TRIP AND THE AMBIGUITY OF ASSESSING CONSTRUCTIVISM
What to make of constructivism in international relations (IR)? One way to assess it is in terms of simple percentages. On this basis, perhaps the most authoritative source on theoretical trends in IR, the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) program at the College of William & Mary paints a muddled picture. On one hand, in terms of teaching time constructivism remains marginal. While the 2014 survey does not probe this issue, the 2011 survey reported that Constructivism clocked 11% of classroom time, just ahead of Marxism (10%) but substantially behind Realism (25%) and Liberalism (22%) (Maliniak, Peterson, and Tierney Reference Maliniak, Peterson and Tierney2011, 12–13). Thus, constructivism appears to be considered as part of a cluster of approaches—including Marxism, feminism, and the English School—that are substantially discounted relative to rationalist approaches embodied in realism and liberalism.
However, the teaching priority results appear to stand at some contrast to indicators in the TRIP surveys of professional and intellectual orientation, which seem to show growing appreciation for constructivism. In the 2004 survey, 15% of respondents located their research in the constructivist tradition (Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak Reference Peterson, Tierney and Maliniak2005). By the 2014 survey, roughly 20% of respondents identify as constructivist (second greatest percentage after nonparadigmatic) even as 80% claim to emphasize ideational factors (Maliniak et al. Reference Maliniak, Peterson and Tierney2011; Maliniak, Peterson, Powers, and Tierney Reference Maliniak, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2014). The large gap between those who identify as constructivist and those who draw on factors that are apparently constructivist-friendly at the least suggests a very conflicted picture in terms of the success of constructivism. In conjunction with the secondary attention to constructivism in teaching, the image gains some clarity—but it is not an encouraging one for constructivism.
I do not purport to address these mixed signals, a task Subotic and Zarakol undertake with great insight. Rather, my point is that the TRIP surveys do not provide an unambiguous vision of what constructivism is or the role it plays in IR. In this short essay I want to assess the place of constructivism in the discipline through a social psychological lens, addressing broader disciplinary and disciplining dynamics and how these shape constructivism. The social psychological basis of my analysis positions claims by scholars to the mainstream or of scientific superiority not as objective characteristics but rather intersubjectively constructed group markers and highlights the ways in which constructivism has fragmented as a research program under disciplinary pressures and internal group dynamics.
THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTIVISM
Barder and Levine have written convincingly on the disciplining pressures in international relations that have both marginalized and diminished constructivism (Barder and Levine Reference Barder and Levine2012; Levine and Barder Reference Levine and Barder2014). While constructivism as propagated by Nick Onuf (Reference Onuf1989) and Alexander Wendt (Reference Wendt1987) predated the end of the Cold War, Barder and Levine note that its rise to prominence was fueled by the tumultuous changes for which existing approaches could not account (Barder and Levine Reference Barder and Levine2012). Thus constructivism gained prominence not because of widespread reconsideration of the predominant theoretical foundations of IR, but rather through imposition by external events.
Even so, the discouraging picture painted by TRIP suggests that constructivism as a field failed to take advantage of these external events. Even research agendas like the practice and relational turns that would seem to have great resonance with constructivism have, to greater or lesser degrees, disavowed inclusion within constructivism (McCourt Reference McCourt2016). These indicators suggest that, as a basis for establishing a cohesive social identity, constructivism has failed.
Many scholars will bristle at the idea that we can talk about theoretical research programs like realism or constructivism as the basis for group identities. But the role of research programs or paradigms as central markers (along with degree-granting institutions) through which IR scholars locate themselves in the academic landscape makes them ripe for a social psychological treatment. Specifically, the social identity approach holds that individuals join groups for affective, material, and cognitive reasons (Abrams et al. Reference Abrams, Wetherell, Cochrane, Hogg and Turner1990; Hogg Reference Hogg2000; Oldmeadow et al. Reference Oldmeadow, Platow, Foddy and Anderson2003; Tajfel and Turner Reference Tajfel, Turner, Austin and Worchel1979). Affective elements of group membership provide emotional fulfillment through the group’s positive distinctiveness. In-group ties provide material benefits to in-group members (jobs, grants, and other professional opportunities). Like any other humans, academics have a multiplicity of identities, and the labels we use activate specific identities with socially constructed ramifications. At stake are questions of who “we” are and how “we” position ourselves with respect to each other. These questions gain power through linkages to status in the discipline and the implicit or explicit threat to individual ontological security that comes from confronting out-group members. As with states in the international system (Mitzen Reference Mitzen2006; Steele Reference Steele2008), academics depend on establishing and defending their intellectual self or identity in academic society to manifest their agency.
Threats to ontological security are all the more powerful because of the ambiguous and contested nature of the characteristics that define what we do as scholars. Take for example the idea that international relations (IR) is a social science. While many IR scholars may agree that IR should strive to be scientific, what that means is both a social construction and something deeply contested—thus establishing questions of science as challenges to academic ontological security. The effort to apply quantitative data standards to qualitative work and the strong response from many scholars using qualitative methods that characterizes the DA-RT controversy in the American Political Science Association is one example (Isaac Reference Isaac2015). A personal example for me occurred at an APSA meeting a few years ago. I expressed interest in a presentation by a copanelist, musing about the ways in which his work (rationalist, quantitative) intersected with my own (constructivist, discursive). Thirty seconds into our conversation he dismissed me out of hand: “What you do isn’t science.”
Research programs serve as powerful, symbolic identity markers that position scholars in social relation to each other and from which they derive social standing and meaning.
In this essay, I am reconceptualizing constructivism and indeed all research programs in IR as identity-based social practice. Research programs serve as powerful, symbolic identity markers that position scholars in social relation to each other and from which they derive social standing and meaning. This positioning then allows for individuals to know in-group members—which enjoy prima facia intellectual validity—and out-group members that may be seen in an adversarial light and certainly in diminished terms with regard to intellectual validity.
Understood in this way, constructivism has become strong enough to provide a necessary other for rationalist IR scholars who once distinguished themselves based on some other criteria (the neo-neo debate for example), but has failed to cohere strongly enough to provide substantial in-group affect (emotional benefits) and ties (material benefits). In large part, I argue this is because constructivism has been internally divided as scholars seek to define the content and composition of the identity group. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced within the US as scholars are marginalized in the context of efforts to discipline constructivism.
Specifically, contestation in the US has revolved around the identities of mainstream and critical constructivism. The challenge in constructivism is that both sides seek to delegitimize the scholarship of the other. More mainstream scholars that seek to employ intersubjective social systems/structures in causal explanations are accused of cultural determinism (Hofferberth and Weber Reference Hofferberth and Weber2015) or of incoherence. Meanwhile, more poststructural or critical constructivists are marginalized as too unscientific. Anecdotes of disregard and delegitimation in hiring and peer review abound, and as primary mechanisms of group perpetuation and growth in academia these practices weaken the material ability of constructivism to reproduce and institutionalize a coherent group dynamic. In most cases, scholars focus on epistemology (to the aggrandizement of rationalist approaches) and thus misapprehend the ties that bind (Price and Reus-Smit Reference Price and Reus-Smit1998).
These contesting conceptions of constructivist identity have weakened the approach as a research program and socio-intellectual identity operating in a context in which rationalist approaches predominate and are at best skeptical of members of the constructivist out-group, if not outright hostile. If I am right, there is a need to reclaim constructivism from itself by raising awareness of these social dynamics, combating them, and refocusing attention on the core of the intellectual agenda as a basis for generating in-group cohesion that would in turn provide the material and intellectual space for constructivism to truly grow into a major research program in the United States rather than serve merely as a convenient foil for rationalist approaches. I address a possible way of reconceptualizing constructivism that might facilitate such a reclamation project in the final section of this essay. Before doing so, I want to touch briefly on why such a project would be successful—at stake are not just intellectual agendas but also material and affective agendas.
If, as I argue, theoretical research programs can be conceived as social identity groups, then they, like all social groups, provide affective and material benefits to their members. Affective benefits accrue from ontological security as well as a sense of belonging and self-esteem from the reflected glow of fellow in-group member success. Material ties include jobs, grants, professional networks, and enhanced citations and publication opportunities. But in order to provide those benefits, the corporate identity of the group must be clearly established—who is a “real constructivist” and who is not. This in turn generates a tendency to objectify constructivism (or any other research program) rather than treat it as an intersubjective construction. The irony of course is that constructivism is uniquely positioned to assess the processes shaping the disciplinary intersubjective space and the questions regarding the boundaries of constructivism—and who is inside or outside those boundaries—that the objectification obscures. Obviously, this disciplining activity has the effect of marginalizing many voices—a point feminist and poststructural scholars have long made more generally about IR. Part of the agenda emerging from a reclamation project is to shift the language of how we talk about constructivism to short circuit the damaging dynamics.
RECONSTRUCTING CONSTRUCTIVISM
Ruggie famously claimed that constructivism is “about human consciousness and its role in international life” (Reference Ruggie1998, 856); but humans rarely express their consciousness in isolation, even if they may think in individual terms. Thus, Ruggie’s claim requires modification: constructivism is about the social embeddedness of human consciousness and its role in international life. Thus, at its core constructivism is about incorporating the fundamentally social nature of humans into the study of international relations.
In response to the dynamics I described in the first two sections, I propose a reconstitution of constructivism along spatial lines: above, below, and between. This approach is not overly novel in the sense that pieces of it are present throughout the constructivist literature; but it does frame constructivism as a theoretical agenda through a constructivist lens based in the social identity argument above, and in response to constructivism’s place in the disciplinary practice of studying international relations. In the end, the argument here is an effort to extract the core elements of constructivism to provide a meaningful and inclusive foundation upon which to build a robust socio-intellectual identity within American IR.
Between
This conception results in a wide space for theory and scholarship, but is centrally concerned with social orders, structures, and systems of meaning created between individuals and collectives and the interactions of collectives and agents with these orders, structures, and systems. Social facts take precedent over natural facts, and rationalist assumptions cannot be held without a social grounding. Thus, a crucially important aspect of constructivism is the intersubjective nature of the social systems that provide meaning and place for individuals as they interpret and engage with the world. Some scholars will treat these systems/structures as temporarily fixed, so as to be able to make causal claims about their influence in the world or how actors strategically interact with the systems/structures. Others will focus on the contingent nature of the systems/structures, probing how they emerge only through the practice of social negotiation.
Rational choice theory, its behavioral variants like prospect theory, and the attendant assumptions are certainly the primary Other for constructivism.
Below
Rational choice theory, its behavioral variants like prospect theory, and the attendant assumptions are certainly the primary Other for constructivism. But to accept this characterization is to accept rationalist theory’s conception of the world: that rational logics operate at the same level as constructivist logics. Rather, constructivism sits below or prior to the rationalist assumptions that have pervaded much of IR theory; this is because rationality is as socially embedded as any other social logic. Indeed, considering rationality as a legitimate or desirable logic of thought or action reveals its social grounding. Some rationalities are more legitimate (characterized as strategic or savvy) than others (such as when an actor is called “selfish”).
For example, before the 2008 financial crisis in the United States, the rational pursuit of self-interest by investment bankers was seen as admirable, but afterward is seen in a diminished light, as selfish or destructive. In the aftermath of this social shift, banks found difficulty recruiting staff (Byrne Reference Byrne2015). The change is not in some presocial self-interest of the individuals, but rather how the same self-interested behavior is understood or socially constructed across a period of shifting social norms. In this example, as in any other rationalist analysis, are assessments of appropriateness and legitimacy that are inescapably social. Thus the social ontology of constructivism precedes the purportedly presocial ontology of rationalism. This approach to constructivism matches up well with McCourt’s argument that constructivism is a space for social theory in IR, and thus that the practice and relational turns are constructivist (McCourt Reference McCourt2016).
Above
Finally, constructivism and its inclusion of social systems/structures situate above the individuals that are central to the rationalist agenda. Because rationalism is presocial in its core assumptions, it cannot expand beyond the individual. Even where rationalist approaches would attempt to explain collective behavior as in IR, they can only do so either through an increasingly implausible claim that states are unitary actors or through aggregation of many rational individuals in an additive fashion.
Constructivism, by contrast, allows for consideration of structures created through social interaction. But this does not mean that agency disappears from the analysis, subsumed within structure. The between nature of constructivism prevents above from becoming hegemonic. Between keeps agency in the mix. Indeed, the constant struggle between the respective influences of agency and structure that lies at the heart of constructivism bears far more similarity to the real dynamics of the social world that the ascendant individualism (either of states or people) of rationalist approaches. Above represents the commitment of constructivists to the idea that social systems are more than the aggregated preferences of individuals.
CONCLUSION: RECLAIMING CONSTRUCTIVISM
Why recast constructivism in spatial terms? Why talk about a need to reclaim constructivism? The discouraging picture painted in the TRIP data and by Subotic and Zarakol in this symposium suggests that constructivism is—far from the third major approach to IR in the United States—increasingly marginalized as rationalist approaches claim ever-greater social status and physical resources. Thus, there is a need to reclaim constructivism from the internal dynamics that have allowed it to become marginal even as the concepts and behaviors it addresses are central to phenomena of international relations. Space constraints preclude a more nuanced analysis, and I realize that talking about IR research programs in identity terms may seem as though I am seeking to rekindle a paradigm war. That is not the goal; rather it is to recognize that social psychological dynamics to which academics are not immune are eroding intellectual diversity in American IR.
This is bad not just for IR but also for rationalist scholarship, which benefits from a dialogue with approaches assessing the complex problems of IR in a very different way. If constructivism did not exist, rationalist scholars would have to invent it—as some in economics are discovering (Parry Reference Parry2015). Reenergizing constructivism might also begin to bridge the growing gap between American IR and IR as it is practiced in the rest of the world where the central analytical claims of constructivism are common and accepted. While the US will continue to be a center of scholarly inquiry, the rise of IR scholarship globally means that scholars in the US will need to build intellectual bridges if they want to avoid damaging national silos of research and inquiry. Constructivism can aid in that effort.
Conceiving of constructivism as I do means that the intellectual agenda we now label as such long predates Onuf’s christening in 1989. Thus, in one sense we do not need to reclaim constructivism because it is and has been a central pillar of human inquiry and will persist even if it does so under different monikers. But in another sense, constructivism does need to be reclaimed, or will need to be so shortly. Because embodied in the question of reclamation is a sociopolitical dynamic that sets constructivists, broadly defined, against each other as they seek to define the field to the exclusion of others.
This move does terrible violence to the intellectual program of constructivism and is at the heart of the tension between the intellectual inquiry and social psychology. The social psychology of identity pushes a narrowing of the intellectual scope of constructivism, a pressure that scholars have difficulty resisting. The proposal here for thinking of constructivism in spatial terms (above, below, between) might help constructivists avoid the trap they are actively trying to ensnare themselves within.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Harry Gould, Rodney Bruce Hall, Nick Onuf, Jelena Subotic, Michael Struett, Ayşe Zarakol, the participants of the Reclaiming Constructivism workshop at the University of Utah, and the anonymous reviewer. In particular, I thank Brent Steele for the invitation to participate in this project, his detailed feedback, and fearless leadership.
