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reaching out, discovery and recalibration. Such constructivist assumptions regarding human learning have long operated as place-holders for the arrival of machine-thinking. 12 Running parallel with early computer programming, by the 1980s constructivism was also appearing in the form of progressive pro-poor international development. Michael Edwards (1987) , for example, in his celebrated piece, The Irrelevance of Development Studies , rehearses the late-modern antagonism towards professional knowledge using the post-humanist premise that the
identity and sovereignty, nation and state, inflicted on the region, a conundrum better addressed by constructivism . 3 Its insistence that systemic structures are not just material configurations of power and wealth and include the cultural norms that derive from identity , helps to understand how the region’s powerful supra-state identities lead to a unique contestation of the state sovereignty which underlays the stability of other regional states systems. Secondly, this study will argue that the state and sub-state levels are at least as
disciplines as sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies and women’s studies. These areas have undergone profound transformations in recent years as a result of the influence of New Left thinking (with residual elements of Hegelian Marxism) since the 1960s, feminist theory, constructivism, and the poststructuralist turn since the 1980s. Influenced to a great extent by the works of German social
, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 ). Contemporary theoretical approaches in international relations, including neoliberalism and constructivism, have not ‘engaged in normative thinking per se ’. They have not ‘addressed questions of the ought and should variety’: see R. Shapcott, ‘Solidarism and after
environments, in fostering cooperation by lowering transaction costs or by promoting confidencebuilding measures, and in facilitating conflict resolution mechanisms that deter war. Much of the scholarship has also focused on the necessary and sufficient conditions required for international institutions to perform that task.39 Two alternative theories of international relations, neo-liberal institutionalism and social constructivism, have generated particularly promising propositions for understanding the role of institutions as facilitators of cooperation and conflict
T HIS CHAPTER EXAMINES the concept of security through discursive contestation at the leadership level in a critical Middle Eastern case – that of Israel. The approach adopted here can be called historical constructivism in that it traces the fractured construction of security as a phenomenon that changes dramatically, and with significant political implications
environment where survival depended more on raw military power than success in ideological competition, the world of constructivism was giving way to that of realism. Finally, the 1970s oil boom had an ambivalent but mostly deleterious effect on Arabism. On the one hand, it generated trans-state movements of labour and capital that, to an extent, integrated the Arab world; oil aid was used to heal inter-Arab conflicts, making the summit system more effective. On the other hand, oil differentiated the interests of the Arabs into rich and poor, detached