[1][4][7][8] Constructivist analysis can only provide substantive explanations or predictions once the relevant actors and their interests have been identified, as well as the content of social structures.
[9][8] Nicholas Onuf has been credited with coining the term constructivism to describe theories that stress the socially constructed character of international relations.
[4] The first is the end of the Cold War, which temporarily suspended the security dilemma, altered the distribution of power, and ushered in a period of peace and unipolarity where ideational factors such as norms, identity, culture, and legitimacy seemed to matter.
[4] The second was the expansion of global civil society, in particular in the form of non-governmental organizations, which suggested that more actors mattered in world politics than just states.
[1] Swathes of constructivist research have focused on norm entrepreneurs: international organizations and law: epistemic communities; speech, argument, and persuasion; and structural configuration as mechanisms and processes for social construction.
[11] Wendt's 1992 article "Anarchy is What States Make of It: the Social Construction of Power Politics"[5] laid the theoretical groundwork for challenging what he considered to be a flaw shared by both neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists, namely, a commitment to a (crude) form of materialism.
By attempting to show that even such a core realist concept as "power politics" is socially constructed—that is, not given by nature and hence, capable of being transformed by human practice—Wendt opened the way for a generation of international relations scholars to pursue work on a wide range of issues from a constructivist perspective.
[6][13] On the one hand, there are "conventional"[8][14] constructivist scholars such as Kathryn Sikkink, Peter Katzenstein, Elizabeth Kier, Martha Finnemore, and Alexander Wendt, who use widely accepted methodologies and epistemologies.
Their work has been widely accepted within the mainstream IR community and generated vibrant scholarly discussions among realists, liberals, and constructivists.
[15] Despite their differences, all strands of constructivism agree that neorealism and neoliberalism pay insufficient attention to social construction in world politics.
[3] Constructivism primarily seeks to demonstrate how core aspects of international relations are, contrary to the assumptions of neorealism and neoliberalism, socially constructed.
The object of the constructivist discourse can be conceived as the arrival, a fundamental factor in the field of international relations, of the recent debate on epistemology, the sociology of knowledge, the agent/structure relationship, and the ontological status of social facts.
Martha Finnemore has been influential in examining the way in which international organizations are involved in these processes of the social construction of actor's perceptions of their interests.
Such interests and identities are central determinants of state behaviour, as such studying their nature and their formation is integral in constructivist methodology to explaining the international system.
That means that actors follow “internalized prescriptions of what is socially defined as normal, true, right, or good, without, or in spite of calculation of consequences and expected utility”.
[35] Martha Finnemore has suggested that international organizations like the World Bank or UNESCO help diffuse norms which, in turn, influence how states define their national interests.
She has argued that this norm has become so deeply embedded in American political and social culture that nuclear weapons have not been employed, even in cases when their use would have made strategic or tactical sense.
In an important edited volume, The Culture of National Security,[53] constructivist scholars—including Elizabeth Kier, Jeffrey Legro, and Peter Katzenstein – challenged many realist assumptions about the dynamics of international politics, particularly in the context of military affairs.
Notable examples of constructivist work in this area include Kathleen R. McNamara's study of European Monetary Union[57] and Mark Blyth's analysis of the rise of Reaganomics in the United States.
[59] Constructivism is often presented as an alternative to the two leading theories of international relations, realism and liberalism, but some maintain that it is not necessarily inconsistent with one or both.
[60] Wendt shares some key assumptions with leading realist and neorealist scholars, such as the existence of anarchy and the centrality of states in the international system.
However, Wendt renders anarchy in cultural rather than materialist terms; he also offers a sophisticated theoretical defense of the state-as-actor assumption in international relations theory.
This is a contentious issue within segments of the IR community as some constructivists challenge Wendt on some of these assumptions (see, for example, exchanges in Review of International Studies, vol.
[61][62] An early example of such synthesis was Jennifer Sterling-Folker's analysis of the United States’ international monetary policy following the Bretton Woods system.
They argue that "mainstream" constructivism has abandoned many of the most important insights from linguistic turn and social-constructionist theory in the pursuit of respectability as a "scientific" approach to international relations.
They are inextricably intertwined with people's brain functions and autonomic nervous systems, which are typically outside the scope of standard constructivist models.