegel's bondsman's tale, where the more powerful slaveowner can neither
know his own identity nor exercise his superior power until his slave, his other,
helps him construct that identity through practice. Perhaps conventional con-
structivism could accept this assumption: the need for others to construct
oneself, but critical constructivism moves beyond this position with the aid of
Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan. 46 The former allows difference to reign, whereas

43. Cynthia Weber points this out as a very important distinction between her approach to the
state and more modernist approaches. Weber similarly separates conventional constructivists from
critical theorists. Max Weber, Simulating Sovereignty:Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press , 1995), p. 3.
44. For a review of this issue see Friedrich Kratochwil , "Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?"
pp. 206-210.
45. The discussion of the work of Todorov and Nandy is in Naeem Inayatullah and David L.
Blaney, "Knowing Encounters: Beyond Parochialism in International Relations Theory," in Lapid
and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, pp. 65-84.
46. For an account of identity based on these three theorists , see Anne Norton, Reflections on
PoliticalIdentity (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

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 The Promiseof Constructivism [ 185

the latter implies either the assimilation of the other, if deemed equal, or his
oppression, if inferior. 47
Critical theory's approach toward identity is rooted in assumptions about
power. 48 Critical theorists see power being exercised in every social exchange,
and there is always a dominant actor in that exchange . Unmasking these power
relations is a large part of critical theory's substantive agenda; conventional
constructivism, on the other hand, remains "analytically neutral" on the issue
of power relations . Although conventional constructivists share the idea that
power is everywhere, because they believe that social practices reproduce
underlying power relations, they are not necessarily interested in interrogating
those relations. Critical theory's assumption that all social relations are in-
stances of hierarchy, subordination, or domination ironically appears similar
to the expectations of realists and neorealists about world politics. 49 The dif-
ferent conceptualizations of power imply different theoretical agendas.
Whereas conventional constructivism is aimed at the production of new
knowledge and insights based on novel understandings, "critical theory ana-
lyzes social constraints and cultural understandings from a supreme human
interest in enlightenment and emancipation. 1150
Although conventional and critical constructivism share a number of posi-
tions-mutual constitution of actors and structures, anarchy as a social con-
struct, power as both material and discursive, and state identities and interests
as variables-conventional constructivism does not accept critical theory's
ideas about its own role in producing change and maintains a fundamentally
different understanding of power. 51

47. Inayatullah and Blaney, "Knowing Encounters," pp. 65-66. For a very useful analysis of how
different accounts of identity have made their way through feminist theorizing, see Allison Weir,
SacrificialLogics:Feminist Theory and the Critique of IdentihJ (New York: Routledge, 1996).
48. My views on the differences separating critical and conventional constructivist positions on
power were shaped in conversation with Jim Richter.
49. See Arturo Escobar, "Discourse and Power in Development: Michel Foucault and the Relevance
of His Work to the Third World," Alternatives, Vol. 10, No. 4 (October-December 1984), esp.
pp. 377-378.
50. This is taken from Andrew Linklater, "The Question of the Next Stage in International Relations
Theory : A Critical-Theoretical Point of View," Millennium: Journal of InternationalStudies, Vol. 21,
No . 1 (Spring 1992), p. 91, and is based on his interpretation of Jurgen Habermas. For a view on
precisely the point of the emancipatory power of critical theory, see Chris Brown, '"Turtles All the
Way Down ': Anti-Foundationalism, Critical Theory, and International Relations," Millennium:Jour-
nal of InternationalStudies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 1994), p. 219.
51. For an alternative account of international relation s theory from a critical theory perspective
in which conventional constructivism's positions can be found as well, see Richard K. Ashley,
"Three Modes of Economism," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 4 (December 1983),
pp. 477-491. On the construction of anarchy, in particular, see Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 \ 186

A ConstructivistResearchAgenda
This section aims at moving constructivism from the margins 52 by articulating
a loosely Lakatosian research program for a constructivist study of interna-
tional relations. 53 I present this research agenda in three sections. The first step
is to show that constructivism offers competing understandings of some key
puzzles from mainstream international relations theory . The second move is to
suggest what new and innovative puzzles constructivism promises to raise.
The last step is for constructivism to point out its own weaknesses.

MAINSTREAM PUZZLES, CONSTRUCTIVIST SOLUTIONS

Constructivism can provide alternative accounts of the balance of threat, secu-
rity dilemmas, neoliberal institutionalist accounts of cooperation under anar-
chy, and the liberal theory of the democratic peace.
BALANCE OF THREAT. Neorealism tells us that states ally against power.
Steven Walt rightly observed that this is empirically wrong. He suggested,
instead, that states ally against threats. The attempted fix was to claim that
states will balance, not against power, but against particular kinds of power.
The latter is the power possessed by a relatively capable, geographically
proximate state with offensive military capabilities and perceived hostile in-
tentions.54 Whereas geographical proximity and offensive military capacity can
be established a priori, perceived intentions threaten tautology . Several con-
structivist scholars have pointed to balance of threat as one of the mainstream

State," p. 253. In addition, conventional constructivism is more willing to accept the ontological
status of the state when theorizing, whereas critical theory demands that the state remain a zone
of contestation, and should be understood as such; its autonomous existence should not be
accepted. For the former conventional view, see Alexander Wendt, "Constructing International
Politics," International Security, Vol. 20, No . 1 (Summer 1995), p . 72. For the critical view of the
state, see Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State," pp. 248-251.
52. For the challenge to constructivists to develop a research program or be marginalized, see
Keohane, "International Institutions," p. 392. For criticism in a similar vein, see Thomas J. Bier-
steker, "Critical Reflections on Post-Positivism in International Relations," International Studies
Quarterly,Vol. 33, No. 3 (September 1989), p. 266.
53. It is a loose adaptation because, while I adopt Lakatosian criteria for what constitutes a
progressive and degenerative shift in a research program, I do not adopt his standards of falsifica-
tionism or their associated "protective belts" of auxiliary hypotheses. See Imre Lakatos, "Falsifica-
tion and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes," in Imre Lakatos and Alan
Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1970), pp. 91-196.
54. Stephen M. Waltz, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N .Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987, p . 5. By
acknowledging that "one cannot determine a priori ... which sources of threat will be most
important in any given case; one can say only that all of them are likely to play a role," Waltz
does not offer a nontautological means for specifying threat. Quotation on p. 26.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 187

accounts most susceptible to a constructivist altemative. 55 What is missing here

is a theory of threat perception, and this is precisely what a constructivist
account of identity offers.
Distribution of power cannot explain the alliance patterns that emerged after
World War 11;otherwise, the United States would have been balanced against,
not the Soviet Union. Instead, the issue must be how France, Britain, Germany,
and the United States came to understand Soviet military capabilities and
geographical proximity as threatening. The neorealist account would be that
the Soviet Union demonstrated by its behavior that it was an objective threat
to Western Europe. A constructivist account would be that the state identities
of Western Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union, each rooted in
domestic sociocultural milieus, produced understandings of one another based
on differences in identity and practice. The potential advantage of this ap-
proach is that it is more likely to surface differences in how the Soviet threat
was constructed in different sites than is the neorealist approach, which ac-
cords objective meaning to Soviet conduct.
Let us imagine, for example, that the United States balanced against the
Soviet Union because of the latter's communist identity, and what that meant
to the United States. If true, it means that other possible Soviet identities, such
as an Asian, Stalinist, Russian, or authoritarian threat, were not operative. So
what? First, how the United States understood the Soviet threat, as communist,
not only explains the anticommunist direction of U.S. actions in the Cold War,
but it also tells us that the United States understood itself as the anticommunist
protector of a particular set of values both at home and abroad. Second, how
the United States constructed the Soviet communist threat needs to be under-
stood in relation to how Western Europeans understood that threat. If, for
example, France understood the Soviet threat as a Russian threat, as an in-
stance of superior Russian power in Europe, then France would not readily
join in U.S. anticommunist ventures against the Soviet Union. In particular,
whereas the United States saw the third world during the Cold War as an arena
for battling communism, as in Vietnam, Europeans very rarely understood it
in those terms, instead regarding third world states as economic actors or as
former colonies.

55. See Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of
NATO," in Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, pp. 361-368; Barnett, "Identity and Alli-
ances," pp. 401--404; Peter J. Katzenstein, "Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National
Security," in Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, pp. 27-28; Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzen-
stein, "Norms, Identity, and Culture, p . 63; and Wendt, "Constructing International Politics," p. 78.

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 International Security 23:1 I 188

SECURITY DILEMMAS. Security dilemmas are the products of presumed un-

certainty.56 They are assumed to be commonplace in world politics because
states presumably cannot know, with sufficient certainty or confidence, the
intentions of others. But as important as the security dilemma is to under-
standing conflictual relations among states, we do not see much evidence of
security dilemmas among many pairs or groups of states: members of the same
alliance, members of the same economic institution, perhaps two peaceful
states or two neutral states, and so on. In the study of world politics, uncer-
tainty might be best treated as a variable, not a constant. Constructivism can
provide an understanding of what happens most of the time in relations
between states, namely, nothing threatening at all. By providing meaning,
identities reduce uncertainty .57
States understand different states differently . Soviet and French nuclear
capabilities had different meanings for British decision makers. But of course
certainty is not always a source of security. Knowing that another state is an
aggressor resolves the security dilemma, but only by replacing it with certain
insecurity, an increased confidence that the other state is in fact threatening .
As Richard Ashley, bowing generously to Karl Deutsch, pointed out, politics
itself is impossible in the absence of "a background of mutual understandings
and habitual practices that orients and limits the mutual comprehension of
practices, the signification of social action." 58Constructivism's empirical mis-
sion is to surface the "background" that makes uncertainty a variable to
understand, rather than a constant to assume.
NEOLIBERAL COOPERATION. Neoliberalism offers compelling arguments
about how states can achieve cooperation among themselves. Simple iterative
interaction among states, even when they prefer to exploit one another, may
still lead to cooperative outcomes . The conditions minimally necessary for such
outcomes include transparency of action, capacity to monitor any noncoopera-
tive behavior and punish the same in a predictable fashion, a sufficiently low
discount (high appreciation) rate for future gains from the relationship, and an
expectation that the relationship will not end in the foreseeable future. 59

56. Robert Jervis, "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma," WorldPolitics,Vol. 30, No. 2 (March
1978), pp. 167-214.
57. I thank Maria Fanis for bringing home to me the importance of thinking about world politics
in this way.
58. Ashley, "Three Modes," p . 478; see also Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space," p. 414.
59. Kenneth A. Oye, "Explaining Cooperation under Anarchy: Hypotheses and Strategies," in
Kenneth A. Oye, ed ., Cooperationunder Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986),
pp. 1-24.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 189

International institutions, whether in the form of regimes, laws, treaties, or

organizations, help provide these necessary conditions for cooperation . By
having rules about what constitutes a violation of a relationship, institutions
help increase the confidence of each state that it will not be exploited and that
its own cooperative move will be reciprocated. By establishing formal mecha-
nisms of surveillance, institutions enable states to see what other states are
doing, again enhancing confidence that a defection will be seen and a coop-
erative action will be followed by the same. By creating rules and procedures
for surveillance and sanction, all parties can have greater confidence that
violations will be punished. By formalizing these relationships, institutions
help reduce each state's discount rate for future gains while increasing each
state's expectation that the relationship will continue into the future .60
Constructivism shares neoliberalism's conclusion that cooperation is possible
under anarchy, but offers a very different account of how that outcome
emerges. Robert Keohane presents as the heart of neoliberalism two funda-
mental assumptions: there are potentially beneficial agreements among states
that have not been reached, and they are hard to achieve. 61 A constructivist
approach might begin by investigating how states understand their interests
within a particular issue area. The distribution of identities and interests of the
relevant states would then help account for whether cooperation is possible.
The assumption of exogenous interests is an obstacle to developing a theory
of cooperation.
Sitting down to negotiate a trade agreement among friends (as opposed to
adversaries or unknowns) affects a state's willingness to lead with a coopera-
tive move . Perhaps it would no longer understand its interests as the unilateral
exploitation of the other state . Instead it might see itself as a partner in pursuit
of some value other than narrow strategic interest. In Logicof CollectiveAction,
Mancur Olson bracketed a host of situations where cooperation was relatively
easy, despite large numbers of players, the absence of a group large enough to
provide a public good, but sufficiently small to avert coordination problems
(a k-group), no hegemonic leadership, and so on. These were situations where
communities of identity existed such that the players were not in a noncoop-
erative game in the first place. Too little attention has been paid to this insight.

60. The regimes literature is vast. For an early foundational volume that includes theoretical
specification, empirical illustration, and some self-critique, see Stephen D. Krasner, ed ., International
Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). Elaboration of the market failure logic is in
Robert 0 . Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton, N .J.: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1984).
61. Keohane, "International Institutions," p . 386.

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 International Security 23:1 I 190

A constructivist account of cooperation would reconstruct such intersubjective

communities as a matter of course.
When a neoliberal writes of difficulty in reaching an agreement, she usually
has one particular problem in mind: uncertainty . Many of the institutional
mechanisms described above are aimed at reducing uncertainty among states :
provision of transparency; facilitation of iteration; enabling of decomposition;
and of course the development of rules, monitoring capabilities, and adjudica-
tion procedures. A constructivist would agree that these are all very important,
but that a prior issue must be raised: Is it not likely that the level of certainty
is a variable associated with identity and practice, and that, ceteris paribus, the
less certainty one has, the more institutional devices are necessary to produce
cooperation, the harder that cooperation will be to achieve, and the more likely
it will be to break down?
Neoliberalism has concluded that an important part of ensuring compliance
with agreements is the development of reputations for reliability. 62 One of the
most important components of discursive power is the capacity to reproduce
order and predictability in understandings and expectations. In this respect,
identities are a congealed reputation, that is, the closest one can get in social
life to being able to confidently expect the same actions from another actor
time after time. Identities subsume reputation; being a particular identity is
sufficient to provide necessary diagnostic information about a state's likely
actions with respect to other states in particular domains. 63
On the other side of the life cycle, neoliberals argue that institutions die
when members no longer "have incentives to maintain them." 64 But one of the
more enduring puzzles for neoliberals is why these institutions persist past the

62. On the critical importance of a theory of reputation to account for economic transactions, such
as contracts, see David M. Kreps, "Corporate Culture and Economic Theory," in James E. Alt and
Kenneth A. Shepsle, eds ., Perspectiveson Positive PoliticalEconomy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. 90-143. Formal game-theoretic work on reputation consistently shows
that it should matter, and it does, but only when assumed to do so. Empirical work in international
relations has shown that reputations do not work as hypothesized by most international relations
theory. See Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and InternationalPolitics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1996); Ted Hopf, PeripheralVisions:DeterrenceTheory and American ForeignPolicy in the Third
World, 1965-1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Richard Ned Lebow, Between
Peaceand War: The Nature of InternationalCrisis (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1981); and Jervis, Logicof Images in InternationalRelations.
63. For a recognition that "shared focal points," a la Thomas Schelling, have much in common
with intersubjective reality and its capacity to promote cooperative solutions to iterative games,
see Geoffrey Garrett and Barry R. Weingast, "Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Constructing the
European Community's Internal Market," in Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy,
pp. 173-206.
64. Keohane, "International Institutions," p. 387.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 191

point that great powers have an apparent interest in sustaining them. Their
answers include lags caused by domestic political resistance to adjustment, the
stickiness of institutional arrangements, and the transaction costs entailed in
the renegotiation of agreements and the establishment of a new order. 65 An
alternative constructivist hypothesis would be that if the identities being re-
produced by the social practices constituting that institution have gone beyond
the strategic game-playing self-regarding units posited by neoliberals, and
have developed an understanding of each other as partners in some common
enterprise, then the institution will persist, even if apparent underlying power
and interests have shifted. 66 Duncan Snidal, in his formal representation of
what is most likely to happen as a hegemon falters, includes as an untheorized
variable "interest in the regime," with the obvious positive relationship be-
tween interest in the regime and willingness to expend resources to maintain
it after hegemonic decline .67 Constructivist research, through exploring the
nature of the norms, practices, and identities constituting membership in some
institution, can provide some measurable substantive content for that variable.
Although constructivists and neoliberals agree that anarchy does not pre-
clude cooperation among states, how they understand the emergence and
reproduction of such cooperation yields very different accounts and research
agendas .
THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE. The observation that democratic states have not
fought each other is an empirical regularity in search of a theory . Neither
structural nor normative accounts fare very well. 68 The former requires assum-
ing a consistently bellicose executive being constrained by a pacific public and
its duly-elected representative institutions-but only when democratic adver-

65. On lags and stickiness, see Stephen D. Krasner, State Power and the Structure of International
Trade," World Politics,Vol. 28, No . 3 (April 1976), pp . 317-343 . On transaction costs, see Keohane,
After Hegemony.
66. Another constructivist hypothesis offers itself here: institutionalized cooperation will be more
likely to endure to the extent that the identities of the members of that institution are understood
as common and they are reproduced by a thick array of social practices . This is meant as a
continuum, with narrow self-interest being arrayed at one end of the spectrum, neoliberal institu-
tionalization of self-interested cooperation in the middle, community of identity toward the other
end, and harmony at the other pole .
67. Duncan Snidal, "The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory," InternationalOrganization,Vol. 39,
No. 4 (Autumn 1985), esp. pp. 610-611.
68. For a comprehensive review of the most recent literature on the democratic peace, and an
empirical test that shows that satisfaction with the status quo (a variable subject to constructivist
interpretation) is the single most important factor affecting the use of force, by democracies and
authoritarian states alike, see David L. Rousseau, Christopher Gel pi, and Dan Reiter, "Assessing
the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918-1988," American PoliticalScienceReview, Vol. 90,
No. 3 (September 1996), p. 527.

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 International Security 23:1 I 192

saries are about. The latter has more promise, but its naturalization of certain
aspects of liberalism-the market, nonviolent resolution of differences, the
franchise, the First Amendment-and its crucial assumption that these norms
actually matter to decision makers in democratic states when making choices
about war and peace with other democracies, are untenable and untested,
respectively.
Constructivism is perfectly suited to the task of testing and fundamentally
revising the democratic peace. 69 Its approach aims at apprehending how the
social practices and norms of states construct the identities and interests of the
same. Ergo, if democracies do not fight each other, then it must be because of
the way they understand each other, their intersubjective accounts of each
other, and the socio-international practices that accompany those accounts.7°
But constructivism could offer a more general account of zones of peace, one
not limited to democracies. Different periods of the histories of both Africa and
Latin America have been marked by long stretches of little or no warfare
between states. These pacific periods are obviously not associated with any
"objective" indicators of democracy. By investigating how African and Latin
American states constructed themselves and others, it might be possible to
understand these neglected zones of "authoritarian peace."

ConstructivistPuzzles
Constructivism offers an account of the politics of identity. 71 It proposes a way
of understanding how nationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and sexu-
ality, and other intersubjectively understood communties, are each involved in
an account of global politics. Understanding how identities are constructed,
what norms and practices accompany their reproduction, and how they con-
struct each other is a major part of the constructivist research program.

69. For a very well developed research design to test constructivist versus mainstream accounts
of the democratic peace , see Colin Kahl, "Constructing a Separate Peace: Constructivism, Collective
Liberal Identity, and the Democratic Peace," Security Studies (forthcoming).
70. For accounts of the democratic peace that focus on its contextual intersubjective characters,
see Ido Oren, "The Subjectivity of the 'Democratic' Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial
Germany," International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp . 147-184; Thomas Risse-Kappen,
Cooperationamong Democracies,p. 30; and Risse-Kappen, "Co llective Identity in a Democratic
Community," pp . 366-367 .
71. I do not try to compile a comprehensive set of questions for constructivists, but instead merely
elaborate general themes for research, themes that do not have a prominent place in mainstream
international relations theory .

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 193

Although nationalism and ethnicity are receiving more attention in main-

stream international relations theory, attention to gender, sexuality, race, and
religion have received much less, and certainly none of them is part of either
neorealist or neoliberal accounts of how the world works. 72 Constructivism
promises to deal with these issues, not merely because they are topical or
heretofore undervalued, but because as varieties of identity, they are central to
how constructivism generates understandings of social phenomena. Construc-
tivism assumes, a priori, that identities are potentially part of the constitutive
practices of the state, and so, productive of its actions at home and abroad. 73
One of the most important by-products of this concern with identity politics
is the return of differences among states . The same state is, in effect, many
different actors in world politics, and different states behave differently toward
other states, based on the identities of each . If true, then we should expect
different patterns of behavior across groups of states with different identities
and interests. 74 Although it is tempting to assert that similarity breeds coop-
eration, it is impossible to make such an a priori claim . Identities have much
more meaning for each state than a mere label. Identities offer each state an
understanding of other states, its nature, motives, interests, probable actions,
attitudes, and role in any given political context.
Understanding another state as one identity, rather than another, has conse-
quences for the possible actions of both. For example, Michael Barnett has
speculated that the failure of deterrence against Iraq in Kuwait in 1990 is
because Saudi Arabia was seen as an" Arab," rather than a "sovereign," state.
Iraq's understanding of Saudi Arabia as an Arab state implied that Riyadh
would never allow U.S. forces to deploy on Arab territory. If, instead, Iraq had

72. For a critical view of neorealism 's belated efforts to capture nationalism, see Yosef Lapid and
Friedrich Kratochwil, "Revisiting the 'National' : Toward an Identity Agenda in Neorealism?, in
Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, pp. 105-126 . For a most imaginative
critical constructivist treatment of nationalism, see Daniel Deudney, "Ground Identity : Nature,
Place, and Space in Nationalism," in ibid ., pp . 129-145; see also Roxanne Lynn Doty, "Sovereignty
and the Nation : Constructing the Boundari es of National Identity ," in Thomas J. Biersteker and
Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereigntyas SocialConstruct (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1996) pp. 121-147 .
73. For example, J. Ann Tickner observes that contemporary masculinized Western understandings
of themselves lead to feminized portrayal s of the South as "emotional and unpredictable . Tickner,
"Identity in International Relations Theory: Feminist Perspectives ," in Lapid and Kratochwil , The
Return of Culture and Identity, pp. 147-162.
74. For example, Risse-Kappen, "Collective Identity in a Democratic Community," finds a common
identity within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; see also Iver B. Neumann and Jennifer M.
Welsh, "The Other in European self-definition," Review of International Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4
(October 1991), pp . 327-348 , for an exploration of "Christian" and "European" states versus
"Islamic " "Asiatic" Turkey.

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 International Security 23:1 I 194

understood Saudi Arabia as a sovereign state, in a realist world, it would have

perhaps expected Saudi balancing against Iraqi actions in Kuwait, including
U.S. military intervention, and would have been deterred .75 In other words,
neorealist predictions of balancing behavior, such as that of Saudi Arabia, rely
on a single particular identity being ascribed to that country by Iraq. But if
alternative identities are possible, as constructivism suggests, the neorealist
world is smaller than alleged.
Or another state may not be seen as another "state" at all, but instead as an
ally, friend, enemy, co-guarantor, threat, a democracy, and so on .76 Finally,
constructivism's expectation of multiple identities for actors in world politics
rests on an openness to local historical context. This receptivity to identities
being generated and reproduced empirically, rather than resting on pregiven
assumptions, opens up the study of world politics to different units alto-
gether. 77 Hypothesizing differences among states allows for movement beyond
the typical binary characterizations of mainstream international relations:
democratic -nondemocratic, great power - non-great power, North-South, and
so forth. While these common axes of analysis are certainly relevant, construc-
tivism promises to explain many other meaningful communities of identity
throughout world politics.
A third constructivist promise is to return culture and domestic politics to
international relations theory. To the extent that constructivism is ontologically
agnostic-that is, it does not include or exclude any particular variables as
meaningful-it envisions no disciplinary divides between international rela-
tions and comparative subfields (or any fields for that matter). Constructivism
has no inherent focus on "second image" accounts of world politics . In fact,
an appropriate criticism would be that it has remained far too long at the
systemic level of analysis.78 Nevertheless, constructivism provides a promising

75. Michael N. Barnett , "Institutions, Roles, and Disorder: The Case of the Arab States System,"
InternationalStudies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3 (September 1993), pp . 271-296 .
76. See Risse-Kappen , "Collective Identity in a Democratic Community," and Michael N. Barnett,
"Sovereignty , Nationalism , and Regional Order in the Arab System," International Organization,
Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp . 479-510 , for examples .
77. Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach , for example , offer a rich variety of "polities ," such as
citycstates, civilizations, polis, empires, kingdoms, caliphates, each of which had and, in some
cases, has and will have , meaningful identities in world politics. Ferguson and Mansbach, "Past
as Prelude," pp. 22-28, and Sujata Chakrabarti Pasic, "Culturing International Relations Theory,"
both in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, pp. 85-104.
78. Keohane, in "International Institutions, " p. 392, has made this observation about "reflectivist"
scholarship .. For similar laments, see Dessler, "What' s At Stake," p . 471; and Barnett, "Institutions,
Roles, and Disorder," p. 276. Alexander Wendt acknowledges he has "systematically bracketed"
domestic factors in Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It," p . 423.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 195

approach for uncovering those features of domestic society, culture, and poli-
tics that should matter to state identity and state action in global politics. There
are many different ways in which a constructivist account can operate at the
domestic level. I mention only several here.
Any state identity in world politics is partly the product of the social
practices that constitute that identity at home. 79 In this way, identity politics at
home constrain and enable state identity, interests, and actions abroad. Ashis
Nandy has written about the close connection between Victorian British gen-
erational and gender identities at home and the colonization of India . Victorian
Britain drew a very strict line between the sexes and also between generations,
differentiating the latter into young and old, productive and unproductive,
respectively. British colonial dominance was understood as masculine in rela-
tionship to Indian's feminine submission, and Indian culture was understood
as infantile and archaic. In these ways Victorian understandings of itself made
India comprehensible to Britain in a particular way. 80 Whereas conventional
accounts of colonialism and imperialism rely on disparities in relative material
power to explain relations of domination and subordination, constructivists
would add that no account of such hierarchical outcomes is complete without
exploring how imperial identities are constructed both at home and with
respect to the subordinated Other abroad. 81 Even if material power is necessary
to produce imperialism, its reproduction cannot be understood without inves-
tigating the social practices that accompanied it and the discursive power,
especially in the form of related identities, they wielded.
Within the state itself might exist areas of cultural practice, sufficiently
empowered through institutionalization and authorization, to exert a constitu-
tive or causative influence on state policy.82 The state's assumed need to
construct a national identity at home to legitimize the state's extractive author-
ity has effects on state identity abroad . A more critical constructivist account

79. Two works that make the connection between domestic identity construction at home and state
identity are Audie Klotz, Norms in internationalrelations:the struggle against apartheid(Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1995); and Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security
(Ithaca, N .Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
80. Inayatullah and Blaney, "Knowing Encounters," pp. 76-80.
81. Compare this, for example, to Richard Cottam's very interesting account of imperial British
images of Egypt. The critical difference is that Cottam does not see British constructions of
themselves or their society's parts as relevant to an understanding of British images of Egyptians.
Richard Cottam, ForeignPolicyMotivation:A GeneralTheoryand Case Study (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).
82. One might say this about the French military between World Wars I and II. See Kier, "Culture
and French Military Doctrine before World War IL"

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 I 196

might begin by positing the state's need for an Other in world politics, so as
to justify its own rule at home. 83
A last promise of constructivism concerns not so much research issues as
research strategy. Constructivism offers a heterogamous research approach:
that is, it readily combines with different fields and disciplines . Constructivism
itself is the product of structural linguistics, postmodern political theory, criti-
cal theory, cultural and media studies, literary criticism, and no doubt others.
Far from claiming primacy as a theory of international politics, constructivism
lends itself to collaboration with other approaches, both within political science
and outside. Literatures in decision making, political culture, socialization, and
experimental cognitive and social psychology would seem to be most promis-
ing partners.

CONSTRUCTIVIST PROBLEMS
A constructivist research program, like all others, has unexplained anomalies,
but their existence need not necessitate the donning of protective belts of any
sort. Conventional constructivism has one large problem that has several parts.
Friedrich Kratochwil has observed that no theory of culture can substitute for
a theory of politics. 84 Paul Kowert and Jeffrey Legro have pointed out that
there is no causal theory of identity construction offered by any of the authors
in the Katzenstein volume. 85 Both criticisms are as accurate as they are differ-
ent, and imply different remedies.
Kratochwil's statement reinforces the point that constructivism is an ap-
proach, not a theory. And if it is a theory, it is a theory of process, not sub-
stantive outcome. In order to achieve the latter, constructivism must adopt
some theory of politics to make it work. Critical theory is far more advanced
in this regard than conventional constructivism, but it comes at a price, a price
that one may or may not be willing to pay, depending on empirical, theoretical,
and/ or aesthetic interests. I have described how differently critical and con-
ventional constructivism treat the origins of identity and the nature of power .

83. This is done by David Campbell, Writing Security: United States ForeignPolicy and the Politics
of Identity (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and Jim George, Discoursesof Global
Politics: A Critical(Re)Introductionto InternationalRelations(Boulder, Colo. : Lynne Rienner, 1994).
84. Kratochwil , "Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?" p. 206.
85. Paul Kowert and Jeffrey Legro, "Norms, Identity, and Their Limits : A Theoretical Reprise," in
Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, p. 469. For other critical reviews of constructivism and
world politics, see Jeffrey T. Checkel, "The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory, "
WorldPolitics, Vol. 50, No . 2 (January 1998), pp. 324-348, and Emanuel Adler , "Seizing the Middle
Ground: Constructivism in World Politics," EuropeanJournalof InternationalRelations,Vol. 3, No. 3
(1997), pp . 319-363 .

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 197

It is here that critical theory finds its animating theory of politics. By assuming
that the identities of the Self and Other are inextricably bound up in a rela-
tionship of power, and that the state is a dominating instrument, critical
theorists can offer theoretically informed accounts of the politics of identity: at
least along the dimensions specified, that of hierarchy, subordination, domina-
tion, emancipation, and state-society struggle.
The price paid for such theories of politics, however, is an ironic one that
naturalizes certain "realities," privileging social relations of dominance and
hierarchy . Of course, critical theory asserts its ultimate openness to variation
and change, but the point here is that its theory of politics, a priori, is more
closed than that of its conventional version, which stands accused of theoretical
underspecification. The problem of underspecification exists because conven-
tional constructivism, as a theory of process, does not specify the existence, let
alone the precise nature or value, of its main causal/ constitutive elements:
identities, norms, practices, and social structures . Instead, constructivism spe-
cifies how these elements are theoretically situated vis-a-vis each other, pro-
viding an understanding of a process and an outcome, but no a priori
prediction per se. The advantages of such an approach are in the nonpareil
richness of its elaboration of causal/ constitutive mechanisms in any given
social context and its openness (and not just in the last instance, as in critical
theory) to the discovery of other substantive theoretical elements at work The
cost here, however, is the absence of a causal theory of identity.
The dilemma is that the more conventional constructivism moves to furnish
such a causal theory, the more it loses the possibility of maintaining the
ontological openness that its interpretivist methods afford. But the dilemma is
a continuum, not a binary opposition. Conventional constructivists can and do
specify their theoretical elements in advance in practice. Just to take one
example, not a single author in the Katzenstein volume assessed gender, class,
or race in any of their analyses. This observation (not criticism) is intended to
underline how conventional constructivists already bound their a priori theo-
retical domains according to empirical interest and theoretical priors. More-
over, conventional constructivists can make predictions, if they choose. Their
only constraint is just how durable they believe the social structures to be that
they have demonstrated are constraining the reproduction of identities, inter-
ests, norms, and practices, in some social context. For example, when Risse-
Kappen argues that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members
regard each other as liberal allies, rather than as realist states balancing against
a threat, he is making a prediction: if NATO members see each other as liberal
allies, NATO will persist beyond the point where the threat disappears.

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 International Security 23:1 I 198

One obstacle to the development of a causal model of identity is conven-

tional constructivism's silence on the issue of intentionality . Critical theorists
confidently declare their indifference to the issue: establishing causality is an
illusory goal. Kowert and Legro point out the failure of any author in the
Katzenstein volume to establish more than a correlative relationship between
an identity and an outcome. In fact, the authors do far more than that: they
control for alternative explanations and they show the connection between
norms and interests and outcomes. But what is missing is the decision based
on the identity. Here again, constructivist heterogamy allows for an attempted
fix. The answer may lie in trying to marry constructivist process to psychologi-
cal process. Kowert and Legro discuss the possibility in terms of the experi-
mental social psychological work of Marilyn Brewer and Jonathan Turner .86 To
the extent it is possible to establish a causal link between a particular identity,
such as Japanese antimilitarism, and an interest in opposing Japanese military
expenditures (or between belief in a norm, such as humanitarian intervention-
ism, and an action to fulfill that norm), it might be attainable through ongoing
work on the connection between identity and behavior in social psychology.
The last problem with constructivism is really not so much a problem as it
is an advantage. Constructivism's theory of process and commitment to inter-
pretivist thick description place extraordinary demands on the researcher to
gather mountains of elaborate empirical data. To reconstruct the operation of
identity politics, even in a limited domain for a short period, requires thou-
sands of pages of reading, months of interviews and archival research, and a
host of less conventional activities, such as riding public transportation, stand-
ing in lines, and going to bars and cafes to participate in local practices. (The
latter need not be so onerous .) The point here is that the evidence necessary
to develop an understanding of, say, a national identity, its relation to domestic
identities, the practices that constitute both, implied interests of each, and the
overall social structure is necessarily vast and varied. Constructivism is no
shortcut.

The Constructivist Promise

The assumptions that underlay constructivism account for its different under-
standing of world politics. Since actors and structures are mutually con-
structed, state behavior in the face of different distributions of power or

86. Ibid ., p. 479.

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 The Promiseof Constructivism I 199

anarchy is unknowable absent a reconstruction of the intersubjective meaning

of these structures and actors . Since actors have multiple identities, and these
identities imply different interests, the a priori and exogenous attribution of
identical interests to states is invalid. Since power is both material and discur-
sive, patterned behavior over time should be understood as a result of material
or economic power working in concert with ideological structures, social prac-
tices, institutionalized norms, and intersubjective webs of meaning. The great-
est power of all is that which disciplines actors to naturally imagine only those
actions that reproduce the underlying arrangements of power-material and
discursive. Since constructivist social structures are both enduring and muta-
ble, change in world politics is considered both difficult and possible.
A conventional constructivist recasting of mainstream international relations
puzzles is based on the implications of its assumptions . Since what constitutes
a threat can never be stated as an a priori, primordial constant, it should be
approached as a social construction of an Other, and theorized at that level.
Since identities, norms, and social practices reduce uncertainty, the security
dilemma should not be the starting point for analyzing relations among states.
Since states are already situated in multiple social contexts, any account of
(non)cooperation among them should begin by exploring how their under-
standings of each other generate their relevant interests. Since communities of
identity are expected to exist, patterns of behavior that spur scholars to con-
sider a liberal peace should instead provoke us to consider zones of peace more
generally.
A conventional constructivist account of politics operates between main-
stream international relations and critical theory. Conventional constructivism
rejects the mainstream presumption that world politics is so homogenous that
universally valid generalizations can be expected to come of theorizing about
it. It denies the critical constructivist position that world politics is so hetero-
geneous that we should presume to look for only the unique and the differen-
tiating. Contrary to both these two approaches, conventional constructivism
presumes we should be looking for communities of intersubjectivity in world
politics, domains within which actors share understandings of themselves and
each other, yielding predictable and replicable patterns of action within a
specific context.
Mainstream international relations theory treats world politics as an inte-
grated whole, undifferentiated by either time or territory. Critical theory re-
gards world politics as an array of fragments that can never add up to a whole,
and regards efforts to construct such a whole as a political move to impose

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 InternationalSecurity 23:1 I 200

some kind of rationalistic, naturalized order on irrepressible difference. Con-

ventional constructivism, on the other hand, regards the world as a compli-
cated and vast array of different domains, the apprehension of all of which
could never yield a fully coherent picture of international politics. The failure
to account for any one of them, however, will guarantee a theoretically unsat-
isfying understanding of the world . In effect, the promise of constructivism is
to restore a kind of partial order and predictability to world politics that
derives not from imposed homogeneity, but from an appreciation of difference.

Corrections:

In Alexei G. Arbatov, "Military Reform in Russia: Dilemmas, Obstacles, and

Prospects," Vol. 22, No . 4 (Spring 1998): p . 86 line 13 should read "The quantity
of military personnel ... must be sacrificed for higher quality arms"; p. 90 line
17 should read "Numerical Balance"; p . 92 line 3 should read "reinforcement
advantages and interdiction capabilities against Russian reinforcements";
p. 106 line 10 should read "has never been preprogrammed into"; p. 109 line
11 should read "to find its force levels and structure on a priority basis"; p. 130
line 1 should read "down to a level of 1.2 million by 1999"; and p. 130 line 25
should read "are not carried out."

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