Search results
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
the complex interplay of factors affecting European foreign policy. This framework is based on a synthesis of elements of social constructivism, the new institutionalism and neo-classical realism. Foreign policy, it has been argued, ‘is the result of a complex interplay of stimuli from the external environment and domestic-level cognitive, institutional and political variables’ (Checkel 1993 : 297). The analytical framework
briefly introduce the main features and assumptions of discourse analysis within the general field of social constructivism, and present the main implications of discourse analysis for concrete empirical research. I end by describing the main dimensions of discourse analysis using the categories of Milliken (1999) : representation , policy practice and play of practice . In the second part of the chapter I highlight the use
appears to be an ideal case for showing the potential and limits of social constructivism. The claim here is not that social constructivism, at all times and in all cases, is the ‘better’ option and thus by necessity more powerful than its competitors in offering an understanding of EU foreign policy, but rather that it seems worthwhile to investigate the scope of its potential in the selected case. It should be emphasised that
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
resurgence of interest in culture in security studies, inspired to a large extent by the rise of constructivism, with its emphasis on identity and interests as being socially constructed.14 On the back of these developments came a new generation of literature applying to various regions and case studies the concept of ‘strategic culture’, as well as cognate notions of security culture, political–military culture and national security culture. Perhaps the most noteworthy major study on strategic culture to have emerged in this period was Alistair Iain Johnston’s Cultural
. In other words, they are essentially instrumental in states’ pursuit of their exogenously defined national interests. More recent strands of international relations theory, such as multilateralism and social constructivism, attempt to address this problem of institutional impact on national interests. Multilateralism focuses on the generalised principles of conduct which are embedded in international
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